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By Shashi Tharoor

“History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.

As Hollywood confirms, Churchill’s reputation (as what Harold Evans has called “the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization”) rests almost entirely on his stirring rhetoric and his talent for a fine phrase during World War II. “We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. … We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. … We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British historian John Charmley dismissed this as “sublime nonsense.”)

Words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. His actions are another matter altogether.

During World War II, Churchill declared himself in favor of “terror bombing.” He wrote that he wanted “absolutely devastating, exterminating attacks by very heavy bombers.” Horrors such as the firebombing of Dresden were the result.

In the fight for Irish independence, Churchill, in his capacity as secretary of state for war and air, was one of the few British officials in favor of bombing Irish protesters, suggesting in 1920 that airplanes should use “machine-gun fire or bombs” to scatter them.

Dealing with unrest in Mesopotamia in 1921, as secretary of state for the colonies, Churchill acted as a war criminal: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilised tribes; it would spread a lively terror.” He ordered large-scale bombing of Mesopotamia, with an entire village wiped out in 45 minutes.

In Afghanistan, Churchill declared that the Pashtuns “needed to recognise the superiority of [the British] race” and that “all who resist will be killed without quarter.” He wrote: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. … Every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”

In Kenya, Churchill either directed or was complicit in policies involving the forced relocation of local people from the fertile highlands to make way for white colonial settlers and the forcing of more than 150,000 people into concentration camps. Rape, castration, lit cigarettes on tender spots, and electric shocks were all used by the British authorities to torture Kenyans under Churchill’s rule.

But the principal victims of Winston Churchill were the Indians — “a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called them. He wanted to use chemical weapons in India but was shot down by his cabinet colleagues, whom he criticized for their “squeamishness,” declaring that “the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable.”

Churchill’s beatification as an apostle of freedom seems all the more preposterous given his 1941 declaration that the Atlantic Charter’s principles would not apply to India and the colored colonies. He refused to see people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself. “Gandhi-ism and all it stands for,” he declared, “will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.”

In such matters, Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their times. Even his own secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, confessed that he could see very little difference between Churchill’s attitude and Adolf Hitler’s.

Thanks to Churchill, some 4 million Bengalis starved to death in a 1943 famine. Churchill ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere. When reminded of the suffering of his Indian victims, his response was that the famine was their own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.”

Madhusree Mukerjee’s searing account of Churchill’s role in the Bengal famine, Churchill’s Secret War,” “documents that while Indians starved, prices for foodgrains were inflated by British purchases and India’s own surplus grains were exported, while Australian ships laden with wheat were not allowed to unload their cargo at Calcutta (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets). Instead, Churchill ordered that grain be shipped to storage depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to increase the buffer stocks for a possible future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. European warehouses filled up as Bengalis died.

This week’s Oscar rewards yet another hagiography of this odious man. To the Iraqis whom Churchill advocated gassing, the Greek protesters on the streets of Athens who were mowed down on Churchill’s orders in 1944, sundry Pashtuns and Irish, as well as to Indians like myself, it will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Churchill’s racist hands.

Many of us will remember Churchill as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples. Ultimately, his great failure — his long darkest hour — was his constant effort to deny us freedom.

Shashi Tharoor is author of “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.” He chairs the Indian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

10 March 2018

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/03/10/in-winston-churchill-hollywood-rewards-a-mass-murderer/?utm_term=.0ff033eab01c

By Robert J. Burrowes

Anyone reading the scientific literature (or the progressive news outlets that truthfully report this literature) knows that homo sapiens sapiens is on the fast track to extinction, most likely some time between 2025 and 2040.

For a taste of the evidence in this regard focusing on the climate, see ‘Climate Collapse and Near Term Human Extinction’, ‘What They Won’t Tell You About Climate Catastrophe’, ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ and ‘7,000 underground [methane] gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’.

Unfortunately, of course, the climate is not the only imminent threat to human survival. With an insane leadership in the White House in the United States – see ‘Resisting Donald Trump’s Violence Strategically’ – we are faced with the prospect of nuclear war. And even if the climate and nuclear threats to our survival are removed, there is still a substantial range of environmental threats – including rainforest destruction, the ongoing dumping of Fukushima radiation into the Pacific Ocean, extensive contamination from military violence… – that need to be addressed too, given the synergistic impacts of these multiple and interrelated threats.

Can these extinction-threatening problems be effectively addressed?

Well the reality is that most (but not all) of them can be tackled effectively if we are courageous enough to make powerful personal and organizational decisions and then implement them. But we are not even close to doing that yet. And time is obviously running out fast.

Given the evidence, scientific and otherwise, documenting the cause and nature of many of these problems and what is required to fix them, why aren’t these strategies to address the problems implemented?

At the political and economic level, it is usually explained structurally – for example, as an outcome of capitalism, patriarchy and/or the states-system – or, more simply, as an outcome of the powerful vested interests that control governments and the corporate imperative to make profits despite exacerbating the current perilous state of the Earth’s biosphere and its many exploited populations (human and otherwise) by doing so.

But the reality is that these political and economic explanations mask the deeper psychological drivers that generate and maintain these dysfunctional structures and behaviours.

Let me explain why and how this happens using the climate catastrophe to illustrate the process.

While scientific concern about the increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had been raised more than a century ago – see ‘The Discovery of Global Warming’ – it wasn’t until the 1980s that this concern started to gain significant traction in public awareness. And despite ongoing agitation by some scientists as well as climate and environment groups, corporate-funded climate deniers were able to stall widespread recognition of, and the start of serious official action on, the climate catastrophe for more than two more decades.

However, as the truth of the climate catastrophe was finally being accepted by most people and the climate deniers were finally forced into full-scale retreat on the issue of whether or not the climate catastrophe was, in fact, so serious that it threatened human extinction, the climate deniers implemented their back-up strategy: they used their corporate media to persuade people that action wasn’t necessary ‘until the end of the [21st] century’ and to exaggerate the argument about the ‘acceptable’ increase above the pre-industrial norm – 2 degrees? 3 degrees? 1.5 degrees? – to obscure the truth that 0.5 degrees was, in fact, the climate science consensus back in 2007.

But, you might ask: ‘Why would anyone prefer to ignore the evidence, given the extinction-threatening nature of this problem?’

Or, to put the question more fully: ‘Why would anyone – whether an “ordinary” worker, academic, lawyer, doctor, businessperson, corporate executive, government leader or anyone else – prefer to live in delusion and believe the mainstream narrative about “the end of the century” (or 1.5 degrees) rather than simply consider the evidence and respond powerfully to it?’

And what is so unattractive about the truth that so many people run from it rather than embrace it?

Obviously, these questions go to the heart of the human (psychological) condition so let me explain why most humans now live in a delusional state whether in relation to the climate, environment issues generally, the ongoing wars and other military violence, the highly exploitative global economy or anything else.

People do not choose to live in delusion nor do they choose their delusion consciously. A delusion is generated by a person’s unconscious mind; that is, the part of their own mind of which the individual is normally unaware. So why does a person’s unconscious mind generate a delusion? What is the purpose of it?

A person’s unconscious mind generates a delusion when the individual is simply too terrified to contemplate and grapple with reality. Instead, the person unconsciously generates a delusion and then lives in accord with that delusion for the (obvious) reason that the delusion does not frighten them.

This unconscious delusional state is the fundamental outcome of the socialization, which I call ‘terrorization’, of the typical child during their childhood.

Endlessly and violently coerced (by a variety of threatened and actual punishments) to obey the will of parents, teachers and religious figures in denial of their own self-will, while simultaneously denied the opportunity to feel the fear, anger, sadness and other feelings that this violence causes, the child has no choice but to suppress their awareness of how they feel and the reality that caused these feelings. As a result, this leaves virtually all children feeling terrified, full of self-hatred and powerless. For brief explanations of how this happens, see ‘Understanding Self-Hatred in World Affairs’ and ‘Why Are Most Human Beings So Powerless?’

However, and this point is important, each of these feelings is extraordinarily unpleasant to feel consciously and the child never gets the listening they need to focus on feeling them. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

As a result, these feelings are suppressed below conscious awareness and this fear, self-hatred and powerlessness become the primary but unconscious psychological drivers of their behaviour and, significantly, results in them participating mindlessly in the widespread ‘socially acceptable’ delusions generated by elites and endlessly promulgated through elite channels such as education systems, the corporate media and entertainment industries.

Hence, as a result of being terrorized during childhood, delusion is the most common state of human individuals, irrespective of their role in society. For a full explanation of why this happens, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

And, as one part of their delusional state, most people must engage in the denial of reality whenever reality (unconsciously) frightens them (or threatens to bring their unconscious self-hatred or powerlessness into their awareness). See ‘The Psychology of Denial’. This, of course, means that they are frightened to take action in response to reality but also deny it is even necessary.

So what can we do about all of this? Well, as always, I would tackle the problem at various levels.

If you are one of those rare people who prefers to research the evidence and to act intelligently and powerfully in response to the truth that emerges from this evidence, I encourage you to do so. One option you have if you find the evidence of near-term human extinction compelling in light of the lacklustre official responses so far, is to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Obviously, tokenism on your part – such as rejecting plastic bags or collecting rubbish from public places – is not enough in the face of the profound changes needed.

Of course, if you are self-aware enough to know that you are inclined to avoid unpleasant realities and to take the action that this requires, then perhaps you could tackle this problem at its source by ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you want intelligent, compassionate and powerful children who do not grow up living in delusion and denial, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you want to campaign on the climate, war, rainforest destruction or any other issue that brings us closer to extinction, consider developing a comprehensive nonviolent strategy to do so. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if you want to participate in the worldwide effort to end violence in all of its manifestations, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary, the primary threat faced by humanity is not the synergistic multitude of complex social, political, economic and technological forces that are precipitating our rush to extinction.

The fundamental threat to our survival is our psychological incapacity (particularly because of our fear, self-hatred and powerlessness) to perceive reality and respond powerfully to it by formulating and implementing appropriate social, political, economic and technological measures that address our multifaceted crisis systematically.

Unless we include addressing this dysfunctional individual and collective psychological state in our strategy to avert human extinction, we will ultimately fail and extinction will indeed be our fate.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981.

9 March 2018

By Rima Najjar

I hate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC, “the preeminent power in Washington lobbying” today. I hate it with a strong, unadulterated passion that has been burning inside me for decades.

Throughout most of these decades, there was no outlet for me to say these words or to do anything about them (Watch U.S.-Israel Relations and Middle East Policy, Free Speech Panel). I have Paul Findley’s 1985 book They Dare to Speak Out (against the pervasive influence of AIPAC) on my shelf. It looked down on me more as a cautionary tale than as an inspiration.

Today, things are different, although still fraught with taboos and dangers associated with free speech against “delegitimizing” Israel, which is what the Palestinian struggle for liberation aims to achieve.

On the occasion of Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2018 address at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, historian Doug Rossinow (University of Oslo) wrote a “perspective” in The Washington post titled “The dark roots of AIPAC, ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’”

Great piece, but the headline has “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby” in quotes. Why the quotes? Is there any doubt about the purpose of this powerful and monied lobby group in DC?

AIPAC used to be called “the Jewish lobby” by some people. Now that was inaccurate for the simple reason that not all groups/individuals in that lobby were/are Jews, though many are.

J.J. Goldberg’s book (titled Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment), which was excerpted in The Washington Post, described AIPAC as

“the Jewish community’s main foreign-policy lobbying organization … The clout that Jewish Americans exercise in American politics is far incommensurate with their population”.

Both anti-Zionist Jewish American groups (example, Jewish Voice for Peace) and Zionist Jewish groups (example J Street) include non-Jews in their organizations.

Splitting hairs without a difference, and still embracing the racist, Apartheid ideology of Zionism, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, refuses to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, referring to it as a “Jewish democratic home, in the state of Israel.”

Historic Palestine is the homeland of Palestinian Arabs of all religions, not of Jews worldwide.

Justice for Palestinians in a state that is “Jewish and democratic” is an absurdity. Even John Kerry acknowledged that “If the choice is one state [as opposed to a partitioned Palestine with a bit of Palestinian state], Israel can either be Jewish or democratic.”

Speaking out against Israel continues to be dressed in tentative formats. A TRT roundtable discussion, for example, that includes speakers who call a spade a spade, nevertheless approaches Israel’s criminality toward the Palestinian people by describing its egregious actions as Israel “going too far” and posing a “debate” question, “Is Israel’s Jewish nation-state bill discriminatory?”, when a bold positive statement is warranted.

There is absolutely no doubt this bill is discriminatory, as both HuwaidaArraf (a Palestinian American activist, lawyer and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement) and Ben White (British author who has written extensively on Israeli Apartheid) conclusively show in a few sentences.

AIPAC lobbies for the security of the Zionist Jewish state. The undeniable obverse of that is the continued oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Some people believe the words “Jewish state” should be put in quotes, not because Israel is not a Jewish state in character and practice, but because there is a minority of Jews worldwide who are anti-Zionist and do not wish the way they identify as Jews to be associated in any way with Israel’s brand of religious and political Zionism. That number, thankfully, is on the increase, especially among the younger generation of American Jews, according to polls.

And there is hope. RamzyBaroud writes in Arab News:

“Despite the massive sums of money spent to channel public opinion in the United States in favor of Israel, unmistakable trends in opinion polls are attesting to the changing dynamics of Israel’s support among ordinary Americans. …. Netanyahu has shoved Israel into the heart of polarizing American politics and, although he has achieved his short-term goals (for example, obtaining US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel), he has irrevocably damaged the decades-long consensus on Israel among Americans, and in that there is a great source of hope.”

From RamzyBaroud’s mouth to heaven.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem.

8 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/08/how-do-i-hate-thee-aipac-let-me-count-the-ways/

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

“The Commission instead opted for the easiest way out, which is a shame as in my perception it reveals a lack of impartiality on your behalf!”

Chief East Timorese negotiator, Xanana Gusmão, Feb 28, 2018

In the scheme of things, Australia has deputised as regional bully for imperial powers since it became an outpost of the British empire.  Neighbouring states have been ridiculed, mocked and derided as sub-human and incapable.  The term “failed state” is still used in Canberra’s circles of presupposing power over desperate basket cases.  Little wonder that China smells a wounded reputation.

It is in that spirit that signing of an agreement between Australia and East Timor to demarcate maritime borders took place.  Officially, there were smiles, even a sense of back slapping.  The March 7 press release from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop conveys the moment of false elevation:

“The treaty is a historic agreement that opens a new chapter in our bilateral relationship.  It establishes permanent maritime boundaries between our countries and provides for the joint development and management of the Great Sunrise gas fields.”

The story behind the rubbing and flesh pressing was more questioning.  The countries had, after all, reached this point after allegations of espionage threatened to scupper talks.  Those allegations pertained to efforts on the part of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service to spy on East Timorese delegates during negotiations of the 2006 CMATS (Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea).  Where the division of revenue is concerned – in that case, the Greater Sunrise gas field in the Timor Sea – the spooks will follow.

The central points of historic contention between the states remain traditional: natural resources and how best to harness them.  Neither could quite agree on who should have access to oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea.  The political imbroglio had its genesis in the 1989 Timor Gap Treaty signed between Australia and Indonesia when President Suharto’s kleptocracy, not to mention brutal suppression of East Timor, were deemed acceptable matters of realpolitik.

The subsequent liberation of East Timor left the fledgling state in a parlous, near-death state.  Indonesia and Australia continued to share the resources of the Timor Gap in gluttonous merriment till the signing of the Timor Sea Treaty.  The document had one glaring flow: the lack of a determined permanent maritime border.  CMATS, which East Timor duly tore up, permitted an equal division of revenue, but similarly postponed the discussion of a maritime border.

Central to the Timor-Leste strategy was a determination to do it by the international law book.  East Timor argued for a maritime border lying half way between it and Australia; Australia, that it follow its continental shelf.  The Permanent Court of Arbitration, and Conciliation Commissioners, were duly engaged in applying the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.  Australia subsequently celebrated the outcome as “the first ever conciliation under [UNCLOS].”

While students of international law cheered the result, the political dimension proved uglier.  East Timor’s chief negotiator and all-round resistance figure Xanana Gusmão lashed Australia and the Commissioners in a letter to the Conciliation Commission.

The Commission, he argued, were ignorant on East Timorese matters.  The “chosen technical expert does not have appropriate experience or understanding from working in Timor-Leste or similar developing country contexts.”  Their assessments on “potential benefits to the Timor-Leste population” were “shockingly superficial”, a point that only advantaged Australia.

Gusmão also had another gripe: Australian negotiators had seemingly been gotten to by the extractive industry heavies, Woodside Petroleum and Conoco Philips. “Civil society could potentially perceive this as a ‘form’ of collusion between the Government of Australia and Darwin LNG Partners and/or the Sunrise J.”

That the officials of Timor-Leste should harbour obstinate suspicions is not only understandable but sagacious.  To deal with a repressive, sanguinary Indonesian military was painful enough.  But then came international knowledge about the brutal regime operating in East Timor, knowledge that came precariously close to active complicity.  Fraternal talk tends to be counterfeit in the market of geopolitics.

The 2,500 page Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, transmitted by Gusmão, then East Timorese president, to the national parliament in November 2005 referenced hundreds of illuminating formerly classified US and British documents.  These showed tacit approval by both the US and UK for the invasion of East Timor in 1975 and the status quo till 1999, during which some 100,000 Timorese died.

There were even open instances of Indonesian officials showing interest, as a National Security Council memorandum to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger states, “in knowing the American attitude regarding Portuguese Timor (and, by implication, our reaction to a possible Indonesian takeover).”  They were not disappointed.

As late as 2014, the Australian government would go to considerable lengths to prevent the release of files pertaining to Canberra’s knowledge of Indonesian troop deployments during the occupation.  Of particular sensitivity were operations conducted in late 1981 and early 1982 which ended in predictable massacre.  In a decision by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal agreeing with the government, President Justice Duncan Kerr claimed with Kafkaesque absurdity that he had to “express conclusions which I am unable to explain”.

What the justice did reveal was a tantalising titbit on the regional bullying East Timor has been subjected to at the hands of murderous and occasionally complicit powers.  Evidence submitted to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade revealed a certain insistence on the part of US authorities in 2013 wanting “the Australian government to continue to restrict access to… four documents” with “ongoing sensitivities”.

East Timor remains a state on a drip. It is impoverished.  Despite all this, the Australian preference remains determined and exploitative.  The issue on where the oil and gas will be processed continues as a niggling sore point.  Canberra prefers that piping take place through Darwin, with an 80 percent revenue sweetener to East Timor.

That will hardy pass muster for Dili, which sees value in having the processing facility in East Timor, where a “petroleum hub” is being developed. To that end, it is even willing to surrender a revenue cut to Australia.  Power machinations, and Australia’s petroleum lobby, may well yet undo these arrangements. The regional bully remains renascent.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

8 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/08/bullied-relations-australia-east-timor-and-natural-resources/

By Andre Damon

In another milestone in the growing integration between the military-intelligence complex and Silicon Valley, Google’s parent company Alphabet has confirmed that it has provided software to identify targets used in the illegal US government drone murder program.

Since initiating its drone assassination program in 2009, the United States claims to have killed close to 3,000 “combatants” in drone strikes. Internal military documents show that for every one person targeted by a drone strike, nine bystanders are killed, meaning that the true toll of the US military’s airborne terrorism campaign in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq potentially rises to the tens of thousands.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “A program of targeted killing far from any battlefield, without charge or trial, violates the constitutional guarantee of due process. It also violates international law, under which lethal force may be used outside armed conflict zones only as a last resort.”

Google’s complicity with the drone murder program implicates the company in the criminal activities of the US military, sparking outrage among employees after executives admitted the collaboration in an internal memo last week, according to a report by Gizmodo.

Sensitive to both the potential legal ramifications of its actions and to the hostility to America’s criminal wars both inside and outside the company, Google stressed in a statement that its collaboration “is for non-offensive uses only,” saying “the technology flags images for human review.”

But this absurd and unserious pretense, aimed to provide talking points to an uncritical, state-controlled media, is the equivalent of a Mafia getaway driver claiming he is not an accomplice to murder because he did not pull the trigger.

The US government has claimed the right to use drones to assassinate American citizens anywhere in the world, including within the borders of the United States. In 2011, the Obama administration assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, with a Predator drone strike in Yemen, then murdered his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, in another drone strike two weeks later.

Google’s partnership in such nefarious operations threatens it not only with legal sanction around the world, but also with serious commercial repercussions. The company’s decision to proceed despite these dangers points to the increasingly vital role of military contracts in the business operations of the major technology giants.

The Defense Department spent at least $7.4 billion on artificial intelligence programs last year, and is expected to spend even more this year, with much of that amount flowing to corporations like Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Nvidia, whose artificial intelligence capacities reportedly outstrip those of in-house Pentagon programs.

Over the past year, Google, Facebook and Twitter have all announced measures to censor the information their services present to users, promoting “authoritative” and “trusted” news outlets over “alternative” viewpoints, which include news outlets that expose and denounce US war crimes. Facebook, which of all the technology companies has been the most unabashed in its determination to censor its platform, has explicitly said it expects user engagement to drop as a result of its demotion of “viral” videos and promotion of “trusted” news sources, such as the New York Times.

As these companies expect some drop-off in consumer demand as they impose increasingly restrictive censorship measures, lucrative defense contracts are a means to pad their bottom line and align their financial interests ever more closely with the war-making and repressive operations of the American state.

The technology giants have moved to impose censorship measures at the same time that the Pentagon has concluded that it has found itself in an “AI arms race,” as the Wall Street Journal put it this month. Facing the rapid economic rise of substantial military powers, such as Russia and China, who are able to develop and implement new technologies without the massive logistical burden of the countless wars, overseas deployments, and destabilization operations engaged in by the United States. US military planners have come to the conclusion that the only way to retain the American military advantage in future conflicts is to integrate Silicon Valley into the warfighting machine.

The Pentagon has devised the so-called “Third offset” strategy to defeat the “pacing threat” from China by focusing on “autonomous learning systems, human-machine collaborative decision-making, assisted human operations, advanced manned-unmanned systems operations,” and “networked autonomous weapons” as the Economist recently put it in the cover story of an issue titled “The next war.”

This strategy revolves around the recruitment of the US private technology sector, which remains the most developed in the world. As the Economist put it, the United States “continues to dominate commercial AI funding and has more firms working in the field than any other country.”

Speaking at a conference last year, Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor, the head of the so-called “Project Maven” in which Google is a key collaborator, declared the US in the midst of an “AI arms race,” adding, “Many of you will have noted that Eric Schmidt is calling Google an AI company now, not a data company.”

He added, “There is no ‘black box’ that delivers the AI system the government needs… Key elements have to be put together … and the only way to do that is with commercial partners alongside us.”

In order to streamline the reciprocal exchange between the technology giants’ vast computational power, artificial intelligence capabilities, and massive database of sensitive user data and the US military’s virtually limitless budget, the Pentagon has set up a series of partnerships with Silicon Valley. In 2015, the Pentagon set up a private-public funding vehicle known as the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), headquartered just minutes from Google’s main campus in Mountain View, California

In 2016, the Pentagon set up an entity called the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, aiming to “bring the technological innovation and best practice of Silicon Valley to the US Military,” chaired by none other than former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Last fall, Schmidt complained about the reluctance of those working in the technology sector to collaborate with the Pentagon, bemoaning the fact, “There’s a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly.”

But beyond leveraging the tech giants’ artificial intelligence capabilities for guiding missiles and selecting victims, the open secret of the Pentagon’s collaboration with Silicon Valley is that, behind the scenes, vast quantities of sensitive, personal user data is likely being funneled to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for the purposes of surveillance and targeting.

As Lt. Gen. John Shanahan, who is closely involved in Project Maven put it at a conference last year, “On the far end of the scale, you see Google. They don’t tell us what they have, unless anyone from Google wants to whisper in my ear later.”

The integration of companies like Google into what had previously been known as the military-intelligence apparatus is creating a vast system of state repression previously unknown in human history. Preparing for great-power conflict requires, as the Pentagon’s recently-released National Defense Strategy puts it, “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and military.”

Censorship and surveillance are the linchpin of this emerging military-technology-intelligence nexus. As the United States prepares to wage “hot” wars against “peer” militaries such as Russia and China, the growth of domestic anti-war sentiment will be combatted through the use of mass censorship, aided by artificial intelligence, with political profiling on the basis of social media communications.

8 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/08/google-admits-collaboration-with-illegal-us-drone-murder-program/

By Yanis Varoufakis

All the happy talk about impending “debt relief” and a “clean exit” from Greece’s third “bailout” obscures an uglier truth: the country’s debt bondage is being extended to 2060. Worse, by ossifying Greece’s insolvency, while pretending to have overcome it, Europe’s establishment is demonstrating its refusal to fix the eurozone’s flaws.

ATHENS – Greece’s never-ending public-debt saga has come to signify the European Union’s inept handling of its inevitable eurozone crisis. Eight years after its bankruptcy, the Greek state’s persistent insolvency remains an embarrassment for Europe’s officialdom. That seems to be why, after having declared the euro crisis over in the rest of Europe, the authorities seem determined to declare final victory on the Greek front, too.

The big moment, it is said, will come in August, when Greece will be pronounced a “normal” European country again. Recently, in preparation for the government’s return to the money markets – from which it has been effectively excluded since 2010 – Greece’s public-debt authority has been testing the waters with a long-term bond issue.

Unfortunately, all the happy talk about impending “debt relief” and a “clean exit” from Greece’s third “bailout” obscures an uglier truth: the country’s debt bondage is being extended to 2060. And, by ossifying Greece’s insolvency, while pretending to have overcome it, Europe’s establishment is demonstrating its dogged refusal to address the eurozone’s underlying fault lines. This augurs ill for all Europeans.

For an EU country to be considered “normal,” it should be subject to the scrutiny facing countries that were never bailed out. That means the standard twice-yearly checks of compliance with the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact, as performed by the European Commission under the so-called European Semester procedure. Nevertheless, for countries like Ireland or Portugal, a tougher “post-program surveillance” procedure was designed following their bailouts: quarterly checks conducted not only by the European Commission but also by the European Central Bank.

It is plain to see why Greece’s road will be much bumpier than Ireland’s or Portugal’s. The ECB had already begun purchasing Irish and Portuguese debt in the secondary markets well before these countries’ bailout exit, as part of its “quantitative easing” program. This enabled the Irish and Portuguese governments to issue large quantities of new debt at low interest rates.

Greece was never included the ECB’s quantitative easing program, for two reasons: its debt burden was too large to service in the long term, even with the help of ECB-sponsored low interest rates, and the ECB was under pressure, mainly from Germany, to wind down the program. Moreover, the post-program surveillance procedure does not give the “troika” of official creditors – the European Commission, the ECB, and the International Monetary Fund – the leverage over Greece that they desire.

In celebrating Greece’s “clean exit,” while retaining its iron grip on the Greek government and withholding debt restructuring, Europe’s establishment is once again displaying its skill at inventing neologisms. Until 75% of Greece’s public debt is repaid – in 2060, at the earliest – the country, we are told, will be subject to “enhanced surveillance” (a term with unfortunate echoes of “enhanced interrogation”).

In practice, this means 42 years of quarterly reviews, during which the European Commission and the ECB “in collaboration with the IMF” may impose new “measures” on Greece (such as austerity, fire sales of public property, and restrictions on organized labor). In short, the next two generations of Greeks will grow up with the troika and its “process” (perhaps under a different name) as a permanent fixture of life.

The celebration of Greece’s return to normality began a few weeks ago with the government’s oversubscribed €3 billion ($3.7 billion) issue of its first seven-year bond in years. What the revelers failed to note, however, was that, to borrow that €3 billion on behalf of its creditors, the Greek state added €816 million in interest payments to its debt repayments for 2025. Germany’s cost for rolling over the same sum, on the same day, was a mere €63 million. Will Greece’s income rise by a similar amount between now and 2025 to make this sustainable?

The official answer is that debt relief will come soon, paving the way for Greece’s smooth return to the money markets. But European officials have ruled out restructuring debt that cannot be repaid. What debt relief really means is that repayment will be shifted from 2022-2035 to 2035-2060, with interest added. In other words, Greece will gain easier medium-term repayments in exchange of 40 years of debt serfdom.

Back in 2015, I was pushing for substantive debt restructuring by means of linking the volume of debt and the rate of repayment to the size of Greece’s nominal GDP and its rate of growth, respectively. Now, it seems that the idea of nominal GDP-indexing will be revived, but only to determine the extent to which medium-term repayment is pushed into the future. Moreover, the easier medium-term payments will be made contingent not only on growth, but also on new “conditionalities” (read: austerity measures) imposed by the (renamed) troika.

According to the authorities’ propaganda, Greece’s creditors are linking debt repayments to growth. In reality, the prospect of recovery will be dealt another blow, because long-term investors will be deterred by the combination of prolonged insolvency and protracted austerity.

What accounts for this implacable determination to leave the Greek wound festering under a flimsily applied Band-Aid? The answer lies in France and Germany, where, a decade after the 2008 financial crash exposed the eurozone’s design flaws, there is still no consensus about how to manage the large-scale insolvencies that are inevitable in a currency union lacking any mechanism to temper financial flows and trade imbalances.

Greece remains the litmus test of the European establishment’s capacity to rationalize the eurozone, and its people have been sacrificed on the altar of an impasse whose repercussions have long since spilled over to the fragmenting political scenery of Central Europe.

Something has to give. Will it be the establishment’s determination to stick to business as usual? Or will it be Europe’s integrity?

Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

26 February 2018

Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-debt-relief-enhanced-surveillance-by-yanis-varoufakis-2018-02?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c1427ae595-sunday_newsletter_4_3_2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-c1427ae595-104996581

By Ishaan Tharoor

Mohammed bin Salman, the youthful and ambitious Saudi crown prince, arrived in London on Wednesday for a three-day visit shrouded in controversy. Critics protested the British government’s close ties to Riyadh, lambasting the kingdom’s human rights record as well its escalation of the war in Yemen, which has led to an unmitigated humanitarian disaster.

Meanwhile, the crown prince’s defenders unleashed a public-relations blitz celebrating the liberalizing reforms being introduced under his watch. Ads in British newspapers and billboards across London hailed how Mohammed was “opening Saudi Arabia to the world.” His supporters blanketed social media with stories of his campaigns to curb corruption and give more freedoms to Saudi women.

Mohammed is indeed shaking things up at home. Recent interviews with prominent Washington Post and New York Times columnists show how eagerly he is styling himself as a millennial reformer steering his nation into 21st-century modernity. But he’s also playing a central role in an international realignment that is perhaps more important.

Before arriving in Britain, Mohammed stopped in Cairo to visit Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, a close Saudi ally. Apart from meeting with Sissi, the crown prince also called on Pope Tawadros II, the head of Egypt’s ancient Coptic Church. It was cast as a sign of Mohammed’s liberal enlightenment: The scion of a regime notorious for embracing and exporting an ultra-conservative brand of Sunni Islam was reaching out to one of the region’s embattled minority faiths.

But the crown prince was also sending a message to his supposed enemies. In remarks reportedly made this week in a meeting with Egyptian newspaper editors, he pointed to a “triangle of evil” in the Middle East made up of Iran — Riyadh’s perennial foe — Islamist extremist groups and Turkey. His rhetoric seemed to echo the notorious “axis of evil” bluster of the George W. Bush administration.

The inclusion of Turkey raised eyebrows and sparked an angry backlash on Turkish social media. There is no love lost between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and leaders in the region, especially in the case of Sissi, who brutally suppressed Islamist factions favored by Erdogan after taking power in a 2013 military coup. To this day, Erdogan and his supporters memorialize a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood activists in Cairo that summer, which saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people killed.

After reports about Mohammed’s comments emerged, Saudi officials moved to placate their critics. “It was alleged that the Saudi Crown prince pointed to Turkey via the words ‘some evil powers in the region,’ ” read a statement from the Saudi Embassy in Ankara. “We would like to state that these ‘evil powers’ are the Muslim Brotherhood and radical groups.”

But that hardly obscures the ill will between Riyadh and Ankara. The two countries represent opposing visions for the Middle East: Erdogan was a champion of the 2011 Arab Spring and cheered on the democratic victories of Islamist political parties across the region. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, reviled parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood and hated the upheavals that plunged much of the old authoritarian order of the Arab world into crisis.

While Erdogan was championing the Turkish model of democracy as a blueprint for the region, deposed Arab autocrats were finding sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. Now, numerous political Islamists from Egypt and other Arab states are in exile in Turkey, and Erdogan cuts an increasingly isolated figure, raging at both the West and his Arab rivals.

In recent months, Turkey has been fighting a media war with both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which also detests Erdogan’s coziness with Islamists and support of its rival, Qatar. In December, Erdogan and the UAE’s foreign minister traded insults over Ottoman history in the Arabian peninsula. This week, the Saudi crown prince reportedly chided Erdogan’s desire for his own “caliphate” across the Middle East.

This week, a major Middle Eastern satellite network based in the UAE — but believed to be majority Saudi-owned — even stopped airing Turkish soap operas, which are tremendously popular across the Middle East and North Africa. The decision is thought to be an extension of the heated political climate.

In that climate, Erdogan has drawn closer to Iran, particularly in the fitful project to broker some sort of truce in Syria. But that hardly justifies being lumped into the “triangle of evil” by the Saudi crown prince. As we’ve noted in Today’s WorldView, Turkey and Iran find themselves on the opposite sides of the Syrian battlefield in many places. And while Turkey is justifiably criticized for allowing myriad Islamist fighters to slip into Syria in the early years of the war, it has also suffered greatly from Islamic State terrorism attacks at home.

Meanwhile, Shiite Iran is ideologically anathema to Sunni jihadist groups. In linking the two, Mohammed took a page directly out of the playbook of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has insisted repeatedly that the Islamic Republic and Islamic State should be seen in the same light.

That, too, is telling. Mohammed is advancing an agenda that is bringing Riyadh into tighter cooperation not only with a hawkish Trump administration, but with Israel itself. Although the Saudis aren’t publicly admitting it, Israeli officials privately confirm that there is growing strategic cooperation between the two countries, as well as Egypt. Think of it, perhaps, as another triangle in a region where new enmities and rivalries constantly take shape.

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post.

8 March 2018

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/08/saudi-crown-prince-sees-a-new-axis-of-evil-in-the-middle-east/?utm_term=.12a43c7fb5f8

By Rachel Blevins

3 Mar 2018 –The Rothschild banking empire will ensure that its control continues to stay within the family for a seventh generation as David de Rothschild, 75, is set to hand the role of chairman over to his son, Alexandre de Rothschild, 37, in June.

The banking dynasty has been passed between generations for the last 200 years. It was started by Mayer Amschel Rothschild as a French railway company, and five of his sons went on to establish banking businesses across Europe. Financial Times reported that the investment bank is currently pushing to “diversify from its core French and British advisory business to help it ride out less buoyant periods in Europe’s mergers and acquisitions market.”

The new chairman joined the bank in 2008, and he has helped to set up and oversee the private equity business. As the group increases its investments in small U.S. operations, the Times noted that the overhaul of the corporate structure that occurred during the elder de Rothschild’s term allowed the family to “tighten control over the group by buying out minority shareholders.”

The Rothschild family has also shown its influence in “U.S. operations” by working closely with political figures such as failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. WikiLeaks revealed that Lynn Forester de Rothschild was working with the Clinton campaign to formulate economic policy as early as January 2015.

“I think this blog overstates what Warren was doing, but we need to craft the economic message for Hillary so that Warren’s common inaccurate conclusions are addressed. Xoxo Lynn,” Lady Rothschild wrote in an email to top Clinton aide, Cheryl Mills.

Emmanuel Macron, the current French president, is also a former employee of Rothschild. He earned the nickname of “Mozart of Finance” at the company after he played a crucial role in advising Nestlé to invest $12 billion in the acquisition of a Pfizer unit in 2012.

The Rothschild family currently has 58 percent of voting rights and owns 49 percent of the company, and the Times noted that while revenue from its global advisory business fell 8 percent, private wealth and asset management and merchant banking divisions grew by more than 30 percent each and overall revenue rose by 6 percent in 2017.

As The Free Thought Project reported in August 2017, Lord Jacob Rothschild, founder and chairman of RIT Capital Partners, sent ominous signals internationally when he began selling U.S. assets because he viewed them as risky and unstable.

“We do not believe this is an appropriate time to add to risk. Share prices have in many cases risen to unprecedented levels at a time when economic growth is by no means assured,” Rothschild wrote in his company’s semi-annual report.

Rothschild also said he believes “The period of monetary accommodation may well be coming to an end,” and that quantitative easing programs employed by central banks, such as the Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. will eventually “come to an end.”

The Rothschilds consider themselves to be the “custodians of the Economist magazine’s legacy.” The magazine published an article in 1988 that claimed a centralized “world currency” could be expected by the year 2018—a methodical movement that has played out in many ways over the years.

The Financial Times reported that while Rothschild was affected by a financial crisis in 2016, its share increased by more than 15 percent in 2017. It remains to be seen how Alexandre de Rothschild’s leadership will impact the banking empire.

As The Free Thought Project previously reported, the Rothschild family has been moving its chess pieces around the world for centuries.

The head of the Rothschild banking empire, and staunch supporter of Israel, Lord Jacob Rothschild, recently revealed the critical role of his family in the securing the Balfour Declaration, which “helped pave the way for the creation of Israel.”

The Balfour Declaration, written in 1917, was an official document from the British Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, addressed to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the Zionist movement in Britain at the time – and Lord Jacob Rothschild’s uncle.

During the television interview with Rothschild, he revealed new details about the extremely pivotal role his cousin Dorothea de Rothschild played. Rothschild described Dorothea, who was in her teens at the time, as “devoted to Israel,” and said: ‘What she did was crucially important.’”

Rothschild went on to say that Dorothy acted as a conduit between Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and the British political establishment. Dorothy “told Weizmann how to integrate, how to insert himself into British establishment life, which he learned very quickly,” according to Rothschild.

Rothschild explained that the manner in which the declaration was procured was extraordinary.

“It was the most incredible piece of opportunism,” he reasoned.

“[Weizmann] gets to Balfour,” Rothschild described, “and unbelievably, he persuades Lord Balfour, and Lloyd George, the prime minister, and most of the ministers, that this idea of a national home for Jews should be allowed to take place. I mean it’s so, so unlikely.”

This extremely revealing interview with Lord Rothschild was conducted by former Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub as part of the Balfour 100 project, commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The interview took place at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, a manor bequeathed to the nation by the Rothschild family in 1957, where the Declaration is stored.

According to Ambassador Taub, the Balfour Declaration “changed the course of history for the Middle East.”

Rothschild said his family at the time was divided on the idea of Israel, noting that some members “didn’t think it was a good thing that this national home be established there.”

Dorothea’s letters are also stored at Waddesdon, and describe her subsequent dealings with a variety of Zionist leaders, as well as her advice on the organization of the Zionist Conference, according to the Times.

Rothschild said that the Declaration went through five separate drafts before finally being formally issued on November 2, 1917.

In her book, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, Alison Weir exposed the fact that numerous drafts of the declaration were presented to Zionists in the United States prior to the document being finalized.

Weir’s book notes that one of the primary inducements offered to British leaders to issue the Balfour Declaration was the Zionist claim that they would bring the U.S. into World War I on Britain’s side if the British would promise to enable the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Balfour Declaration Text:
Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you. on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist     aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours,

Arthur James Balfour

The deeply intertwined relationship between modern Zionism and the Rothschild banking empire cannot be overstated. Without the Rothschild family’s vast influence and direct assistance, Israel very well may have never been created.

Rachel Blevins is an independent journalist from Texas, who aspires to break the false left/right paradigm in media and politics by pursuing truth and questioning existing narratives.

5 March 2018

Source: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/rothschild-passing-dynasty-on-to-7th-generation-marking-200-years-of-banker-family-rule/

By Chris Hedges

25 Feb 2018 – The proliferation of guns in American society is not only profitable for gun manufacturers, it fools the disempowered into fetishizing weapons as a guarantor of political agency. Guns buttress the myth of a rugged individualism that atomizes Americans, disdains organization and obliterates community, compounding powerlessness. Gun ownership in the United States, largely criminalized for poor people of color, is a potent tool of oppression. It does not protect us from tyranny. It is an instrument of tyranny.

“Second Amendment cultists truly believe that guns are political power,” writes Mark Ames, the author of “Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.” “[They believe that] guns in fact are the only source of political power. That’s why, despite loving guns, and despite being so right-wing, they betray such a paranoid fear and hatred of armed agents of the government (minus Border Guards, they all tend to love our Border Guards). If you think guns, rather than concentrated wealth, equals political power, then you’d resent government power far more than you’d resent billionaires’ power or corporations’ hyper-concentrated wealth/power, because government will always have more and bigger guns. In fact you’d see pro-gun, anti-government billionaires like the Kochs as your natural political allies in your gun-centric notion of political struggle against the concentrated gun power of government.”

American violence has always been primarily vigilante violence. It is a product of the colonial militias; the U.S. Army, which carried out campaigns of genocide against Native Americans; slave patrols; hired mercenaries and gunslingers; the Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detective agencies; gangs of strikebreakers; the Iron and Coal Police; company militias; the American Legion veterans of World War I who attacked union agitators; the White Citizens’ Council; the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia; and the Ku Klux Klan, which controlled some states. These vigilante groups carried out atrocities, mostly against people of color and radicals, within our borders that later characterized our savage subjugation of the Philippines, interventions in Latin America, the wars in Korea and Vietnam and our current debacles in the Middle East. Gen. Jacob H. Smith summed up American attitudes about wholesale violence in the Philippines when he ordered his troops to turn the island of Samar, defended by Filipino insurgents, into “a howling wilderness.”

Mass culture and most historians do not acknowledge the patterns of violence that have played out over and over since the founding of the nation. This historical amnesia blinds us to the endemic violence that defines our culture and is encoded in our national myth. As historian Richard Slotkin writes in “Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860,” the first of his three magisterial works on violence in American society, our Jacksonian form of democracy was defined by “the western man-on-the-make, the speculator, and the wildcat banker; [in a time] when racist irrationalism and a falsely conceived economics prolonged and intensified slavery in the teeth of American democratic idealism; and when men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining national aspirations in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”

“The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation,” he writes, “but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.”

“A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their ethics and their institutions,” Slotkin writes.

The metaphors we use to describe ourselves to ourselves are rooted in this national myth. We explain our history and our experience and seek our identity in this myth. This myth connects us to the forces that shape and give meaning to our lives. It bridges, as Slotkin writes, “the gap between the world of the mind and the world of affairs, between dream and reality, between impulse or desire and action. It draws on the content of individual and collective memory, structures it, and develops it from imperatives for belief and action.”

The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment” also illustrates how the racist, white settler vision of the world continues to color our perception of reality. She writes:

The populist frontier ideology has served the U.S. ruling class well for its entire history and once again found tremendous resonance in the Vietnam War as another Indian war. A key to John F. Kennedy’s political success was that he revived the “frontier” as a trope of populist imperialism, speaking of the “settling” of the continent and “taming” a different sort of “wilderness.” In Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angeles at the 1960 Democratic Convention, he said: “I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3,000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. … We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.” The metaphor described Kennedy’s plan for employing political power to make the world the new frontier of the United States. Central to this vision was the Cold War, what Richard Slotkin calls “a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against communism,” to which the nation was summoned by Kennedy in his inaugural address. Soon after he took office, that struggle took the form of the counterinsurgency program in Vietnam and his creation of the Green Beret Special Forces. “Seven years after Kennedy’s nomination,” Slotkin reminds us, “American troops would be describing Vietnam as ‘Indian Country’ and search-and-destroy missions as a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’; and Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the ‘Indians’ away from the ‘fort’ so that the ‘settlers’ could plant ‘corn.’ ”

The gun culture permits a dispossessed public, sheared of economic and political power, to buy a firearm and revel in feelings of omnipotence. A gun reminds Americans that they are divine agents of purification, anointed by God and Western civilization to remake the world in their own image. Violence in America is not about the defense of liberty or radical change. It is an expression of domination, racism and hate. American vigilantes are the shock troops of capitalism. They butcher the weak on behalf of the strong. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” the English novelist and essayist D.H. Lawrence wrote. “It has never yet melted.”

There are some 310 million firearms in the United States, including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns. The number of military-style assault weapons in private hands—including the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles used in the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.—is estimated at 1.5 million. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, an average of 90 firearms per 100 people.

“Total gun deaths in the United States average around 37,000 a year, with two-thirds of those deaths being suicides, leaving approximately 12,000 homicides, a thousand of those at the hands of the police,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz. “Mass shootings—ones that leave four or more people wounded or dead—now occur in the United States, on average, at the pace of one or more per day. Disturbing as that fact is, mass shootings currently account for only 2 percent of gun killings annually. The number of gun deaths—37,000—is roughly equal to death-by-vehicle incidents in the United States per year.”

If the ruling elites feared an armed uprising, a draconian form of gun control would instantly be law. But the engine of gun ownership is not the fear of government. It is the fear by white people of the black and brown underclass, an underclass many whites are convinced will threaten them as society breaks down. Guns, largely in the hands of whites, have rarely been deployed against the state. In this, the United States is an exception. It has a heavily armed population and yet maintains political stability. The few armed rebellions—the 1786 and 1787 Shays’ Rebellion, the 1921 armed uprising by 10,000 coal miners at Blair Mountain in West Virginia—were swiftly and brutally put down by militias and armed vigilantes hired by capitalists. These uprisings were about specific grievances, not systemic change. Revolution is foreign to our intellectual tradition.

As jobs and manufacturing are shipped overseas, communities crumble, despair grips much of the country and chronic poverty plagues American families, the gun seems to be the last tangible relic of a free and mythic America. It offers the illusion of power, protection and freedom. This is why the powerless will not give it up.

“In the heartland, these are people who feel they’ve been the victims of sustained economic violence at the hands of tyrannical governments of both parties,” writer and editor Daniel Hayes wrote in The New York Times in 2016. “In 2008, Barack Obama’s notorious misstep got one thing right: Rural people will ‘cling’ to guns. Not because they are sad or misguided, but because it is the last right they feel they still have: a liberty at least, in place of opportunity.”

“Outsourcing and guns: These are the twin issues animating Trump voters in rural Kentucky,” he wrote. “The two are linked and feed off each other; the only difference between them is that white rural voters see outsourcing as a losing battle, whereas protecting and expanding Second Amendment rights is the only policy they’ve been able to get politicians to move on. For that reason alone, it is totemic.”

The Second Amendment, as Dunbar-Ortiz makes clear in her book, was never about protecting individual freedom. It was about codifying white vigilante violence into law.

“The elephant in the room in these debates has long been what the armed militias of the Second Amendment were to be used for,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. “The kind of militias and gun rights of the Second Amendment had long existed in the colonies and were expected to continue fulfilling two primary roles in the United States: destroying Native communities in the armed march to possess the continent, and brutally subjugating the enslaved African population. …”

Attacks on the gun culture and the gun violence that plagues the nation are seen by many gun owners as an attack on their national identity. The more powerful the weapon, the more powerful the gun owner feels. There are those among the marginalized and enraged who are tempted, especially because of easy access to assault-style weapons, to use their guns in mass killings to cleanse the world. The lone killer, almost always a white male, is celebrated by Hollywood and in our national myth and “frontier psychology.” This peculiar American veneration of violence, Slotkin writes, “reaches out of the past to cripple, incapacitate, or strike down the living.”

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.

5 March 2018

Source: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/guns-and-liberty/

By Johan Galtung

The world is getting worse.  Violence used to cluster around the global power of USA and the regional power of Israel. Now two more:

• The unstoppable growing power of China” (NYT editorial 28 Feb 2018)

• Erdögan’s Neo-Ottomanism at a Dangerous Turning Point” Pier Zaccone (Other-news.info/2018/02, 28 Feb 2018). One global, with “Military buildup on the reefs” in South China Sea (NYT), one regional.

There are similarities.  Xi and Erdögan have a religious base, Buddhism and Islam.  And great successes, Xi in “lifting the bottom up”, Erdögan in ridding his country of secular military dictatorship.

One may speculate that the successes have gone to their heads so they see themselves as indispensable for their countries, and invincible. Being male and strong they have Trump’s approval, a fragile benefit.

Both have taken serious steps to make their reign long lasting–uninterrupted by elections–also known as dictatorships.  And, whereas democracies are different, dictatorships tend to be boringly similar.

One similarity: decline, fall and violent death of the dictator.  There is something suicidal about dictators.  They may be praised for problems they solve but have to know when their time is over.  If not coalitions will arise with one shared goal: to get rid of them. The rumblings of coalitions shaping up may now be heard in both countries.

We take note with sadness, mindful of their achievements.  Gandhi did no such thing nor did Mandela, applying nonviolence to themselves. Xi-Erdögan were not inspired by nonviolence, nor is it a requisite. The self-interest in being remembered for the achievements is enough.

The world needs peaceful co-existence, not more belligerence; and arms races, China with USA, Turkey with Iran. Russia makes arms and the people less vulnerable, but “U.S. chases Russia into a new nuclear arms race” (NYT 6 Feb 2018). Much more dangerous is “The Army of the EU” with no national democratic controls (CounterPunch 16 Feb 2018).

What else?  “The economy, stupid”, Bill Clinton said, and most economic stupidity is found in his country. “‘America First’ policy leaves country isolated while others make deals” (NYT 26 Jan 2018) with 35 bilateral and regional trade pacts (USA only with EU, and “that negotiation has gone dormant”. Hence “Poverty American Style” (Kenneth Shurin, CounterPunch 9 Feb 2018), brilliantly explored by UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Australian Professor Philip Alston. The USA does worse than other developed countries on “life expectancy, infant mortality, pregnant mother mortality, obesity, incarceration, homicide, educational attainment, income disparity, childhood poverty, nutrition, homelessness, etc.”

The recent life expectancy decline was “fueled by a 21 percent rise in the death rate from drug overdoses”.

Early February Dow plunged 4.6 percent, erasing January gains.  That will happen again, and we are waiting for bigger crashes. The clever strategy is obvious: make economic distance to the USA.

Look at the Spanish version. The price of housing increased 3,1 percent in 2017, not much. But 3,6 percent January 2018 alone is much, even if we only multiply by 12 for 2018 (Spaniaposten March 2018). People less able to service debts may still buy housing, and banks shall collapse as did Banco Popular in 2017, losing 13,5 billion euro in failed housing investment. Bought by Banco Santander for 1 euro.

German trade expands. From 1986 to 2016 Germany added to the biggest-second biggest trade partners Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, most of former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria (Le Monde Diplomatique Feb 2018). Germany has moved east before.  Trade creates dependence, more lasting than conquest as it craves for more. The US approach, dependence on military support, is at best ambiguous.

All is set to make the USA the biggest loser. But there will be many losers as “an era of easy money draws to end” (NYT 8 Feb 2018).

How about Afghanistan?   “In an unwinnable war, what is the least bad loss?” (Max Fisher, NYT 3-4 Feb 2018). Six points: Nation-building of sorts, Starting over, The Somalia federal model, A peace that satisfies no one, A post-American civil war, Perpetual stalemate.  Not a word about 25,000 independent villages or about the 1893 Durand line cutting the Pashtun = Taliban nation in two; now even with palisades.  And, “least bad” for whom?  For the USA. of course. How about Afghans?

An article as badly informed as Pentagon-State Department?

Billy Graham passed away February 21st at the age of 99, and the article by Cecil Bothwell in CounterPunch 23 Feb 2018 is recommended.  Graham had incredible power over US presidents, making them believe that the way to God’s support of their wars went through him. A country listening to him and his likes is not worth listening to.

We note “In Britain, privatizing gone wrong” (NYT 24 Jan 2018). The giant Carillion went into liquidation after gaping over far too many tasks that cannot be run for profits and serve all citizens. The state is needed, but not the state alone, we hasten to add.  Both-And.

“Challenging the cult of youth” (NYT 12 Feb 2018): interesting for the people advanced in age, so is “Aging Pride”. But exhibiting “Nudes of old people, men and women alike” focuses only on the body, not on mind and spirit. No.  Like Xi and Erdögan, do better next time.

“The secret to a happy marriage is knowing how to fight” (NYT 19 Jan 2018, by Daphne de Marneffe) makes good points. But, is “fight” the word?  How to solve conflict, concile trauma is our answer.  How about “how to have a conversation”, “how to talk”, not how to fight?

Tore Linné-Eriksen revisits (KK 25 Jan 2018) four 1968 aspects: periphery against center (Oslo), lower against higher classes, revolt within the state church, international solidarity. Add informality. First names, no Sie-vous, but du-tu.  Inter-human, not only -district, -class, -state.  An enormous, and irreversible, gain.  Thanks, 1968.

Johan Galtung, a professor of peace studies, dr hc mult, is founder of TRANSCEND International and rector of TRANSCEND Peace University.

5 March 2018

Source: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2018/03/meanwhile-around-the-world-11/