Chris Hedges's Blog, page 48

America’s Dangerous Inheritance From World War I

The article was originally published in the Future of Freedom.

“War is the health of the state.” So said the eerily prescient and uncompromising anti-war radical Randolph Bourne in the very midst of what Europeans called the Great War, a nihilistic conflict that eventually consumed the lives of at least 9 million soldiers, including some 50,000 Americans. He meant, ultimately, that wars — especially foreign wars — inevitably increase the punitive and regulatory power of government. He opposed what Americans commonly term the First World War on those principled grounds. Though he’d soon die a premature death, Bourne had correctly predicted the violations of civil liberties, deceptive propaganda, suppression of immigrants, vigilantism, and press restriction that would result on the home front, even as tens of thousands of American boys were slaughtered in the trenches of France.

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This, the war on the free press, free speech, and dissent more generally, is the true legacy of the American war in Europe (1917–18). More disturbing, in the wake of 9/11 and Washington’s two-decade-old wars for the Greater Middle East, the dark, twisted, underbelly of World War I’s legacy has again reared its ugly head. Bipartisan, interventionist presidential administrations — unilaterally tyrannical in foreign affairs — from George W.Bush to Barrack Obama to Donald Trump have sought mammoth expansions of executive power, suppressed civil liberties, trampled on the Constitution, and waged outright war on the press.

All this was done — in 1917 and today — in the name of “patriot-ism,” what Oscar Wilde (perhaps apocryphally) labeled the “virtue of the vicious.” World War I produced the repressive and now-infamous Espionage and Sedition Acts, along with brutal vigilante attacks on Germans and other immigrants. The 21st century’s endless wars have engendered the equally autocratic USA PATRIOT Act, and their own reinvigorated brand of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim abuses. It is for this reason that a brief reflection on America’s troubled — and oft-forgotten — experience on the home front during the First World War is more relevant than ever.

Rethinking American intervention in World War I

The truth about this particular war, at least of America’s own late intervention, is that it was unnecessary. That is not, of course, how World War I is today collectively remembered, but it was a common — perhaps even majority — viewpoint in the interwar period of 1919–1940. The more common modern memory, of Uncle Sam rushing into the war at last to save the day, ensure victory, and thereby “save democracy,” was, in fact, carefully crafted in the aftermath of the Second World War when the United States decided, once and for all, to seek global imperium. No doubt, the Germans were no angels during the First World War. None of the belligerents was. All contestants (even little Belgium) were land-hungry belligerent states with sometimes large (and distant) overseas empires. If the great sin of Germany was to violate Belgian neutrality (Britain’s declared casus belli for war), it was instructive that nothing was said about Brussels’s decades-long rape of the Congo, a campaign that bordered on the genocidal.

Early in the war, there were, now famous, German attacks on U.S. ships that sometimes killed American citizens, and that had already whipped up anti-German rancor among some, but did not lead to outright war. They included the German submarine sinking of the famed British ocean liner Lusitania, which killed more than 100 Americans. Jumping to conclusions, as the former president was apt to, Theodore Roosevelt denounced the attack as “murder on the high seas.” The problem was, it turned out that Germany had been correct: the liner was carrying armaments in secret, including a total of 1,248 cases of 3-inch artillery shells and 4,927 boxes of rifle cartridges bound for the British Army. When he felt Woodrow Wilson protested too vehemently, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan — an ardent opponent of intervention — resigned in protest. “A Ship carrying contraband, should not rely on passengers to protect her from attack,” the outgoing secretary accurately noted regarding the Lusitania, adding that “it would be like putting women and children in front of an army.” Nonetheless, the biggest dove in the Wilson cabinet was gone and the path to war became that much more open.

Nevertheless, Germany did — by the winter of 1916-17 — declare unrestricted submarine warfare on U.S. merchant ships bound for the Allies, and even sent a telegram to Mexico that appeared to entice Mexico’s entry into the war on the Kaiser’s side in exchange for the reclamation of its lost provinces of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These seemed, to many, to be unacceptable provocations that required war. But were they?

Germany had a point, after all. For years, as Washington pledged neutrality, it had floated massive banking loans to the Allies, traded almost exclusively with Allied states, and hardly raised a peep about Britain’s own violation of neutral trading rights through its starvation blockade of German ports. Feeling itself backed into a corner, squeezing the British economy seemed the only way to end the war on terms favorable to Germany. While unrestricted warfare turned out to be a tactical blunder, it need not have prompted outright American military intervention. The United States might have insisted on true neutral trading rights whereby its merchant ships could pierce the blockade of Germany, and refused loans or arms deals of any kind to any belligerent power. True neutrality — in action — just might have averted war. It was not to be.

It seems ironic that it was Woodrow Wilson — a self-described “Progressive” who had run just months earlier on the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war” — who asked Congress for a martial declaration against Germany on April 2, 1917. Wilson had always favored the British and French Allies over the Central Powers of Germany and Austria, but he had once seemed genuinely leery of the potential consequences of intervention. In 1914, he had said, “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war.” He’d soon be proven correct.

Contrary to common — albeit now debunked, but still prevalent — historical mythology, the pre–Great War United States was never a full-tilt isolationist state. Although since the War of 1812 at least, Washington had tended to avoid intervention in Europe’s endless conflicts, Uncle Sam had nevertheless expanded its own continental empire through aggressive conquests at the expense of Indians and the state of Mexico. Then, after 1898, the United States joined in the overseas imperial game, gobbling up Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and various other Pacific and Caribbean Islands in the wake of the one-sided, unnecessary Spanish-American War.

Nevertheless, Washington’s early spring 1917 entrance into a catastrophic and epic European ground war was a profound departure from America’s past. The United States would have to raise armies exceeding even those of the Civil War and somehow deploy them to France. Intervention would also, inevitably, alter society. As the historian David M. Kennedy summarized, “The war temporarily required the United States … to discipline and mobilize its citizens in a manner from which history and geography had theretofore singularly spared them.” Only, as it turned out, those economic and social changes would prove far from temporary. Furthermore, as war always does, the war across the Atlantic eventually came home, affecting domestic politics, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and the very existence of the ostensible republic.

Civil liberties in the First World War

“Woe be to the man or group of men that stand in our way.”

— President Wilson in a June 1917 warning to peace advocates

In this, one of the darker, if rarely remembered, phases of American history, the U.S. government waged a veritable war on peaceful dissent. Pacifism, skepticism, radicalism: seemingly overnight all three were officially or practically criminalized. In a familiar pattern in the suppression of civil liberties, the White House would raise the national-security alarm and request the power to curtail freedom and squash protest; then Congress would do the president’s bidding and pass repressive legislation forthwith; much later the courts tended to uphold the highly questionable laws.

War fever produced a vehement “patriotic” crusade against even the sentiment of peace or doubt. When, in the congressional debates that followed Wilson’s request for war, some representatives and senators questioned the case for intervention, they were regularly met with shouts of “Treason! Treason!” Earlier, in response to the Progressive senator Robert La Follette’s opposition to the arming of U.S. merchant ships, Teddy Roosevelt had quipped that the Wisconsin senator “has shown himself to be an unhung traitor, and if the war should come, he ought to be hung.” When even a still-popular, and ostensibly Progressive, former president used such provocative language, it proved unsurprising that thousands of private citizens would indeed inflict violence on their anti-war neighbors in 1917-18.

Had La Follette been so far off the mark in his criticism? Honest analysis proves otherwise. Prudently, if rarely among his contemporaries, the senator questioned the Manichean duality of Wilson’s official framing of the war as one between liberal Western states and autocratic Germanic states. After all, where did monarchical Tsarist Russia — a core member of the Allies — fit into that equation? And what of the massive overseas imperium of Britain and France, which dwarfed the German and Austrian empires? On April 4, 1917, during the congressional war debate, La Follette pointed out the contradictions then at work, as he asserted “[Wilson] says this is a war … for democracy…. But the president has not suggested that we make our support of Britain conditional to her granting home rule to Ireland, Egypt, or India….” It was a fair point; indeed, World War I was a war between empires, not — as Wilson pretended — against empire.

The primary tool of oppression for the U.S. government was the Sedition Act, overwhelmingly passed into law on May 16, 1917. The impetus for the bill was Attorney General Thomas Gregory’s request for an amendment to the press-constricting Espionage Act, which would allow him to prosecute “disloyal utterances.” The result was a new law that prohibited “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government … or Constitution … or flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy.” Beyond the law’s troubling, and obvious, attack on free expression, the very vagueness of the statute lent itself to abuse.

It was the fanatic Gregory who would wield this new tool of federal oppression. He performed his duties with glee, stating of war opponents, “May God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.” It didn’t take particularly violent or catalyzing speech to earn an arrest, conviction, and federal prison sentence. When a New Hampshire citizen cited his opinion that “this was a [banker J.P.] Morgan war and not a war of the people,” he received a three-year prison sentence.

More famous, when the prominent Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs delivered an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio — which focused mainly on the supposed ills of capitalism and hadn’t explicitly urged violation of conscription laws — he was arrested and earned a ten-year term in the federal penitentiary. Ultimately, the martyrdom of Debs partly backfired. Running, from federal prison, for the presidency in 1920, he earned nearly a million votes, the highest popular vote percentage by a Socialist in American history.

No court challenges of the deplorable Sedition Act bore fruit, and the law remained on the books until repealed in December 1920. By then the war was over, precedent was set, and damage was done. Many languished in prison for years for the crime of war opposition, even criticism. As historian David Kennedy concluded, “Commentators ever since have rightly viewed it as a landmark of repression in American history…. [It] reveals a great deal about the popular temper at the midpoint of American belligerency.” Indeed it was, and did.

That the Sedition Act needed to be used so broadly deflates the myth that Americans rushed en masse to recruiting stations and waged war with great enthusiasm. In reality, when the government called for one million military volunteers only 73,000 enlisted. Six weeks later the United States settled on conscription. Throughout the war 330,000 Americans were officially classified as war evaders and thousands of pacifists were detained in so-called Conscientious Objector Prison Camps.

One outgrowth of the government war on dissent — and the failed yet furious counteraction — was the formation of what later became the still-prominent (if controversial) American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The battles waged by the new organization and countless other grassroots protests against the war and liberty violations demonstrated the potential power, and vigorous persistence, of dissenters. The battle rages again today, as after 9/11 to be anti-war is to be brushed with the toxic brand of “Un-Americanism.”

Glenn Greenwald Faces Possible Imprisonment by Bolsonaro Regime

When Edward Snowden was an anonymous National Security Agency subcontractor with documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs, Glenn Greenwald, then at The Guardian, was among the small group of journalists Snowden trusted to publish the documents in 2013.

The publication earned Greenwald a reputation as an outspoken defender of free speech and whistleblowers. He went on to co-found The Intercept, and then The Intercept Brasil, after moving to Brazil in 2005.

A staunch critic of Brazilian far-right president Jair Bolsanaro, Greenwald has been charged with cybercrimes by the Brazilian government, for his role in publishing articles based on text messages that, The New York Times says, “embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force.”

The Intercept Brasil’s articles questioned the integrity of the task force and the Brazilian judiciary as a whole, including Sérgio Moro, a former judge, and now Bolsanaro’s minister of justice. In addition, as The Daily Beast explains, “The messages implicated Brazilian prosecutors and judges in a plot to arrest and jail Bolsonaro’s opponent, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on bogus charges and prevent him from running for a third term in the 2018 election.”

Brazilian prosecutors allege that Greenwald and The Intercept Brasil went beyond the boundaries of journalism and the public interest. They claim Greenwald and his colleagues played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime” and are part of a “criminal organization” responsible for hacking into public officials’ mobile phones.

Six other people were named in the complaint.

The charges were a surprise, as Greenwald was previously cleared of charges by Federal Police in a December report. HuffPosts’ Ryan Grenoble called the development “an alarming sign that Brazil’s increasingly authoritarian government is punishing a journalist for revealing explosive information.” Greenwald and his family had previously received death threats from Bolsanaro supporters. Bolsanaro himself even threatened Greenwald with jail time, and said Greenwald married his husband, David Miranda, a Rio de Janeiro council member, to avoid getting deported.

“The Bolsonaro government and the movement that supports it has made repeatedly clear that it does not believe in basic press freedoms,” Greenwald said in a statement to The Daily Beast. He continued:

Less than two months ago, after examining the same evidence cited today by Brazil’s Public Ministry, the Federal Police stated that not only have I never committed any crimes in my contacts with our source, but also that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist. This new accusation — brought by the same prosecutor who just tried and failed to criminally prosecute the head of the Brazilian Bar Association for criticizing Minister Moro — is an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government.

Multiple international civil liberties and journalism organizations defended Greenwald. The ACLU denounced the charges on Twitter:

Our government must immediately condemn this outrageous assault on the freedom of the press, and recognize that its attacks on press freedoms at home have consequences for American journalists doing their jobs abroad, like Glenn Greenwald. https://t.co/fHycUBq3Dq

— ACLU (@ACLU) January 21, 2020

Freedom of the Press Foundation Executive Director Trevor Timm posted a statement of support on the organization’s website:

These sham charges are a sickening escalation of the Bolsonaro administration’s authoritarian attacks on press freedom and the rule of law. They cannot be allowed to stand. We call on the Brazilian government to immediately halt its persecution of Greenwald and respect press freedom — as the Brazilian Supreme Court has already ordered them to do. In the meantime, we dearly hope Glenn is safe and is able to continue doing his job as a journalist.

Greenwald told The Daily Beast he intends to fight the charges however he can.

The Many Ways the Military-Industrial Complex Gets Away With Murder

Call it a colossal victory for a Pentagon that hasn’t won a war in this century, but not for the rest of us. Congress only recently passed and the president approved one of the largest Pentagon budgets ever. It will surpass spending at the peaks of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. As last year ended, as if to highlight the strangeness of all this, the Washington Post broke a story about a “confidential trove of government documents” — interviews with key figures involved in the Afghan War by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction — revealing the degree to which senior Pentagon leaders and military commanders understood that the war was failing. Yet, year after year, they provided “rosy pronouncements they knew to be false,” while “hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable.”

However, as the latest Pentagon budget shows, no matter the revelations, there will be no reckoning when it comes to this country’s endless wars or its military establishment — not at a moment when President Donald Trump is sending yet more U.S. military personnel into the Middle East and has picked a new fight with Iran. No less troubling: how few in either party in Congress are willing to hold the president and the Pentagon accountable for runaway defense spending or the poor performance that has gone with it.

Given the way the Pentagon has sunk taxpayer dollars into those endless wars, in a more reasonable world that institution would be overdue for a comprehensive audit of all its programs and a reevaluation of its expenditures. (It has, by the way, never actually passed an audit.) According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Washington has already spent at least $2 trillion on its war in Afghanistan alone and, as the Post made clear, the corruption, waste, and failure associated with those expenditures was (or at least should have been) mindboggling.

Of course, little of this was news to people who had read the damning reports released by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction in previous years. They included evidence, for instance, that somewhere between $10 million and $43 million had been spent constructing a single gas station in the middle of nowhere, that $150 million had gone into luxury private villas for Americans who were supposed to be helping strengthen Afghanistan’s economy, and that tens of millions more were wasted on failed programs to improve Afghan industries focused on extracting more of the country’s minerals, oil, and natural gas reserves.

In the face of all this, rather than curtailing Pentagon spending, Congress continued to increase its budget, while also supporting a Department of Defense slush fund for war spending to keep the efforts going. Still, the special inspector general’s reports did manage to rankle American military commanders (unable to find successful combat strategies in Afghanistan) enough to launch what, in effect, would be a public-relations war to try to undermine that watchdog’s findings.

All of this, in turn, reflected the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President (and former five-star General) Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about in his memorable 1961 farewell address. That complex only continues to thrive and grow almost six decades later, as contractor profits are endlessly prioritized over what might be considered the national security interests of the citizenry.

The infamous “revolving door” that regularly ushers senior Pentagon officials into defense-industry posts and senior defense-industry figures into key positions at the Pentagon (and in the rest of the national security state) just adds to the endless public-relations offensives that accompany this country’s forever wars. After all, the retired generals and other officials the media regularly looks to for expertise are often essentially paid shills for the defense industry. The lack of public disclosure and media discussion about such obvious conflicts of interest only further corrupts public debate on both the wars and the funding of the military, while giving the arms industry the biggest seat at the table when decisions are made on how much to spend on war and preparations for the same.

Media Analysis Brought to You by the Arms Industry

That lack of disclosure regarding potential conflicts of interest recently came into fresh relief as industry boosters beat the media drums for war with Iran. Unfortunately, it’s a story we’ve seen many times before. Back in 2008, for instance, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series, the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon had launched a program to cultivate a coterie of retired-military-officers-turned-pundits in support of its already disastrous war in Iraq. Seeing such figures on TV or reading their comments in the press, the public may have assumed that they were just speaking their minds. However, the Times investigation showed that, while widely cited in the media and regularly featured on the TV news, they never disclosed that they received special Pentagon access and that, collectively, they had financial ties to more than 150 Pentagon contractors.

Given such financial interests, it was nearly impossible for them to be “objective” when it came to this country’s failing war in Iraq. After all, they needed to secure more contracts for their defense-industry employers. A subsequent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that the Pentagon’s program raised “legitimate questions” about how its public propaganda efforts were tied to the weaponry it bought, highlighting “the possibility of compromised procurements resulting from potential competitive advantages” for those who helped them.

While the program was discontinued that same year, a similar effort was revealed in 2013 during a debate over whether the U.S. should attack Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that most of the former military figures and officials used as analysts at the time supported action against Syria. A review of their commentary by the Public Accountability Initiative found a number of them also had undisclosed ties to the arms industry. In fact, of 111 appearances in major media outlets by 22 commentators, only 13 of them disclosed any aspect of their potential conflicts of interest that might lead them to promote war.

The same pattern is now being repeated in the debate over the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate by drone Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani and other Iran-related issues. While Suleimani clearly opposed the United States and many of its national security interests, his killing risked pushing Washington into another endless war in the Middle East. And in a distinctly recognizable pattern, the Intercept has already found that the air waves were subsequently flooded by defense-industry pundits praising the strike. Unsurprisingly, news of a potential war also promptly boosted defense industry stocks. Northrop Grumman’s, Raytheon’s, and Lockheed Martin’s all started 2020 with an uptick.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) have offered legislation that could shut down that revolving door between the major weapons makers and Washington for good, but it has met concerted resistance from Pentagon officials and others still in Congress who stand to benefit from preserving the system as is. Even if that revolving door wasn’t shut down, transparency about just who was going through it would help the public better understand what former officials and military commanders are really advocating for when they speak positively of the necessity for yet another war in the Middle East.

Costly Weapons (and Well-Paid Lobbyists)

Here’s what we already know about how it all now works: weapon systems produced by the big defense firms with all those retired generals, former administration officials, and one-time congressional representatives on their boards (or lobbying for or consulting for them behind the scenes) regularly come in overpriced, are often delivered behind schedule, and repeatedly fail to have the capabilities advertised. Take, for instance, the new Ford class aircraft carriers, produced by Huntington Ingalls Industries, the sort of ships that have traditionally been used to show strength globally. In this case, however, the program’s development has been stifled by problems with its weapons elevators and the systems used to launch and recover its aircraft. Those problems have been costly enough to send the price for the first of those carriers soaring to $13.1 billion. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, the most expensive weapons system in Pentagon history, has an abysmal rate of combat readiness and currently comes in at more than $100 million per aircraft.

And yet, somehow, no one ever seems to be responsible for such programmatic failures and prices — certainly not the companies that make them (or all those retired military commanders sitting on their boards or working for them). One crucial reason for this lack of accountability is that key members of Congress serving on committees that should be overseeing such spending are often the top recipients of campaign contributions from the big weapons makers and their allies. And just as at the Pentagon, members of those committees or their staff often later become lobbyists for those very federal contractors.

With this in mind, the big defense firms carefully spread their contracts for weapons production across as many congressional districts as possible. This practice of “political engineering,” a term promoted by former Department of Defense analyst and military reformer Chuck Spinney, helps those contractors and the Pentagon buy off members of Congress from both parties. Take, for example, the Littoral Combat Ship, a vessel meant to operate close to shore. Costs for the program tripled over initial estimates and, according to Defense News, the Navy is already considering decommissioning four of the new ships next year as a cost-saving measure. It’s not the first time that program has been threatened with the budget axe. In the past, however, pork-barrel politics spearheaded by Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Richard Shelby (R-AL), in whose states those boats were being built, kept the program afloat.

The Air Force’s new bomber, the B-21, being built by Northrup Grumman, has been on a similar trajectory. Despite significant pressure from then-Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the Air Force refused in 2017 to make public or agree upon a contract price for the program. (It was a “cost-plus,” not a “fixed price” contract, after all.) It did, however, release the names of the companies providing components to the program, ensuring that relevant congressional representatives would support it, no matter the predictably spiraling costs to come.

Recent polling indicates that such pork-barrel politics isn’t backed by the public, even when they might benefit from it. Asked whether congressional representatives should use the Pentagon’s budget to generate jobs in their districts, 77% of respondents rejected the notion. Two-thirds favored shifting such funds to sectors like healthcare, infrastructure, and clean energy that would, in fact, create significantly more jobs.

And keep in mind that, in this big-time system of profiteering, hardware costs, however staggering, are just a modest part of the equation. The Pentagon spends about as much on what it calls “services” as it does on the weaponry itself and those service contracts are another major source of profits. For example, it’s estimated that the F-35 program will cost $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of the plane, but a trillion dollars of those costs will be for support and maintenance of the aircraft.

Increasingly, this means contractors are able to hold the Pentagon hostage over a weapon’s lifetime, which means overcharges of just about every imaginable sort, including for labor. The Project On Government Oversight (where I work) has, for instance, been uncovering overcharges in spare parts since our founding, including an infamous $435 hammer back in 1983. I’m sad to report that what, in the 1980s, was a seemingly outrageous $640 plastic toilet-seat cover for military airplanes now costs an eye-popping $10,000. A number of factors help explain such otherwise unimaginable prices, including the way contractors often retain intellectual property rights to many of the systems taxpayers funded to develop, legal loopholes that make it difficult for the government to challenge wild charges, and a system largely beholden to the interests of defense companies.

The most recent and notorious case may be TransDigm, a company that has purchased other companies with a monopoly on providing spare parts for a number of weapon systems. That, in turn, gave it power to increase the prices of parts with little fear of losing business — once, receiving 9,400% in excess profits for a single half-inch metal pin. An investigation by the House Oversight and Reform Committee found that TransDigm’s employees had been coached to resist providing cost or pricing information to the government, lest such overcharges be challenged.

In one case, for instance, a subsidiary of TransDigm resisted providing such information until the government, desperate for parts for weapons to be used in Iraq and Afghanistan, was forced to capitulate or risk putting troops’ lives on the line. TransDigm did later repay the government $16 million for certain overcharges, but only after the House Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing on the subject that shamed the company. As it happens, TransDigm’s behavior isn’t an outlier. It’s typical of many defense-related companies doing business with the government — about 20 major industry players, according to a former Pentagon pricing czar.

A Recipe for Disaster

For too long Congress has largely abdicated its responsibilities when it comes to holding the Pentagon accountable. You won’t be surprised to learn that most of the “acquisition reforms” it’s passed in recent years, which affect how the Department of Defense buys goods and services, have placed just about all real negotiating power in the hands of the big defense contractors. To add insult to injury, both parties of Congress continue to vote in near unanimity for increases in the Pentagon budget, despite 18-plus years of losing wars, the never-ending gross mismanagement of weapons programs, and a continued failure to pass a basic audit. If any other federal agency (or the contractors it dealt with) had a similar track record, you can only begin to imagine the hubbub that would ensue. But not the Pentagon. Never the Pentagon.

A significantly reduced budget would undoubtedly increase that institution’s effectiveness by curbing its urge to throw ever more money at problems. Instead, an often bought-and-paid-for Congress continues to enable bad decision-making about what to buy and how to buy it. And let’s face it, a Congress that allows endless wars, terrible spending practices, and multiplying conflicts of interest is, as the history of the twenty-first century has shown us, a recipe for disaster.

Planned Parenthood Endorses Challenger to Sen. Susan Collins

PORTLAND, Maine — Planned Parenthood on Tuesday endorsed a Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, saying Collins “turned her back” on women and citing her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court as well as other judicial nominees who oppose abortion.

Sara Gideon, speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, welcomed the endorsement from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “There’s never been a more important time to stand up for reproductive rights,” she said, in the face of “systematic attacks on reproductive rights across the country.

Collins, who was honored by Planned Parenthood as recently as 2017 as “an outspoken champion for women’s health,” is facing perhaps the toughest reelection fight of her career. Critics have vowed they won’t forget her key vote for Kavanaugh, whose nomination survived an accusation that he sexually assaulted someone in high school.

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“From her decisive vote to confirm Kavanaugh to her refusal to stop Republican attacks on our health and rights, it’s clear that she has turned her back on those she should be championing,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, acting president and CEO of Planned Parenthood. She said Collins “has abandoned not only the people of Maine, but women across the country.”

The Collins campaign said Planned Parenthood has changed and become more partisan, noting that no Republicans have won its endorsement.

“Senator Collins has not changed, but leadership at Planned Parenthood certainly has,” Collins campaign spokesman Kevin Kelley said. “It’s sad that the group is now run by far left activists who would rather focus on partisan politics than bipartisan policies that provide health care to women.”

The endorsement was one of several announced Tuesday, the day before the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortion legal. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund also is backing Democrat Jaime Harrison, who’s seeking to unseat GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Democrat Barbara Bollier, who’s running for an open Senate seat in Kansas.

In Maine, Collins and Planned Parenthood have had a complicated relationship.

Collins has supported funding for the organization, and she received its endorsement once before, in her 2002 reelection campaign. She was honored by the group in 2017 with its Barry Goldwater Award to a public official who has acted as a leader within the Republican Party to support Planned Parenthood.

“Senator Collins has been an outspoken champion for women’s health. Thanks to Senator Collins’ steadfast commitment to her constituents, tens of thousands of women in Maine and millions of women across the country still have access to essential health care,” Cecile Richards, then-president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said at the time, about a year before the Kavanaugh vote.

The relationship with the organization has gone downhill since then.

The 67-year-old Collins said Kavanaugh, who denied the sexual assault allegation, vowed to respect precedent including the Roe v. Wade ruling. But Planned Parenthood contends 26 proposals to limit abortions have been adopted in 17 states since then.

Gideon, meanwhile, supports Medicaid expansion and expanded health care for women and has vowed to continue “the fight to protect and expand reproductive rights.”

“As a former Planned Parenthood patient, she knows what it means to be able to get the care you need from a trusted provider and how hurtful it is to see your provider attacked by extremist politicians,” Nicole Clegg, of Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund, said in a statement.

Money is already pouring into the Senate race. Collins is considered among the most vulnerable Republican senators in the nation, a new position for her in a state where rising polarization and partisanship is clashing with a culture of independence.

Gideon is backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But she faces activist Betsy Sweet, attorney Bre Kidman, former Google executive Ross LaJeunesse and travel agent Michael Bunker in the Democratic primary.

Sweet said she supports Planned Parenthood “wholeheartedly,” but feels the organization has “overlooked my work fighting for women’s reproductive rights for almost four decades to side with the Washington establishment.”

Kidman also expressed disappointment Tuesday, saying that when her team reached out she was told that Planned Parenthood Action Fund “intended to remain neutral in the primary.”

“As one of the first greeters at the Planned Parenthood health center in Portland, I physically protected patients’ rights to access reproductive healthcare in sun, rain, sleet, and snow — often bodily shielding people from encounters with protestors,” she said in a statement.

Both Collins and Gideon already have raised millions of dollars for the race. Tracking firm Advertising Analytics projects that the candidates and outside groups will spend $55 million on ads by Election Day.

The Trump Coup to Come

America’s political authoritarianism comes in different, yet combined, mutually reinforcing forms. We have the neofascist authoritarianism of the white nationalist Republican Party, its Great Dog-Wagging God in the White House and his cultish, white-Amerikaner base.

Donald Trump may well not leave the White House without a dangerous fight if he is bested in the Electoral College in November. In his book titled “A Warning,” the senior Trump administration official known only as “Anonymous” cites a “worry for our republic … if Trump is removed from office—by impeachment or a narrow defeat in the ballot box … Trump will not exit quietly—or easily.” The author continues: “It is why at many turns he suggests ‘coups’ are afoot and a ‘civil war’ is in the offing. He is already seeding the narrative for his followers – a narrative that could end tragically.”

Indeed. An angry old white male Trumpist outside one of the president’s recurrent hate rallies on Dec. 10 told a New York Times reporter that he’d respond to his hero’s removal with “my .357 Magnum.” One week later, another Caucasian in Arizona pointed to a pistol he was wearing and told the Times that he’d been “stockpiling weapons, in case Mr. Trump’s re-election is not successful” and said that Trump’s defeat would mean “a civil war.”

The Trumpenvolk can probably keep their weapons holstered. Removal through impeachment is unlikely, given the fact that the Senate is held down by a Republican majority whose leaders are mocking constitutional checks and balances by working hand in glove with the president to craft a Senate trial certain to exonerate the truth-trashing Trump for his Ukrainegate transgression. So what if he set the Founding Fathers’ wigs on fire and violated federal law (the Impoundment Control Act) by leveraging congressionally approved military funding to a U.S. ally in order to obtain dirt to use against a potential political rival? The game is rigged in the absurdly apportioned Senate, where superwhite and Republican Wyoming, home to 578,720 people, claims the same number of senators (two) as ethnically and racially diverse and Democratic California, home to 39 million.

Trump may win the 2020 election. If that happens, it would be due in no small part to another key form of American political authoritarianism—the centrist, corporate-financial and imperial neoliberalism fueling the Democratic Party and most of the corporate media. The “inauthentic opposition” Party of Fake Resistance’s (PFR’s) leading funders, operatives and media would rather lose to the evermore fascist, right-wing GOP than to the leftish Bernie Sanders wing of their own party. So what if only Sanders can mobilize the voters required to defeat Trump, the wannabe president for life?

Meanwhile, the media more closely aligned with Democrats does everything it can to ignore and demean the Sanders candidacy, failing to cover his rallies and dismissing his platform and “electability.” The Democratic establishment and loyal media outlets refuse to respectfully transmit and take seriously his strong critique of American class inequality and plutocracy. Nor does it highlight his urgent calls for action to confront capitalogenic climate change before the planet is cooked beyond repair. The elite Democrats and their many media allies also smear Sanders’ popular call for single-payer health insurance, declaring it “too radical,” “too expensive” and—to use the contemptuous language of Amy Klobuchar—a “pipe dream” hopelessly untethered from the real world here on earth.

In the distorting hall of mirrors that is the corporate-managed, Democratic, center-left media and politics culture, single-payer isn’t a great social-democratic victory that would embed health care as a human right while dramatically reducing health care costs, improving ordinary Americans’ health and instilling new democratic space in the United States. No, “Medicare for All” is absurdly portrayed by mainstream Democratic politics and media as an overly expensive assault on the population’s existing health insurance plans. Never mind the ridiculously inflated cost and woefully poor performance of the U.S. health care system under the rule of private, for-profit corporations, with their giant and parasitic administrative and marketing costs.

The neoliberal, centrist, media-political order harps on Sanders’ age, even as it promotes right-leaning, 77-year-old bumbler Joe “Corn Pop” Biden.

The supposedly liberal media recently has engaged in a vicious effort to smear Sanders as a sexist by spreading the story that he told Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren that her gender prevents her from winning the 2020 election. The claim came from Warren herself, via CNN, in a cold-blooded move to revive her flagging campaign by playing the sexism card.

The hit job was absurd on its face. Sanders deferred to Warren in 2015 and 2016, agreeing to run for president only after Warren declined to pursue the Democratic nomination. Sanders has long advocated for women’s rights and backed female candidates. He embraces the progressive Latina Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as a prized ally and campaign surrogate. AOC and two other progressive and feminist congresswomen of color, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, are campaigning for Sanders.

“Liberal” CNN likely promoted Warren’s attack on Sanders with three purposes in mind: to drive viewer interest in the last televised and CNN-sponsored Democratic presidential debate before the Iowa caucus; to diminish Sanders’ appeal to female voters; and to widen divisions between and among progressive Democrats.

Just before the debate in Des Moines last week, CNN ran a story absurdly depicting Sanders as a misogynist. Then, during the debate, CNN moderator Abby Phillip threw this loaded question at him: “Sen. Sanders, CNN reported yesterday, and Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement [as if the episode wasn’t initiated by the Warren campaign] that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it,” Sanders said. “Anybody who knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be president of the United States. Go to YouTube. … There’s a video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States.”

Phillip then repeated the question. When Sanders denied that he’d ever said that a woman could not win the election, she turned to Warren. “Sen. Warren,” Phillip said, “what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”

“I disagreed,” Warren said.

Hello? Sanders had just denied the charge, but Phillip simply repeated Warren’s accusation as if it was a fully acknowledged and irrefutable fact. Phillip didn’t bother to ask Warren if Sanders was telling the truth. How absurdly authoritarian was that?

In the post-game discussion of the debate, a CNN pundit mocked Sanders for denying “a reported CNN story.” The talking head was really saying that CNN can construct candidate realities and then evaluate candidates in accord with whether they accept that reality as undisputed fact. More authoritarian absurdity.

In the Chicago Tribune the next day, the main takeaway from the debate was that Sanders and Warren tangled over gender. Sanders’ statements on and against extreme economic inequality, plutocracy, parasitic insurance and drug companies, and climate-/capital-led ecocide were sent down George Orwell’s memory hole in this coverage.

“Ordinary” Iowa voters could be heard on CNN, MSNBC and NPR talking about Sanders’ supposed gender and women problems. Establishment mission accomplished: Divide and rule in service to corporate power; provide distractions from the biggest issues of our (or any) time. As the leftist activist Mona Shaw of Iowa wrote me, “Medicare for All has been getting too much traction. The plutocrats have to change the subject.” Yes, and divide progressives.

One great unspoken irony is that the only leading Democratic presidential candidate with a troubling track record on gender is Joe “Phonographs for the Poor” Biden. If Warren and CNN wanted to play the divide-and-rule sexism card against any Democratic contender, the corporate imperialist Biden would have been the proper target, not Sanders. But, of course, Warren is not fighting to steal voters from Biden but rather from her “fellow progressive” Sanders—and CNN is in league with corporate centrists, not leftist radicals like Sanders.

Probably nobody enjoyed the episode more than the hapless Biden, who came off in the debate like an elderly retiree ready for a nap.

We can expect more vicious centrist smearing of Sanders by the Democratic establishment and its media in the next three weeks. Its elite operatives, backers and allies are horrified that Sanders might break through Biden’s black voter “firewall” in South Carolina if the Vermont senator can win Iowa and New Hampshire—a “nightmare scenario for Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic presidential field.”

So what if Sanders is the Democrats’ best chance to energize disaffected and disadvantaged sectors of the electorate that need to be rallied to defeat Trump? The Democratic Party isn’t primarily about winning elections, much less social justice, democracy and environmental sanity. It’s mainly about serving corporate sponsors who don’t want even a mildly progressive populist like Sanders in the White House. Even Elizabeth “capitalist in my bones” Warren (who stood up and clapped when Trump ordered Congress to pledge that the U.S. would “never be a socialist country” during his last State of the Union address) is absurdly considered too left for many, if not most, Wall Street Democrats.

No less of a corporate-neoliberal Democratic icon than Barack Obama has made it clear that the Democrats’ most electable candidate must be stopped. As Politico’s Ryan Lizza reported in November, the officially neutral Obama indicated that he would speak up to block Sanders. “Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now,” Lizza wrote, “Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.” A “close Obama friend” told Lizza that “Bernie’s not a Democrat.”

If Sanders somehow gets past all the slime and other centrist obstacles to secure the nomination, make no mistake: Many big, traditionally Democratic funders and operatives could sit out the general election and possibly even actively back Trump.

Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment—which opened the stable door to the tangerine hate “genius” and gets ironically whitewashed by his relentless awfulness—certainly loves it that the left-most presidential candidates, Sanders and Warren (polling No. 1 and 2 in Iowa, respectively) will be tied down in the futile, GOP-negated Senate impeachment process while the top two Wall Street darlings, right-wing Democrats Biden and Pete Buttigieg, are free to run around Iowa and New Hampshire in the final weeks leading up to the nation’s first presidential caucus (Iowa) and primary (New Hampshire).

If I were Sanders, I’d walk out of the impeachment trial and resume campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire if Republicans block witnesses and new evidence. If it means the loss of his Senate position, so be it. The notion of Sanders being put under impeachment house arrest and kept off the campaign trail to sit mute while the white nationalist party makes a mockery of the Constitution and the rule of law is truly nauseating.

I can hardly blame tens of millions of Americans for going into voting booths for their fleeting moment to mark ballots and try to evict the wannabe fascist strongman Trump. Still, bearing in mind the real possibility that Trump will refuse to honor an election that doesn’t go his way, my advice is that those tens of millions take to the streets to overthrow the Trump-Pence regime and then confront the deeper system of class rule that has spawned the white-nationalist Republican Party, the center-right PFR (the Democrats) and the sick synergistic game these “two wings of the same bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904) play on behalf of the nation’s unelected and overlapping dictatorships of money, empire, white supremacy, patriarchy and environmental ruin.

How Corporate Media Feeds America’s Bloodlust

This Washington Post headline  (1/7/20) is probably true.

Even when critical of US actions, media commentary on recent US bombings and assassinations in the Middle East is premised on the assumption that the US has the right to use violence (or the threat of it) to assert its will, anytime, anywhere. Conversely, corporate media coverage suggests that any countermeasure—such as resistance to the US presence in Iraq—is inherently illegitimate, criminal and/or terroristic.

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Iranian puppeteers

One step in this dance is depicting US military forces in Iraq as innocent bystanders under attack by sadistic Iranian puppetmasters. Media analysis of the US murder of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani consistently asserted that he was “an architect of international terrorism responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans” (New York Times, 1/3/20) or “a terrorist with the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands” (Washington Post, 1/7/20). According to Leon Panetta (Washington Post, 1/7/20), a former Defense secretary and CIA director,

The death of Soleimani should not be mourned, given his responsibility for the killing of thousands of innocent people and hundreds of US military personnel over the years.

There is little evidence for this contention that Iran in general or Soleimani personally is responsible for killing hundreds of Americans. When the State Department claimed last April that Iran was responsible for the deaths of 608 American servicemembers in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, investigative journalist Gareth Porter (Truthout, 7/9/19) asked Navy Commander Sean Robertson for evidence, and Robertson “acknowledged that the Pentagon doesn’t have any study, documentation or data to provide journalists that would support such a figure.”

Porter showed that the US attribution of deaths in Iraq to Iran is an unsubstantiated government talking point from the Cheney era, one that was exposed at the time when Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno admitted that, though the US had attributed Iraqi resistance fighters’ weapons to Iran, US troops found many sites in Iraq at which such weapons were being manufactured.

Gareth Porter reported in Truthout (7/9/19) that “the myth that Tehran is responsible for killing over 600 US troops in the Iraq War is merely a new variant of a propaganda line that former Vice President Dick Cheney used to attempt to justify a war against Iran more than a decade ago.”

Scholar Stephen Zunes (Progressive, 1/7/20) similarly demonstrated the lack of evidence for the idea that Iran is behind the killing of US forces in Iraq. Zunes noted that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, compiled by America’s 16 intelligence agencies, downplayed Iran’s role in Iraq’s violence at roughly the same time that the Bush administration was saying that Iran was culpable.

As Porter pointed out, there was a much simpler explanation for American deaths in the period: The US targeted Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army fought back, imposing more casualties on US troops.

That the pundits dusted off 13-year-old propaganda to rationalize killing Soleimani is a clear indication that they were desperately grasping for any imperialist apologia within reach. If the American public is led to believe that Soleimani killed hundreds of Americans, large swathes of it are likely to regard his assassination as justified, necessary, or at worst a feature of the tit-for-tat ugliness inherent to war.

The narrative also ideologically shores up the US war on Iran in the American popular consciousness by presenting Iranians as primordially violent savages out to spill the blood of Americans, notably those in the military who are in the Middle East, presumably doing nothing but minding their own business. Presenting Iran as the reason for attacks on US forces in Iraq also implies that Iraqis had little objection to the US invasion, legitimizing the US’s ongoing military presence in the country. The most obvious point about the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq is that they wouldn’t happen if US soldiers weren’t in Iraq.

When violence isn’t violence

Another media dance move is to condemn anti-imperial violence while naturalizing imperialist violence. An editorial in the New York Times (1/3/20) said that Soleimani

no doubt had a role in the campaign of provocations by Shiite militias against American forces in Iraq that recently led to the death of an American defense contractor and a retaliatory American airstrike against the militia responsible for the attack.

Having US troops in Iraq, a country in which the US is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, is not a “provocation,” in the Times’ perspective; opposition to their presence is the provocation.

The December 27 attack that killed the US contractor did not occur in a vacuum. In 2018, the US was suspected of bombing affiliates of Kataib Hezbollah, the group the US blames for killing the contractor. Israel is suspected of carrying out a string of deadly bombings of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, of which Kataib Hezbollah is a key component, between July and September, a scenario at which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted.

The US reportedly confirmed that Israel was behind at least one of the bombings, and said it supports Israel’s actions while denying direct participation. In any case, the US’s lavish military support for Israel means that the former is effectively a party to the latter’s bombing. Thus, the Kataib Hezbollah attack that killed the contractor can be seen as “retaliatory,” which complicates the notion that the subsequent US attack was as well.

Another Times editorial (1/4/20) describes Soleimani as “one of the region’s most powerful and, yes, blood-soaked military commanders.” At no point is Trump or any other US leader described as “blood-soaked” or anything comparable—here, or in any of the mainstream media coverage I can find—even as he and his predecessors are sopping with that of Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, to cite only a few recent cases. Evidently imperial violence is so righteous it leaves no trace behind.

Stephen Hadley, national security adviser in the George W Bush administration, wrote in the Washington Post (1/5/20):

What is clear is that one of the PMFs, Kataib Hezbollah, has been behind the escalating violence over the past several months as part of a campaign (assuredly with Iranian approval) to force out US troops. The campaign culminated in the December 31 attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad. (The head of Kataib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was killed with Soleimani.)

By expelling US forces, the Iraqi government would be falling into Kataib Hezbollah’s trap: rewarding the militia’s violent campaign, strengthening the Iranian-backed PMFs, weakening the Iraqi government and state sovereignty, and jeopardizing the fight against the Islamic State.

Kataib Hezbollah’s actions are called “violence” twice in these three sentences, with their apex apparently being “the December 31 attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad.” Remarkably, the author makes no mention of the December 29 US airstrikes on five sites in Iraq and Syria that the US says belong to Kataib Hezbollah, bombings that reportedly killed 25 and injured 55. Those, it would seem, do not constitute “violence.” Iraqis damaging the embassy of the country whose economic sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children is “violence,” but the US’s lethal air raids are not. And expelling foreign armies weakens state sovereignty!

“No one in Baghdad was fooled” by anti-US protests in Iraq, which were “almost certainly a Soleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out,” declared Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 1/3/20). (In a 2016 poll, 93% of young Iraqis said that they perceived the US as an “enemy.”)

Thomas Friedman’s Times article (1/3/20) on Soleimani’s murder was bad even by Thomas Friedman standards. He dismissed the protests at the US embassy:

The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Soleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Soleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Soleimani instead.

That there were thousands of protesters at the US embassy and that the Iraqi security forces stood aside to allow them to demonstrate suggests that what happened at the embassy cannot be reduced to a hoax stage-managed and paid for by Iran. Furthermore, the US did kill Iraqis two days before the protests, and that’s what ignited them (to say nothing of the longer term record of the US devastating Iraq). Like Hadley, however, Friedman pretends that the US’s December 27 bombings didn’t happen.

In the imperial imagination, the US has the right to violently pursue its objectives wherever it wants, and any resistance is illegitimate.

Gustave Flaubert Anticipated Our Surreal New Normal

Are we all trapped in a live-action version of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”?

The Jan. 3 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was followed by a torrent of contradictory narratives.

Was Soleimani planning to attack Americans? What about Vice President Mike Pence’s erroneous assertion that Soleimani was involved in 9/11? Or was the plan all along to withdraw troops, as a letter accidentally sent to the Iraqi government suggested?

Was Trump simply trying to distract from his impeachment trial? Was the attack the knee-jerk decision of a malignant narcissist? Or was it a reasonable response following months of Iranian provocations?

Were Democrats mourning Soleimani’s death? Or were they also responsible for the attack?

Each burst of accusations and justifications has elicited a flood of public responses, expert opinions and efforts to correct a record full of hostilities and absurdities.

Many might feel bewildered and demoralized. But fans of the 19th-century French novel have seen this before.

In a 1852 letter, French author Gustave Flaubert mused, “When will we write the facts from the point of view of a cosmic joke, that is as God sees them from on high?”

He answered his own question in his 1857 novel, “Madame Bovary,” which he published during the regime of Napoleon III – the French president whose autocratic ambitions were aided by a swirl of misinformation and warring political factions.

When language loses all meaning

As I’ve previously written, “Madame Bovary” traffics in deliberate meaninglessness, or, as literary critic Leo Bersani put it, the “arbitrary, insignificant, inexpressive nature of language.”

The main character, Emma Bovary, has devoured romantic novels and is disillusioned by a provincial existence that has proven dull. Her search for excitement and escape leads to adulterous disasters and financial ruin.

That’s a common enough premise, but what makes “Madame Bovary” unique is its insistence on the unreliability of narratives, phrases, descriptions and words. All the characters, from the callow manipulators to the well-meaning dullards, are awash in cliché. Emma and her future lover, Léon, declare that they love sunsets by the seaside, though neither has been to the ocean. The pharmacist Homais counsels prudence to others, though no one listens, and he himself is ruthlessly ambitious; the novel ends with him receiving the cross of the Legion of Honor. Léon tells Emma that he wanted to be buried in a rug she gave him, though the narrator reveals that this is false.

It isn’t even that everyone in the novel lies; some earnest characters really mean what they say. The problem is that language itself has had the meaning drained out of it by a combination of insincerity, repetition and bombast. In a famous scene at an agricultural fair, the audience of attentive townspeople hangs on every word of a mind-numbing, meandering speech about crops: “Here we have the vine, there we have the cider apple, further on we have cheese, and flax!”

When the fireworks planned for the event’s grand finale sputter out, the newspaper nonetheless reports that they went off without a hitch, describing them as a “veritable kaleidoscope, a true stage-setting for an opera.” No one cares that the description is made up.

The ultimate punchline of Flaubert’s cosmic joke is that the narrator himself is a master of subtle confusion. He starts the story in the first person, positioning himself as a schoolmate of Emma’s husband, before changing abruptly to the third person. Some of his accounts are straightforward and dispassionate. Others are entirely confounding. Descriptions of a boy’s cap, a wedding cake and a medical device are so detailed – and yet so baffling – that readers find themselves unable to even imagine what they might look like.

“I want to produce such an impression of utter weariness and ennui,” Flaubert later wrote in the plans for a subsequent literary project, “that my readers will imagine the book could only have been written by a cretin.”

France in political turmoil

Flaubert didn’t write “Madame Bovary” in a vacuum. As he was starting the novel in 1851, elected President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was staging the coup d’état that would transform him from president to emperor.

Bonaparte gave his followers important positions, reminded soldiers of their oath of “passive obedience” and crushed parliamentarian revolts and rural insurrections.

French citizens found themselves bewildered and disoriented. Journalist and politician Eugène Ténot, writing an account of the coup in 1868, warned readers that “no truthful narrative of that event has been published in France.” He also remarked that “narratives written in troubled times are always imbued with partiality, exaggeration, injustice, even bad faith.”Roughly 10,000 political opponents were deported to penal colonies. Victor Hugo, a staunch opponent of the coup, fled to Brussels, while Alexis de Tocqueville retired from political life to avoid joining the regime.

In an open letter published in December 1851, Bonaparte announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, which he called a “hotbed of conspiracies.” In January 1852 he put in place a new constitution, all the while accusing “démagogues” of spreading “fausses nouvelles” (“fake news”). In December 1852, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte became Napoléon III. France’s Second Empire commenced.

Described as “the first modern dictator” and “one of the first modern leaders to rule by propaganda,” Bonaparte went from being France’s first elected president to its last emperor. The Second Empire lasted until 1870, when the emperor, conscious of his declining popularity, declared war on Prussia – and lost.

Echoes today

France’s political upheaval, misinformation wars, sporadic uprisings and public confusion likely left a deep impression on Flaubert.

Americans today might sympathize with his characters, who exist in an endless vortex of repetition, insincerity and stupidity.

Recent technological advances are partially to blame.

Over the past decade, abundant research has emerged on media oversaturation, narrative overload and the deluge of digital images – and what this does to the brain. Incessant stimuli and distractions lead to memory impairment, confusion and troubles with retention.

These conditions are ripe for political warfare.

In his 2014 book “The Contradictions of Media Power,” media studies professor Das Freedman wrote that, in times of political instability, “existing narratives are under stress and audiences themselves are actively seeking out new perspectives.” Information wars and fake news seem to be endemic during times of political upheaval.

In many ways, we’re living out an extreme version of the cosmic joke Flaubert envisioned.

A continual stream of tedious lies, meaningless clichés and empty grandstanding has disillusioned Americans just as much as it confounded Emma Bovary. Lieuvain’s boring, bizarre address at the agricultural fair has its modern equivalents – think of Trump’s meandering rally speeches, or his complaints about toilet flushing and cancer-causing windmills. Republican Congressman Devin Nunes is currently suing a fictitious cow for defamation, while the president’s supporters applauded the statement that there was a war on “Thanksgiving.”

With the assassination of Soleimani, disregard for truth and reality – and examples of Madame Bovary-esque word salad – remains as blatant as ever. Mike Pence’s reference to Soleimani’s involvement in 9/11 is as detached from reality as Emma’s vision of Roman ruins bordering a forest of tigers, camels, swans, sultans and English ladies.

The flood of narrative confusion continues unabated. Only time will tell if Iran becomes the Prussia of 21st-century America.

[ Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day. ]

Susanna Lee, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Georgetown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

McConnell Abruptly Eases Impeachment Limits

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate plunged into President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Tuesday with Republicans abruptly abandoning plans to cram opening arguments into two late-night sessions and Democrats arguing for more witnesses to expose Trump’s “trifecta” of offenses.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backed off with no warning, also agreeing to the House Democrats’ demand that the evidence from their impeachment of Trump be included in the trial. McConnell acted after protests from senators, including fellow Republicans.

Chief Justice John Roberts gaveled open the session, with House prosecutors on one side, Trump’s team on the other, in the well of the Senate, as senators sat silently at their desks, under oath to do “impartial justice.” No cellphones or other electronics were allowed.

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McConnell stunned fellow senators and delayed the start of proceedings, with his decision to back off some of his proposed rules. Republicans were said to be concerned over the political optics “dark of night” sessions.

It was a dramatic setback for the Republican leader and the president’s legal team, exposing a crack within the GOP ranks and the political unease over the historic impeachment proceedings unfolding amid a watchful public in an election year.

Instead, 24 hours of opening arguments for each side will be spread over three days, giving Democrats momentum as they push to break the standoff over calling new witnesses.

As the visitors’ gallery filled with guests, actress-and-activist Alyssa Milano among them, and Trump’s most ardent House allies lining the back rows, the day swiftly took on the cadence of a trial proceeding over whether the president’s actions toward Ukraine warranted removal from office.

Without comment, the Republican leader submitted an amended proposal after meeting behind closed doors with his senators as the trial opened. The handwritten changes would add an extra day for each side’s opening arguments and stipulate that evidence from the Democratic House’s impeachment hearings be included in the record.

There is still deep disagreement about calling additional witnesses.

“It’s time to start with this trial,” said White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, the president’s lead lawyer in brief remarks as the proceedings opened in public.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York offered the first of several expected amendments to the rules — a proposal to issue a subpoena to the White House for “all documents, communications and other records” relating to the Ukraine matter. It was rejected by Republicans, tabled on a party line vote 53-47.

Schumer then offered a second amendment, seeking documents from the State Department. It, too, was turned back on the same 53-47 vote.

A spokeswoman for Republican Sen. Susan Collins said that she and others had raised concerns about the restrictive rules McConnell had proposed. The Maine senator sees the changes as significant improvements, said spokeswoman Annie Clark.

Collins, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and a substantial number of other Republicans from across the party’s ideological spectrum wanted to make the changes, according to two people familiar with the matter but unauthorized to discuss it in public. Some argued that the two-day limitation would have helped Democrats cast Republicans as squeezing testimony through in the dead of night.

The turnaround was a swift lesson as White House wishes run into the reality of the Senate. The White House wanted a session crammed into a shorter period to both expedite the trial and shift more of the proceedings into late night, according to a person familiar with the matter but unauthorized to discuss it in public.

“READ THE TRANSCRIPTS!” the president tweeted from overseas miles away, as he returned to his hotel at a global leaders conference in Davos, Switzerland.

That’s the transcript of his phone call in which he asked new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for “a favor.” A whistleblower’s complaint led the House to impeach Trump on a charge of abuse of power for pushing Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden as the White House was withholding military aid from the U.S. ally at war with bordering Russia. The Democrats cite that transcript as solid evidence against Trump, though he repeatedly describes it as “perfect.”

Democrats had warned that the rules package from Trump’s ally, the Senate GOP leader, could force midnight sessions that would keep most Americans in the dark and create a sham proceeding.

“This is not a process for a fair trial, this is the process for a rigged trial” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Ca., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee leading the prosecution, told reporters. He called it a “cover-up.”

Schiff opened his arguments before the Senate playing a video of Trump calling for more witnesses to testify. Schiff noted the sudden change in proposed rules, made moments before he rose to address the chamber.

“The facts will come out in the end,” Schiff told the senators. “ The question is, will it come out in time?”

McConnell said, “The president’s lawyers will finally receive a level playing field,” contrasting it with the House impeachment inquiry.

The rare impeachment trial, unfolding in an election year, is testing whether Trump’s actions toward Ukraine warrant removal at the same time that voters are forming their own verdict on his White House.

Four senators who are presidential candidates are off the campaign trail, seated as jurors.

“My focus is going to be on impeachment,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, told reporters. He said his supporters would keep working “to defeat the most dangerous president in American history.”

The Democrats say the prospect of middle-of-the-night proceedings, without allowing new witnesses or even the voluminous House records into the trial, would leave the public without crucial information about Trump’s political pressure campaign on Ukraine and the White House’s obstruction of the House impeachment probe.

Trump’s legal team doesn’t dispute Trump’s actions — that he called the Ukraine president and asked for a “favor” during a July 25 phone call. In fact, the lawyers included the rough transcript of Trump’s conversation as part of its 110-page trial brief submitted ahead of the proceedings.

Instead the lawyers for the president, led Cipollone and a TV-famous legal team including Alan Dershowitz, say the two charges against the president don’t amount to impeachable offenses and Trump committed no crime.

Democrats in prosecuting the case against the president point in particular to a General Accountability Office report that found the White House violated federal law by stalling money to Ukraine that had been approved by Congress.

Roberts administered the oath to one remaining senator, James Inhofe, who was attending a family medical issue in Oklahoma last week when the other senators vowed the oath and signed the oath book.

Also Tuesday, the House Democratic managers overseeing the impeachment case asked Cipollone, the president’s lead lawyer at the trial, to disclose any “first-hand knowledge” he has of the charges against Trump. They said evidence gathered so far indicates that Cipollone is a “material witness” to the allegations at hand.

House Democrats impeached the Republican president last month on two charges: abuse of power by withholding U.S. military aid to Ukraine as he pressed the country to investigate Biden, and obstruction of Congress by refusing to cooperate with their investigation.

No president has ever been removed from office by the Senate. With its 53-47 Republican majority, the Senate is not expected to mount the two-thirds voted needed for conviction. Even if it did, the White House team argues it would be an “‘unconstitutional conviction” because the articles of impeachment were too broad.

___

Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman, Mary Clare Jalonick, Alan Fram, Andrew Taylor, Matthew Daly and Padmananda Rama in Washington and David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

What MLK Would Make of the Israeli Occupation

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose activism we honor today, took stands far beyond Selma and Montgomery, and called on other capitals than Washington, D.C., to ensure a dignified life for human beings. Dr. King was an early and vigorous opponent of the white South African Apartheid (segregationist) government.

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He wrote former ambassador Chester Bowles in 1957 on behalf of a rally in New York on Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, organized by the National Committee of the American Committee on Africa, where Eleanor Roosevelt was to speak. He said,

“We have watched with great concern the relentless pursuit of official racism (apartheid) by the South African Government. It has defied the most elemental considerations of human decency in its treatment of African and Asian citizens, loosely called non-whites. Our concern has turned to horror as we have learned of the brutal treatment of these non-white South Africans and the extension of totalitarian control into almost every area of human life. What has been almost as shocking is the callous disregard of this tragedy by the free peoples of the world.”

King was throughout his life a warm supporter of security for Israel. Only late in his life, in 1967, did he cancel a trip to Israel over its preemptive Six Day War against Egypt and Tel Aviv’s unilateral occupation of Jerusalem, of which, reading between the lines, he disapproved.

An FBI wiretap of a conference call between Dr.King and Andrew Young and others in July of 1967 recorded Dr. King’s reasons for declining, in the end, the invitation of the Israeli prime minister’s office:

“I’d run into the situation where I’m damned if I say this and I’m damned if I say that no matter what I’d say, and I’ve already faced enough criticism including pro-Arab. I just think that if I go, the Arab world, and of course Africa and Asia for that matter, would interpret this as endorsing everything that Israel has done, and I do have questions of doubt… Most of it [the pilgrimage] would be Jerusalem and they [the Israelis] have annexed Jerusalem, and any way you say it they don’t plan to give it up… I frankly have to admit that my instincts – and when I follow my instincts so to speak I’m usually right – I just think that this would be a great mistake. I don’t think I could come out unscathed”

A careful reading of this text shows that Dr. King was not just concerned about criticism from “pro-Arab” African-American leaders of a Black Nationalist bent, or from African and Arab governments. He took plenty of criticism throughout his life. What he was afraid of was looking like he intended to endorse something he did not. “I do have questions of doubt,” he said, about Israel’s war.

Dr. King was an anti-war pacifist who had begun speaking out against the American war against Vietnam. He did not approve of wars of choice. Moreover, it was clear to him that the Israelis, having conquered East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Palestinians by force of arms, would never relinquish it. He seems to have felt a foreboding that Israel had just become a colonial occupier of the sort he had spent his life condemning.

Dr. King did not want to look as though, by going to Israel in the summer of 1967, he was signalling approval of what Tel Aviv had done.

(Israeli propaganda is so effective that it has convinced a lot of people that 1967 was a war of defense. It was not. It was a preemptive war of choice. Israel fired the first shot, and Egyptian leaders have admitted that despite Abdel Nasser’s big talk, Egypt was then bogged down in the Yemen Civil War and was in no position to launch a war against Israel in June of 1967. Moreover, Egypt’s superpower patron, the Soviet Union, told Cairo that if the Egyptian army fired the first shot, it was on its own and the Soviets would not offer any help. As for Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinians there were civilians and did not play a role in the war, which was Israel’s war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and there was no defensive justification at all for occupying the Palestinians.)

There is a further consideration. Jerusalem is a Christian holy city, and Dr. King was a Christian clergyman thinking of taking a Christian group of pilgrims there. The UN General Assembly partition plan for British Mandate Palestine of fall, 1947, never had the force of law, since only the UN Security Council could so have endowed it, and they declined to do it. But even it avoided awarding Jerusalem to Israel. There is no warrant in international law for Israel to annex all of Jerusalem, and Dr. King was keenly aware of it.

We thus see there at the end of his life the beginning of a change in Dr. King’s thinking about Israel. Earlier, like many on the Left, he had seen Israel as a postcolonial state that freed itself from British colonialism, just as had Ghana and Kenya. Before 1967, most Palestinians were under caretaker rule, Egypt in Gaza and Jordan in the West Bank. Israel itself was 20% Palestinian, but it was largely Jewish and many Israelis were from the families of Holocaust survivors. Israeli governments were socialist. Even an anti-colonial, Communist man of the left such as Jean-Paul Sartre was pro-Israel under those circumstances. The international Left, moreover, coded the Arab leaders as feudal or as fascist (in the case of Abdel Nasser, who persecuted Egyptian Communists).

The big difference between Sartre and Dr. King is that Sartre wholeheartedly supported Israel in 1967, but Dr. King could not. He had “questions of doubt.”

Those who have argued that Dr. King was pro-Israel are correct. He was also a major champion of American Jews against hateful bigotry and anti-Semitism.

But those who argue that Dr. King would have had no problem with Israel’s policies in the Occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank after 1967 are being illogical. Israeli policies toward occupied Palestinians are if anything much worse than South African Apartheid. And we know exactly what Dr. King thought about Apartheid.

He slammed brutality. He slammed segregation. He slammed totalitarian control. What would he have thought of the Israeli checkpoints Palestinians have to go through to get from one town in Palestine to another (and even sometimes just to get to the hospital)? It deeply resembles the Apartheid pass system for black Africans.

In 1960, Dr. King telegraphed President Eisenhower to protest South Africa’s Sharpeville massacre:

“we are grateful that our state department has protested the mass killings of our south african brothers and we are pleased that the un security council will meet march 29th to consider that outrage.2 we urge that before march 29th our government issue a statement placing the administration firmly on the side of negroes in the southern states in their present struggle for their constitutional rights, since they are subjected to intimidation, threats and violence when they claim these rights.”

Here is what the site South African History says about that massacre:

“Early on the 21st the local PAC [Pan-Africanist Congress] leaders first gathered in a field not far from the Sharpeville police station, when a sizable crowd of people had joined them they proceeded to the police station – chanting freedom songs and calling out the campaign slogans “Izwe lethu” (Our land); “Awaphele amapasti” (Down with passes); “Sobukwe Sikhokhele” (Lead us Sobukwe); “Forward to Independence,Tomorrow the United States of Africa.”…

According to the police, protesters began to stone them and, without any warning, one of the policemen on the top of an armoured car panicked and opened fire. His colleagues followed suit and opened fire. The firing lasted for approximately two minutes, leaving 69 people dead and, according to the official inquest, 180 people seriously wounded. The policemen were apparently jittery after a recent event in Durban where nine policemen were shot. Unlike elsewhere on the East Rand where police used baton when charging at resisters, the police at Sharpeville used live ammunition.”

What would Dr. King have said about the Israeli army on the Gaza border shooting fish in a barrel with live ammunition: or as the UN says, “In 2019, 33 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during the GMR protests and 11,523 were injured, bringing the total to 212 fatalities and 36,134 injuries since the demonstrations began” (in spring 2018). The Palestinians in Gaza have shouted slogans similar to those of the PAC at Sharpeville. They have staged weekly the Great March of Return, insisting that the land is their land (70% of Gaza families were ethnically cleansed from what is now Israel by Zionist militias, who then stole their houses and land).

What difference is there between the Sharpville Massacre of 1960 and the Gaza Massacre of 2018 – 2020, except the enormously greater scale of Israeli army brutality? You really think Dr. King would be all right with this?

Dr. King would be emailing President Trump, just as he telegraphed President Eisenhower. How far America has fallen is demonstrated by Eisenhower’s concern over Sharpeville and Trump’s complete insouciance toward Israeli Apartheid toward the Palestinians.

Bush, Obama and Trump Have Routinely Lied to Us

This piece originally appeared on Truthout.

The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all routinely lied to the American people about the success of the 18-year war in Afghanistan. They exaggerated progress and inflated statistics to create an illusion that that the war was winnable. But after the deaths of 157,000 people at a cost of $2 trillion, corruption is rampant and the carnage continues.

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“There’s an odor of mendacity throughout the Afghanistan issue … mendacity and hubris,” John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during his January 15 testimony. In the last few years, Sopko said, the Trump administration has been “lying by omissions,” classifying “everything that is bad news,” including Afghan troop casualties and calculation of Taliban strength.

Sopko was called to testify before the committee to explain The Washington Post’s explosive December 2019 series known as “The Afghanistan Papers.” Based on hundreds of interviews with leading U.S. officials, Sopko published “Lessons Learned,” seven reports about the secret history of the war. The reports omitted the names of more than 90 percent of the interviewees.

“Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public,” the Post reported. “They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.” U.S. military officials took a page from the Vietnam War playbook, “manipulating public opinion.” As Sopko told the Post, “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

In September 2008, Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser declared in a news briefing, “Are we losing this war? Absolutely no way. Can the enemy win it? Absolutely no way.”

Meanwhile, U.S. troops didn’t know whether the enemy was al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Pakistan, Islamic State, foreign jihadists or warlords on the CIA payroll.

Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a 2003 memo, “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

Since Bush illegally invaded Afghanistan in 2001, about 157,000 people have been killed, including 2,300 U.S. military personnel and 43,074 Afghan civilians. In 2018 alone, 3,804 Afghan civilians were killed, the highest yearly number since the United Nations began calculating casualties 10 years ago.

The cost of the United States’ longest war is over $2 trillion. That figure includes $1.5 trillion to wage war, $87 billion to train Afghan military and police, $10 billion for counter-narcotics, $24 billion for economic development, $30 billion for other reconstruction programs and $500 billion for interest.

Moreover, U.S. policies have exacerbated corruption in Afghanistan. “A toxic mix of U.S. government policies, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, directly contributed to Afghanistan’s descent into one of the world’s most corrupt countries,” the Post reported.

The massive amount of money Congress appropriated was distributed “with little oversight or recordkeeping,” according to the Post. “The ensuing greed and corruption undermined the legitimacy of the nascent government and helped make the ground more fertile for the Taliban’s resurgence.”

For example, a forensic accountant analyzed 3,000 Defense Department contracts from 2010 to 2012, totaling $106 billion. Approximately 40 percent of that money went to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan officials, criminal syndicates or insurgents.

A senior U.S. official reported, “[W]e were the most corrupt here, so had no credibility on the corruption issue.” One government contractor said he distributed $3 million per day for projects in an Afghan district the size of a county in the United States.

On January 8, reportedly over 60 Afghan civilians and “dozens of militants” were killed in a U.S. drone attack in Herat Province. TOLO News, Afghanistan’s main 24/7 television news channel, cited local government officials and members of the Herat provincial council, who said “at least 60 civilians including women and children” were killed in the drone strikes.

Abdul Hakim told Stars & Stripes that U.S. bombers carried out a “double tap” in Herat, in which the drone or warplane bombs the people trying to rescue those hit by the first strike.

Two U.S. service members died on January 11, when their vehicle collided with an improvised explosive device. In 2019, 23 service members were killed during operations, the highest number in five years.

The U.S. government has been negotiating with the Taliban. On January 16, the Taliban offered a brief period of reduction in the violence but it is not clear whether the U.S. has agreed. The two sides were on the brink of a peace agreement when Trump thwarted the negotiations in September 2019.

During the last Democratic debate, none of the candidates promised to pull all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan. Elizabeth Warren said she wants to bring combat troops home. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have also said they would withdraw combat troops. But, as Phyllis Bennis noted, “[C]ombat troops are not the ones who have been killing people probably since about 2011. The killing of civilians, in particular, is being carried out by Special Forces, by bombing, by drones.”

Both the progressive Veterans for Peace (VFP) and the conservative Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) support withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. CVA has mounted a multimillion-dollar advertising operation, funded by the Koch family, in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump’s unfulfilled 2016 campaign promise to end the United States’ “endless wars” was favorably received in those three swing states.

Veterans for Peace said in a statement, “The U.S. military has destroyed countless villages and continues to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred with covert drone operations that kill thousands of innocent people.” VFP called for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, immediate release of all 300 names of those quoted in the Afghanistan Papers, a congressional tribunal at which Afghanistan veterans could testify, repeal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and reparations to all Afghan families who have lost a family member.

A majority of U.S. veterans thinks the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not worth fighting, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. This mirrors the sentiment of the public at large.

After 18 years, it is long past time to end this war. We must contact our congressional representatives and Democratic presidential candidates, cite The Afghanistan Papers, and demand total withdrawal of all U.S. forces — including intelligence and Special Forces — from Afghanistan. It will save lives and money.