David Swanson's Blog, page 52
December 22, 2015
How Did Hillary Win Over Michael Moore?
Here's Michael Moore explaining that you cannot morally vote for Hillary because of her war-making:
Here's Michael Moore in completely delusional mode fantasizing about a future President Hillary Clinton somehow turning on her Wall Street and warmongering chums:
What changed? Nothing about Hillary.
Talk Nation Radio: Chris Williams on How Paris Set the Earth on a Course to Burn
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-chris-williams-on-how-paris-set-the-earth-on-a-course-to-burn
Chris Williams wrote the book Ecology & Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. He is a long-time environmental activist with a scientific background and has authored numerous articles on the science and politics of climate change and energy for various media outlets. He's a writer-in-residence at Truthout, and an educator and professor at Pace University in the dept of chemical and physical sciences. He discusses climate change after Paris.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.
Pacifica stations can also download from AudioPort.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Please embed the SoundCloud audio on your own website!
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://TalkNationRadio.org
and at
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/tracks
December 17, 2015
A Quiz to See if U.S. Schools Taught You State Propaganda
U.S. schools provide a great deal of useful information, but also leave out a great deal. Please see whether you can answer the following questions before scrolling down and clicking a link at the bottom for the answers. How many can your kids answer? Can your kids' teachers answer them? Can your parents answer them? Can your uncle who tells you whom to vote for and what to think answer them?
These questions are not intended to comprise an ideal comprehensive course in U.S. or world history. They are intended as a quick sampling of the sort of material that would be included, along with other material, in a basic education that wasn't twisted by the interests of the U.S. government. There might be many questions I would have chosen to include in the place of some of these if I knew more. I was educated in public schools in Fairfax Country, Va., where the schools were ranked among the best in the country. I have a Master's in philosophy from the University of Virginia. I didn't learn the answer to a single one of these questions in any school.
If you can give a generally accurate response to most of these questions, you have almost certainly gone out of your way to learn things not taught in U.S. schools. If you find most of them difficult to answer, I would urge you not to quickly conclude that this is because the topics asked about are of minor importance. Please consider with an open mind whether these questions are not in fact central and vital to the education of a citizen of the United States. And please consider how they relate to what you would expect people in other countries to learn about their own histories.
1. Should German schools teach how many people Germany killed in World War II?
2. How many was it?
3. Should U.S. schools teach how many people the United States killed in wars on Native Americans, in the Philippines, in Vietnam, or in Iraq?
4. How many was it?
5. How many Africans were put on ships to the United States in chains?
6. How many made it there alive?
7. How many people lived enslaved in the United States before slavery was officially ended?
8. How many after that?
9. Who was Olaudah Equiano?
10. What percentage of deaths in wars of the past half-century have been civilian?
11. How many people has the United States killed in wars, large and small, since 1950?
12. How many democratic governments has the U.S. government overthrown?
13. If you persistently asked for money for a trip, finally got some, went on the trip to a foreign country, and then murdered anyone you met there who failed to give you lots of gold, would a good teacher praise your persistence in asking for the money for the trip?
14. Would they praise Christopher Columbus' persistence?
15. Can you name some Virginians who chose to free everyone they had enslaved while Thomas Jefferson was enslaving more people?
16. What is the appropriate justification for Jefferson enslaving people?
17. What percentage of people in the world are in the United States?
18. What percentage of prisoners in the world are in the United States?
19. What percentage of military spending in the world is by the U.S. government?
20. What percentage is by the U.S. government and its close allies?
21. What percentage of foreign military troops stationed in nations around the world are U.S. troops?
22. What percentage of the world's nations have U.S. troops in them?
23. In what nations of the world do people have the longest life expectancy? Name 3 of the top 10.
24. What nations of the world poll highest for happiness? Name 3 of the top 10.
25. What nations of the world have the highest inequality of wealth? Name 3 of the top 10.
26. What nations of the world have the greatest economic opportunity and mobility? Name 3 of the top 10.
27. What nations' students score highest in academic tests? Name 3 of the top 10.
28. How many of the world's 50 wealthiest nations provide free and universal health coverage?
29. Which countries provide the best retirement security? Name 3 of the top 10.
30. How much does it cost to attend college in Brazil, Germany, Finland, France, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden?
31. In which nations do people average the shortest working hours? Name 3 of the top 10.
32. How many wealthy nations guarantee no paid parental leave?
33. Which nations have the highest labor union representation? Name 3 of the top 10.
34. In which nations of the world does one face the lowest risk of violent crime? Name 3 of the top 10.
35. Approximately how much money does the U.S. government spend every year?
36. Where does that money come from?
37. How much of that money is in dedicated permanent funds separate from the rest of the budget or otherwise mandatory, and how much is subject to the discretion of the Congress?
38. What percentage of discretionary spending is for war preparations?
39. What percentage is for foreign aid, education, or environmental protection?
40. What is the correlation between Congress members' actions and their sources of funding?
41. What is the correlation between greatest campaign funding and electoral victory?
42. What is the success rate in Congressional reelection campaigns by incumbents?
43. Does the U.S. government subsidize fossil fuels?
44. Does the U.S. government subsidize nuclear energy?
45. How many private insurance companies insure nuclear power plants?
46. Is the United States a democracy, republic, communist collective, dictatorship, or oligarchy?
47. Which nations are the world's top weapons exporters?
48. Name at least three recent wars in which weapons from the same nation were used on both sides.
49. Explain, by comparison to Canada, how the United States benefitted from its revolution against England.
50. How did the U.S. revolution benefit Native Americans, farmers, enslaved people, and women?
51. Were there more or fewer popular rebellions in the United States after the revolution?
52. What nation did Congress members predict would welcome invaders as liberators in 1812?
53. Did it?
54. What nation did the United States steal the northern half of in the 1840s through a bloody war despite that nation's willingness to negotiate a nonviolent sale of the land?
55. What was the one condition the United States insisted on in acquiring that land?
56. What President lied to start that war?
57. What Congressman denounced his lies?
58. What hero of that war and future president denounced the war as an immoral outrage?
59. What percentage of nations that abolished slavery fought civil wars before doing so?
60. Why did Mississippi say it was seceding from the United States?
61. How was slavery ended in Washington DC?
62. How many years since 1776 has the United States gone without any wars?
63. What evidence was there that Spain blew up the Maine?
64. What did Spain propose instead of the Spanish-American war?
65. Name three reasons President McKinley gave for occupying the Philippines.
66. Name three good reasons for World War I.
67. What was the general theme of the most common lies of the Four-Minute Men?
68. What was the Lusitania carrying on its fateful voyage, and what advertisement had Germany placed in U.S. newspapers prior to its sailing?
69. What U.S. Secretary of State resigned over President Woodrow Wilson's position regarding the Lusitania?
70. What were the Greer and the Kerney and which U.S. President lied about them?
71. Is the Monroe Doctrine popular in Latin America?
72. What U.S. President encouraged Japanese imperialism, promising them a Monroe Doctrine for Asia?
73. Name one or more observers who predicted at the time of the Treaty of Versailles that it would lead to World War II. Why did they say that?
74. Would a stalemate in World War I, rather than a lopsided victory, have led to the same future?
75. How many right-wing coups were seriously planned against President Franklin Roosevelt?
76. Who was Smedley Butler and what did he conclude about the institution of war?
77. Why was Butler locked up in Quantico?
78. What U.S. whistleblower was later locked up in Quantico and kept naked in a tiny cell?
79. What had she exposed?
80. During the 1930s and early 1940s U.S. peace activists held demonstrations against growing U.S. hostility and war preparations against what nation?
81. Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, what did Winston Churchill tell his cabinet that President Franklin Roosevelt had promised to do in order to bring the United States into the war in Europe?
82. What did FDR use a forged Nazi map to lie to the U.S. public about, and who forged the map?
83. What was the Ludlow Amendment?
84. Prior to Pearl Harbor, in the diary of the U.S. Secretary of War, when did he say FDR expected a Japanese attack?
85. Did the United States begin supporting China in its war against Japanese aggression before or after Pearl Harbor?
86. What was President Roosevelt's approach to Jewish refugees?
87. What percentage of World War II propaganda posters in the United States included mention of the need to rescue Jews?
88. Why did the New York Times downplay the story of the holocaust?
89. Why did Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin say she voted against U.S. entry into World War II?
90. During the rise of Nazism, did Wall Street investment in Germany decrease, stay the same, or increase?
91. How many people died in World War II?
92. What percentage of them died in German concentration camps?
93. Who said "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word"?
94. What future director of the CIA rescued numerous top Nazis from prosecution and employed some of them for the United States?
95. How many former Nazis were employed by the U.S. military in Operation Paperclip?
96. What U.S. space agency's first director was a former Nazi who had employed slave labor?
97. Who remarked in 1937, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place"?
98. Within hours of Germany's surrender in World War II, Winston Churchill proposed a new war using what troops against what nation?
99. When did Japan first express willingness to surrender on the terms that actually ended World War II, before or after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
100. When President Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima what did he lie that Hiroshima was?
101. What nations of the world have nuclear weapons, and how many do they have?
102. What nations have official policies of potentially using nuclear weapons first?
103. What does the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty require nations with nuclear weapons to do?
104. How has Iran violated that treaty?
105. What do the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and a virgin birth have in common?
106. What was Operation Northwoods?
107. Who was Mohammad Mossadegh?
108. What nation proposed to abandon its nuclear energy program in 2003 until the U.S. dismissed the proposal?
109. What nation proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War?
110. What nation tried to spread bubonic plague in North Korea?
111. What U.S. presidential candidate secretly sabotaged peace talks for Vietnam?
112. Did the United States begin arming Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, who would develop into al Qaeda, before or after the Soviet invasion?
113. During the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan that began in 2001, what were the primary sources of funding for the other, or Taliban, side of the war?
114. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, whom did the Taliban offer to turn over to a neutral country to have put on trial?
115. How large has the al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan been during the war that began in 2001?
116. How large was the al Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion?
117. Has international terrorism decreased, stayed the same, or increased during the Global War on Terrorism?
118. The U.S. government originally announced that a mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden had succeeded despite his armed resistance. What did numerous people involved in that mission later change about that story?
119. When Germany reunited and the Cold War ended, what promise did the United States make to Russia regarding NATO expansion?
120. Was the promise kept?
121. What nation's army in 1990 took babies out of incubators and left them on the floor to die?
122. Prior to the Persian Gulf War, what nation offered to peacefully withdraw from Kuwait?
123. Prior to September 11, 2001, what did a CIA memo warn President George W. Bush might happen?
124. What nation was behind anthrax attacks in 2001 in the United States?
125. Who in January 2003 proposed that a means of starting a war on Iraq would be to paint an airplane with United Nations colors and fly it low over Iraq until it was shot at?
126. What portion of the nation of Iraq did the Iraqi government offer to let U.S. troops search prior to the 2003 U.S. attack?
127. In 2003, how quickly did Iraq promise to hold internationally monitored elections if it were not attacked?
128. Who offered to leave Iraq in 2003 if he could keep $1 billion and if Iraq would not be attacked?
129. Whose 2003 testimony at the United Nations in favor of attacking Iraq included fabricated dialogue from supposedly wiretapped conversations and numerous claims that his own staff had warned him would not even seem plausible?
130. What war's aftermath gave birth to a new al Qaeda spin-off called ISIS or ISIL or Islamic State or Daesh?
131. Where did ISIS get most of its weapons?
132. What have been top sources of ISIS funding?
133. What did ISIS ask the U.S. to do in order to boost its recruiting?
134. Did the U.S. do it?
135. Did it boost ISIS recruiting?
136. Did the U.S. drone war on Yemen replace a worse form of war or help create one?
137. Who supplied Saudi Arabia with its weapons for its 2015 war on Yemen?
138. Does the U.S. know the names of most of the people it targets with missiles from drones?
139. Does the U.S. target with drones only people it cannot arrest and put on trial?
140. Name three former top U.S. officials who have warned that drone wars produce more enemies than they kill.
141. Name three current or former top U.S. officials who maintain that every nation must have equal and identical rights in the use of drones.
142. Which nations did former NATO commander Wesley Clark say the Pentagon wanted to overthrow in 2003, and which nations did former Prime Minister of the U.K. Tony Blair say that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to overthrow at the same time? What has happened to those nations?
143. In which nations of the world do the highest percentages of people say they would go to war for their nation?
144. In which nations of the world are the highest percentages of the people religious?
145. What percentage of human beings who have ever lived, and of human societies that have ever existed, have experienced or participated in war?
146. In which nations of the world are children regularly told to pledge allegiance to a flag?
147. If you read that peace activists many years before your birth helped to end a war or halt the production of a weapon, would a good teacher expect you to write about that activism in the first person, using the word "we"?
148. If you read about the United States invading a Central American nation before your birth, would a good teacher allow you to write about it in the first person, using the word "we"?
149. Which nations of the world have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child? Why haven't they?
150. Which major military nations have not joined the International Criminal Court, or the treaties banning land mines, cluster bombs, racial discrimination, discrimination against women, or weapons in space, or those establishing rights of migrant workers, regulating the arms trade, providing protection from disappearances, defending the rights of people with disabilities, or the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights?
151. Which nation has used the power of its veto at the United Nations most frequently and for what purpose?
152. How many people were killed or driven out of their homes during the 1948 creation of Israel?
153. Who was the last president to propose abolishing the CIA?
154. What president created the CIA and came to regret it?
155. What was the Safari Club?
156. Which article of the U.S. Constitution sanctions secret agencies?
157. How does war preparation and weapons testing benefit human and environmental health?
158. Have more U.S. citizens been killed by working on nuclear weapons, fighting in wars, being victimized by foreign terrorists, or by domestic gun violence, or smoking cigarettes? What are the numbers?
159. How many U.S. wars has the U.S. Institute for Peace opposed since its creation?
160. What do the people of Diego Garcia, Koho'alawe, the Aleutian Islands, Bikini Atoll, Kwajalein Atoll, Culebra, Vieques, Okinawa, Thule, the Aetas, the Cherokee, and most native peoples of the United States have in common?
161. What percentage of U.S. wars are marketed as promoting freedom?
162. During what percentage of U.S. wars are civil liberties in the United States curtailed?
163. How many average Europeans, Asians, Africans, or Latin Americans would it take to damage the natural environment as much as the average person in the United States?
164. What single institution creates the most environmental destruction?
165. How did women in the United States and around the world vote themselves the right to vote?
166. What did it take to win children's rights in the United States?
167. What is the Vietnam Syndrome?
168. What were the most successful tactics of the Civil Rights movement?
169. How many corporations control most major U.S. media outlets?
170. How was Apartheid officially ended in South Africa?
171. What happened on Rosenstrasse?
172. Which have succeeded more often and with longer lasting successes in struggles against tyranny during the past 100 years, violent or nonviolent revolutions?
173. Who were the Wobblies?
174. What was the Prague Spring?
175. Who was A.J. Muste?
176. What percentage of prisoners ever kept in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo had been convicted of terrorism?
177. What three interlocking evils did Martin Luther King Jr. say needed to be ended?
178. When did the people of Hawaii vote to join the United States?
179. Why did the United States bomb West Virginia?
180. Why did the United States drop nuclear bombs on North Carolina?
181. Why did the British end the occupation of India?
182. Who was Abdul Ghaffar Khan?
183. When was the damage from Agent Orange finally cleaned up in Vietnam?
184. How did Norwegian teachers have to teach under Nazi occupation?
185. Which nations resisted Nazi orders to kill Jews most successfully?
186. Why did duelling end?
187. Why did Marcos' rule of the Philippines end?
188. Who kidnapped the President of Haiti in 2004?
189. Who was Claudette Colvin?
190. What was the income tax created to pay for?
191. How did the United States prevent the Three Mile Island accident from killing anyone?
192. Did more U.S. troops die in Vietnam or from suicide after returning home?
193. What is the leading cause of death for U.S. troops sent to U.S. wars in recent years?
194. Why did Congresswoman Barbara Lee say she was voting against the Global War on Terrorism in 2001?
195. Who did the U.S. attack with chemical weapons in 1932?
196. How did a ban on war get into the Japanese Constitution and who has been trying to remove it ever since?
197. Who assassinated the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in 1994?
198. Who killed Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, and John Wayne?
199. How do U.S. gun laws reduce gun violence better than Australia's?
200. Who overthrew the government of Honduras in 2009?
201. How many people were killed in the recent Russian military invasion of Ukraine?
202. Why do the people of Okinawa so strongly support the presence of U.S. military bases on their island?
203. What was the anti-imperialist league?
204. What was the outlawry movement?
205. What law was General Custer enforcing when he died?
206. Who urged all scientists to refuse any military work in 1931?
207. Who was Garry Davis?
208. Who was Jane Addams?
209. What was the New England Non-Resistance Society?
210. What ended friendly relations between Eisenhower and Khrushchev?
211. When did Armistice Day become Veterans Day and why?
212. What was the Iran-Contra scandal?
213. What is the Kellogg-Briand Pact?
214. Which recent wars have complied with the Kellogg-Briand Pact?
215. Which recent wars have complied with the United Nations Charter?
216. Which recent wars have complied with the separation of powers stipulated in the U.S. Constitution?
217. If the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the state of Florida to count all its votes in 2000, who would have become president of the United States in 2001?
218. What thwarted efforts by the African Union to negotiate peace in Libya in 2011?
219. Who proposed a peace process for Syria in 2012 that would have included a change of government?
220. Who dismissed it out of hand?
221. What did the U.S. military / White House plan for Syria in 2013 before being blocked by public, international, and Congressional pressure?
222. When the CIA produced a report in 2013 on past successes of arming local proxy armies, what was missing from the report?
223. Which nations still use the death penalty?
224. In how many nations in history have the majority of rape victims been male?
225. How many unarmed people do U.S. police kill each year?
226. Which stages of the criminal justice process in the United States are racially biased?
227. How much wealth do the average white, black, and Latino households have in the U.S.?
228. What percentage of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth?
229. What percentage could provide the world with clean drinking water?
230. What percentage could double U.S. investment in clean energy?
231. Is clean coal clean?
232. Is natural gas natural?
233. Is safe nuclear power safe?
234. Which nations are getting the highest percentage of their energy from sustainable sources?
235. Which nation did people in the most countries around the world view as the greatest threat to peace on earth in a 2013 Gallup poll?
236. Is terrorism among the top 100 causes of death in the United States?
237. What are 10 of them?
238. Does domestic terrorism in the United States kill more or fewer people than foreign terrorism?
239. What percentage of foreign terrorists in the United States provide a clear explanation of their motives?
240. What do they say?
Click here for the answers only after trying to answer the questions to the best of your ability.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. The updated second edition of that book will be published April 5, 2016, by Just World Books. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Quiz Answers
1. Should German schools teach how many people Germany killed in World War II?
Yes, of course, they should. This is the one question that pretty much everyone should get right.
2. How many was it?
World War II, including war-related diseases and famines, killed some 80 million people. Excluding some 30 million killed in Asia brings the total down to 50 million. Excluding some 6 million Germans and Austrians and a half million Italians as having been killed by the Allies (though of course also by their own governments) brings the total down to 43-and-a-half million. Of those, some 30 million were killed as civilians or soldiers in the course of the war, including from war-related diseases and famines -- the majority of them from the Soviet Union. The other 13 million were killed in German camps, including 6 million Jews, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 2 million Soviet civilians, 1 million Polish civilians, 1 million Yugoslav civilians, 200,000 gypsies, and thousands of political prisoners, homosexuals, and people with mental or physical disabilities.
December 15, 2015
Talk Nation Radio: Jon Schwarz on Secret Unaccountable Government
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-jon-schwarz-on-secret-unaccountable-government
Jon Schwarz's new job is with The Intercept. He previously worked for Michael Moore's Dog Eat Dog Films and was Research Producer for Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. He's contributed to many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones and Slate, as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.” In 2003 he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of mass destruction. See:
https://theintercept.com/staff/jonschwarz
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download from LetsTryDemocracy or Archive.
Pacifica stations can also download from AudioPort.
Syndicated by Pacifica Network.
Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!
Please embed the SoundCloud audio on your own website!
Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://TalkNationRadio.org
and at
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/tracks
December 14, 2015
Ending War: An Online Course
I'm very excited to announce that I will be teaching an online course beginning January 1, 2016, and that you can sign up for it now at the World Institute for Social Change.
The course is called "A World Beyond War" and will examine the possibility, desirability, and feasibility of abolishing the institution of war, examining arguments for the desirability and necessity of war, considering possible costs and benefits of war, and weighing alternative strategies for advancing the cause of reduction and abolition.
Under review will be historic, recent, and current examples of war and war propaganda from various parts of the world. I will provide text and video each week, engage in discussion with students, answer any questions, and provide feedback on writing by students each week. Students are encouraged to bring any and all examples and arguments to the discussion.
I plan to devote a great deal of time and effort to working with each of you who participates in this course, and I think the WISC website will work well for this. I'm looking forward to your input.
The trickiest part of taking this online course may be signing up for it. Here's how.
1. Go to: https://zcomm.org/zschool/moodle/login
2. Make up and type in (and remember) a username (it can be your email address) and a password.
3. On the next screen, type in your name and email address.
4. The website may send you a confirmation email. It may say that you've "changed" your email address. Just click the link in the email it sends you.
5. You will then be logged in and able to sign up for the course here:
https://zcomm.org/zschool/moodle/enrol/index.php?id=32
There are lots of other great courses that may interest you as well.
Each course costs $50 or $25 for those with low income. Part of the funding from my course goes to World Beyond War.
If you have any technical difficulties, please contact sysop@zmag.org
If you have any questions about the course, please see the outline on the website and contact me by replying to this email.
Thanks!
--David
I'm Dreaming of a Christmas Below 70
The sun is shining, the grass is green
It feels like a summer day
It's not supposed to be this way
In Charlottesville VA
'Cause it's December the 24th
At latitude 38 North...
I'm dreaming of a Christmas below 70
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten and children listen
To wisdom instead of Morning Joe
I'm dreaming of a year with seasons
Instead of growing heat and blight
If climate deniers see the light
And our society is set right
December 9, 2015
UVA Hires Dick Cheney / Pentagon Staffer Whose Failures Include Iraq and Mitt Romney
Eric Edelman is a former undersecretary at the Pentagon. He promotes higher military spending, an attack on Iran, and deployment of nuclear weapons to nations on Russia's border.
He pushed for war on Iraq and accused anyone opposed of "aiding enemies," including denouncing any sort of end date as "aiding enemies" not long before Bush and Maliki set an end date.
He pushed Obama for esclation in Afghanistan.
He's on the board of the pro-war "U.S. Institute of Peace."
He advised Mitt Romney how to become president, and Congress how to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran. He pushed all sorts of lies about Iran in the process.
Despite his advocacy for more wars all the time, Edelman seems to explain his string of disastrous decisions by explaining that people do dumb things during "war time." (video)
Here's a good summary of his work. some excerpts:
Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. diplomat and adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, has supported a number of militarist policy initiatives. He is a founding board member of the Foreign Policy Initiative, an advocacy group founded in 2009 by neoconservative figures William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor widely regarded as a successor group to the Project for the New American Century. He also served as a key foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012 and helped launch a new pressure group dedicated to pressing a hawkish GOP line in the 2016 presidential campaign.
In 2014, Edelman joined the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) as a co-chair of its Iran Task Force, which has pushed a hard line on Iran's nuclear enrichment program. ...
Edelman has been a vociferous critic of Obama administration's foreign policy, claiming that President Obama has an "ideological aversion to American power" ...
In a Boston Globe op-ed coauthored with fellow Romney advisers Meghan O'Sullivan and Eliot Cohen shortly before the election, Edelman argued: "Because of the last four years, we face a world in which our enemies do not fear us ...
In early 2013, Edelman and other Romney campaign alums joined to form the "John Hay Initiative."[7] The aim of the group is to influence potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates. Its more than 150 members include prominent militarists such as Eliot Cohen, Michael Chertoff, and former Sen. Norm Coleman. Mitt Romney himself is on the group's advisory council.[8]
In August 2015, Bloomberg View reported that members of the John Hay Initiative were playing a key role shaping the foreign policy agendas of most of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates. ...
The article added: "For the party itself, the group's omnipresence behind the scenes is shaping a hawkish, right-of-Hillary-Clinton foreign policy agenda that is quickly becoming the established position of the party hopefuls going into 2016."[10]
In September 2014, Edelman argued in a Washington Post op-ed written with Michele Flournoy, a former Obama administration undersecretary of defense for policy and noted "liberal hawk," that military spending should be increased ... that "the U.S. military must be able to deter or stop aggression in multiple theaters, not just one, even when engaged in a large-scale war."[11] ...
In a Weekly Standardcommentary, Edelman called for the United States "to dispatch a military needs assessment team to identify crucial shortfalls in the Ukrainian military and to lay the basis for urgent and longer-term military assistance programs on a bilateral U.S.-Ukraine basis."[16]
Edelman has also pushed for greater involvement of NATO in Ukraine, ...
Edelman has also taken a hawkish line on Iran. In January 2011, Edelman co-wrote, with two CSBA colleagues, an article for Foreign Affairs titled "The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran: The Limits of Containment." The article argued that the United States should pursue an approach "that brings diplomacy and sanctions, clandestine action, and the threat of military force into alignment." ...
Edelman also supported U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war over the Syrian regime's alleged use of chemical weapons in 2013. Edelman linked the issue to the U.S. standoff with Iran, arguing if the United States does not "enforce the WMD norm in Syria," Iran would "not put too much stock in the threat of the use of force if they don't negotiate an end to their nuclear weapons program."[31] ...
The Turkish columnist Ibrahim Karagul described Edelman as "probably the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in Turkish history." ...
Edelman served under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney during the administration of George H.W. Bush. At that time, he became part of a "shop" within the Pentagon that was set up by Cheney "to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level," wrote Nicholas Lehman in the New Yorker.[40]
The work of this shop, which was headed by Paul Wolfowitz, eventually led to the crafting of the 1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance, a document that was meant to serve as a post-Cold War framework for U.S. military strategy.
Here's the news from the 19th most militarized university in the 1st most militarized nation:
Ambassador Eric S. Edelman Appointed James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller CenterA, Dec. 9, 2015 – Eric S. Edelman, a veteran diplomat and policy adviser during both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations, has been appointed as the next James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for public policy at the University of Virginia.
Ambassador Edelman, currently Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, retired as a Career Minister from the U.S. Foreign Service on May 1, 2009. He is also Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and was a senior associate of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University from 2009-2013. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace.
Edelman has served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House, where he led organizations providing analysis, strategy, policy development, security services, trade advocacy, public outreach, citizen services, and congressional relations. As the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (August, 2005-January 2009), he oversaw strategy development as DoD’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls.
“It’s a special honor and pleasure for me to welcome Ambassador Edelman to the Miller Center," said William Antholis, Director and CEO. “He is widely respected in both parties as one of the leading career diplomats of his generation, and I had the great fortune to work with Eric and learn from him. I’m delighted that my colleagues and UVA students will also have that opportunity. Secretary Schlesinger would have been proud."
Edelman served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and Bush Administrations and was Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. In other assignments he has been Chief of Staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, special assistant to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Robert Kimmitt and special assistant to Secretary of State George Shultz.
He has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and several Department of State Superior Honor Awards. In January, 2011 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French Government.
Edelman holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and earned his Ph.D. in U.S. diplomatic history at Yale University.
As the Schlesinger Professor over the next 12 months, Edelman will participate in Miller Center conferences; engage with faculty and students across the University of Virginia at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, the Law School, and the History and Politics Departments; contribute to the First Year project and other Miller Center publications; and appear on the Center’s signature public affairs television interview program, American Forum.
The University of Virginia established the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professorship at the Miller Center in 2007 to bring public servants of great distinction to the University. Mr. Schlesinger served as Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy, in addition to holding leadership roles with the Central Intelligence Agency, Atomic Energy Agency, and numerous other government bodies during a distinguished career in public service.
Building on Schlesinger’s interest in strategic matters, the Schlesinger Professorship provides a unique opportunity for public servants who have experience with foreign policy and national security to participate as visiting faculty in programs at the Miller Center and engage with students at the University, as well as possibly draft memoirs or reflections with the Miller Center’s research support.
Trump Didn't Vote to Kill 1 Million Muslims in Iraq, Hillary Did
Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for pointing out that the U.S. media is acting as though Donald Trump just invented bigotry this week (one of those ugly details I'm happy to miss by never watching television). But not only is explicit bigotry toward Muslims not new, implicit bigotry toward Muslims has been the foundation of the largest public project in the United States for the past quarter century.
The driving forces behind war planning in Washington are power, domination, profit, politics, and the inertia of war planning as a path toward career success. These sociopaths are happy to bomb Germans or Yugoslavians. The value they place on sailors in Pearl Harbor or contemplated victims of Operation Northwoods, or U.S. troops stop-lossed into insanity is negligible. They don't think twice about overthrowing a democracy in Iran and laying the groundwork for Islamic power. They have no qualms about arming Muslim radicals in Afghanistan or Iraq, and toppling secular governments in Iraq or Libya or Syria. That most ISIS weaponry is U.S. weaponry seized from Iraq can only please the profiteers who will sell the weapons to combat ISIS. Their best friends are the killer Muslims running Saudi Arabia and nearby kingdoms. Their Christian hatred for Islam is as real as Karl Rove's integrity or Donald Trump's hair.
But you can't keep dumping $1 trillion a year into U.S. militarism without an enemy as frightening as -- actually it has to be more frightening than -- the Soviet Union and nuclear holocaust. In the irrational world of fear, a throat slitting is as frightening as a nuclear bomb, in fact more so. Many, many people in the United States, when they stop to think about it, recognize that the wars of recent decades have been counterproductive, creating enemies rather than eliminating them, endangering rather than protecting, costing a mountain of lives and of dollars, savagely destroying the natural environment, eroding civil liberties in the name of wars for "freedom," and brutalizing morality, justifying murder, torture, kidnapping, etc. But with fear and hatred of Muslims thrown into the mix, all of that clear understanding is erased by the need to kill Muslims. Suddenly a rich stew of World War II myths and Hollywood entertainment reminds everyone that only war works and nothing else is acceptable.
Donald Trump didn't vote for the war on Iraq that killed a million Muslims. He didn't vote to fund it and escalate it over and over again. Hillary Clinton did that. Which is not to say that Trump wouldn't have done so too, or worse, if he thought it would get him on TV more. The point is that the hatred is not new. Without it, basic U.S. policy would be understood as irrational.
There are now news stories from around the United States and the world about people shunning Trump businesses and expressing fear about living in Trump-branded buildings. They're concerned that there may be an attack. No doubt among those expressing this worry are some of that majority of Americans who tell pollsters they want more war. So, they recognize blowback. It's not a difficult concept. Hostility toward others produces hostility back toward you or someone taken to represent you. Pretty basic. But in advocating more war, millions of people are willing and able to hide their understanding of blowback in some fascist vault in a back corner of their brains. Sure, more war will produce more blowback, they may think, but hopefully it will hit somebody else -- especially if I unload my Trump condo and live somewhere else, perhaps a liberal gated community with an African-American guard whose name I even know.
I walked by a wall recently and took a photo of it. Someone had written "Anything war can do, peace can do better." Wisest thing I've ever seen on that wall. But someone else had scrawled underneath a poetic piece of pure ignorance from deep within the terrified soul of U.S. paranoia: "(Except stopping Hitler!)" I don't think the rest of the world finds it easy to get inside this type of U.S. thinking, in which the outside world is full of a menacing evil constantly analogized to Hitler, the "new Hitler," the "modern Hitler," -- and Hitler is understood as having arisen with no help from the Treaty of Versailles, no help from Wall Street, no assistance from the militarism of Western culture, and no possibility of being halted short of global domination except by massive violence.
Kids, dear world, in the United States, you should know are compelled to pledge allegiance to a U.S. flag every morning, and then to pray in what they call a "moment of silence." They are then taught a mythologized U.S. history year after year with hardly any mention of the other 96% of humanity. Then they're told that Muslims want to slit their throats. Why? What did they do? Nothing. They'd just been shopping and watching football and minding their own business. They had a flag out front and plenty of support-the-troops shit stuck to the SUV. Why? Must just be the barbarity of the Muslims. Why not kill them off? It worked with the Native Americans. Kill them off, but don't talk about it like that out loud.
Only, if there's a war on al Qaeda support it, and if there's a war with al Qaeda against Syria oppose it, and if it's repackaged as a war on al Qaeda under a new and even scarier name, support it with a passion. And if killing them is OK, what in the hell is all the fuss about over torturing them? And if torturing them is OK, what in the world could be wrong with denying them entry into the United States? This is the logic of war propaganda. Trump agrees with the Washington establishment, he just has some sort of media-driven Tourette syndrome that leads him to blurt things out. If he's made president, the second most dangerous place in this country will be a mosque. The first will remain anywhere between Trump and a television camera.
December 8, 2015
In Fantasyland Your Neighbors Live in, More War Is a Smart Idea
People in the United States want tighter gun laws within the United States. They probably can't be, and certainly aren't being, polled on the U.S. role as top weapons supplier to the world. You can't poll people on something they've never heard of.
People in the United States want more done to protect the environment. They have no clue that their government is politely destroying all hope for future human life at a nice conference in Paris. They've never heard that the U.S. military is the single biggest destroyer of the environment. These are topics you can't poll on.
People in the United States believe that ISIS is present within the United States trying to kill them. You can't poll them on what to do in the actual universe, because they're living in that one. In their la-la land they say the United States should wage more war on ISIS.
Even in an alternative universe in which ISIS members from Honduras have snuck Ebola into Planned Parenthood clinics, waging war on ISIS makes no sense. The war and the accompanying bigotry and hatred are the greatest gift ISIS could ask for. And it did ask for them. And the United States has obliged, helping ISIS's recruitment soar. Blowback isn't reduced by escalating. You can't use terrorism to eliminate terrorism.
But here's where the important delusions come in. More than a matter of immediate facts, good Americans suffer from a twisted worldview in which blowback is spontaneously generated by irrational subhuman urges in lesser races and religious groups, wars waged abroad by the United States don't hurt anyone -- other than evil beasts, the war on Iraq benefited Iraq, and wars can be made even better than normal by making them multicultural feminist environmentalist Geneva-Conventionized local efforts with dark-skinned inhabitants doing the dying but the United States doing the deciding.
Let's try a little context.
It is no more "defensive" now than it was in 2003 or any other year to bomb people's homes thousands of miles from your shores.
It is not an act of generosity -- except to the weapons makers -- to kill huge numbers of people for no good reason.
War is not a last resort, and imagining it is while cheering and pushing for it, is self-delusional in a very basic way, no matter how poorly informed you are.
As your World War II myths can probably be removed only with invasive surgery, just look at the past 70 years and find a war that worked on its own terms, that didn't produce more harm than it halted.
The politicians who lie to you about everything other than war, and the media that tries to bias you in disastrous directions on everything other than war, both do the exact same thing when it comes to war.
Two years ago you didn't want to join a war on Syria on the side of al Qaeda, but you didn't want to be bothered to really stop it, end the provision of arms and trainers, pull the CIA out, permit the world to negotiate peace. Now you want to join a war on Syria on the side of al Qaeda while simultaneously joining it on the side against al Qaeda under the new name ISIS.
Why? Because ISIS is evil, so evil you can't talk to them.
ISIS is a large and growing number of people. Do you intend to murder them all? Do you have any idea of the global storm of hatred and vengeance that doing so would unleash on the United States including from people within the United States who can't be kept out by some idiotic walls? Because if you don't intend to murder them all, but only some of them (generating more of them than you kill), then you're going to have to talk with those who survive.
I'm not even asking you to talk to them. I'm asking you to stop making matters worse. Stop bombing. Stop shooting. Stop flooding the region with weapons. Stop supporting governments that fund ISIS. Protect people at risk with actual defensive protection if needed, but don't use them as excuses for escalated war. Send in aid and peaceworkers. Let professionals at conflict resolution speak to ISIS. Go back to television and shopping. Just stop telling pollsters you want more war.
