Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 3

Israel's 77th Birthday: Recalling A History of Horror

Zionist efforts to remove the Palestinian Arabs from their land long predated Hitler's rise as a historical figure. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson's King-Crane Commission reported back from the region that, "No British officer consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms . . . only a greatly reduced Zionist program should be attempted . . . and then only very gradually initiated." The Commissioners called for a serious modification of existing plans for unlimited Jewish immigration culminating in Jewish statehood. Regarding Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had promised the Jews a home in Palestine, King and Crane wrote: "A national home is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor can the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." At the time, "existing non-Jewish communities" were Christian and Muslim Arabs constituting 93% of Palestine's population.

 

During the course of the King-Crane Commission's inquiry, Jewish representatives had not concealed their ultimate hope of dispossessing the Arab inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of purchase, in spite of the fact that ninety percent of the latter were completely against surrendering their land to the Zionist project. "To subject the people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land would be a gross violation" of Wilsonian principle, the Commissioners wrote, "and of the people's rights, though it be kept within the forms of law." Leaving aside the dubious equation of Wilsonian principle with self-determination, it is safe to say that overriding a 93% indigenous majority with whatever forms of pressure can hardly be described as an exercise in democracy. 

 

Sadly, the gross violation the Commissioners warned against occurred, and Israel was founded, but commentary in the U.S. has almost completely ignored the peculiar history behind the event. To wit: a largely irreligious people reclaimed land after an absence of two thousand years based on fantastical Biblical texts few of them believed in; Jehovah's carvings on a Tablet in the Bronze Age became the basis of Near East politics in the 20th Century; a "Jews-only" state bent on conquest and expansion was hailed as a model of democratic socialism with unique sensitivity to morality and human rights. Displaying amazing chutzpah, Zionist leaders embarked on an "in-gathering" of the Jewish Diaspora and plotted the exodus of Jews from lands they had lived in for centuries while intoning the words Hitler had used in carrying out the Holocaust: "You are not a German, you are a Jew - you are not a Frenchman, you are a Jew - you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew." 

 

The heart of the problem was and remains a serious and deliberate confusion of nationalism with religion. Organized Jewry, a staunch supporter of separation of Church and State outside the Holy Land, condoned their union in Israel, demanding the loyalty of Jews everywhere, whether or not they identified themselves as such. Diasporan Jews supported Israel out of religious duty, though they may or may not have been aware of what Zionist ideology actually entailed. Jewish identity became the basis of Israeli citizenship, with political debate naturally centering on the vexing question, "What is a Jew?" Since Jews, like most people, have a mixed ancestry, Jewish supremacist myth-makers buttressed weak territorial claims with appeals to historical continuity, blurring distinctions between Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, and Judaism, while forestalling recognition that these were different people at different times in history with different ways of life. Neither the Jews nor these varied forebears ever constituted a race or even a distinctive pure ethnic grouping, and since Judaism had been of declining significance for most Jews for some time, it quickly became clear that Jewish identity was to be as arbitrary as it was convenient for Israel to have it. Not surprisingly, only Palestinians can't belong.

 

Inevitably, Israel's birth was traumatic. In November 1947, a Washington-dominated U.N. passed a resolution awarding over 56% of the land of Palestine to 650,000 Jews, who represented just a third of the population and owned some 6% of the land. Britain, its empire near collapse, began withdrawing from its colonies the following Spring when its mandate over Palestine expired. As the British pulled out, Zionist armies attacked Arab villages, driving out roughly three-quarters of a million Palestinians in the process of forging a Jewish state with a sizable Arab minority, the latter forced to choose between exile and perpetual discrimination. 

 

The fundamental injustice in the new state was rooted in the divorce of citizenship from territoriality. Jews around the world had rights in the Jewish state, but there could be nothing like full human rights for non-Jews and only the most limited progress towards a just society. The Jewish National Fund purchased lands on behalf of the Jewish people, from which non-Jews were necessarily excluded. According to official Israeli figures 92% of the state's surface prior to June, 1967 was restricted to Jewish use - in perpetuity. Palestinians had no claim on the land they had lived on for centuries.

 

Israel acted to guarantee a permanent Jewish majority while establishing the exclusivist institutions that statist Zionism called for. A huge effort was made to attract the Jewish Diaspora to Israel, while expelling as many Arabs as possible. Jews were ceaselessly reminded of the dangers of anti-Semitism and the hopelessness of assimilation. At the same time, and long before Menachem Begin and the Likud bloc took power, Israel's Labor Party gradually incorporated a supranationalist "Greater Israel" movement into its program, preaching expulsion to the Arabs, fear to Diasporan Jews, and reflexively accusing anti-Zionist Gentiles of anti-Semitism.

 

The Zionist triumph placed a borderless Jewish island in a sea of angry Arabs. Expansionism and new frontiers were its by-products, and war was quite inevitable.

In the seventy-seven years since Israel came into existence as a Jewish state it has not only taken hold of the land but also the structure of opinion and commentary in the West, in such a way that the Palestinians have been quite literally obliterated as a people with any claim to rights or historical continuity. At the same time, the history of Israel that has produced this appalling result has likewise been obliterated, especially in the United States. It is nearly impossible to find mainstream commentary referring to Israel's assassinating children at will, bulldozing homes, bombing schools and hospitals, uprooting orchards, arresting, deporting, and torturing anyone posing a "threat" to Jewish supremacy, and locking an entire people in a giant, outdoor cage. On the contrary. Everything is carefully filtered through the lens of "little Israel," victim of eternal anti-Semitism, in which Palestinians are congenital terrorists yearning to kill Jews, especially children. The fact that Israel introduced terrorism against civilians to the region, that it originated in conquest, that it has repeatedly invaded and occupied its neighbors, and was instrumental in instigating the blood-drenched disaster in Iraq, never rises to perceptibility in the U.S. media or in American political discourse. In the official optic Israel bears no responsibility for "terrorism" and is, in fact the victim of the peoples it occupies and kills.

 

Every media comment about Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran invokes a cartoon-like fantasy of total despotism, infantile rage, and savage violence, all targeted at "us," the good people who save Jews from gas chambers and otherwise pursue our charmingly harmless lives in a world devoid of illegitimate authority and oppression. Never is there the slightest hint that "extremist Islam" caused us absolutely no harm until Washington backed Jewish supremacy over Arab lands, overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran (1953), planted permanent military bases near the holiest sites of Islam, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with economic sanctions. And all this was before the neo-cons engineered the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq.

 

 
Seventy-seven years on it is more than time to recognize that "little Israel" is a permanent disaster fully capable of ringing down the curtain on the entire human race. Racist, nuclear armed, violently delusional, it seeks in the name of "security" to destroy any and all resistance to Jewish domination. Though success on these terms is impossible, the attempt to succeed can only yield a succession of unprecedented horrors.

Russia, the Defeat of Nazism, and the Collaborationist West

 Yesterday, Russia welcomed twenty-seven heads of state from around the world to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, which ended in victory over the Nazis, one of the greatest achievements in Russian history, and one that would make any nation justly proud.

 

The United States likes to portray the defeat of Nazism as a glorious U.S. achievement, with a nod to British, Canadian, Australian, French and a few others for their supporting roles. This ignores the central fact that the Wehrmacht had been ground down to the barest shadow of its former self by the time the U.S. invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, an event that 80 years of Hollywood fantasies have attempted to transform into the key battle of the war. In reality, however, this much-delayed opening of a second front in the European war occurred when Hitler's troops had been reduced to mostly children and old men, the military-aged soldiers having perished in gargantuan numbers on the Eastern front. Tens of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians also perished there, a large majority deliberately starved by Hitler, who looked to eliminate Slavic peoples and re-populate their territories with a civilized master race of "Aryans."

 

U.S. mind-managers have dispatched this immense suffering to Orwell's memory hole, along with the suffering of the Chinese, who lost about half as much as the USSR on the battlefield, in horrendous camps, or in "scientific" laboratories that treated them like experimental rats. British, French, and American losses, especially civilian deaths, were but a tiny fraction of these. 

 

The ferocity of the battles fought in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk defy description, and are well beyond the West's impoverished moral capacity to even begin to apprehend. Three million Nazi soldiers invaded the USSR with the launching of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.*  This represented eighty percent of the German Army, almost all of whom were either killed, captured, or wounded over the subsequent three years. Meanwhile, the USSR not only fought the invading Germans, but also ardent Nazi-supporters in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, along with other European countries that facilitated German military operations and replaced fallen German soldiers in battle.

The Western powers typically regard themselves as the most heroic human rights champions in history, but it was actually the Red Army that shot anti-Semites, while Western myth-makers cast the Jew-haters as anti-Communist freedom fighters worthy of admiration.

In the post-WWII world, Washington imposed a "cordon-sanitaire" in order to erradicate Communism in Western Europe, a broadly-defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements while those who had accommodated Nazism or gone into hiding faced no such exclusion.

Today's inheritors of collaborationist Europe have re-doubled their attacks on Russia with economic sanctions and anti-Russian "human rights" tribunals, all in the name of a "never again" anti-genocide crusade that lacks even the slightest pretense of concern for Israel's ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people. 

 

Our problems go far beyond Donald Trump.

 

 

*Harry Truman stood up on the Senate floor the following day and recommended that the U.S. role in the war should be to help the Russians when Germany was getting the upper hand and Germany when Russia had the advantage, thus helping eliminate both populations to the greatest extent possible.

For more on the U.S. role in WWII, see:

 

"How The U.S. Really Reacted To Nazism," Legalienate, 8/20/17

"75th Anniverary of the Defeat of Nazism," Legalienate, 5/9/20

"Mythology and Reality in World War II," Legalienate, 8/15/10

"False Savior - FDR," Legalienate, 4/15/09

U.S. Troops In Mexico?

President Donald Trump has offered President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico U.S. troops to help combat organized crime in Mexico. The offer came in a recent phone call between the two heads of state, and the offer was sharply rejected by Sheinbaum, who reminded the U.S. president that "we can share information but we are never going to accept the presence of the U.S. Army on our territory."*

 

Trump is doubling down on militarizing the handling of drug trafficking, assigning all blame for the fentanyl crisis to China and countries south of the U.S. border with Mexico. He has declared the drug cartels "terrorist organizations," and equates drug trafficking and illegal immigration with military invasion, i.e., outright war, which gives him wartime powers, or so he believes. In line with this, he's cutting $163 billion from budget allocations for education and social services, raising military spending $375 billion, and flooding the border with U.S. soldiers, all part of an effort to accelerate his mass deportation campaign. 

 

Attempting to solve the complex problems of drug trafficking and consumption as though they were features of a Hollywood action movie susceptible to easy solution by generous doses of gratuitous violence is beyond ludicrous. As the late Edward Said observed, Hollywood productions are a form of science fiction with relevance to no one's actual life, which is why the Hollywood-like "war on drugs" has had no discernible impact on eliminating the drug trade, though it has contributed substantially to horrifying bloodshed and major human rights violations. Recall that under the U.S. Army's two-decade long occupation of Afghanistan heroin trafficking soared to record levels.

 

In official Washington, political thinking about drugs and almost everything else has yet to reach beyond adolescent fantasy.

*In the war of 1846-8, the United States invaded Mexico on the false pretext of self-defense, robbing half its national territory, which later became California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, half of Texas and Colorado, and bits of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

Sources:

 "U.S. Troops In Mexico: Not Now, Not Ever," La Jornada (Spanish), May 4, 2025

John Gibler, "Mexico Unconquered, - Chronicles of Power and Revolt,"(City Lights, 2009) p. 121

 

 

50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

 After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.

 

Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, band of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh's imminent victory. 

 

At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons, rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.  

 

Saigon was no more.*

To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.  

The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished, are punished anew. 

After two decades of Western terror, retribution deaths were near zero. The much predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese. 

This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those who Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures. 

The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.**

 

As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless: 

 

"There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth . . . A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel."

Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for "success." This position, re-iterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.

U.S. hands off other countries.

To the Times' editors, these words were incomprehensible.***

 

U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that, "We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in," perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the "loss" of Vietnam on the "impatience" of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. "You can't fight a war on television," he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would "be well advised to silence future critics by executive order."

 

With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. "The lessons of the past," he implausibly advised, "have already been learned . . . and we should have our focus on the future."****

Sources:

*Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History, (Grove Weidenfeld, 1985) pps. 266-70; Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, (Random House, 1969) pps. 206-7

 

**Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979) pps. 28-9 

 

*** Raphael Salkie, The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) pps. 131-2 

 

****Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 389 

  

Empire's End: Trump Endorses Sending U.S. Citizens To Banana Republic Gulag

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

              -----Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

 

President Donald Trump has endorsed sending "the worst of the worst" criminals (i.e., anybody he so labels, regardless of what the facts show) to a foreign gulag for life whenever he sees fit. Trump revealed this view during a meeting with Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele at the White House, where both men agreed nothing should or would be done to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who ICE agents kidnapped and mistakenly sent to Bukele's notorious mega-prison CECOT due to what they called an "administrative error" last month. Trump labeled Garcia a MS-13 gang member and Bukele gratuitously proclaimed him a "terrorist," though there is no evidence he was even a criminal, much less a political actor using violence to force changes in government policy. In any event, neither president sees any reason to try to correct the error and return Garcia to his life and family in the United States, so he continues to rot in a Salvadorean prison.

Trump's interpretation of presidential power to justify such outrages is the one U.S. presidents always use:  that we are at war with evildoers and so are obliged to toss aside trivialities like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the latest iteration of this farce Trump has stripped away the rights of foreign workers, natural residents, and even naturalized citizens, with birth citizens soon to be persecuted for thought crimes, another venerable American tradition. When questioned about the legitimacy of his self-serving views, Trump asked without irony if there were any reason to regard U.S. citizens as a special class deserving of protection, regarding it as self-evident that once he labels U.S. citizens or anybody else "criminal," they deserve to be treated as sub-human. Clearly, the president sees no reason to acknowledge that U.S. law enforcement has the dual purpose of punishing criminal conduct and protecting individual rights, with the latter responsibility being the more important of the two, since without rights the state itself becomes boundlessly criminal, and no one can escape being victimized by its crimes on a constant basis. Indeed, he may not even understand these responsibilities.

It is easy enough to mock Trump's buffoonish approach to governance, but this only misses the forest for the trees. All of U.S. history shows that the law has only the most tangential relation to power, and is promptly cast to the flames whenever authority or profit is at stake. The USA really was founded on slavery and mass extermination, with the presumed legitimacy of the first written into the Constitution itself, and official justification of the latter codified in the Declaration of Independence as self-defense against "merciless Indian savages." It took the law centuries to ban slavery while a century-and-a-half later it still hasn't provided even the merest pretense of legal justification for the robbery of Indian lands, upon which the very existence of the United States depends. 

So president Trump should properly be seen as the culmination of a process of contempt for human rights, not an aberration from a tradition of upholding them. He is able to use ICE as his personal kidnapping force only because George W. Bush invented the agency out of thin air as part of his modest ambition to "rid the world of evil." He may get away with dispatching U.S. citizens to a foreign dungeon because Obama already got away with murdering a U.S. citizen on foreign soil. He can attract support for making America "great" again by seizing Greenland or annexing Canada because our schoolbooks and media mouthpieces have long taught us that U.S. conquest and expansion are by definition glorious.

In other words, bringing down Trump, which more and more people want to see done, may require that we repudiate the long tradition of Trumpism that preceded his rise to power, that is, if we really intend to get rid of arbitrary rule. 

 

After all, if George W. Bush could rig intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and then destroy Iraq on that false pretext, why can't Trump rig intelligence to show that Iran has nukes and later bomb Teheran? If McKinley could grab Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, why can't Trump take Greenland and the Panama Canal? If John F. Kennedy could invade Cuba and Vietnam, why can't Trump invade Mexico?

Trump's rule by executive fiat is the consequence of what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim once identified as "anomie" - literally normlessness - a state of intellectual vertigo owing to a complete lack of coherent expectations regulating conduct. We have arrived at this state of affairs because a long line of U.S. leaders and their media propagandists have obliterated rationality with double-talk and lies, leaving Trump an intellectual black hole that allows him to "govern" by authoritarian impulse.

The only potential plus in all this is that power weakens as legitimacy erodes, and the whims of an ignorant narcissist are provoking massive discontent.

And thus the U.S. empire implodes with gathering momentum.

 

Trump Endorses Sending U.S. Citizens To Banana Republic Gulag

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

              -----Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

 

President Donald Trump has endorsed sending "the worst of the worst" criminals (i.e. anybody he so labels, regardless of what the facts show) to a foreign gulag for life whenever he sees fit. Trump revealed this view during a meeting with Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele at the White House, where both men agreed nothing should or would be done to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who ICE agents kidnapped and mistakenly sent to Bukele's notorious mega-prison CECOT due to what they called an "administrative error" last month. Trump labeled Garcia a MS-13 gang member and Bukele gratuitously proclaimed him a "terrorist," though there is no evidence he was even a criminal, much less a political actor using violence to force changes in government policy. In any event, neither president  sees any reason to try to correct the error and return Garcia to his life and family in the United States, so he continues to rot in a Salvadorean prison.

Trump's interpretation of presidential power to justify such outrages is the one U.S. presidents always use:  that we are at war with evildoers and so are obliged to toss aside trivialities like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the latest iteration of this farce Trump has stripped away the rights of foreign workers, natural residents, and even naturalized citizens, with birth citizens soon to be persecuted for thought crimes, another venerable American tradition. When questioned about the legitimacy of his self-serving views, Trump asked without irony if there were any reason to regard U.S. citizens as a special class deserving of protection, regarding it as self-evident that once he labels U.S. citizens or anybody else "criminal," they deserve to be treated as sub-human. Clearly, the president sees no reason to acknowledge that U.S. law enforcement has the dual purpose of punishing criminal conduct and protecting individual rights, with the latter responsibility being the more important of the two, since without rights the state itself becomes boundlessly criminal, and no one can escape being victimized by its crimes on a constant basis. Indeed, he may not even understand these responsibilities.

It is easy enough to mock Trump's buffoonish approach to governance, but this only misses the forest for the trees. All of U.S. history shows that the law has only the most tangential relation to power, and is promptly cast to the flames whenever authority or profit is at stake. The USA really was founded on slavery and mass extermination, with the presumed legitimacy of the first written into the Constitution itself, and official justification of the latter codified in the Declaration of Independence as self-defense against "merciless Indian savages." It took the law centuries to ban slavery while a century-and-a-half later it still hasn't provided even the merest pretense of legal justification for the robbery of Indian lands, upon which the very existence of the United States depends. 

So president Trump should properly be seen as the culmination of a process of contempt for human rights, not an aberration from a tradition of upholding them. He is able to use ICE as his personal kidnapping force only because George W. Bush invented the agency out of thin air as part of his modest ambition to "rid the world of evil." He may get away with dispatching U.S. citizens to a foreign dungeon because Obama already got away with murdering a U.S. citizen on foreign soil. He can attract support for making America "great" again by seizing Greenland or annexing Canada because our schoolbooks and media mouthpieces have long taught us that U.S. conquest and expansion are by definition glorious.

In other words, bringing down Trump, which more and more people want to see done, may require that we repudiate the long tradition of Trumpism that preceded his rise to power, that is, if we really intend to get rid of arbitrary rule. 

 

After all, if George W. Bush could rig intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and then destroy Iraq on that false pretext, why can't Trump rig intelligence to show that Iran has nukes and later bomb Teheran? If McKinley could grab Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, why can't Trump take Greenland and the Panama Canal? If John F. Kennedy could invade Cuba and Vietnam, why can't Trump invade Mexico?

Trump's rule by executive fiat is the consequence of what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim once identified as "anomie" - literally normlessness - a state of intellectual vertigo owing to a complete lack of coherent expectations regulating conduct. We have arrived at this state of affairs because a long line of U.S. leaders and their media propagandists have obliterated rationality with double-talk and lies, leaving Trump an intellectual black hole that allows him to "govern" by authoritarian impulse, as nothing else exists.

The only potential plus in all this is that power weakens as legitimacy erodes, and the whims of an ignorant narcissist are provoking massive discontent.

And thus the U.S. empire implodes with gathering momentum.

 

A Capitalist Running Capitalism?

 

 

A Capitalist RunningCapitalism?    

 

It becomes clearer to morepeople everyday that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” maneuvering and shapingmarket forces into being beneficial towards humanity has become a massive forceof waste and destruction visibly giving humanity the finger in far more thansymbolic ways. One of the materially obvious ones is Donald Trump once againbeing president of the United States. Some LibCons and ConLibs rejoice but mostcapitalists are near terrified, along with a general public manipulated but foronce almost equal to a ruling class though only in fear.

 

The center of globalcapitalism has been imperial America since the end of the second world war andthat ruling power is nearing its finish which cant come too soon and may meanultimate destruction if it doesn’t happen soon enough. But this happening isnot a matter of fate but of human action taken on behalf of humanity’s survival.Unfortunately, under the near total control of anti-social corporate media,millions of decent citizens are reduced to calling the American minority ownedand operated society “our” democracy, totally swallowing the notion that beingable to vote defines democracy.

 

When reminded, or just aslikely learning for the first time, that the all encompassing boogie man AdolphHitler came to power under supposed democratic election rules and not byshooting his way into power, as infantile political science teaches from gradeschool through college, they accept the notion that his evil was so great andpowerful nothing could stand in his way. Much as naïve Americans think Trumpwinning an election for the second time was anti-democratically arranged byfascists who somehow materialize when things are going wrong anywhere andeverywhere that capitalism rules. The lesser evil form of capitalism that ranthe nation and much of the west after the end of WW2 was known as capitalistsocial democracy and it made life better for a broad section of the workingclass so that ruling wealth and their professional class servants would notface the danger of revolutions such as happened in Russia and China and werethreatened in growing numbers of nations. That phase ended later in the 20thcentury and became a return to alleged free market and austerity politics thatsaw much freedom for a minority class of capital and growing degradation forthe great majority as previous government programs at least partly aimed atpeople who needed help mostly reverted to help for wealth to become morewealthy and in the inspired capitalist religious faith able to invest andthereby create more jobs and prosperity for the great unwashed, as advertisersand politicians often referred to the public.

 

Screeching about fascismwithout pointing out that it is the logical extreme of the system when it is introuble as always neglects the basic point that the only connection betweenHitler fascism in Germany and alleged Trump fascism in America is capitalism.In its local and global forms it is sinking into bloody degeneracy that humanitycan see more clearly than ever, whether in Israel, Ukraine, Yemen or dozens ofother places in Africa and Asia and Europe. Naturally, consciousness controlworks harder than ever to distract, misinform and lie, still successful among ashrinking number of mortals but failing fast among the majority paying for thewretched outcome of a tinier minority than ever lavishing in wealth whilegrowing millions suffer physically and mentally.

 

 

 

 

Decent, well meaning andsincere Americans who refer to “our” democracy miss that it is a marketcommodity in which a we get what they pay for minority pays for and a majority sufferas parishioners at the Capitalist Cathedral where prayers are about as usefulas belief in the hypocrisy that passes for “our” democracy. Our true belief andacceptance of the faith needs to end soon or all of us – true believers,agnostics, atheists, members of the WGAS minority and others – will pay theultimate price of dying in a nuclear war, at worst, or suffer a slower death asnature in all its form succumbs to minority rule that reduces humans, earth,air and water to profit making consumables. Trump’s seeming blunderingrepresents marketing at its near extreme with failure looming larger as doeshope for humanity.

 

 

 

 

Voting is easier-and as meaningless as ever if not more so - thanat any time in our crippled history. All one had to do was fill out a postcardand mail it postage free to have the right to vote for an employee or well-meaning stooge for capital. Black vote white vote testicle vote vaginavote etc. the voter is guaranteed unaffordable housing and healthcare whilebeing allegedly represented by moral disgraces who rush to bury their faces inthe crotch of banking, finance, Israel and the military murderers who make our allegeddemocracy smell like a combination of social vomit and political excrement. 

 

Trump’s assault on business as usual horror has introduced newtechniques to do the same thing: create profits for a shrinking minority whileincreasing losses for the majority, which has reduced the upper professionalclass to near hysteria and their subjects to worse. Instead of the usual formof society being run for capitalism by its upper servant class it has an actualcapitalist acting as CEO of the bloody corporation, this one having an egobeyond measurement accompanied by an intellect almost incapable ofmagnification. Yet while reducing most to panic he has pleased many by makingsounds of peace in Ukraine even while increasing the menace of possibly themost insane, stupid, dumb thing imaginable: war with china.

 

The wider and more populated world is being brought closer by capital’sdemise and this while the minority west is facing economic ruin and furthersocial disgrace. Trump is a further sign of the end of empire and the hopeful beginningof a global population united by common interest that all of us should beassured of food, clothing and shelter before anyone can have so much more thanis needed for survival as is the current case, with billionaires making moremoney while mass murder goes on in Palestine/Israel and more American live inthe streets while our pets are guaranteed creature comforts and health carewhile more American humans suffer than during what was called the greatdepression. Since that time depression has become a moneymaker for the psychbusiness but humanity will cheer up once it/we works together, for a change.Maybe we’ll ultimately thank Trump for helping to bring about the end of capitalismand the beginning of global democracy. Whatever and however, we need to uniteas members of the one and only human race and speed up the process.

 

 

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Timothy McVeigh: Model Soldier Sickened By Iraq Massacres, Turned on His Own

Growing up in the Reagan years with first-strike nuclear weapons pouring off assembly lines, he became a survivalist. Fresh out of high school, he pooled money with a friend to buy nine wooded acres on the side of a mountain in New York on which to build a bomb shelter. 

Opting for a military career, he became a superb soldier. Of fifty-six gunners at Fort Riley, he out-shot them all. His written evaluations glowed with praise, including the observations that he "displays absolute loyalty to superiors and to the unit . . . and a high degree of honesty, loyalty, and integrity," and that he "inspires soldiers to win."

Decorated for his performance in the Gulf War, he was shocked by the butchery of Iraqis that Pentagon estimates claimed killed 200,000 people in all.* After waiting out weeks of U.S. bombings before he could join the mission, he encountered not the battle-hardened Iraqi army he had been told to expect, but hordes of panicked conscripts, eyes wild, mouths agape, outstretched hands begging for mercy. Bulldozed into mass graves, they were succeeded by starving Iraqi children pleading for food, which the U.S. army forbade soldiers to give out. McVeigh disobeyed orders and dispensed cases of prepackaged meals to the desperate. After he got home, he reflected on the gruesome mission, deeply regretting the injustice of it all. 

 

The 1993 Waco Massacre was the final straw.  Watching on television, McVeigh saw tanks and CS gas used on U.S. citizens, heavy weaponry smashing through the Branch Davidians' defenses, and then the entire compound wrapped in flames. Dozens of men, women and children trapped inside were burned alive.  McVeigh screamed in horror. 

On the second anniversary of Waco, McVeigh loaded a bomb onto a Ryder truck and drove to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. **

The north face of the building buckled when the explosion peeled the roof back on the top floor, slicing the edifice in half.  Dozens of office workers pitched to their deaths as large sections of concrete, mortar, glass and plywood cascaded deafeningly into a huge crater where solid structure had been moments before. 

Beyond the building's collapsing walls, parking meters were ripped from the ground, roofs caved in, and metal doors twisted around themselves. At 9:02 a.m. a red-orange fireball hung over downtown and thick black smoke mushroomed into the morning sky as glass, paper and debris rained down on whole sections of the city. Fifth and Harvey Streets were engulfed in flames. 

With cable and concrete drooling out of the building's carcass onto the plaza below, stunned and bleeding survivors emerged from the smoking ruins, stumbling along in blood-filled shoes or staggering barefoot over the glass-strewn ground. Frantic parents scrambled through the wreckage screaming for the children they had left in the daycare center on the second floor. Rescue workers plunged into the devastation to excavate blackened babies and children with their faces blown off. 

 

Scattered toys and severed limbs lay everywhere. ***

Within hours of the attack talking heads in the U.S. media were glibly announcing that Muslims had to be behind the bombing. A "terrorism expert" on CBS Evening News asserted that, "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait." The New York Times editorialized that, "Whatever we are doing to destroy Middle East terrorism has not been working." In a Newsday column Jeff Kamen recommended that U.S. military commandos "shoot them now before they get us." 

A Palestinian-American on his way to Jordan was strip-searched and paraded in handcuffs through London's crowded Heathrow Airport. Photographed and finger-printed, his name was leaked to the news media and reporters besieged his family's home in Oklahoma City. An angry crowd spit at the house and threw trash on the lawn. 

Elsewhere in town vigilantes shattered the windows of an Iraqi refugee's home with stones. Seven months pregnant, Saher Al-Saidi  began suffering abdominal pains and internal bleeding.

Her baby was born dead. ****

No one could conceive that a decorated U.S. soldier driven over the edge by his required participation in wholesale massacre against people with no effective means to fight back might be moved to launch an attack against his own side.

But that is what happened.

 

Notes: 

 

* Michael Parenti, "Democracy For The Few," 7th Edition, (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2002) p. 89

**Richard A. Serrano, "One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," (Norton, 1998)  pps. 21, 26-30, 32, 36, 44. Mark S. Hamm, "Apocalypse In Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged" (Northeastern University, 1997)"  pps. 146-9)

 

***Time Annual, 1995, "A Blow To The Heart," The Year in Review, pps. 40-5

 

****Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, "The Wizards of Media Oz," (Common Courage, 1997,) pps. 104-6. "Oklahoma Fallout," Z Magazine, July/August 1995)

Timothy McVeigh: Model Soldier Sickened By Iraq Massacres, Turned on HIs Own

Growing up in the Reagan years with first-strike nuclear weapons pouring off assembly lines, he became a survivalist. Fresh out of high school, he pooled money with a friend to buy nine wooded acres on the side of a mountain in New York on which to build a bomb shelter. 

Opting for a military career, he became a superb soldier. Of fifty-six gunners at Fort Riley, he out-shot them all. His written evaluations glowed with praise, including the observations that he "displays absolute loyalty to superiors and to the unit . . . and a high degree of honesty, loyalty, and integrity," and that he "inspires soldiers to win."

Decorated for his performance in the Gulf War, he was shocked by the butchery of Iraqis that Pentagon estimates claimed killed 200,000 people in all.* After waiting out weeks of U.S. bombings before he could join the mission, he encountered not the battle-hardened Iraqi army he had been told to expect, but hordes of panicked conscripts, eyes wild, mouths agape, outstretched hands begging for mercy. Bulldozed into mass graves, they were succeeded by starving Iraqi children pleading for food, which the U.S. army forbade soldiers to give out. McVeigh disobeyed orders and dispensed cases of prepackaged meals to the desperate. After he got home, he reflected on the gruesome mission, deeply regretting the injustice of it all. 

 

The 1993 Waco Massacre was the final straw.  Watching on television, McVeigh saw tanks and CS gas used on U.S. citizens, heavy weaponry smashing through the Branch Davidians' defenses, and then the entire compound wrapped in flames. Dozens of men, women and children trapped inside were burned alive.  McVeigh screamed in horror. 

On the second anniversary of Waco, McVeigh loaded a bomb onto a Ryder truck and drove to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. **

The north face of the building buckled when the explosion peeled the roof back on the top floor, slicing the edifice in half.  Dozens of office workers pitched to their deaths as large sections of concrete, mortar, glass and plywood cascaded deafeningly into a huge crater where solid structure had been moments before. 

Beyond the building's collapsing walls, parking meters were ripped from the ground, roofs caved in, and metal doors twisted around themselves. At 9:02 a.m. a red-orange fireball hung over downtown and thick black smoke mushroomed into the morning sky as glass, paper and debris rained down on whole sections of the city. Fifth and Harvey Streets were engulfed in flames. 

With cable and concrete drooling out of the building's carcass onto the plaza below, stunned and bleeding survivors emerged from the smoking ruins, stumbling along in blood-filled shoes or staggering barefoot over the glass-strewn ground. Frantic parents scrambled through the wreckage screaming for the children they had left in the daycare center on the second floor. Rescue workers plunged into the devastation to excavate blackened babies and children with their faces blown off. 

 

Scattered toys and severed limbs lay everywhere. ***

Within hours of the attack talking heads in the U.S. media were glibly announcing that Muslims had to be behind the bombing. A "terrorism expert" on CBS Evening News asserted that, "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait." The New York Times editorialized that, "Whatever we are doing to destroy Middle East terrorism has not been working." In a Newsday column Jeff Kamen recommended that U.S. military commandos "shoot them now before they get us." 

A Palestinian-American on his way to Jordan was strip-searched and paraded in handcuffs through London's crowded Heathrow Airport. Photographed and finger-printed, his name was leaked to the news media and reporters besieged his family's home in Oklahoma City. An angry crowd spit at the house and threw trash on the lawn. 

Elsewhere in town vigilantes shattered the windows of an Iraqi refugee's home with stones. Seven months pregnant, Saher Al-Saidi  began suffering abdominal pains and internal bleeding.

Her baby was born dead. ****

No one could conceive that a decorated U.S. soldier driven over the edge by his required participation in wholesale massacre against people with no effective means to fight back might be moved to launch an attack against his own side.

But that is what happened.

 

Notes: 

 

* Michael Parenti, "Democracy For The Few," 7th Edition, (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2002) p. 89

**Richard A. Serrano, "One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," (Norton, 1998)  pps. 21, 26-30, 32, 36, 44. Mark S. Hamm, "Apocalypse In Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged" (Northeastern University, 1997)"  pps. 146-9)

 

***Time Annual, 1995, "A Blow To The Heart," The Year in Review, pps. 40-5

 

****Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, "The Wizards of Media Oz," (Common Courage, 1997,) pps. 104-6. "Oklahoma Fallout," Z Magazine, July/August 1995)

Eduardo Galeano: Ten Years Gone

Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015: A Voice, Not An Echo"We are opinionated, yet we cannot offer our opinions. We have a right to the echo, not to the voice, and those who rule praise our talent to repeat parrot fashion. We refuse to accept this mediocrity as our destiny."

-----Eduardo Galeano, opening speech at "Chile Creates," an international meeting in support of Chilean democracy, July 11, 1988

In him was wedded the wonder of a child with the wisdom of a sage.

In school, he hated history and was a lousy history student. He wanted to be a soccer player, a saint, and a painter. He abandoned the first two ambitions, and achieved the third only by learning to use words in place of paint.

He always took the side of the doomed, despised, and damned. Even at the height of the Cold War, with shrieking anti-Communist hysteria the norm, he was not afraid to befriend those Washington denounced as satanic. He praised Che Guevara as a man "who said what he thought and did what he said he was going to do," a rare example of moral and intellectual coherence in a world of near total hypocrisy, which in his view redounded to Guevara's perpetual glory. Galeano summed up just how rare an achievement this was by stating that, "In this world, when words and deeds run into each other in the street, they don't say hello, because they don't recognize each other."  

He wrote not from duty but from joy, always waiting until "his hand began to itch." Immune to the obsessions of established literary critics, he casually combined literary styles and ignored the (alleged) border between journalism and literature. His most famous work, Open Veins of Latin America, (1971) only won honorable mention in the House of the Americas literary competition because the judges felt that a history book that wasn't boring couldn't be a serious work. Fat, dry tomes dominated the social sciences at the time (they still do), and Galeano's lush and lyrical prose was anything but boring, so he had to settle for a consolation prize. 

The book was going nowhere on sales charts - even Galeano's family wasn't reading it - until Latin America's ubiquitous dictatorships did it the honor of banning it. The Uruguayan dictatorship, relatively unpracticed in the repressive arts, lagged behind its authoritarian brothers, mistakenly classifying the book as an anatomy text at first, before making up for lost time by jailing the author along with the book. Upon his release, Galeano fled to Spain, where almost ten years of intense research led to the publication of his magnificent trilogy on the history of the Americas:  Memory of Fire. In these microhistories he found his permanent style - richly textured vignettes portraying historical characters and events in the present tense - as though glimpsed through a keyhole. Galeano's vividly creative prose was too much for the jealous guardians of literary boundaries, who classified the English translation of Memory of Fire as fiction, albeit with a bibliography and index. 

Serious but never solemn, he wrote with a gentle, leg-pulling humor that forever had a smile playing at the corners of his readers' lips. In his masterpiece, "Upside Down - A Primer For The Looking Glass World," - he opened with a "message to parents" lamenting the loss of "virtue, honor, and truth" in the modern world. The message was from Al Capone. In a vignette about the death of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world at the time, he wrote that, "In the autopsy, no scruples were detected." Commenting on the fact that cigarette ads in magazines were required to carry the warning, "Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide," whereas highly polluting automobiles were under no similar obligation, Galeano simply said, "People can't smoke. Cars can."  

Even horrible scenes, all too familiar in history and politics, could not deflate his good humor, or cause him to avert his gaze. He once paid tribute to the "skill" of the torturers who worked for former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by highlighting the precision of their work: "Armed with pincers and spoons, these lads can tear out fingernails without breaking the roots and eyes without injuring the lids." Simple denunciation would not capture the horror nearly as well as Galeano's detached irony.

Detached though he might sound, uncommitted he was not. With relentless application (he once re-wrote the entire manuscript of a book eleven times) he dedicated himself to revealing the most painful realities, drawing on a deeply thoughtful joy that became his trademark. Nevertheless, he shunned the title "thinker," as though he were merely a disembodied head, pointing out that he wrote with his whole being, not just from his neck up. He delighted in the name a Colombian fisherman once gave his work - "senti-pensante" - feeling-thinking, which was much more in line with how Galeano regarded himself and his writing. He recognized that, dualistic conventions notwithstanding, thought and feeling cannot ultimately be divorced, and was astute enough to avoid the twin dangers of sentimentality and frigidity, as all too many other writers do not.

The enemy of verbosity and inflated speech, Galeano was aghast at the ever increasing torrents of empty words, and rated "word inflation" even more dangerous than monetary inflation. Brevity became his natural style and irony his habitual tone. This preference for the concise he picked up from his mentor and friend, Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, who helped Galeano early in his career. To lend authority to his literary advice, Onetti used to disguise it as proverbial wisdom: "There is a Chinese proverb that says" . . . or, "according to the Persians" . . . But in reality the sayings were all his. One of his favorites, which Galeano took to heart, was: "The only words that deserve to exist, are those that improve upon the silence."

Onetti taught Galeano to boil his writing down to pure "meat and bone." The immense struggle involved in learning to say more with less is nowhere better illustrated than in Galeano's effort to describe the 19th century love affair between a young woman of Buenos Aires high society (Camila O'Gorman) and her priest (Ladislao Gutierrez), a story he related to sociologist and philosopher Aurelio Alonso in a Havana interview some years ago. The young woman and her priest had fallen madly in love and fled the scandalized capital, only to be captured and executed for "the crime of love."  

At the time Galeano was trying to describe the love that had impelled them to their deaths, he had a friend and literary critic living with him, a founder of the Tupamaros who had lost one lung to tuberculosis and most of the second one to the beatings he received after being taken prisoner. The man had a remote rural upbringing and knew nothing of formal literary training, but possessed a fine aesthetic intuition that Galeano greatly appreciated. When he showed him his description of the love affair between the young high society woman and the priest, his friend abruptly dismissed the effort with a gesture of contempt: "There are a lot of pebbles in the lentils. You've got to get those pebbles out of there." So Galeano wrote draft after draft, trying with mounting frustration to capture the scene in words, only to have his friend reject them all: "I still see pebbles in the lentils." Finally, Galeano reached the limit of his patience, and told his friend that the latest version would be the last: "If you don't like this one I won't ask you again, because this is abuse. I wrote six pages and all I've got left is a single sentence." His friend responded, "But what a sentence. You have me to thank for it, because without me you wouldn't have made it." And the sentence that described the love of the young high-society woman and the priest who fled with her to certain death was vintage Galeano:  

"They are two by an error that the night corrects." 

Now we mourn the man that gave voice to those moving words, a superb writer finally indeed reduced to an echo, though not that of a lickspittle parroting official cliches, but of a free man who spent his life telling the truth.  

Let that echo sound long, and loud, and often.

Sources:

Most of the Galeano quotes are from an interview (in Spanish) with Cuban sociologist Aurelio Alonso on "Countercurrent," published on You Tube 1/7/13

On Somoza's torturers, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire" Vol. 3 (Pantheon, 1988) p. 249 

On Galeano's quote regarding the right to a voice instead of an echo, see "We Say No," (Norton, 1992) p. 243

On the love affair between Camila O'Gorman and her priest, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire," Vol. 2, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 163-4

"Senti-pensante" and "my hand begins to itch," see "Democracy Now," May 19, 2006