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The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished.
John Coatsworth writes in the Cambridge History of the Cold War, from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington.16
Geronimo. The name caused outrage in Mexico and was protested by indigenous groups in the United States, but there seems to have been no other notice of the fact that Obama was identifying bin Laden with the Apache Indian chief who led his people’s courageous resistance to invaders. The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne. How would we have reacted if the Luftwaffe had called its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”?
“mistreatment of the Native Americans,” again eliciting no comment.32 Would we accept the word “mistreatment”
Lmao the whitewashing of "genocide" with "mistreatment"
threats of an attack on Iran (“all options are open,” in the standard phrase).
intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.
the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an “act of armed aggression” (with the United States abstaining).10 “Aggression” is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism.
Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level “bad apples” who were, naturally, “out of control”).
Al-Musawi was murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel’s illegal “security zone” in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibchit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another imam murdered by Israeli forces; the helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year-old child. Israel then employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.
Kinsley explained that U.S. terrorist attacks on civilian targets are justified if they satisfy pragmatic criteria: a “sensible policy [should] meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” an analysis of “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end”26—“democracy” as U.S. elites determine its shape. Kinsley’s thoughts elicited no public comment; to my knowledge, they were apparently deemed acceptable.
Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods: “The use of torture by the US,” he believes, not only elicits no useful information but “has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11.” From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.
Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance.” He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians. After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen Iraqi soldiers—“the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee,” according to the Washington Post, and according to
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Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.
While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s. None of this is problematic for the very wealthy, who benefit from the “too big to fail” government insurance policy.
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion—a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap.
the United States supports democracy if, and only if, the outcomes accord with its strategic and economic objectives—the
U.S. strategic analysts describe the result of China’s military programs as a “classic ‘security dilemma,’ whereby military programs and national strategies deemed defensive by their planners are viewed as threatening by the other side,”
And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistle-blowers than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement for an administration that came to office promising transparency.
“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation.
The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are: How did it begin? And how did it end? It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a “rational” person, but were unthinkable because they would have undermined the fundamental principle that the United States has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, even on their borders, and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have
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Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West—not in the Arab world, not in Asia—the gravest threat to world peace. It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons, but I’ll put that aside here. Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace? Actually, there are quite a few. One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed at a meeting of the nonaligned countries in Tehran in 2013. In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the UN General Assembly.
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He reports the thinking of skilled workers in New York 170 years ago, who repeated the common view that a daily wage is a form of slavery and warned perceptively that a day might come when wage slaves “will so far forget what is due to manhood as to glory in a system forced on them by their necessity and in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect.”17
The United States somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.
Anati was one of the twenty-three Palestinians (including three children) killed by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank during the Gaza onslaught, according to UN statistics, along with more than two thousand wounded, 38 percent by live fire. “None of those killed were endangering soldiers’ lives,” Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reported.13 To none of this is there any reaction, just as there was no reaction while Israel killed, on average, more than two Palestinian children a week for the past fourteen years. They are unpeople, after all.
We should begin by recognizing what careful research has convincingly shown: those drawn to jihad “are longing for something in their history, in their traditions, with their heroes and their morals; and the Islamic State, however brutal and repugnant to us and even to most in the Arab-Muslim world, is speaking directly to that. … What inspires the most lethal assailants today is not so much the Quran but a thrilling cause and a call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends.” In fact, few of the jihadis have much of a background in Islamic texts or theology, if any.32
