RUNAWAY TRAIN
America’s election and
its inability to alter the nation’s deadly course
John Chuckman
America is engaged in another of its sprawling and costly
national election campaigns. A few of the events, such as the New Hampshire
primary or the Iowa Caucus, I’m sure have participants seeing themselves as Thomas
Jefferson’s sturdy yeomen doing their civic duty. But such humble and
misty-eyed tableaux can be deceiving for the big picture is quite disturbing,
including, as it does, billions of dollars spent and a lot of noise generated about
things which will not change in any outcome.
America is, despite all the noise and expense of its election
campaigns, not a democracy, and, as the world’s greatest imperial power, it is
not a place which genuinely honors human rights, either at home or abroad although
its politicians never stop talking about them. It is a country controlled by
wealth whose purpose is the acquisition of still more wealth, equipped with a
military that in scores of wars and interventions has fought, arguably, precisely
once for the country’s defense.
It marked a fateful time in the modern era when America,
under Harry Truman, decided to partner with the emerging state of Israel, a
very fateful time indeed. Today much of the Middle East is in ruins, whole
states and societies have been destroyed, at least a million have died, and
some of the world’s great archeological and historical treasures have been
destroyed as though by a gang of gleeful wanton young men.
Accompanying America’s long march of destruction through the
Middle East – the work both of its own armed forces and of various proxies - has
been the rise of a phenomenon called international terrorism. Our newspapers
and broadcasters all focus on this last, leaving the preceding great acts of
destruction unquestioned. After all, America’s much-consolidated press is an
industry like any other and is owned by a relatively small number of wealthy
people, and it depends upon good relations with other great industries for its
revenue and with the government for its operating environment. It never
questions policies, no matter how brutal, and it never scrutinizes what those
policies are doing to people. America’s major allies all carry on in exactly
the same fashion for they have become highly dependent on America’s goodwill.
Day after day, our press gives horrifying accounts of events
such as the bombing in Brussels or the attacks in Paris, and it has been doing
so since 9/11, providing a relentless war chant of “See what these bastards do!”
These horrors are always treated as though they had no context, having sprung full-blown
from the minds of bizarre people who think nothing, for example, of blowing
themselves up. But I’m pretty sure that virtually every person who does such
things sees himself or herself in the same light as the Japanese Kamikazes
everyone once fearfully admired.
When was the last time your newspaper or broadcaster
featured life in Gaza or in Syria or in Iraq or in Libya or in Yemen? It simply
does not happen, and except for the rare independent article or book, our
information about these places and the terrible assaults they are under is
deliberately constrained. I am convinced that the natural human sympathy of
most people, including many residents of imperial America, would respond to
such sights and reports, but you are simply not given the opportunity to do so.
For me, this subject is the pivotal matter in the upcoming
American election. Donald Trump, despite many unpleasant views and much
careless rhetoric, seemed to have a spark of something new, an independent mind
not shaped by America’s political establishment, and he an extremely successful
and self-confident man in business not beholden to the special interests which
shape the insincere news and own the loyalty of a great many politicians. He
has made a number of encouraging statements, saying America should get along
with Russia and China, leave Syria for Russia to clean-up, and talked about
making deals instead of conflicts, but, most remarkably, he said that Israel
should pay for its own defense. That last, something most timorous American
politicians wouldn’t dream of uttering, is an example of bravery under the
threat of fire, a quality I admire and one sorely needed to ever have a hope of
having America extricated from the its Middle East’s Gordian Knot.
But two things just recently have given me pause: Trump’s
words about using torture and the recent appointment to his foreign relations
team of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. Torture is unacceptable, ever. Legally
innocent people are kidnapped and hurt in the mere hope they know something of
interest, and in the process many die, convicted of nothing. The CIA has killed
a number of prisoners in its Rendition Gulag since 9/11, whether accidentally
or deliberately almost doesn’t matter, but their filthy work violates every
principle we hold dear.
Calls for more torture are not new thinking, and they are
repulsive. They ignore the actual cause of terror, which is America’s treatment
of countless people in societies swept aside and rudely rearranged as though
their homes and places were toy living room furniture being tossed by an angry child
giant. As for Senator Sessions, there is a man who gets along just fine with
the bloodiest people in Washington doing the rearranging.
Perhaps I should not have allowed a glimmer of hope that at
least in one part of America’s domain a few things might change for the better.
After all, seven years ago, I had hopes for a young black man with a charming
smile and a tendency to talk and act with more independence than we usually see
in Washington, not afraid sometimes to wear sandals and do without the primordial
totem of an American flag pin always fixed to his lapel, but look what happened
to him. He joined the great game and became nothing less than a mass murderer.
Oh, he had one or two modest successes, as in stopping Israel’s raging demands
to attack Iran, a country which has attacked no one in its entire modern
history, but otherwise his is a long and dreary tale.
He has America still killing in Iraq, still killing in
Afghanistan, destroying a decent civilization in Libya, supporting destruction
in beautiful Syria, re-inserting an absolute dictator into Egypt to keep its prickly
neighbor Israel happy, and creating an armada of drones to assassinate people in
far off places guilty of no crime, killing in the process many others besides
the innocent targets. Oh, and there are many other Neanderthal stupidities,
from creating a coup and ensuing civil war in Ukraine to demanding Europe join
in destructive economic sanctions and a huge military build-ups tight on
Russia’s borders. And then there are all the efforts to intimidate China in its
own sphere of influence.
You see, these are all the brutal stupidities of America’s
establishment which our press would have you ignore while it goes on and on with
its war chant about mindless international terror, virtually all of which is simply
a pathetic human response to the stupidities, a response likely as unavoidable as
having accidents if you go around driving drunk.
I say unavoidable, but that is not absolutely true. If a
society goes far enough into the suppression of rights, terrorism can be almost
eliminated. Stalin’s Russia did not experience much in the way of terrorism.
Neither does Netanyahu’s Israel. And there is no doubt that America’s huge effort
to suppress traditional rights and freedoms since 9/11 reflects that understanding,
and the effort at suppression is not over. New surprises await Americans and
their allies without question. It is an interesting sidelight to this ongoing process
of building a super-security state that it just happens also to leave the
ruling establishment increasingly unchallenged and unchallengeable. It is,
indeed, a very dark path America has taken.
Is it any wonder I would grab at straws to see some change, even
a modest re-think about what is being done? But I do fear that’s just what it
is, grabbing at straws. The only realistic alternative is Hillary Clinton, a
proven killer and serial liar and someone who much resembles Tony Blair for
repulsive insincerity and selling herself to wealthy interests.
Indeed just at this writing, Radovan Karadzic has been
convicted of war crimes during the Serbian war. I think it would be impossible
to convincingly distinguish a great deal of what he did to Muslims in Bosnia
and what Hillary Clinton did in Libya, which included running a program to
gather small armies of thugs and arm them for insertion into Syria where they
helped kill more than a quarter of a million people and create devastation. Her
satanic laughter over her own bizarre joke about the leader of Libya, “We came,
we saw, he died,” speaks volumes about her. This was a leader who had for
decades given his people enlightened state policies and who ended being
murdered in an American-created chaos.
It has been
interesting to see the reactions to organized opposition against Trump, opposition
taking a form sadly resembling 1930’s German Brownshirts shoving, threatening,
and shouting at political rallies. Trump’s base, which is not only part of the
Right but includes people who decades ago would have been Democrat-voting union
people before their jobs disappeared, has very confusingly attributed all the
organized opposition to “liberals.” Well, George Soros and Hillary Clinton are
not, by any stretch of the imagination, liberals. Soros is in the CIA’s pocket,
as Russia well knew when it recently banned his NGOs from operating there, and
Hillary is just a plain killer. I’m
pretty sure America has no liberals anymore, at least as an organized body.
George Soros and Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are perhaps best described as neocon
“fellow travellers.”
Now, in case you don’t know who the neocons are, they are a group
of influential people in the Washington establishment and in Right-wing
publishing who forcefully advocate that America use its full might to re-order
the planet to its liking. Many of the best known of them are Jewish Americans
who never have Israel far from their concerns. There was a natural meshing of
interests in supposedly re-making and stabilizing the Middle East with support
for Israel. All the countries flattened or decimated in recent years effectively
represent a collective effort to make the Middle East safe for Israel, to
surround it with a vast cordon sanitaire, eliminating virtually all independent-minded
leaders in an almost continent-sized region, and assuring Israel’s hegemony as
a kind of regional miniature replica of what the United States has become in
the world.
The chief problem here has been the murder of huge numbers
of people and the perfectly natural reactions of many to revenge what has happened
to their families, friends, and lands. If that is to be called terror, so be
it, but in other times we have called the same reaction everything from the resistance
or national liberation to war by other means or simple vengeance. The most
important thing to understand about it is that it is not some unnatural
eruption of insane extremists as our press constantly makes every effort to
impress upon us.
The only way to control terror is to stop your part in it. The
biggest part of all modern terror is the work of the United States, unless you
regard a family blown up in Damascus or Tripoli or Fallujah or Gaza City or Sana'a
as being somehow different in kind to the victims in Brussels or Paris. America
also pressures all its traditional allies to support the work with efforts of
one kind or another, anything from arms to training, always maintaining the
stance that it opposes terror and insisting they do the same. Well, it does
oppose terror, but only the wrong kind of terror, the terror which does not
support or advance America’s efforts. America’s destruction and mass killing in
recent years are the great bulk of what any reasonable person, one not
dedicated to the silly idea that America is a benign force, would call terror.
Events in Brussels or Paris or even New York have been only the results of what
America and its allies have been doing, the “blowback” as they quaintly put it
in intelligence circles.
Well, it has been my faint hope that Trump might represent
at least some progress in this horrible business, but I am growing to doubt
that possibility. I do think for many reasons things are rather out of control,
hence my reference to a runaway train. The American establishment of wealth
along with its Praetorian Guard of military and security services is firmly in
control and the ability of any elected individual to redirect things seems remote,
as does the initial likelihood of such a person even being elected to office.
In my heart of hearts I do still believe that Obama was the
kind of man who wanted things otherwise, but the realities of those meetings at
huge conference tables surrounded by square-jawed generals in uniforms stiff and
glittering with brass and medals and the sneering, elusive country-club types
of the security services, impenetrably self-confident in all their secret
operations and resources, many of which will never even be known to a
president, made him what he has become. That and the pressing demands of hugely
wealthy individuals and corporations, powerful lobby groups, and the virtually
daily calls from people like Netanyahu (we do know that “daily calls” is no
exaggeration from a slip of Obama’s tongue several years back) have given us
this failed man who may well have had good intentions at the start.
The cause of so much of the war and terror in the world, the
artificial re-creation of Israel and its endless demands for the re-ordering of
its region, will likely just have to run its course. It is a state which,
rather surprisingly, shares a great many features with the former Soviet Union.
It is monstrously over-militarized, occupied by vast and invasive security
services, with no guarantees of any rights, holding millions down who don’t
want to be held, and boasts an inefficient economy only kept afloat by huge
subsidies from outside. I do think, just like the Soviet Union, it eventually will
collapse on its own weak foundations.
As for the United States, I have long believed that the era
of its unquestioned authority in the world, which it has always greatly abused,
is drawing to a close. The world is not only becoming multi-polar, the United
States simply cannot govern itself in many of its activities, almost like a great
spoiled child who cannot stop gobbling ice cream cones. It is always pushing to
excesses. Its finances are in appalling shape and it can only be a matter of
time before huge corrections occur with all the terrible consequences they
entail for many. It is spending unconscionable amounts it doesn’t even have on
its military and security, and the exaggerated, paranoid perceptions of need motivating
these expenditures reflect all that we’ve discussed above. But perhaps most
important of all, it has no effective leadership, and its absolutely corrupt
political system is unable to provide any, allowing the inside ruling coterie to
just keep stumbling along towards we don’t know quite what.
