JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: WHY NATIONALISM IS NOT A POSITIVE FORCE IN HUMAN AFFAIRS - AMERICA'S VERSION CALLED "PATRIOTISM" SHOULD PROVIDE A WARNING WITH ITS ALMOST RELIGIOUS NATURE AND INTOLERANCE AND READINESS TO PUT ITS LAW ABOVE EVERYONE ELSE'S - AND SOME OUTFITS IT SUPPORTS IN UKRAINE DO FRIGHTENINGLY RESEMBLE 1930s BROWNSHIRTS - THE UNPLEASANT LOYALTY OATH FOR CHILDREN - FOOTBALL AND THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE UNZ REVIEW


"Nationalism Is Transforming the Politics of the British Isles"


I think Patrick Cockburn is right about that, and I much regret the fact.

I do not see nationalism as a positive force in human affairs, even when it is not extreme. I am taking “nationalism” as something a little more serious than just reasonable affection for your country. It is an organizing principle, a motive for laws and policies, something associated with sets of loyalties and disloyalties, and can be even more.

Apart from other unhelpful tendencies, nationalism represents a kind of atomizing force in international affairs. At its most extreme, it represents fear and even hatred, organized fear and hatred.

I know it is highly idealistic, but I’ve always been fond of the H. G. Wells quote, “Our true nationality is mankind.”

There is a tendency for many people to treat nationalism as a kind of secular religion, one with its own tenets, rituals and demands and sacred texts.

In the United States, where it is called Patriotism – yes, it is often capitalized – we see that to an extraordinary degree.

There are a number of biblical texts scholars pore over – including the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Washington’s Farewell Address, etc.  – a host of rituals, including various salutes and recitations, some saint-like figures, including a martyr in Nathan Hale, and even a Judas Iscariot figure in Benedict Arnold. We find scholars using terms like ”present at the creation” when discussing the Constitutional Convention. The term “original intent” is used often to discuss the Supreme Court interpreting Constitutional law.

I do think the American experience with nationalism offers powerful warnings about how poisonous it can be. The country is on a new international crusade to enforce its will over others. It insists that America’s rules and laws are more important than anyone else’s rules and laws, whether those of other countries or of international organizations and treaties. All the great wars and horrors of the past reflect exactly that kind of thinking.

We are all somewhat immunized, or believe we are, through our popular culture, against the darkest extremes of nationalism Europe experienced in the 1930s. But in Ukraine today we see such extreme political organizations as the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector, resembling 1930s Brownshirts in a frightening number of details. And we should reflect on the fact that such gangs were supported by none other than the United States for its coup against an elected government in Ukraine.



ADDED NOTE ON AMERICA’S FORM OF NATIONALISM COMPLETE WITH ITS LOYALTY OATH IN SCHOOLS AND ANTHEM AT FOOTBALL GAMES

America has not just an anthem and flag and golden eagles and marching bands, but what amounts to a kind of loyalty oath, the Pledge of Allegiance, which most American school children are required to recite each morning. “Loyalty oath” is the right term owing to its origin.

Written in the 1890s - just before a huge new surge of American imperialism abroad with the Spanish-American War – the Pledge was only officially adopted in the thick of WWII, 1942, with all its accompanying fears and loyalty concerns.

No one in a free country should be expected to take a loyalty oath, much less children.

The quasi-religious nature of the Pledge is underlined by the words “under God,” added in 1954, during a national hysteria over “godless communism” and the Cold War. This in a country whose Constitution is supposed to guarantee freedom of religion, a concept which of course includes freedom from religion.

I suppose no one can make you say the Pledge, but social pressure is a powerful force. Social pressure around religious-tinged matters can become downright dangerous.

Look at the recent national turmoil in America over some football players who respectfully knelt during the playing of the national anthem as a quiet protest against police violence, a legitimate concern in a country where police on average kill three citizens each day.

Vehement arguments were made over so simple a gesture and even the President and Vice president got involved. All kinds of demands were made for punishing players.

What’s the national anthem even doing at a sports event where people pay good money to be entertained? I would be tempted to say it is the anthem which is out of place, not a respectful gesture of protest, for surely kneeling is respectful.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: WHEN FACTS AND LOGIC NO LONGER MATTER - HOW AMERICA'S POWER ESTABLISHMENT WORKS AT HOME AND ABROAD - WHY IT CANNOT BE CHANGED BY AMERICANS - CHANGE IS COMING THOUGH - FROM OUTSIDE - RESPONSE TO AN ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY REPUBLISHED IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


“An apology & Explanation, Two Years On”


https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/29/an-apology-and-explanation-two-years-on/


“Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent.”


Indeed.

And I think that reflects the general decline and corruption of the United States’ establishment. The observations are not just things found in the country’s politics or journalism.

Look at the long record abroad of wars and coups, killing millions and serving no good purpose, plus all the lying and hypocrisy required to support them.

Are they the handiwork of a sound, productive society? Of enlightened leadership? Of strong national values? Respect for the rule of law?

America's establishment – which consists of both political parties plus their financial supporters and the corporate press plus other institutional helpers - really no longer has a lot worth saying to anyone.

It does pretty much as it pleases with little regard for the bulk of American citizens and none at all for the other 95% of humanity.

Only the existence of a small number of other fairly powerful states prevents it becoming completely tyrannical.

It is a global version of what the French Aristocracy was in the late 18^th century, an era of immense privilege and abuse.

Any notions of dedication to democratic ideals are fanciful. People with that kind of power don’t give it up, either through elections or principled acts.

And agencies like the Pentagon and the CIA and the FBI operate under principles the polar opposite of democracy. The more pervasive and powerful they are in a society, the less it can possibly be democratic.

America’s establishment serves a plutocracy, the people who pay its bills.

At home, it runs an elaborate and costly political system which has some appearance of democracy but with a basic unspoken rule that most of the establishment and all of the plutocratic corporations and individuals cannot be replaced or adversely affected.

There is a corollary rule that indeed nothing in the society is to be greatly changed.

But in its imperial efforts abroad – its wars, its coups, its sanctioning, its threatening – even that pretence of democracy is dropped.

How can you be democratic and treat countless millions and their governments as though they were your property? Perhaps the attitude that you can is a holdover from America’s long years of slavery?

The parties impose empire on the world and shovel money at destructive, completely anti-democratic institutions like the Pentagon and CIA and FBI who are their willing helpers.

Change will only come with decline and replacement by new global arrangements whose sketchy outlines already are to be seen.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: NOTES ON THE INSANITY GRIPPING THE UNITED STATES - RUSSO-PHOBIA AND MEANINGLESS WARS - WITH THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF PROPAGANDA

John Chuckman


NOTES ON THE INSANITY GRIPPING THE UNITED STATES – RUSSOPHOBIA AND MEANINGLESS WARS WITH THOUGHTS ON THE NATURE OF PROPAGANDA


[Note to readers: this is a collection of thoughts loosely related to the title above rather than a finished essay]


In all American mainline publications, you will find Russo-phobia. It comes in many forms and variations, just as is always the case with propaganda and disinformation.

That sense of its being vaguely “everywhere” should serve as a warning for what is a universal characteristic of a certain kind of propaganda. Call it synthetic gossip.

Such propaganda follows the logic of big advertisers who want you to be as continuously aware of their products as it is possible to make you. That is why the Internet now is plagued by advertising, a longstanding reality of print and broadcast journalism and we see “product placement” in the films we pay to see.

That warning largely goes unheeded, just as for most people advertising saturating everything is just taken for granted as part of the atmosphere, part of the air they breathe.

And being “part of the air everyone breathes” has its real effects. In the early days of television, when advertising began to appear in everyone’s living room, often by the deceptively open and honest face of the star or host of a show, it quickly became apparent how powerful its effects were. Companies noted immediate jumps in sales of advertised products.

It had been so for radio, too, with its intimacy of a friendly, attractive voice listened to closely by families from the comfort of their living-room couches and armchairs, especially at certain evening hours.

But television was even more so with a friendly or sympathetic famous face seen glowing in a dimly-lighted room, almost a form of enchantment. A great deal of early television advertising was of the form of a program’s host or star taking a minute from the work of the program to talk to you directly about something he or she especially liked. Neighborly. Chatty. Cozy.

The approach is no longer “cozy” - Arthur Godfrey or Rod Serling or Bob Cummings taking a moment from his show to focus on you with a friendly word of recommendation - because American society in large part has moved on from “cozy.”

Part of the impact of post-early television technology has been to atomize and de-centralize society, each member of a family, for example, focusing on his or her own interests through various “media’ and devices.

A trace of the early form of personal advertising has survived in the endorsements now so widely used in every written or image format from labels to boxes. Companies pay such people great sums of money for lending their influence with fans or followers to the company’s interest of selling its product.

Advertising works as a form of suggestion in the human mind, and as with suggestion, not everyone is equally susceptible, but virtually everyone is to some degree. That’s why advertising works and why companies spend countless billions of dollars every year to place their “suggestions” “out there,” ideally in forms and in places where the most susceptible population will be exposed.

Propaganda and disinformation work exactly the same way. It is naïve to believe, as I am sure most Americans very much believed during the height of the Cold War, that only in authoritarian states is propaganda used on the people of a country. That belief was itself a suggestion constantly reinforced in television shows, movies, and in magazines and newspapers. It was inescapable.

Over the decades, advertising and propaganda have grown not just in volume but in sophistication and complexity. There is still some room for the simplistic stuff of an earlier time, but the dark arts have largely moved on.

The ideal is to plant a “targeted” suggestion in your mind, one targeted to appeal to your tastes and preferences because such suggestions are the most powerful. And ideally, that is accomplished in a manner so that you are really not aware of what is even taking place.

That is part of why we have in our daily-living environment something almost resembling a cosmic storm among the stars, a storm of cosmic rays and particles of every description bombarding everything entering a region.

That’s a pretty good description of Russo-phobia in the United States. It isn’t just in political speeches, it isn’t just in government and political publications, nor is it only in newspaper articles and television programs, it is virtually everywhere in one form or another, including just the word choices writers and speakers make and the attitudes they strike.

It is the contemporary sophisticated descendent of such rather clumsy propaganda as a television series, “I Led Three Lives” in the 1950s, or “The FBI” of the late 1960s, each episode of which had a brief personal anti-communist message at the end from J. Edgar Hoover himself.

Such shows were only one of countless ways that the “Soviet menace” was made almost tangible inside America. Politicians speeches, newspaper and broadcast story selection and emphasis and editorials kept fueling the fires.

I vividly remember, near the real start of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War, a local newspaper in Chicago, and certainly not the most conservative one, having an editorial with a big bold headline, “The Reds are at the Gates!” That was likely 1964.

Even the assassination of John Kennedy was employed in the cause. Books and articles suggesting Russia was directly or indirectly involved, or that Russian-supported Cuba was, appeared for many years after his death, another measure of the size and intensity of historical anti-Russian activities.

Those suggestions were interesting because the assassination was almost certainly about the opposite of those claims and suggestions. It was about ending Kennedy’s efforts to form new communications with, and policies towards, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

In the case of Cuba, during the early 1960s, an entire industry had become established in the United States to promote hostility and war.

The CIA and FBI had massive investments in everything from radio and newspaper propaganda to gun-running operations, the training of private armies, the writing of manuals, the regular mounting of a range of terrorist operations against Cuba, plus many other activities right down to relationships with mafia interests who were offended by events in Cuba and keen to display their patriotism through cooperation with agencies like CIA and FBI.

All of it was supported by the vast resources of the State Department and other agencies and departments of government. I think few Americans today, younger ones anyway, are aware of the scale of the enterprise. Well, Kennedy very much got in its way, and it was unquestionably elements of that enterprise who killed him.

I do not mean to diverge into the 1960s or the assassination, a subject of great past interest to me.

I’m only touching on the massive legacy of anti-Russian feelings and notions fixed into the very fabric of the country. It still helps support any new anti-Russian initiatives. That always includes the Pentagon and CIA and FBI – it’s just their gut institutional instinct – but it also very much includes American political interests, and from both parties, each party’s emphasis varying over time.

In America it often takes a very long time for the public consensus to reach a conclusion about something you might think should have been apparent fairly early.

But when the establishment sets its mind to doing something, it is virtually impossible to stop it. And it has so many avenues for influencing people and keeping them confused – from corporate newspapers and broadcasters and hack writers and speakers at many institutions to virtually the entire national political establishment of both parties.

Since America is so much less a democracy than many recognize, it really isn’t necessary to fool all the people all the time. Far from it. And the flow of “information” from establishment sources is constant, virtually around the clock. It becomes part of the air you breathe.

Besides, Americans work very hard, and many have little time for becoming informed about such matters as, say, foreign affairs. If they have to trust someone with the idea of truth, it will tend to be the establishment voices easily accessed.

Most hardworking people at any level have little time or inclination to search for and assess different sources of information, as independent or foreign ones. And, truth be told, there are relatively few solid independent voices out there despite the apparent crush we can see on the Internet.

Apart from outfits on the Internet that now function virtually as agents for the establishment – outfits like Facebook, Wikipedia, or Google - the establishment has a good many inauthentic “independent” publications that it keeps going. The CIA always followed that practice with magazines and news sources during the Cold War, and it does still with sites many believe are independent voices.

Major Western European news sources today – as in Britain, France, or Germany – are in virtual lockstep with their American counterparts. If you think the Washington Post is biased - and it is, heavily – try The Guardian or BBC. They are often toe-scrunchingly insincere.

At the higher end of the employment scale in America, up-and-coming corporate and large professional office types work long hours, ten and twelve hours a day is not unusual, and often more than five days a week. It’s just expected of them. It keeps you looking like someone suitable for promotion. And the competition of others looking for promotions reinforces the discipline. When you do get home, there’s all those middle-class obligations, from the kids’ sports teams or music recitals or meetings at school to walking the dog or attending a service club meeting.

At the low end of the employment scale, millions of Americans must work more than one job just to make a go of things. Or, many jobs demand unusual hours and days. On public transit, for example, pretty good-paying working-class jobs, it is common to have “swing shifts,” where you are responsible for two periods each day. Yes, the hours between are free, but they are often effectively not very useful with not enough time to travel home and do anything substantial. These realities of everyday American economic life are I think not widely appreciated abroad.

For all its reputation for individualism, too, the United States in many matters exhibits very little of it. It is a remarkably lockstep society at a certain social level, the level that counts in influencing anything. I’ve never quite understood where that reputation for individualism, as touted in movies or novels, comes from.

The Vietnam War was a decade-long killing spree in defense of an artificially created rump state, South Vietnam, which for its entire existence was run by dictators. Although run by dictators, Americans were steadily given vague assurances that they were fighting for the values of American democracy.

The rump state served almost exclusively the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States. It served as a toehold in Southeast Asia, a kind of colony, a base for American corporations to market their wares. A pied-a-terre for the CIA. Those were the only American values ever really being served.

The big fighting got started not too long after the flimsiest of excuses, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident in the summer of 1964. It was a non-event, even as described in the news at the time, and later we learned it was truly a non-event with virtually nothing having happened.

But it’s the kind of thing we’ve seen in so many other places since, and notably in Syria where non-existent poison gas attacks, supposedly by the government, gave America the excuse to hurl fleets of cruise missiles at people it wanted to hurt anyway, the Syrian Army.

Of course, it was the presence of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” that gave America the excuse to invade Iraq, destroying one of the most advanced societies in the Arab world and ultimately killing about a million people with all the violent aftermath included.

The destruction of Iraq’s basic facilities was so thorough that all these years later many in Iraq do not have dependable drinking water and electricity. The term “Shock and Awe” was coined by the public relations flacks at the Pentagon for the opening massive, overwhelming destruction, a term which gives some idea of the intensity and one, by the way, with clear bloodlines to Hitler’s concept of “Blitzkrieg” (lightning war).

Once America got into heavy fighting in a protracted war, Vietnam became many other things, including a testing ground for new methods of mass killing, an important part of a supply chain into North America for hard drugs, a laboratory for mass CIA terror tactics attempting to influence a population, and a place of endless lies.

While not all the details were apparent to anyone at the start, enough was understood by a good many to question the United States ever seriously entering the war. John Kennedy, who was inclined not to get involved beyond the level of a significant body of military advisors, was replaced by perhaps the most corrupt and ruthless man ever to become President, Lyndon Johnson, who had his chance to be a “war president,” and he wasted very little time getting things moving.

Today, we have among other wars, the war in Afghanistan. The pointlessness of the war in Afghanistan – that 18 years of bombing peasants and strafing wedding parties – was apparent to a good many from the start. I wrote a number of essays on the subject.

At the time of the invasion, I felt it was just a brute need for some kind of vengeance over 9/11, even if they didn’t know who to take vengeance on. I could imagine certain Americans sitting at bars across the country doing a lot of elbow-pumping and hooting and yelling at the first broadcasts of bombs dropping in Afghanistan, something resembling a scene from a big football game.

But the Taliban were not terrorists, the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. They are not pleasant people, but that is common enough in poor places where people earn hardscrabble livings. And I think my original view remains valid.

Recent revelations by The Washington Post (which to a certainty reflect someone in high places leaking for political purposes, not the investigative thoroughness of a newspaper which always doggedly supports America’s wars with the same enthusiasm as the late John McCain) tell us that even inside the military, no one understood why the United States was fighting in Afghanistan.

Yet America still fights there.

And will be still after Trump makes his election-campaign withdrawal, whose size is said to amount to a fraction of the troops.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THOUGHTS RAISED BY A STEPHEN F. COHEN ARTICLE - RUSSO-PHOBIA AND IMPEACHMENT - TRUMP AND PUTIN AND THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT - THE REAL PROBLEM IN AMERICA THAT SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF IMPEACHMENT CANNOT POSSIBLY SORT OUT

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY STEPHEN F. COHEN IN THE UNZ REVIEW


“How Impeachment Is Escalating the New US-Russian Cold War”


"Putin wants stability and partners."


A truer statement could not be made.

What is remarkable is that so many prominent Americans could say the opposite.

Of course, if a powerful country is guided by blindness, the risks are clear and they are enormous.

Yet relatively few in America seem to care.

I depart from Cohen’s view that the leadership of Trump – combined with that of Putin - could make a difference. Despite a few early encouraging words about Russia, I just do not see where Trump has provided any leadership.

Putin is a remarkable statesman, but he is in no position to overcome an American establishment hell-bent on opposing every reasonable effort. That’s part of why so much of his attention has been turned toward Asia and the larger world.

Trump’s early encouraging words about Russia only provided a target for America’s Russo-phobia mania, a condition always present in gigantic, self-perpetuating, and scarcely-scrutinized bureaucracies like CIA and the FBI, but something also seized upon since the election by the Democratic Party both to explain its loss and to intimidate future voters.

Induced chaos is nothing new as a means used to gain power. The CIA uses it in virtually all of its coups abroad. So, it should come as no surprise that there are forces, privileged establishment interests, ready to employ the same approach inside the United States, so comfortable have they grown with it.

The trouble is that Trump is simply not a real leader. He is a bully towards opponents and towards the entire world in matters of trade and military policy, but that is not leadership. He himself represents just another form of chaos.

That is the United States’ real problem. It has no leadership, in either party or in the major “organs” of the state, only a pretty ugly class of people – corrupt, privileged, arrogant - who influence the direction of events and feel entitled to tell others how to run their affairs.

The situation very much reflects America’s general relative decline, much resembling that of a decayed once-great merchant family, as a new order in world affairs prepares to make its debut.

I tend to doubt the impeachment will succeed, despite my views that what Trump did very much is inappropriate and that impeachment in America is largely a political act.

But if that proves to be the case, it is no great mercy for the county or the world. It means four more years of a poor leader making great bellowing claims about nothing.

The Democrats, too, are bereft of real leadership in the candidates for the nomination. Some of them are almost ridiculous, much like figures in current popular culture, and none of those with any chance opposes imperial wars and hostility towards Russia.

However, the Democrats, in holding up the indictment (the articles of impeachment), are very much looking for added elements, as those likely to come from scrutiny of Trump’s financial and tax records, should access to them be gained. He is an unscrupulous man, and I have little doubt those records could provide rich veins of impeachment material.

They are likely also looking to other potential high-level insider witnesses to Trump’s shady methods, potential witnesses whom Trump dismissed at various points.

Well, even were the impeachment to succeed, the only gain would be an end to Trump’s glaring, half-lunatic faces and ugly-kid complaining and bellowing. There are no meaningful likely alternatives in the Democratic Party.


On Putin, readers may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/john-chuckman-comment-china-russia-and-the-united-states-in-the-21st-century-some-difficult-and-dangerous-times-ahead-as-the-world-now-rapidly-evolves-in-ways-america-rejects/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/john-chuckman-comment-reflections-on-putin-as-a-leader-and-on-the-world-situation-in-which-he-works/

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: "THOSE WHOM THE GODS WISH TO DESTROY THEY FIRST MAKE MAD" - TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE BOTH OF JOURNALISM BENT TO PROPAGANDA AND THE ABSURD LENGTHS TO WHICH AMERICA'S WITCH-HUNT RUSSO-PHOBIA IS TAKEN - MONTY PYTHON TAKES ON THE RUSSIAN NAVY

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY KATE NG IN THE INDEPENDENT


“British warship scrambles to respond to Russian vessel moving into Channel”

“'Leaving our families at this time of year is especially difficult, but national security doesn’t stop for Christmas,' says ship's commanding officer”


What a truly ridiculous article.


"Scrambles to respond" 

"Especially hard this time of year"

"Tireless efforts"


This was a training ship full of young Russian cadets on a training exercise in a body of water everyone on the planet is entitled to freely enter.

They represent about the same "threat level" as a big gathering of Boy Scouts.

I don't know about the Royal Navy's efforts this way historically, but no one would have considered such an event worth reporting before Russo-phobia.

Russo-phobia manufactured and promoted ceaselessly by the United States.

And I guess editors at The Independent feel they must do their loyal bit.

You might call the incident, "Monty Python Takes on The Russian Navy."

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: VARIOUS THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF AIRCRAFT CARRIERS - ALREADY NEW TECHNOLOGIES CHALLENGE THEIR USEFULNESS IN TRADITIONAL ROLES - SOME COMMENTATORS HAVE DECLARED THEM VIRTUALLY OBSOLETE AND AS OFFERING ONLY DRAMATIC HIGH-VALUE TARGETS

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE SAKER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA



“It’s Time for Russian Carrier Ambitions to Sail Into the Sunset

“If carriers are obsolete that goes double for Russia”



I didn't know there were any "Russian carrier ambitions."

The Kuznetsov [a Soviet era carrier, Russia’s only remaining one] does appear to have been effectively sidelined already.

Since it had been sitting around, Russia was going to upgrade it so long as the job wasn’t too costly.

But it is hard to see the cautious and pragmatic Putin spending on the costly new dry dock now required, owing to the sinking of the old one, to work on a dated ship.

That is not his style. It might well be useful for other ships, but its great size is determined by the old carrier.

Anyway, America and China have very different purposes for their carriers.

America uses them all over the world as tools of intimidation. And they do make impressive sights in distant lands.

And it thinks it must have platforms to work in places like the South China Sea. It of course always has Israel on its mind, too. And Iran is an obsession.

It should be noted that during the last big flare-up Trump generated against Iran, an American aircraft carrier was kept a few hundred miles from Iran’s coast, which is lined with that country’s own anti-ship missile. I don’t think the effectiveness of that missile is known, but Iran has demonstrated the accuracy and effectiveness of a couple of its other missiles.

The latest, most sophisticated anti-ship missiles – those of Russia and China, certainly – do make that American use of carriers a risky business now, although not all weapons systems reach the international arms market.

I do believe there is an element in Pentagon and American Naval thinking a little resembling that of the Polish Army of 1939, not wanting to give up on its splendid-looking cavalry.

America likes to use the term "power projection," although there is something almost 19th century British imperial in the term. Well, what do you know, American indeed has a global empire?

China likely thinks in terms of perhaps eventually having to use force on Taiwan. At any rate, it will be prepared, and Taiwan’s just knowing that encourages caution in its behavior.

China’s artificial island bases in the South China Sea, complete with runways and defensive missiles, actually somewhat resemble a permanently at-sea carrier fleet.

Nobody knows better than China the vulnerabilities of such capital ships today. They do have one of the most destructive missiles for use against them, a missile with which they’ve lined a good part of their coast.

Yet they still see enough useful purpose in carriers to build new ones. I believe they’re planning a total of about half a dozen. The next one, their third, is to have an electromagnetic catapult for the planes rather than the European-style ski ramp.

Since Russia is far, far more reluctant about being in the power-projection business than America, I'm not sure there is a good role for these immensely costly ships. Just their crews are on the order of 3 to 5,000 trained men who must be fed and housed and doctored at sea, and they require escort ships.

Putin wants a good decade or so for Russia to grow economically in peace, and he believes he has assured that with the new hypersonic and other hi-tech weapons. He even cut the military’s budget, something America’s press and politicians seem reluctant to mention while they’re busy hyping the Russian threat.

The role of these ships, whoever uses them, is likely to change with new sophisticated drones. Stealthy drones will be used both against carriers, as spotters for certain kinds of anti-ship missiles, and be used by them. You can haul more drones than fighter planes, and you don’t need quite the same crews.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TRUMP'S INHERENT BELLIGERENT AND ARGUMENTATIVE CHARACTER - THE ARTICLE TO WHICH THIS RESPONDS CLAIMS THE CAMPAIGN-FINANCE SYSTEM IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS FAILURE TO PURSUE PEACE - WHAT IS REVEALED BY TRUMP'S APPROACH TO TRADE - PUTTING THE LIE TO THOSE WHO CLAIM OTHERS FRUSTRATE HIM FROM SEEKING PEACE

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ELI CLIFTON IN CHECKPOINT ASIA


“Trump Stuck Between Campaign Promise to End Wars and His Hawkish Megadonors

“The purchase price of the entire US democracy? A modest $250 million”


I find this a rather feeble effort to defend Trump on war and violence. A kind of "if only" or "the devil made me do it" approach. Not convincing.

The case against Trump is much stronger than the writer makes it. I actually find it overwhelming.

Yes, money dominates American politics. The Supreme Court has ruled "money is free speech,” a Supreme Court all of whose members were appointed over time by politicians who themselves benefitted from money-driven politics.

I've written very pointedly on the topic, as here:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

A man who was genuinely driven by motives for peace and important changes in the world would have managed to do something to make them manifest, but Trump has not, not at all. Just a few little public affairs gestures here and there.

For a start, he might seek political money from other quarters. Everyone knows from the outset the price, in terms of conflict in the Middle East, of taking large sums from Sheldon Adelson or the other American Oligarchs cited (Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus), but Trump keeps going back to the same well. If his intentions were sincere enough, he might just find other sources of campaign money.

At worst, a dedicated man might settle on becoming a one-term president who had achieved something worthy rather than a two-term yes-man.

When weighing the worth of his earlier campaign words, it helps to recall other things Trump has said in his time on the world’s stage, things outside the sphere of war and peace, and to reflect on his approach to them. I believe the exercise is revealing.

The best start is in his signature slogan of, “make America great again.” What this goal really is about is doing something literally impossible, turning back the clock to the 1950s, to the time of “the American Dream.” The notion is nothing but day dreams and patriotic hot air. It is ignorance passing for ideas. But it is a goal Trump now pursues fiercely with dangerous rhetoric and activity.

What we actually see is a man ripping to shreds the world’s international legal and organizational structure – the infrastructure, if you will, of world trade and economics – and working hard to steal value in trade from others, much as he stole oil from Syria.

His effort literally is founded on a notion that world trade is a zero-sum game – that is, that it is an activity, like holding oil fields, where either one party or another is in possession. Besides being an inherently aggressive notion, it is just plain wrong.

Trade is not like that at all, something any elementary textbook in economics can readily explain. The wider trade expands, the wealthier the group of participants in that trade becomes. There are synergies which make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Just look at the world’s largest free-trade bloc, the European Union. Despite its many problems, especially political ones, there are always nations lined up either to join it or to form associations with it, and that is so because there are inherent great economic strengths in such arrangements.

Trump’s effort is founded on still another notion, and that is that America should always be on top, always be first – in effect, that America is somehow exceptional or entitled or blessed beyond others. There is no rational basis for such a view. It is a form of religious belief or superstition, sometimes bordering on hysteria.

The nations of the world do not and cannot accept religious convictions or superstitions as a basis for trade and commerce. Indeed, I think it easy to see how dangerous it can be, injecting that into what should be rational arrangements and well-intentioned efforts.

In Trump, we have a kind of contemporary Don Quixote figure, one with rhetoric as outlandish as his dyed-orange hair, charging at windmills as though they were dragons. Only his activity isn’t funny or touching, as were the antics of Don Quixote. And he isn’t a character in a story, he is real, and he is damaging things everywhere.

In all international economic and trade matters, too, we have to keep in mind the immense military power of the Pentagon and how easy it is for nations arguing and threatening over trade to slip into something else.

America’s Founding Fathers were not wrong about the inherent dangers of standing armies. Historians can cite many examples of wars having been the result, at least in good part, just of the existence of large standing armies. WWI, a great pointless bloodbath, was a powerful example, and it led directly to WWII, an even greater bloodbath.

And on that point, Trump’s position is unmistakable. Huge and increasing resources are to go for an already bloated Pentagon. It certainly is not the view of a man concerned with peace, but it is not the view either of a man seriously concerned with international trade and economics.

We all ultimately will be poorer by virtue of Trump’s efforts. The only reason I believe he is not stopped by America’s establishment is that they see his effort as war by another means, war to assure America’s “full-spectrum dominance” as the official Pentagon “mission statement” goes.

Many of Trump’s acts in the economic and trade sphere do represent just another kind of war, further evidence of Trump’s extremely belligerent personal impulses.

Nothing ever issues from Trump’s mouth about competitiveness or efficiency or hard work or improved management or reduction of colossal, unproductive American waste (such as the military-security complex itself which helps drive destructive empire abroad) or about smarter government.

Nothing about infrastructure, much of which in America is in terrible shape, or about improving education or the sad state of great swathes of America’s cities with tens of millions of people trying to survive on next-to nothing. Nothing for sure about the damning inequalities of wealth and power that America’s taxation and imperial system of government have generated, inequalities which tend to act in self-reinforcing ways through the political dominance of those with great means.

Just as there is never a word about all the other societies now striving to share a place in the sun as America enjoyed for so long after WWII. America’s relative decline in the world, say, since the 1950s has nothing to do with others taking anything from it.

It is about others rising, some with new and better ways of doing things, and it is about America’s habits and expectations from a unique golden era having rendered it in many ways uncompetitive. It is also about such titanically wasteful enterprises as the Pentagon and CIA consuming resources, redirecting them away from investments in new and better ways to do things, and supporting an entire class of privileged, unproductive people who believe they have a right to determine the fates of other nations.

It is that same sense of exceptionalism and entitlement we see in Trump. The blind leading the blind, really.

That postwar result wasn’t the outcome of zany plans like Trump’s “make America great” or of religious beliefs in America’s exceptionalism and entitlement. It represented the sheer good fortunes of war with America left standing, its industries humming, behind the defensive walls of two vast oceans, relatively unscathed while competitors and potential competitors were flattened.

Photos of Germany or Japan or China or Russia in the 1940s searingly tell the tale. Many cities, the centers of most human enterprise, had been reduced to rubble with armies of ghost-like refugees wandering through them.

The nations now striving towards their places in the sun are not stealing. They are not warring. They are competing and working hard and smart, something a great deal of America has forgotten how to do. Trump thinks he brings unique enterprise and leadership through belligerence and threats and sanctions. His thinking just could not be more wrong.

__________________________

Here are recent, related words about war and peace and Trump:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/12/23/john-chuckman-comment-yet-another-right-wing-writer-tries-portraying-trump-as-a-peace-oriented-president-this-time-in-the-context-of-his-impeachment/

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: DONALD TRUMP AND THE EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS - A GREAT POLITICAL MYSTERY - AN EXPLORATION FROM SOMEONE WHO ONCE, LONG AGO, WAS PART OF THAT COMMUNITY

John Chuckman


COMMENT ON TRUMP AND THE EVANGELICALS


One of the great political mysteries of our time is the substantial support Trump enjoys among America’s Christian Evangelicals.

Here surely, by almost any measure, is one of the most openly irreligious men ever to be President, and I don’t mean just through the fact that he has no membership in any church. He doesn’t show a flicker of the sometimes-strong personal faith that characterizes some religious people who are not associated with a church, as was very much the case for Abraham Lincoln.

Even more, he has a long public record of deeply offensive language and lying. He is an undependable colleague, having betrayed many in positions of trust and responsibility around him in just a few short years at the White House and even an undependable marriage partner, if we are to believe many witnesses.

His whole approach to world affairs as President might be said to be an extension of the same characteristics. His completely ignoring matters like murder and theft from “friends” like Saudi Arabia and Israel is pretty spectacular testimony. He enthusiastically smiles and shakes hands with the murderous tyrant of Saudi Arabia.

Old friends and allies, to say nothing of others, all over the globe have been upset and even shocked by some of his sudden demands and seeming lack of concern for keeping the good faith of the United States in many matters, especially where important international treaties are concerned.

His has been a record of tearing up or tossing away treaty after treaty in everything from arms control to international trade and regulation. Years of patient work by thousands of conscientious and intelligent people engaged in an effort to construct some necessary architecture for world affairs tossed as though it were toilet paper.

He does seem to believe that if he personally considers a new demand appropriate, then it is, ipso facto, appropriate and even beneficial to the United States, and the rest of the world must simply accept that. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth or more dangerous as an approach to matters affecting earth’s entire seven billion people, all of them being equally in the eyes of traditional Christian faith, God’s children.

Of course, Jesus, as he is portrayed in the New Testament and revered by hundreds of millions of Christians, tells the world that he has come to bring a new law to human affairs, and it is a new law entirely eschewing Trump’s concepts and values. It is, moreover, quite importantly, a law universal in its application with no exceptions for personal or special interests. None.

I’m going to confess to the fact that as a boy I was raised an Evangelical Christian, a Baptist. Our church accepted the Bible literally as the Word of God. Indeed, the Bible was often referred to as “God’s Word.” The Church practiced Baptism in the fashion of John the Baptist as a declaration of one’s faith and as a bond to the community of fellow Christians.

One of the characteristics I knew in my then-fellow Christians was a fairly strong bias for demonstrating your faith through deeds rather than just words. It was the bias of the Apostle Paul. I wouldn’t say that it was universal, but it was very common.

And that is what is so mystifying. How can people with that kind of bias – one I tend still to regard as sound whether we are talking of Christianity or any other matter, deeds say more than words – in their views support a man who demonstrates in everything virtually the opposite?

We have the controversy over a recent article in “Christianity Today,” a publication founded by the late Billy Graham, noted Baptist evangelist and one I heard preach as a boy, that called Trump, quite accurately I think, a "grossly immoral character." Well, the best part of two hundred Evangelical leaders have strongly objected.

What can I say? The editorial in “Christianity Today” itself took long enough coming given Trump’s public behavior. Calling that magazine, as Trump and his faithful do, "far left" is pretty close to ridiculous. The traditional concerns of Christian Evangelicals are concerns about issues of Christianity, not any form of politics. God’s laws always are placed higher than humanity’s laws. The words of Jesus, as we have them in the new Testament, couldn’t be clearer on the subject.

There may be differences on the relative importance of various matters to the Christian community, but there really can be no confusion between matters in general of Christianity and pure visceral politics. The distinctions are blindingly apparent. Christians are enjoined in the New Testament to avoid and ignore the “ungodly,” to avoid being “unequally yoked.”

Yet here we have many leaders in their communities using “Christianity” as a kind of cloak for political bias, and very much political bias in favor of a man of thoroughly amoral character. It actually much resembles the traditional Catholic Church’s efforts, say in the 1950s and 1960s, to protect priests who have grievously harmed parishioners with unacceptable sexual practices.

I am not sure that I understand, although it is clear that these leaders and their communities see in Trump things important enough to simply ignore all traditional Christian values such as honesty and loyalty and decency.

It does seem to be the story of America in general, starting with the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and arriving at the likes of George Bush and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

It’s a huge journey, but how easily and effortlessly it has been carried out. Of course, many or most Americans deny the journey has taken place, insist that sacred honors and human rights still count uppermost in America, but that’s a little like thinking quill pens and parchment still give force to laws.

While I am no longer a Christian, having left the church in my late teens, I unavoidably carry something of that rather powerful emotional legacy, enough to recognize in Donald Trump a man completely alien to it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: YET ANOTHER RIGHT-WING WRITER TRIES PORTRAYING TRUMP AS A PEACE-ORIENTED PRESIDENT - THIS TIME IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS IMPEACHMENT - I OFFER A FAIRLY COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF TRUMP'S EFFORTS FOR "PEACE"

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY W JAMES ANTLE III IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE (AND QUICKLY REMOVED BY EDITOR)


“A Hawkish Impeachment

“Democrats have inadvertently supplied the template for undermining a future antiwar president”


Sorry, I see nothing genuinely anti-war about Trump.

I wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and I am someone who closely follows world affairs through many information sources.

In the beginning, despite the bad taste his personality left in the mouth, I supported him for exactly the reasons of decreasing war and improving relations with Russia.

He has done nothing worth mentioning towards either goal.

I know he has a powerful establishment warning and telling him not to do this or that, but still he makes himself out as tough guy, a rather foul-mouthed one, one who can stand up to anyone, so where are his results?

He has given away, with no legal authority, a good part of Palestine to the most war-mongering government on earth.

He has started new severe hostilities with the government of Iran, a government which threatened no one and is widely known to have met its every obligation under the nuclear agreement Trump arbitrarily tore up, an act again in favor of the world’s most belligerent government.

He has launched war-like sanctions against Iran, causing its innocent people great deprivation and harm, and he accompanied these with serious military threats – the movement of fleets and nuclear bombers – and he even used the indefensible word, “obliterate,” towards Iran’s 80 million people.

He appointed some of the most belligerent men in America to high posts – Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo – from which they did little but threaten and lie.

He has almost turned sanctions and tariffs into a new form of war.

He overthrew an elected government in Bolivia and tried exactly the same in Venezuela, causing great harm to millions of ordinary citizens. He has also stolen Venezuela’s assets abroad, just as he’s stolen Syria’s oil, and laid a deadly blockade causing much hardship for millions.

He completely supports the government of Israel’s unrelenting oppression of millions of Palestinians, never saying a word about matters like the outright ambush killing of several hundred in Gaza.

He loyally supports a murderer Crown Prince. His own CIA Director told him the Prince was responsible for Khashoggi’s grisly murder, but Trump just smiles broadly and is photographed shaking hands with the man, and sells him literally tens of billions of dollars in weapons, certainly a tool for peace in the region, as we see with the killing of thousands of women and children in Yemen.

The favored Prince has also been busy on the home front with violent attacks on Shia Muslim minorities and a huge increase in executions, including even the execution of teenagers.

Trump never says a word against the mass killer running Egypt either. It just happens that Israel is rather fond of Field Marshall el Sisi just as it is of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. Israel’s government likes Arab neighbors who suppress their people.

Trump’s antics in Syria have been close to absurd. He bombed people a couple of times on the basis of clearly falsified chemical-weapons incidents. He withdrew in the northeast only to reoccupy with armored strength Syria’s oil fields, making sophomoric jokes about liking to steal oil. Of course, what he’s really doing is accommodating Israel yet again, to weaken Syria for its postwar rebuilding.

The War in Afghanistan has been a disgrace from the beginning, and Trump still has yet to do one real thing to end it. He talks of a withdrawal, but this reportedly involves a rather small fraction of the American troops there who have done nothing but kill peasants for eighteen years. It’s a cheap gimmick for his election. Not a genuine policy.

Trump of course has threatened many others, from North Korea to Nicaragua and Cuba.

He has continued running tanks up against the Russian border in Europe. He destroyed the INF Treaty, an important part of the international architecture for peace in Europe. He has worked tirelessly to militarize space with the creation of a new branch of America’s military, the so-called Space Force.

This is an anti-war President? You sure could have fooled me.

He has been killing and bombing and threatening and sanctioning for all of his three years. Indeed, with sanctions, he has almost created a new form of hybrid warfare, and he’s using it against almost everyone, traditional friends and opponents, creating animosities and instabilities that could easily break out into new wars.


On the nature of Trump's impeachment, see this just posted:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/12/21/john-chuckman-comment-further-thoughts-on-trumps-impeachment-and-the-extreme-divisions-now-characterizing-american-society/

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: SURE SOUNDS LIKE DISINFORMATION FROM CANADA - DOCUMENTS SHOW TURKEY TURNED DOWN CANADA'S OFFER TO HELP INVESTIGATE KHASHOGGI MURDER IN 2018 - IT IS SIMPLY UNBELIEVABLE THAT THEN-FOREIGN MINISTER CHRYSTIA FREELAND WOULD DO ANYTHING TO TARNISH A MAJOR AMERICAN INTEREST LIKE THE SAUDI CROWN PRINCE

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS


“Turkey passed up Canada's offer of help with Khashoggi investigation, documents show

“Then-foreign affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland made the offer to her Turkish counterpart in 2018”


"passed up Canada's offer of help with Khashoggi investigation, documents show"

Apart from the fact that it is hard to see what Canada could actually do to be helpful, there is something very odd about that claim.

Chrystia Freeland was almost a Canadian cheering section for American foreign policy

And a chief piece of American foreign policy very much is to do no harm to the Saudi Crown Prince, no matter what he's done.

Everyone knows he was responsible for the murder of Khashoggi. The Director of CIA quietly said so shortly after.

Besides, how else do around 15 men with positions in the Royal Court manage to go to Turkey equipped to do this? That kind of initiative just cannot happen under such an authoritarian government. It's literally impossible, especially since the act would cast a shadow on the Crown Prince. Only he could authorize it

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: AMERICA'S DENSE HAZE OF LIES - ARTICLE REVEALS SURPRISING TRUTHS ABOUT AMERICAN PRESS TREATMENT OF VENEZUELA

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALAN MACLEOD IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


“How Journalists Demonize Venezuela’s Government, in Their Own Words”


https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/20/how-journalists-demonize-venezuelas-government-in-their-own-words/


A very interesting piece.

And anyone expects truth in anything from America?

Inside and outside the country, Americans walk through a dense haze of lies.

It resembles a science-fiction tale, but it is real.

It's what happens when you have an empire instead of a country.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON TRUMP'S IMPEACHMENT AND THE EXTREME DIVISIONS NOW CHARACTERIZING AMERICAN SOCIETY

John Chuckman


FURTHER COMMENT ON THE TRUMP IMPEACHMENT


There many extreme claims on the Internet about the impeachment of Donald Trump.

The House investigation and official impeachment are even called a “coup.”

The rhetoric is unhelpful and divisive. At an extremely divisive time in American history, and I don’t mean divisive just because of the impeachment, the last thing the country needs is more volatile rhetoric and division, practices to which Trump has been especially devoted.

Trump has done a great deal to pollute the country’s political environment. He is responsible for a major dump of toxic sludge, though he cannot be impeached for doing that.

Division is part of Trump’s operating style. Divide and conquer, one measure of a really unprincipled leader. His ready aptitude for calling people names and laughing at them is right out of Archie Bunker.

Some of the impeachment rhetoric is just childish, as that from Senator Lindsey Graham and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell telling everyone ahead of time how they will not carry out their duties with impartiality or proper procedure.

A Supreme Court justice of some distinction and standing, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has said that the Supreme Court could simply remove Senators who have declared prejudices beforehand. Going into the proceedings, which are a Constitutional obligation, with open prejudice and intent to torpedo a fair trial is not something to be tolerated.

Hardly desirable for Trump supporters, the Lindsey Graham approach represents flirting with the removal of pro-Trump votes from the Senate trial. Perhaps that is a good measure of the American Right’s extremely poor judgment. But ideologues do tend to be fanatics, and fanaticism is another factor contributing to America’s division.

Are there past public statements on virtually any topic by a politician like Lindsey Graham that stand up to scrutiny? I think not. He represents one of the best examples of establishment corruption and bias in American government.

Let me say that I very much believe Obama and Hillary Clinton did try to prevent or negate Trump’s. election. Given their backgrounds, it should surprise no one. Dark figures, both of them. The FBI and CIA at the highest level were used. That is, indeed, unconstitutional activity by people sworn to defend the American Constitution, an oath which today means remarkably little.

But the imperialists of America’s establishment, which include both parties, can hardly be blamed for bringing home ugly practices used for many decades against many other countries. Practices with which the privileged of both parties have become completely at-ease.

The Constitution gives little guidance on the matter of impeachment. The guidance it does give has been closely followed by the House in carrying out its duties of investigation and indictment.

People claim that the charges against Trump could have been laid against many other presidents. That may well be, but it represents an irrelevant accusation. Prosecutors in our legal system always have considerable latitude about those to be indicted for crimes. Just as police have considerable latitude about laying charges.

Indeed, a great many crimes never result in charges or indictments or trials, and there are many reasons for that. Plea-bargaining, for example, is a major tool of the criminal justice system. Without it, far fewer cases would be cleared.

No one is in a position to tell the House of Representatives what it should do in such matters or how it should carry out its Constitutional obligations. It assumes the political risks that its acts incur, and that’s about all you can say with any meaning.

The American Constitution is, in fact, a very flawed and incomplete document, despite fervent claims to the contrary by Patriot religious zealots. On the topic of impeachment of a president, it doesn’t say much more than the that House is responsible for investigation and indictment and the Senate for conducting a trial on the House’s indictment.

It makes cursory reference to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” that last term being especially vague. In today’s body of law, “misdemeanors” include such ordinary matters as public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and reckless driving.

Such an interpretation would indeed qualify almost every past president for trial. Maybe some of the earnest types who created the Constitution would have been satisfied with that, but it seems patently ridiculous in today’s terms.

Especially when we are talking about the operations of a global empire which could not even have been imagined by any Founding Father and would have been rejected by perhaps all of them. Virtually all the words they wrote apply to a country completely unlike the one America has become. The garments of long ago are outgrown.

The Constitution here, as in so many matters – including the anti-democratic Electoral College, the means for electing a number of minority presidents, including Trump - is badly flawed. Criticize it if you wish or start a political movement to amend it, but you cannot condemn, ipso facto, those acting according to its precepts.

Impeachment in America is essentially a political act and always has been. With impeachment, we have a procedure having little to do with the body of law. The modern era’s use of impeachment is a measure of how much the country has changed. Originally, there were no political parties. Today, they are the vehicles of power.

The political nature of impeachment is so for many reasons, including the selection of those to be investigated, the “jurors” in the Senate not being selected and being responsible for their trial votes only to the voters in their local constituencies, the lack of any detailed procedures or rules in the Constitution, and the lack of any court of appeal.

Trump’s call to a foreign leader requesting actions against a political opponent must be viewed as troubling by anyone. If Joe Biden committed inappropriate acts in Ukraine, and likely he did, there are proper avenues for investigating him. They don’t include a president calling another president, asking a favor, and delaying or withholding foreign aid as an incentive to act.

Trump opened himself to the charges. He didn’t have to, but he did. The recklessness and bravado are just part of his make-up, but they are qualities which can lead to bad outcomes, just as they very much have in almost all of America’s foreign relations. The divisions created there among both traditional friends and opponents and the coercive tactics used are just part of what is dividing America.

Given the entire context of an American-induced coup overthrowing an elected government in Ukraine (and remember, no American politician of either party admits to that) – just as Trump has done in Bolivia and attempted in Venezuela - Trump’s phone call may seem small, but I don’t think anyone can defend it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE SINGLE-STATE SOLUTION TO ISRAEL AND PALESTINE IS REASONABLE TO ALL REASONABLE PEOPLE - BUT IT HAS THE SAME BASIC PROBLEM AS THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION - AND THAT IS THE UNITED STATES - WHICH IS UNABLE TO PLAY ITS REQUIRED ROLE AS HONEST BROKER

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO A BOOK REVIEW AND DISCUSSION BY JOEL DOERFLER IN MONDOWEISS


“Facing Reality: moving on from the two-state solution in Ian Lustick’s ‘Paradigm Lost’”



I believe the late (wonderful) Edward Said had supported the single-state solution.

No reasonable person, I think, can oppose it, however the region has a good many unreasonable residents, both Israeli and Palestinian.

And the absolute key to either solution, two-state or one-state, is American support and authority, but that in itself represents a huge problem.

America has not acted as an honest broker in Middle East affairs, and I think it fair to say that that statement is even truer today than previously.

A few years ago, I wrote a clear and concise article on some of the problems involved.

Readers may find it here:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/john-chuckman-essay-two-states-or-one-state-the-stark-reality-is-that-both-solutions-are-impossible-unless-imposed-from-outside-and-just-where-do-we-see-any-prospect-for-that/

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: MY RESPONSE TO THE NOTION OF AMERICA'S IMPEACHMENT BEING A "DEMOCRACY-DEFINING" MOMENT - YOU HAD BETTER LOOK A LITTLE MORE CLOSELY AT EVENTS BEFORE TOSSING AROUND SUCH HIGH-BLOWN AND EMPTY WORDS - ALSO REVEALS DEEP DIVISIONS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS


"'Democracy-defining moment': House representatives debate Trump impeachment"


Well, maybe.

I think it more likely the impeachment effort will reveal how deeply divided the United States is.

The White House refuses to cooperate.

Leadership in the Senate - where such trials occur - has talked about calling no witnesses and shutting down the whole thing quickly, leaving Trump exonerated.

Where does that take anyone that is worth going?

America is a deeply troubled country. Divided, seriously so.

You might not recognize that from the way it tyrannizes over so much of the world with its unceasing imperial demands, but real differences on empire and the military are simply not part of America’s political division.

Likely, Trump will prevail in the Senate. Despite a few dissenting Republicans, there is little evidence of a serious undercurrent against him. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote in a Republican-dominated body.

Yes, Trump’s behavior vis-à-vis Ukraine, trying to use it to influence American domestic politics, has been inappropriate, but it is only inappropriate in a country where people adhere to civility and the rule of law.

And that country is certainly not the United States. Running an empire, and an increasingly harsh one in response to growing awareness of its own relative decline in the world, is the polar opposite to civility and respect for rule of law, but running an empire is the business that America’s establishment is in full-time. All of its establishment, which includes the major figures of both parties, the wealthy interests they all faithfully represent, and powerful, almost unaccountable agencies like CIA assisting their efforts.

A situation arose in Ukraine only because the United States fomented and paid for a coup against an elected government there in 2014. All of the controversy which swirls around Joe Biden arises from the fact of his having served as Obama’s proconsul to demand certain directions for the new government.

Trump’s phone call was wrong, but in the context of all the dirt that the United States has been mired in with Ukraine, it does seem almost small.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: IMMENSE FRAGMENTATION OBSERVED IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF PEOPLE ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OTHER LANDS - IT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT - THE PURPOSE IT SERVES - THE FORCES AT WORK - HOPES FOR THE FUTURE

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANDRE VLTCHEK IN THE UNZ REVIEW


"I Never Saw a World So Fragmented!"

“Still, they looked, but their brains were not capable of processing what they were being shown. Images and words; these people were conditioned not to comprehend certain types of information [said of some Hong Kong protesters to whom the author spoke, trying to explain to them some of the realities of events going on in other countries].”

https://www.unz.com/avltchek/i-never-saw-a-world-so-fragmented/


Fragmentation?

Well, we have several huge, dedicated, extremely well-financed organizations committed to keeping it so.

The State Department, CIA, the Pentagon, and America’s corporate press. They are assisted mightily by their “sister” organizations in American-dominated parts of Europe and Asia.

History does tend to support the view that when fragmented forces of any kind – in war, in politics, in business - are engaged against large, well-organized opposition, they lose.

Many old sayings, such as "Divide and conquer," have this truth embedded in them. So, the servants and willing helpers of American dominance work hard to keep things fragmented.

I see little opportunity for change in the situation beyond the gradual, inexorable change now underway in the world, the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, the result of many new competitors arising and the realigning of interests of many older ones in the face of new opportunities and challenges.

Also, there is the rise of new centers of opposition, notably China and Russia. New centers of leadership. Even new technologies play a role in this great transition in world affairs.

America’s own establishment is now unthinkingly contributing to increase the rate of change through its heavy-handed reactions to the emerging order.

Sanctions, tariffs, threats, ultimatums are not the stuff of which to build a brave new world. They confront and attempt to demolish the genuine interests of many others, something that is simply not possible over the long term.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: A PROMISING DEVELOPMENT IN CANADA'S POLITICS - THE TALENTED AND EXPERIENCED JEAN CHAREST MAY JOIN THE RACE FOR A NEW CONSERVATIVE PARTY LEADER

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS


“Former Quebec premier Jean Charest considering run for Conservative leadership”


This is encouraging. Very encouraging.

An active intelligence, a good personality, not at all identified as an ideologue, and some appeal in Quebec.

As well, he is a man who has demonstrated, at his own political risk, dedication to the idea of Canada.

Jean Charest has many appealing qualities and possess a storehouse of hard political experience.

He might well represent the best chance the Conservatives have for getting rid of Trudeau's government, a government which for me, with its many failings and embarrassments - and I am not a Conservative - simply leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: BORIS JOHNSON'S BRITISH ELECTION VICTORY - MAJOR REASONS FOR AN OUTCOME SURE TO BRING PAIN INSTEAD OF RELIEF - SERIOUS WEAKNESS IN WESTERN DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS - JOHNSON ECHOES TRUMP'S BULLYING UGLINESS IN ALMOST EVERY DETAIL, DIFFERING ONLY BY AN ETON ACCENT AND A SCHOOLBOY SMILE - THE "SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP" IS ABOUT TO GET A WHOLE NEW MEANING

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


“The Most Unpopular Government in UK Political History

“The disillusionment will be on the same scale as Boris Johnson’s bombastic promises”


https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/14/the-most-unpopular-government-in-uk-political-history/?unapproved=391014&moderation-hash=f0686a8bd6f9945f044d0711f33dc1ea#comment-391014


This is a good summary of forces set in motion by Britain’s election of Boris Johnson, a summary coming from Craig Murray, a writer worth reading.

It seems almost beyond understanding that a man like Boris Johnson, caught various times recently lying and misrepresenting things – a man even with an instance of a police call concerning domestic violence at his girlfriend’s flat not long before the election - and a man with a long record of schoolboy crassness and name-calling, should be given a mandate.

But you have only to look at the United States to see a comparable example in Donald Trump, a man who should actually embarrass America with his bellowing crassness.

Our Western "democracies" are so feeble.

With 43.6 % of the people’s votes, Johnson is said to have a “landslide” victory. Donald Trump actually received a minority of 46.4 % of the people’s votes.

Such are the outcomes of our custom-tailored democratic institutions.

In Johnson’s case, I believe two major circumstances worked for his “landslide.”

First, Britain was bone-achingly tired of more than three years of previous government leaders’ words and schemes over BREXIT. For all that time, you could not look at a newspaper without seeing articles and reports on the subject.

It was an extremely complex, technical subject demanding more time and effort to grasp than most people could possibly give, the very reason the earlier Conservative leader, David Cameron, should never have held such a referendum.

Tiresome, to say the least. Johnson simply threatened to be done with it all, one way or another.

Second, over much the same period – although four years instead of three – Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party has been under almost constant assault by special interests.

Another very long, wearying effort. Corbyn, essentially a decent man of traditional liberal and progressive values, was called names and challenged regularly by outlandish accusations. Libelous at times. We saw even the direct interference in British politics of several political leaders from another state, Israel.

Corbyn’s sense fairness and balance were not wanted in that part of the world. Intensely so.

He survived the assault but was weakened, and many would say he failed to stand up to accusers as forcefully as he should have. Even supporters do tire of that kind of response.

Both men - Trump and Johnson - have set their attention to major, society-changing efforts, destructive efforts in the view of many observers, yet they do so without even that fundamental democratic concept of clean and fair support from a majority.

Donald Trump literally threatens the stability of the much of the world’s trade and economy with tariffs and a massive sanction regime and telling both friend and opponents how they should be conducting their affairs. And that is all apart from his many military threats and open support for coups and the theft of other countries’ resources.

Boris Johnson displays many similar views and attitudes. He is Donald Trump with an Eton accent and a boyish smile instead of a grimly-set jaw. The traditional “special relationship” between Britain and the United States is about to be given a whole new meaning.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: CANADA'S CHRYSTIA FREELAND RECEIVES SO MANY NEW RESPONSIBILITIES FROM JUSTIN TRUDEAU SHE IS CALLED BY A (PRO-TRUDEAU) COLUMNIST "MINISTER OF EVERYTHING" - IN ORDINARY LIFE FAILURE IN ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU'VE UNDERTAKEN DOESN'T QUALIFY YOU FOR BIG NEW RESPONSIBILITIES - BUT POLITICS CAN BE DIFFERENT - FREELAND IS WELL LIKED BY TRUMP'S STATE DEPARTMENT AND WITH A TRULY WEAK LEADER LIKE TRUDEAU THAT'S ALL THE MERIT REQUIRED

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY AARON WHERRY IN CBC NEWS


“Chrystia Freeland [with many newly assigned responsibilities] is now the minister for almost everything

“New mandate letters suggest a government focused on being seen to get things done”


As Canada's Foreign Minister, Freeland supported a terrible government in Ukraine, Poroshenko's, one put in place by a coup against an elected one. A government supported by extreme Right-wing factions like Azov Battalion and the Right Sector.

She supported America's attempt to overthrow a twice-elected government in Venezuela. Effectively, she supported terrorist acts like shutting down all the country's electricity a couple of times, destroying refrigerated food for millions of ordinary people.

She's not said a word against new American pressures threatening Nicaragua and Cuba. Not a word against the obvious coup in Bolivia, overthrowing another elected government.

She never said a word about the extreme bloodshed of Saudi Arabia, both in its foreign and domestic affairs, never complaining about a single important matter in that terrible government.

She supported America's destructive trade war on China, and, indeed, destroyed Canada's good relations with China as part of her support.

She echoed Washington's empty, hostile rhetoric against Russia.

Ditto for Iran and America's reckless destruction of a well-working nuclear treaty.

She is liked by Trump's State Department, in a kind of recommendation from hell.

What does it take to fail in a Justin Trudeau Liberal government?

Oh God, for the Canada of Pierre Trudeau or Lester Pearson or Paul Martin, a Canada with some honor and principles in international affairs.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE ROLE OF SATAN IN MODERN AMERICAN SOCIETY - THE CONSTANT NEED FOR AN ENEMY AS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE COUNTRY'S PURITAN HERITAGE

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHARLES FREEMAN IN CHECKPOINT ASIA



“Instead of Fixing Itself the US Seeks to Retain Supremacy by Tripping Up and Immobilizing China

“But, finally, in China, we Americans have a cure for enemy-deprivation syndrome”



I've long thought that one of the great formative influences on American society was European Puritanism.

If you've ever read any serious history of the Puritans coming from Europe, they weren't the charming Pilgrim figures of American Thanksgiving decorative candles.

And they weren’t escaping religious persecution. They were escaping the wrath of many people they had offended.

They were truly nasty people, many of whom had been driven from countries owing to their ugly practices, which included everything from running through some of glorious ancient British Cathedrals and smashing statues and relics and stained glass to desecrating tombs and attending other people’s church services to make a complete nuisance of themselves.

Self-righteous in the extreme, believing others completely wrong in their beliefs, and very much believing in the living presence of Satan.

America, since its early days, has featured those very qualities. And the strain of Puritanism is still seen in many things, including certain intolerant attitudes and aspects of American Christian Fundamentalism, especially stuff about the Second Coming of Jesus and about Israel.

The presence of Satan in American foreign policy and wars is represented by some much-despised enemy who changes periodically - whether, at various times, Britain or Spain or France or Russia or Japan or China. There seems always to be the need for having such an enemy.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: SAUDI ARABIA AND ISRAEL AND AMERICAN MIDEAST POLICY - THOUGHTS INSPIRED BY AN EXCELLENT PHILIP GIRALDI ARTICLE - WHAT AMERICA'S POLICY SHOULD BE AND WHY IT CANNOT BE THAT - INSTEAD AMERICA INTRODUCES RISK AND UNCERTAINTY PLUS UNWARRANTED HOSTILITY AND COUNTLESS NEW WEAPONS INTO THE REGION

John Chuckman


COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI IN UNZ REVIEW


“America’s Unreliable Friends: Today’s Allies Are Tomorrow’s Enemies"


As usual, Philip Giraldi provides good writing and food for thought.

"but the Alshamrani [Pensacola] incident suggests that there is more dissidence bubbling beneath the surface than is apparent from the rosy assurances about The Kingdom coming out of the White House and the Royal Palace in Riyadh."

Indeed. It is a very conservative country dominated by a very conservative branch of its religion.

Those are real forces inside any society and things which do not evolve or change with any speed.

We have to think in terms of lifetimes.

And the country’s leadership, the House of Saud, is not part of the region’s ancient, stable history but a relatively new addition, going back only a decade or so before Israel’s founding. It really represents another interloper.

I am sure many ordinary Saudis are offended at the increased American presence in their country, representing, as it does to them, a sacred place like no other.

And the new close cooperation with Israel, acting much as allies, while largely kept secret, couldn’t help but offend some who would become aware of it.

Playing with fire? Quite possibly. There may already have been some unknown events in Saudi Arabia with the mysterious murder of the King’s faithful chief bodyguard and a fire at the new Jeddah high-speed rail station recently plus the sending of significant new American forces, likely as bodyguards more than as countering any (nonexistent) threat from Iran.

"In 2015, Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon explained how Israel might have to strike Iran hard to prevent a long war. He cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki..."

I am reminded of a remark Hitler once made about whether anyone even remembered the Armenian genocide.

America is playing dangerous games with dangerous people.

Instead, it should be the one to represent and enforce the rule of law in the region.

But it cannot do so because Israel is something like an undeveloped Siamese twin attached in vital ways to America’s body.

Israel exhibits no respect for the rule of law, caring only for narrowly-defined interests of control and expansion. We must never forget for the long-term, no matter what Israel does for temporary advantage, those five or six million Palestinians aren’t going anywhere.

Of course, the relationship with Saudi Arabia derives in many ways from the relationship with Israel. The Crown Prince is seen in Israel as part of a new relationship with the region, almost a parody of making good neighbors out of old enemies.

The Crown Prince has done so many dirty deeds to ingratiate himself with Israel (and, ergo, the United States), from the horrors in Syria to the horrors in Yemen. He has earned Israel’s good will, so much so that it supported the sale of tens of billions in American armaments to the Crown Prince, something it would never have done in the past.

It’s the kind of sale Trump loves, believing he’s making America richer and spreading American influence in the region, all while crowing about his own incomparable “salesmanship,” but that’s a very superficial view.

Such weapons are nothing on which to build a future. They only increase overall uncertainty and risk. Just look at what they encouraged the Crown Prince to do in Yemen, earning himself surprise attacks and a very prominent black eye, adding to everyone’s sense of greater instability.

Without even touching on the unwarranted hostility against that major, ancient country of Iran, the United States is doing nothing helpful or creative in the region. It is building only the possibility for more war and destruction, a badly distorted mirror image of China’s efforts abroad to build infrastructure, promoting trade and prosperity for billions of people.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: TRUMP'S BIZARRE NEW EXECUTIVE ORDER ABOUT ISRAEL AND "ANTI-SEMITISM" AND DEFINING A RACE

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ERIC STRIKER IN UNZ REVIEW


“Why Trump's New Executive Order Matters

“Trump’s executive order is reported to do two things: first, reclassify criticism of Israel and Zionism as anti-Semitism, and two, categorize Jews as a non-white race. This will effectively turn expressing negative sentiments towards Israel on college campuses into a hate crime.”


https://www.unz.com/estriker/why-trumps-new-executive-order-matters/


The only good thing you can say about such a measure is that it reveals the weakness of the cause it is supposed to defend.

This shows no respect for the rights of others and the rule of law, just as is the case with other Israeli-inspired measures against free speech and peaceful boycott.

Of course, that is in keeping with Israel's daily treatment of millions of Palestinians.

A strong and vital and fair society wants no such props.

An unfair one applauds them.

And, my God, defining “a race”? Who were the last folks to do that?

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON RUSSIA-GATE - INSPIRED BY A RE-PRINTED ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY - RUSSIA-GATE HAD AT LEAST TWO MAJOR PURPOSES - AMERICA'S PAST ANTI-RUSSIAN HYSTERIA PROVIDED FERTILE GROUND - AMERICANS AS CONDITIONED AS PAVLOV'S DOGS - HILLARY CLINTON OBAMA AND TRUMP - THE DISHONESTY OF BOTH MAJOR PARTIES WHO DO NOT WANT TO EXAMINE MANY MATTERS - TREATMENT OF ASSANGE IS VERY TELLING ABOUT THE REALITIES OF WANTING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF ANYTHING

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE LATE ROBERT PARRY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS


The Foundering Russia-gate ‘Scandal’


https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/13/the-foundering-russia-gate-scandal/


Thanks for re-publishing another honest and insightful piece from Robert Parry, honesty and insight being pretty rare qualities in American journalism. It inspires some thoughts.

Russia-gate arose from at least two impulses. Both of them are political, and no one in the establishment, which includes the important people of both parties, really wants to investigate either of them thoroughly.

It is important to say that America’s nearly ancient hostility (a good century old) towards the Soviet Union with all the propaganda and vehement rhetoric inspired by it provides even now a fertile medium for any negative accusation touching Russia. Americans are as conditioned as Pavlov’s dogs to have a certain response at just the mention of Russia.

The major impulse was a top-level, yet undisclosed effort to either stop or destroy Trump. There is no other way for senior officials of CIA and FBI to have worked and spoken in public about such matters without the support of President Obama, a fact which again demonstrates – again, as in Neocon Wars, the coup in Ukraine, and rolling tanks up to Russia’s borders – what a destructive leader Obama actually was, destructive even to his own country’s election principles.

And a very secretive leader, a president with an almost unparalleled drive for secrecy and a fierce enemy of all whistle-blowers and the truth. After all, he sent people to prison - Chelsea Manning, just one of several - and consigned others to a life of hell on earth - as we see in the case of Julian Assange.

By the way, Trump’s and the Republican Party’s attitudes and actions towards Julian Assange, a man who could clarify instantly so many controversial matters, screams at us about the true nature of America’s establishment. At a certain level in both political parties, all desire for truth and openness simply evaporates. It is at that level that they all effectively work together to keep America’s creaky sham of democracy going. Plutocracy, privilege, and empire come first for both parties, urgently and without question.

I think we will never get to the bottom of Obama’s scheme. He and his associates made sure he was well insulated, and the operation involved so many very high-level people, including of course Hillary Clinton - a politician with a different style, but a match for Obama’s secrecy and destructiveness in every way – that there is no way America’s establishment today will ever seriously dig into it.

Just the thought of damage to the reputation and security of the United States would prevent that from occurring. And Hillary Clinton’s name serves as a mighty defensive fortress because the Clintons have been one of the Democratic Party’s major conduits for immense campaign funds for over a quarter of a century. In American politics, you do not cross the big-money people.

Look at all the (appropriately) bad publicity in Britain around Prince Andrew’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Even Buckingham Palace has not been able to protect him completely. Compare its extent and impact to that around Bill and Hillary Clinton. We know Bill Clinton was at least as important an associate of Epstein as the Prince. He made 26 flights on “the Lolita Express” according to the plane’s co-pilot and logs, and Epstein contributed to the Clinton Foundation and to other Clinton “causes.” Epstein even claimed a role in creating the Foundation that has served the Clintons’ personal interests so handsomely.

The American establishment is not inclined to attack the Clintons in the way they deserve. And just so, Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Obama administration plots against Trump.

The notion is further supported by the fact that Hillary never was held accountable for the embarrassing disaster at Benghazi, Libya, which involved the killing of an American Ambassador, a side-effect of a dark program she oversaw as Secretary of State.

That program related to America’s involvement in destroying Libya’s government and in working to do the same to Syria’s. Benghazi was an unintended result of a State Department plan to scoop up weapons and thugs and have them transshipped through Turkey or Saudi Arabia for their final destination in Syria.

The weapons and thugs were everywhere in the collapsed ruins of Libya because the United States had worked hard to put them there for its hybrid attack on Gadhafi. No member of either establishment party wants to “open that can of worms” to public scrutiny.

That’s just how it works when you have an empire instead of a country.

So, people like the Clintons and Obama, having faithfully served imperial interests for years of dark and violent activity, effectively have “get out of jail free” cards good for all their shady pasts.

I read the other day that the Obamas just bought another home, one in prestigious Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, for nearly $12 million. This follows the small castle in Washington for which they paid over 8 million dollars when they left the White House, a small castle which received many costly upgrades.

Not bad financial results for a man who was an undistinguished, untenured university lecturer and who served about half a term as a United States Senator. The establishment takes care of you, handsomely, if you have served it well.

The topic of Hillary brings us to another motive for Russia-gate, and that is covering up the scandal of her behavior in the Democratic Party’s 2016 campaign for a presidential candidate. We know that Hillary’s forces cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. They approached that goal in many different ways, and we have the best evidence in the Wikileaks documents released before the election and in the testimony of various people.

So, there already was an effort to “undermine American democracy” (don’t you just love that hollow phrase?) before there was Russia-gate operating against Trump. Russia-gate represents, in addition to its intent against Trump, kicking lots of dust into everyone’s eyes concerning Hillary Clinton’s political crimes in her own party, and “political crimes” is not too strong an expression for elaborate efforts to steal the nomination of a major political party, efforts which included every imaginable dirty trick right down to seeing huge numbers of ballots trashed.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not a defender of Trump. He is an appalling man by every measure, from his rudeness to his to his aggression, dishonesty, and ignorance. So many of the people bellowing on the Internet about the Constitution-violating treatment of Trump are his supporters. Unfortunately in America, political dialogue can almost never be subtle or sophisticated. It’s always black or white, for or against, when discussing the two political parties. That fact also helps disguise the most fundamental problems at work here.

Yes, Trump is appalling, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are equally so. A sense of Hillary’s violence and crudity long ago reached a good portion of the public’s awareness. She has a reputation, but her crudities are different in nature than Trump’s.

Trump is a man who can take pride and even smirk about law-breaking, whether stealing Syrian oil or giving away parts of Palestine. Hillary is no less a law-breaker, but she doesn’t usually boast about it. She likes wearing the platitudes of old-fashioned democratic principles, much as one of her favorite lipsticks.

Obama represents a different case. We see and hear no crudity, a nice smile, and a fairly pleasant voice, but he is a devious and secretive and murderous man.

Americans seem never to ask themselves, if they carry on abroad with covert wars, interventions, coups, all kinds of interference in the governments of others, even democratic governments, and hold no respect for the rule of law, what’s to prevent the same approach being applied inside their own country?

Well, the clearest answer is, nothing. Habits of mind long-set by practice, arrogance, lack of real accountability, immensely powerful agencies at your disposal, secrecy as a way of life, unlimited access to money – these conspire to give you what we see in American government.

It really should not surprise. The last President who actually tried to make the authority of elected high office prevail over an entrenched establishment left half of his head splattered in the streets of Dallas. You’ll perhaps note the fact that no President since has tried that again. Faithful to the establishment, every one of them.

There is no better study of the contemporary American state than the events of the last few years. The ugliness of America’s renewed aggression in the world is apparent to tens of millions in many lands, but the ugliness of America’s internal politics is less well understood. Plutocracy, money-saturated elections, establishment privilege, secrecy, lack of accountability, and behind-the-scenes plotting conspire to make the high school civics textbook version of Washington politics a parody.

It is all comparable to the sense of the Roman Empire going into its decline, yet a great many Americans remain able to conjure a mental image of their country as a modest Eighteenth-century Republic with a well-defined Constitution and Rights and a pervasive respect for law. Many of Washington’s privileged establishment are themselves able to lapse into such fantasies in the course of speeches.

In the deadly accurate words of the 1980s Cyndi Lauper song, money changes everything.

It may all be too complicated to explain to the general public, and America’s dog-loyal corporate press would never even attempt the job. Only here or there on some detail, from which a temporary political advantage might be extracted, do they genuinely report and analyze. They will never conduct an operation which reveals the putrescence inside the body politic of America because their own corporations are indeed part of it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: A SURPRISING "YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS" ARTICLE TRIES TO DISTINGUISH THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FROM THE AMERICAN EMPIRE - BUT YOU SIMPLY CANNOT DO THAT - APART FROM THE SHEER SENTIMENTALITY OF "DON'T CONFUSE JIMMY STEWART WITH LYNDON JOHNSON," IT IS JUST A FALSE ARGUMENT - I EXPLAIN WHY

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA



“Who or What Is Empire?

“The American Empire is not America. It's not even the United States Government”

"Obviously a sales lady in a Milwaukee donut shop or a mechanic in Topeka are in no way the Empire."



I disagree. And fairly strongly.

The old saying that you get the government you deserve has a lot of truth in it.

And without the Topeka mechanics and Milwaukee sales ladies, there could be no empire and no Pentagon.

They staff the armed forces. They fill government offices.  They pay taxes. They vote. They do political work. They tolerate and even often act as a cheerleading section for the wars. For the most part, they never protest, in any form.

There were no meaningful protests in America when Iraq was illegally invaded and a million people killed. The Arab world’s most advanced society was reduced to broken poverty, a position it still holds.

Except for a limited period of rising conscript deaths in the late mid-1960s, there really were no meaningful protests while the United States killed three million people in Vietnam in a ten-year war, and killed them in the most grotesque and horrifying ways. The US lost a relatively small number of soldiers over that long and intense war by comparison.

Do you know that just the total mass assassinations of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix – non-military village leaders throats slashed by night-crawling special forces under CIA direction in a true program of intimidating and demoralizing mass terror - over that period killed nearly as many as the Americans killed in combat?

American combat losses were “light” by the standards of serious war because the Pentagon used overwhelmingly brutal force with carpet-bombing, napalm, and early cluster bombs – everything they could think of to raise the “body count,” a common expression of the time in America’s military.

The CIA and special forces joined in with terror and torture. And don’t forget such often-used horrors as throwing a man out of a helicopter when he wouldn’t give the expected information. A complete nightmare, from beginning to end, and to no purpose (except throwing your weight around), achieving nothing.

Ending the old form of conscription shut most of the protests right up. A well-paid professional army – a mercenary force, really – put an end to them for all the future. Indeed, the job and pay became another avenue for little Tommy or Sally, perhaps not overly well educated or talented, to directly benefit from empire. As they do today from something on the order of 800 military bases abroad.

I see in these and other examples, a people with a good deal of selfishness, not a great deal of empathy for others, so long as they and theirs are spared. And/or benefit.

They are, after all, people who for a long period benefitted from empire with far above-average jobs and pay when compared to the world. It was called The American Dream in the postwar period.

There was, unquestionably too, a sense of entitlement assumed by a lot of ordinary Americans in their speech and on their travels. I know because I lived through it.

I worked one summer when just out of high school at a steel mill in Chicago, in the first half of the 1960s. Those workers were not only paid extremely handsome salaries, especially by world standards, but they enjoyed unbelievable benefits, like 13 solid weeks of annual paid vacation with some seniority. That is why they hired students like me.

Imagine, the humblest steel workers with homes, cars, vacation trips, and even small boats? Unheard of living anywhere else on the planet. That’s why it was called, The American Dream. It didn’t last, of course, and for decades America’s middle class has relatively declined as many countries grow and compete.

So how do ordinary Americans react to that fact sinking in? They elect and support a savage in a suit who literally makes it American policy to try ripping benefits from other countries, trying desperately (and in the end, hopelessly) to recreate The American Dream as MAGA, the political and economic and social equivalent of a televangelist religious revival.

The 1950s and early 1960s American industrial workers were the privileged workers of the world, and always with privilege comes a certain degree of arrogance. And besides, they were subjected to corporate and government propaganda around the clock. As kids in grade school, every single day, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the Star-Spangled Banner, and on “movie day,” each week, we saw corporate and government films in the assembly hall.

The anthem, an unsingable one for most people, might have been okay, but the Pledge was like something from an authoritarian government. Indeed, it was born in that very era. It had no long history. And it is very unpleasant, loaded with social pressures, to demand that children “pledge” their loyalty every single day. It is really an offspring of McCarthyism, and it is alive and well.

Remember, too, Trump, a remarkably ignorant and aggressive and intolerant man, has the support of nearly half of America's people. Some polls even say fully half.

Obama, an equally grotesque killer and a proven liar, although one with more style and a really nice smile, could be said to hold the other half’s loyalty.

Saying that pledge every day, plus a whole lot more, sure seemed to have done its work for the later adult attitudes and critical capacities.

Look at something so ordinary as a football game. Not only is the game itself much styled after combats and with military-style marching bands and cheerleaders, but any interference is met with serious social disapproval.

As we very much saw with black players respectfully kneeling at the National Anthem in protest over police brutality, a grave reality in America with an average of three Americans a day killed by their own police. They were vilified by tens of thousands. Literally vilified, including by their President and Vice president. And all they were doing was exercising their rights, and doing so quite respectfully.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, just as there is no innocent Jimmy Stewart American people just being ruled over by the plutocrats and thugs. No country, even in a dictatorship, functions without at least the tacit approval of the majority of its people.