According to Richard Clarke's book "Your Government Failed You", he witnessed the US intelligence services catching Saudi Arabia in 1986 attempting to import an entire Chinese nuclear missile facility. We do not let Egypt and Saudi Arabia get nukes. We let Pakistan and South Africa and Israel get nukes. We have arbitrary power.
I wonder what would happen if Russia and China suddenly allowed Iran to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization? That means an Israeli attack on Iran might be treated as an attack on China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Currently the SCO will not allow a country under UN sanctions to join.
Amazing that all those Israeli leaders speak English and yet none of their later words ever get reported in America. Only their youthful lies, repeated over and over again until they've set our knowledge of history in stone.
While I don't totally disagree with you on your points, it's important to recall when we look downthread at the stuff about how bad Diem was, that the Republic of Vietnam was manufactured by the CIA for the purpose of being ruled by Diem. He was shacked up in a monastery in California when the CIA talked him into the gig. He and his supporters were mostly northerners, so the CIA had to evacuate them to the South to create a Southern ruling elite, and once there these bastards drove Southerners off their land to create their own (absentee) estates. South Vietnam was not a real nation that chose freely to ally with us, it was theft backed by our refusal to accept the Geneva Accords. If Diem was illegitmate, thus justifying our support for the coup, how could the country be legitimate?
Well, it debunks the line Washington tries to put out that Afghanistan is not a deeply Islamic society, that they can all be persuaded not just to be our mercenaries du jour but really to see things our way, and that the Taliban are an aberration.
That might have been feasible in 1979 before the Soviet invasion and the Saudi-Wahhabi counterinvasion, but it looks like even Kabul (where the old Marxist regime had its only support) has gone pretty far to the right. This is not a unified nation, but if big chunks of it oppose the Taliban more for ethnic rivalries than because they disagree that apostates must be shot, I don't see what we can accomplish there.
Watch the documentary Restrepo. It seemed that many Americans who watched it thought that it portrayed GIs positively. But the elite Special Forces guys who are supposedly reknowned for communicating with the natives are really of two minds; the officers try hard to sling the propaganda to the tribal elders, but they don't really understand their own scripts. The enlisted men just don't regard Afghans as particularly human. And I'm sure those tribal elders could see that.
I expect among the garrison troops in Kabul it's far worse.
He may have no chance, but his extremism appeals to tens of millions of mostly gun-owning Americans. They have the highest voter turnout, they control midterm elections, they get fascists elected for judge, sheriff, and the board that writes your kid's schoolbooks. They supply more of their sons for our wars than anyone else, and some of those sons come home ready to apply the Pentagon's violent methods to other Americans they don't approve of.
This is one of those moments when they are illuminated in our headlights, and we'd better learn who keeps cancelling out our votes for a better America.
Twenty years ago I swore that I would go to war on this society rather than see it dragged back into the injustices of the 19th century. I could see it coming (which proves I understand capitalism), and now I have to look at candidates like Santorum, Gingrich and Paul who actually want to restore aspects of Jim Crow, States' Rights, and the former absolute tyranny of white Christian men of property under "limited government" and "laissez faire". If one of those men win, I'm going to do what I can to organize a violent revolution to overthrow the degenerate capitalism that produced them. This country deserves to die if it returns to its worst evils.
The People's Army of Vietnam, which defeated France, the United States, and the People's Republic of China and drove them from Vietnam in 30 years, was a local, organized resistance movement that did some pretty damn nasty things, but they killed far fewer civilians than American tax dollars did. If it were my country being conquered by overwhelmingly powerful hostile aliens, Phud1, I'd consider them my role model in what I'd do. Ditto the liberation movements in Algeria, Ireland, et al. Because capitalist imperialists rely on private wealth and control the jobs the masses need, it is not possible to defeat them without attacking civilians.
Thus the descendants of the Loyalists who were driven from America into Canada 240 years ago are still complaining about the atrocities committed against them by our Founding Fathers.
The countries against Iran are generally the capitalist ones that still have bad economies. The economically strong regions right now seem to be backing Iran: China, Turkey, and Latin America. The old, declining white societies against everyone else.
I hope this map is not a foreshadowing of the combatants in World War III. I see no awareness in America that, like Germany in the early 20th century, we are making more enemies than we can handle.
I have read many, many accounts of the behavior of US troops towards civilians in Vietnam. Much of it was horrifying, but much of it was also friendly and well-intentioned. It's now unimaginable that US troops once rented dives off-base in Saigon and lived unsupervised among civilians. We should be alarmed that in Iraq and Afghanistan the balance has shifted towards unbridled hostility. The problem isn't the training; the problem is that something is changing inside of us, or at least of that portion of us that joins the Army and Marines to fight the rest of the world. There is a growing barbarism loose in our land that shows in a hundred little ways every day.
Gingrich is out to prove that the American people never really believed they were occupying Afghanistan to help the people there, but only to punish them for the sin of Islam. He might succeed.
Hillary Clinton seemed to generate her own policy backing the coup in Honduras, as well. But when it looked like she was in the bag for Mubarak, things turned around.
I think we are reaching the point where the supporters of these candidates are whom we have to confront; interchangeable demagogues can easily outhate each other for their support. The problem is, 8 years ago, I figured the Cheney gang's secret plan was that if the conquest of Iraq failed and the economy collapsed, they'd simply declare martial law and deputize those we now call The Tea Party to enforce it. Now, the whackos have deputized themselves and hunt for a trustworthy tyrant to do the declaring. You cannot negotiate with people who already have decided that their survival requires that you be stripped of the vote and equal protection (or lack of same) under the law. You can only show them that if they try to get their way, you are equally willing to burn down the country rather than live as their slave or their cannon fodder.
Didn't Cole refer to the debate as "squalid"? That's close enough to "disgusting".
Also, it might be time Rep. Paul realized that the price our society paid for centuries of blind embrace of private property and free enterprise as the only value of a man, while said systems were in fact totally rigged to favor white Christians and produce staggering national and global inequality, is that white Christian capitalist men must be viewed as superior to other kinds of humans. Thus the other kinds of humans, and anyone who dissents from the masters, has a life that is of so little value that it should simply be snuffed out at the first sign of a slave rebellion. The government exists to protect "our" property, right? That is how Western capitalism triumphed, and all those who have stood against it or its wars successfully have been those who demanded human equality in reality, not in bought-out 19th century bourgeoise cliches that libertarians still worship. That's why the yuppies love you until it's time to pull the lever, Ron.
My conclusion from reading the linked article is that when a person who is committed to a movement has more education and more sources of information, he uses it for nothing but to empower his movement. The survey was done in an America where the Left has many narrow single-issue movements, but the Right has a single overarching movement that is vague enough to allow factional contradictions: that America was a better land before the 20th century and its governmental, racial and economic features must be restored to that past state or it's not really America. Not surprising; there's more agreement about the past than about the future in a declining empire. Thus right-wing neo-confederates, neoconservatives, libertarians, and theocrats all have their special erudition in their own ideologies, but are bound together in a certainty that the modern world is an evil conspiracy by Reds, Moslems, queers, etc. to take away their birthright.
So these factions are predisposed to listen to each other's conspiracy theories to the extent that it reinforces their own fears, and the more educated persons are the faster they will adapt. Seeing global warming as a conspiracy to destroy capitalism started with the libertarians. As late as 2008 there were still neocons who backed energy conservation and measures to restrain CO2 emissions until further research could be completed. But after that, the fear that the "conspiracy" was defeating real America caused all the other factions to fall into line. We are seeing the homogenization of these different reactionary strains from their fear of a growing horde of young Americans with the wrong values overrunning the ballot box. So now far-right Catholics sound like far-right Pentecostals did in 2008, libertarians have adopted anti-immigration and anti-abortion positions from white natalists, corporate conservatives are screeching "interposition" and "nullification" like George Wallace, etc.
Comparing the advertising of the past to the sophisticated mind control techniques that multinational corporations spend fortunes on today is like comparing Tippecanoe & Tyler Too with Dr. Goebbels' Ministry of Information.
There have been articles recently about how Target stores track and study people's movements so they can predict their behavior. The evil wizards of Madison Avenue also claim that most people are sheep following a handful of influential, charistmatic types. The latter have been identified demographically and targeted. Of course, Karl Rove and his ilk keep up with this, which is how they are able to target black neighborhoods with harassing flyers that imply they should stay away from the voting booth unless they're absolutely sure all their "papers" are in order. The automation of personalized propaganda is being pioneered by the big Internet players.
They know too much about us, their knowlege is growing exponentially, and they are using it against us.
Since there's no reason why any ad needs to be true, and advertisers are increasing their understanding and control of human thought faster than humans are evolving in intelligence, we must eventually lose control of our senses to those who pay for the ads.
That means Free Will, the entire premise behind Christian sin, liberal government, and free markets, is simply another technological problem that is being defeated by our plucky plutocrats and bureaucrats. That means our entire concept of freedom is potentially meaningless. We can't be sure that anything we do is not the product of contrived programming.
Every commercial you've ever seen, besides selling the product it's obviously about, sells one other thing: the idea that business, in general, has your best interests at heart, that it is the main source of goodness, prosperity and freedom. Government propaganda and religious theology at least shove that in your face for you to reject. But to reject that all those different products in our lives from all those businessmen represent some higher good is damn near impossible.
So really, you DON'T like Ike, who defended democracy, kept the military more firmly under civilian control than it has been since, and enforced a 99% marginal tax rate on the ultra-wealthy that he might not have agreed with.
In those days, voter turnout was higher than now, and government was generally improving.
Whenever foreigners criticize a conservative official in our government, our far right fanatics are immediately ready to go to war for him, to kill, to destroy, to terrorize everyone else into silence.
So now that foreigners have criticized an American general and his vaguely liberal boss for not being pro-war enough, will American peaceniks, pacifists, leftists, and Occupiers take to the streets to back them up?
No chance in Hell. And Obama gets the message from that, which us idealists will never understand. Politicians will go where the loyalty is, even if it's blind, bland, centrist loyalty. And that is why the Right gets away with its extremism and no one else does.
Iran isn't my enemy. Any Moslem who refuses to bown down to arbitrary demands, attacks and invasions from Israel is your enemy. Your boys have hundreds of nukes and it's time to admit it - meaning that you admit you don't really need to put settlements on stolen land as a "buffer zone".
Hooray! We're starving Iranians for a non-existent weapons program!
Mark, I'd have one tiny iota of respect for you if you were enough of a man to admit that your goal is illegal regime change. The second iota burned up in Iraq when we destroyed the place for its non-existent nuclear program.
The policy of the United States is to enforce regional hegemonies by backing a "friendly" dictator. The Shah of Iran was to serve that purpose in the region, but you saw the consequences. That left America falling back on the insane and impossible goal of making both Saudi Arabia and Israel the dominant powers. The oil lobby wanted the former and the Israel lobby the latter. But Saudi Arabia is founded on Wahhabism and obligated to use its wealth to expand it, while Israel wants all faithful Moslems stripped of any political power. Thus it's a zero-sum game between them and any help we give to either makes it worse.
As the Israel lobby grew in Washington, ex-Defense Secretary Cheney and his mad Neocons attempted to surmount this contradiction in both America and Israel by creating a single, far-right capitalist warmongerer ideology. They created the Clean Break manifesto for the Likud Party, and the matching Project for a New American Century for the GOP. The plan was to go to war on Moslem countries, install friendly govts in Iraq and Iran, and thus bypass those fundamentalist crazies in Saudi and transfer Big Oil's loyalties to these new regimes.
It was a total disaster. Now we're stuck keeping the mess from exploding.
The biggest military favor we perform for Israel is not exposing its open secret nuclear arsenal or treating it as a fugitive from nuclear arms control, while treating Iran as if it is. Our other favors consist of not treating its invasions and occupations as we would treat them if anyone else were perpetrating them.
I love it. The more crazy Santorum gets, the harder the far right will find it to reeducate themselves to live with Romney after the convention. Of course, Santorum could be the running mate; Palin II - Pentecatholic Boogaloo.
Well, Delia, you Canadians could get rid of Harper immediately by uniting your four left-of-center parties to stop his noisy minority from dismantling your healthcare system. This is the downside of multiparty systems; they don't know how to respond to a crazed high-turnout minority that wants to permanently overthrow the values of the society.
The Saudis felt safe when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.
We removed Saddam. Then we told the Gulf states that our failure to stabilize Iraq was Iran's fault. So they're stuck having to help us manufacture a Sunni buffer zone. It's also a fantastic way for oil-free Jordan to get back on the US aid gravy train after the late King sided with Saddam Hussein against Kuwait.
But that creates mischief for America too. We handed the Saudis a vested interest in intervening in Bahrain and Syria. Since the Saudis keep OPEC operating in US dollars, which pressures the oil states to have to invest in the USA, we can't have everything our way with the Saudis.
In fact, the Gulf states have not shut down relations with Iran, which you would know if you read the Asia Times. It was there alleged that the Bush administration sabotaged a grand settlement Saudi Arabia had negotiated with Iran about 6 years ago to end all regional disputes between them. That made the current hysteria possible.
You've made a point so important that I've been bedeviled by it for years. Why are fascists so willing to ally with libertarians when their agendas point in opposite moral directions?
I've come to the conclusion that the fascist trick is to divide Free Enterprise into "good" capitalists and "bad" capitalists. The good are the patriarchs and oligarchs, who rule over happy, isolated peasants and support the dominant church in controlling their minds. Catholic fascism modernized Catholic love of feudalism into the relationship of private or family-owned industry with their workers. This was called vertical syndicalism, which allowed workers to only have relationships with their superiors, not with workers from other oligarchies. Hitler took this into an even more modern Germany. His good capitalists invariably were those he needed to control Germany and build its war machine: manufacturers and certain bankers (who had connections to right-wingers like Prescott Bush in the US).
The bad capitalists, of course, are stereotyped as urban and Jewish. Their industries are hated for not producing hard goods: movies, music, and financial speculation. They also are accused of allying with Blacks to surround and destroy the righteous white Christian middle class and replacing their culture with a gutter culture with a danceable beat. Thus George Soros, Harvey Weinstein, and every Black rapper and NBA player who doesn't know his place are today rolled into a big Limbaugh snowball of liberal permissiveness/socialism.
It's ridiculous, but perfectly logical if one wishes to protect the fundamental evils of capitalism from their consequences. Speculators are a welcome part of "productive" capitalism in the good times, but when the inevitable crash happens, the fascists provide the rich with cover by isolating a scapegoat among the elites. The fascist solution is a capitalism entirely dedicated to war and profitable conquest, with the loyal masses pressured to give up certain cultural contaminants but not others (thus rap and Harry Potter are burned, but gas-guzzlers and guns are raised to a sacrament).
The unification has already happened. Pentecostals hate Catholics and Mormons, Baptists hate Pentecostals, far-right Catholics still reject the legitimacy of Protestantism, Zionist Jews know perfectly well that Pentecostals and far-right Catholics still hate "cosmopolitan" Jews. Yet they're all falling over their feet to collectively worship whichever presidential candidate promises the most tyrannical Puritanism this week.
Is this sincere? Have they truly renounced their long-term agendas to sink consecrated daggers into each others backs? How do they intend to work together once in the White House? I literally don't see any way to do it but by actually starting World War III against the Moslems, which would give them the dictatorial powers to reorganize the government and economy to permanently subsidize their sponsors.
Longtime US intelligence official Richard Clarke, on page 103 of his book "Your Government Failed You", claims he was involved in an incident in 1988 when Saudi Arabia tried to import Chinese nuclear-capable long-range missiles and set them up at a secret base. George Schultz extracted a promise from the King that the base would be open for inspection, which apparently forced its closure.
In 1988, would the Saudis have been buying nukes to deal with Iran, or to deter an attack from an Israel that already had a nuclear arsenal and had America in its pocket? The US obviously felt the latter, and had the power to overrule Saudi Arabia. Whether it still has this power today is open to question. If it does, then the current Saudi threat is horseshit meant to give the US an excuse to act pre-emptively against Iran.
But if you recall any geography, Bill, there are no natural barriers to an invading force going in either direction in Eastern Europe. And we had a nuclear monopoly at first. So what choice did the Soviets have but to treat us as being capable of doing what Hitler did? Stalin was a mass murderer, but he didn't make the same mistake twice.
This isn't actually an argument I accept, but your refusal to even consider the other side's point of view is characteristic of why America blundered into the Cold War. George Kennan saw the entire problem in 1946: Stalin would demand to dominate Eastern Europe by right of conquest, America's crusader mentality would turn against the USSR, and each side would see the other as a Fourth Reich ready to strike.
His solution puts the lie to your justifications to America's actions and to Redshift's revisionism: Containment. Kennan's Containment was far more restrained and genuinely defensive than what the USA actually carried out. He wanted it to be strictly a European matter because he knew our aid to already-bourgeoise liberal societies would win. Our paranoia globalized the conflict to assume that any Communist anywhere who fought British, French and Dutch imperialism was a monster who wanted to rape our daughters in Kansas. The spread of the conflict was used to justify orders of magnitude increases in nuclear arsenals, power projection weapons, bases, and budgets. It also was used to purge America of radical thinkers who might have questioned that whole profitable enterprise.
Kennan became a bitter critic of the Cold War infrastructure and the developing US empire, which was never dismantled after the fall of the USSR, for reasons well outlined by Eisenhower in his farewell warning.
Read "The Shock Doctrine", for God's sake. We fully intended to turn the place into a colony, but the people fought back and Rumsfeld's mercenarized military was too weak and hated. Oil companies know international law as well as Prof. Cole does: contracts signed with a foreign occupation regime have no lasting validity. The US tried to manufacture an unelected regime under an Iraqi to satisfy those conditions, but Sistani's demand for elections scared the companies away. The Iraqi oil workers' union bravely declared that they would destroy all their facilities rather than turn them over to foreigners. Thus no elected Iraqi government dared give in to Occupation
"recommendations". The civil war resulting from our criminal incompetence (documented by the Lancet death study) made US corporate operations completely impossible, and that ran out the clock on our wretched Occupation.
To claim that we didn't intend to win control of Iraqi oil is as evil as claiming that Iraq was behind 9/11 or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; a pretty lie to justify further holocausts.
Bill, isn't the point of an empire of bases in 130 countries that we can encircle anyone, anywhere, at any time, without any justification, leaving us an easy half-step from aggression?
You are being far too charitable to the US government in its reasons for spending more on its military than the rest of the world put together. Do you believe that America has a unique right to global hegemony, or don't you? Because that strikes at the heart of the concept of international law.
To all those here who claim proof that Iran is a terrorist nation, I throw down this challenge:
What is your damned solution?
We all know the wretched history of sanctions. If we had tried to slap Gadaffi with sanctions after he slaughtered an unaided rebellion and blew up half his cities, it would mean allowing no oil to escape his borders. So everyone else would starve, but he'd still have his fortune hidden abroad, and Libya's oil taken off the market would now have oil close to $150 again, at which point the whole global economy collapses again. How many people would die worldwide from a second crash?
In Syria, sanctions won't stop the killing either.
So now if Iran continues to do business with China and India, do we just hit all of them with sanctions? India, a democracy with millions on the brink of starvation, and China, which we soon will owe a trillion bucks to? That plus the loss of Persian Gulf oil, and how big an economic apocalypse are we talking about?
Don't pretend that there was no relationship between 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the '08 crash.
Didn't all the good warmongerers tell us that Saddam Hussein was acting as though he was engaged in a nuclear weapons program in '03, when in fact he wasn't? Who needs facts, when we feel like killing more Moslems?
Since you have no recent posts running that are specific to this, I will post this photo of the Marine sniper unit proudly displaying its Stars & Stripes with a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan:
I am really upset about this and I want to provoke as much discussion about it as I can. If a context with the embassy attack story is needed, I guess I can ask the question, do you think that these Marines and their banner and their representation of the United States people and government bears any comparison with the accusations our media hurls daily against Iran of wanting to exterminate the Jews?
Who are these warriors fighting for? Do they consider me part of the America they wish to control the world for, or will they come hunting for me one day? I think these are bigger questions for the citizen of a democracy than the supposed threat of everyone who's not American.
Consider why Israel once helped Khomeini, and now claims Iran is an existential threat, once helped Hamas, and now claims it is an existential threat, etc. It doesn't care about Pakistan because all these threats are cultivated on schedule. After Israel nukes Iran, then it will tell us all that Pakistan is an existential threat. Or that someone else is an existential threat. Rinse and repeat.
Okay, so what you're saying is, when the Church is progressive, compassionate, egalitarian, and pacifist, it's always optional, but when it's bigoted, misogynistic, tyrannical, and Crusading, it's always mandatory.
So all the former is just window dressing and Roman Catholicism is in truth bigoted, misogynistic, tyrannical, and Crusading, like all the other monotheistic cults. Difference being that in working to drag civilization back to the Dark Ages, the Church has the advantage of actually being to BLAME for the Dark Ages.
Thank you, I thought there were still some good things about Catholicism but you've taught me otherwise.
And I bet you and Kate never, ever would vote for a truly liberal Catholic, no matter how air-tight his religious justifications are, and you'd be first in line to support his excommunication for failing to be a far-right bigot. How did you feel when Archbishop Romero was murdered for his "communism", using your tax dollars?
You obviously were already looking for an excuse to destroy Obama and vote in a murderous gangster like Gingrich. If you work for those who will take away my liberties, then your definition of liberty and my definition of liberty are in conflict. This has happened before, all the way up to civil war. I'm sick of the growing tyranny of Protestant fundamentalists, who bomb abortion clinics and get away with it, scheme to take the vote away from minorities a la Jim Crow, build armed militias and claim they have the right to restore the right of state governments to secede and discriminate and restore the unconscionable injustices of the past. I'm ready to fight them to the death. If you want to be their ally, just remember that once they've destroyed people like Prof. Cole, they will come for the Catholics and Jews.
Here is an article on how religious-run adoption services, due to the privatization fetish in Virginia, are getting the right to discriminate against gays.
See how this works, folks? The libertarians privatize all our social services to religious fanatics, in effect granting them hundreds of billions of $ in subsidies, and then exempt them from all anti-discrimination rules that conflict with their fallible, self-serving dogma. We will be paying as much in taxes as ever since the hypocrites will siphon it off to give to politicians and other theocratic projects, but we will suffer all the bigotry and inequality we had in the laissez-faire era they worship. Interesting to see who will be happy with that.
Prof. Cole, you must make these remarks by Santorum the subject of a posting. Crusade-apologism is monstrous in this day and age. And it ought to shut up the libertard Obama-bashers here - how you Ayn-boys feel about the church's right to order you to fight a war on Islam just 'cause?
It's insane. The Crusades are nothing but a list of crimes and aggressions, including the sacking of Christian Constantinople and the butchering of Jerusalem's population. The Crusades and the Inquisition are recognized by historians as being a coordinated effort by the papacy to restore its authority after its return to Rome from exile. Crusades = anti-Semitism, in the eyes of its authors.
Irony is, Prohibition was a Protestant-run movement that viewed alcohol as a "Catholic" drug, and looked to punish Catholic immigrants for their alieness. Catholics defended a freedom that Protestants and most of the GOP wanted to trash.
Bill Clinton already destroyed the welfare state in 1999 at the behest of capitalists and the GOP congress. Which is why the Bush economic collapse left tens of millions in suffering unprecedented since WW2. Are you going to seriously sit there and claim Obama is way to the left of Bill Clinton?
You want to go back to the good old days when censorship boards run by local Protestant churches chopped up books and movies in towns all over America? Or when private clubs and neighborhoods allowed no Jews? That's more totalitarian than who the hell pays for a woman's medical care, and you know it. The tyranny of landlords, robber barons, popes, superstition-mongering priests, all once Church-approved, was a hundred times worse than living in the modern America created by FDR. You don't like it, move to a Catholic country that still arrests gays and women who have abortions, like... uh, well, every Catholic country seems to be getting more advanced than the USA in gay rights and women's rights now, along with health care for the poor. I guess Catholics are a bunch of leftist totalitarians everywhere but Gingrich-land.
As a former Baptist and long-time critic of Protestant fundamentalism, I have never been able to understand the game being played between far-right Protestants and far-right Catholics to join forces while ignoring the differences in doctrine that justify their separate existences.
It's as if both groups are really part of a 3rd religion, extremist, violent Americanism, yet they must hide in their existing religions to obtain certain Constitutional advantages that they intend to deny to everyone they regard as un-American.
Pat Buchanan is the paragon of the Catholic-who's-really-a-Baptist. Like a quantum particle he exists in two religious states at the same time, embracing the Pope's anti-Communism and utterly ignoring his pacifism, because the Pope is himself just a tool to strengthen America.
I think every religion introduced into this country gets contaminated over several generations by the essentially Protestant aggression of its founding; the individual greedbag who claims that God approves of his rape of land and "lesser" peoples in the name of productivity, which will then fund further conversion and conquest. This entrepreneurial evangelism became first Manifest Destiny, then Imperialism, then the road to assimiliation for Jews and Catholics. Thus pro-war, pro-natalism, pro-rich, pro-pollution, pro-speculation, anti-Latino and anti-regulation.
Americanism is Protestantism twisted into a self-justifying tribal religion; people of other religions want to be part of the tribe too. But they will get shortchanged by ignoring an agenda that demands total conversion. Right-wing Catholics can support the destruction of the public school system, but Catholic schools are too expensive to compete with the vast fanatic-subsidized machinery of Baptist and Pentecostal schools and home-schooling. Is it so important to crush liberalism that you will hand your children over to enemies for conversion?
But a coup would normally mean the generals, who are wedded to the status quo. So it would happen because they think Assad Jr. isn't brutal enough to save their privileges. A coup by lower-ranking officers, meaning Sunnis looking for power redistribution, would be harder. Note that in most coups carried out by colonels, majors, etc, the overthrown regime was incompetently organized: Libya '69, Egypt '52. No surprise that Liberia and The Congo were conquered by former sergeants! If you're only a colonel and you want to take over a country, you need serious CIA backing.
I don't see how either this or Libya could be defined as genocides unless the population of a particular city were defined as an ethnic group. Mass murder is not the same thing as genocide.
I'm disappointed that there's not more response to this posting. Prof. Cole is broaching a provocative idea, that the 3rd world countries may be more objective about alternative energy than the US. After all, there's nothing more objective than being broke and having to solve a problem regardless. I've been reading about the idea that great empires are ideologically wedded to their sources of power, even when they become a liability. The British were in love, not with coal, but the power that coal brought them, and lagged behind the newer industrial states in adopting more modern hydrocarbons. Now the problem seems to be a culture of gasoline in America, such that the mere act of building an electric car gets one attacked in bizarre and deeply sociopathic ways. Many people seem to think that any change in how we transport ourselves is literally treason, even if our great-grandparents happily lived in cities and rode around on streetcars without equating it with communism.
Mancur Olson thought that a country might stand a better chance of modernizing itself by losing a war and getting badly destroyed, because the previously successful must be crushed to make it possible.
Wow, I'm reading all this bickering and realizing why the American left is beyond useless. We don't agree on definitions, we don't agree on facts, and we don't even admit our narrow agendas to each other, which mostly consist of backing one particular murderous tyrant in the hope that he, whether "Westernizing" Zionist, "Socialist" Arab, or "just plain ornery" Iranian will somehow turn the tide of evil that rules the world.
No wonder those Occupy kids won't say what their platform is. They've seen us all make fools of ourselves.
We're not defending Iran's hypothetical nuclear program, we're condemning the hypocrisy of people like yourself who deny that Israel has hundreds of nukes (the South African govt. has produced documents showing Israel tried to sell some to the apartheid regime) so that you can justify more wars for "defenseless" Israel.
Well sure, they've had America doing it for them. But China still benefits. You think China doesn't worry about Islamists? Or heroin smuggling from Afghanistan? When China's ideology-free cynicism leads them to oppose every popular uprising and every attempt at political change because it upsets Chinese shipping contracts, they are very happy to often share the interests of America, a declining status-quo power afraid of futher change.
The day will come when China will exert itself as a military power, and we will have to live with it because we made it so goddam easy by wasting our power on paranoid delusions. At that point, will we prefer a China that defends the status quo everywhere, or attacks it everywhere?
What's sickening to me about the slowly growing Chinaphobe meme is that China is actually propping up the US at some expense to itself, as are Saudi Arabia and Japan. You know the Saudis were somehow pressured into getting OPEC to denominate all oil purchases in US $ in 1971, which created permanent demand for a currency that was unlinking from gold due to its problems. The Arab $ had to be spent somewhere; OPEC knew a lot would be reinvested in the States. Japan in turn got stuck having to recycle its US $ back here to prevent our currency from collapsing to the point where we couldn't buy Japanese goods anymore, and now China has fallen into the same trap.
Perhaps China has a real strategy to make us pay for it long-term. But right now they must keep buying our T-bills. Neither of our parties dares announce an economic strategy designed to take advantage of a falling $ to return us into a exporter; it would ruin too many lives.
For all we know, all three of these countries also prop us up as a quid pro quo for our global military hegemony. As much as we at this forum hate what the US does with its power, the rulers of those countries are cynics, not human rights advocates. Saudi needs protection from its own people, Japan and China need the world made safe for commerce. Ironically, our ideologues built an empire of military bases in 130 countries that has doubtless gained our corporations many unfair benefits abroad. But now, our corporations can't be bothered to make things to export, or learn what foreigners think. China needs Islamism to be contained, it needs radicals and populists silenced, it needs Central Asia "stabilized"... why not let America foolishly spend its blood on these tasks, then Chinese corporations can move in and build factories and railroads and pipelines where Wall Street is too cowardly to tread?
Somehow, I doubt that back when Great Britain was cashing out its empire to survive the World Wars and going from the world's greatest creditor to its greatest debtor while the US was doing the reverse - because all the gold went from London to New York - any British politician would have run for office using this ad, with a friendly caucasian speaking the same message in a perfect Yankee accent.
The ad is meant to stoke anger. If we were losing our hegemony to a white country, we wouldn't be as angry. The British could bear handing their dominance over to us because we were the most "like" them, and we were trusted to protect them. No country will, or should, do this for us now.
I read the article. They think big, don't they? The Israelis and Arabs each think they can use China against each other, but China will just suck them dry and get them in debt, while advancing its economic juggernaut towards Europe. Still, that should be an improvement over the current madness.
So now can we all agree that there is no clear parting of the nations into good guys and bad guys? I've been cheering for the BRIC states to take down the US a peg just like many of you, but I knew they had their own agendas. It would be better if a social democracy were surpassing America because then we'd have to learn a lesson. But even the anti-American countries have needed cheap labor and weak pollution laws to attract capital and thus attain the growth rates that strengthen themn against America and the Pentagon. We should hope their options improve with success, as they did for the current 1st world states, and that they don't merely back every endangered dictator against his own people in the name of anti-intervention - which would make them ironic mirrors of anti-Communist America.
We need a world of balance of power, and that requires that the USA remain a player, not that it remain a hegemon.
How often have liberals, anywhere or at any time in human history, deliberately embraced the dismantling of their country's power when they thought they still had the resources to continue it? When have even leftists done that? Lenin gave up part of the Russian empire to the Kaiser fully expecting to get it back by revolution. Britain and France gave up their colonial empires not out of liberal enlightenment, but under pressure from the (leftist-despised) Truman and his newly superpowered America. Liberals, radicals, progressives, socialists and Marxists have all cynically backed the continued power of their homelands when it supported their goals. ESPECIALLY in democracies. They know voters hate them for being unpatriotic and weak.
The dark question is, when will human beings start rewarding leaders for walking away without a concocted claim of victory? I'm not going to vote for a peace candidate if I believe his foreign or domestic policies will ruin my country.
Actually, your evidence equally supports the idea that this is an unrepresentative dictatorship which favors a minority over all other citizens, and that minority will fight to the death to hold onto power. I bet the old apartheid regime could have put together a pretty good street march in Johannesburg in favor of white power, and it would have been sincere. Unfair distribution of wealth between population groups was also a cause of the Libyan revolution, and a source of conflict in many, many developing countries across the political spectrum.
Question is, how do you disarm this bomb when it's already going off?
Well, Mo, after Iran launches its only nuke against Tel Aviv (since nuking Jerusalem would be apostasy), Israel will still have 200 nukes left to launch against Iran. So the rest of your laughable scenario is invalid.
Oh wait, you actually believe Israel doesn't have nukes? Based on what? Israel NEVER denied having nukes! Anyone who accuses it of having nukes, like Jimmy Carter, is simply smeared as an Arab-lover without the accusation being addressed.
You want to believe Israel has no nukes to justify America going to war to kill every Moslem that Israel says is a threat, and then giving the wasteland to more Jewish settlers.
And the fact that Israel co-developed its bomb with apartheid South Africa (Mandela dismantled SA's program after he won) says so much that you don't want said.
But you're admitting, then, that after we attack the reactor, we will be in a state of war with a still-functional Iranian military, right? So logically, we will have to defeat that military to protect our client states in the region. And since we can't send troops to Tehran, we will have to bomb its command and control centers. To which Iran can reasonably retaliate with everything it has, if international law still means anything. So we really have no choice but to pursue regime change rather than spend a decade worrying about Iran's retaliation.
Some folks think Iran-Contra was a "two-off", or even a "three-off". I've read allegations that Reagan not only used Bush Sr. as a go-between (while still running for office) to talk Khomeini into holding the hostages just a little bit longer, but also that Israelis were present at those meetings. Israel was quite friendly with Khomeini that year; it wanted Persians to butcher Arabs that year. Other years, it wanted Arabs to butcher Persians.
I guess before 1972 our alliance with Taiwan was considered untouchable. However, only a schemer with Nixon's putrid witchhunting credentials could disarm his own party's extremists to abandon Taiwan.
I recall they actually did call it a Taiwan Lobby, but it was nothing compared to what we now merely call THE Lobby.
Your last paragraph is one of those Things Americans Aren't Supposed To Say, so I'm glad you did. How dare we imply that conservative culture yearns for a restoration of Jim Crow? Even if they do fly Confederate flags, piss on Abe Lincoln (still), look for every opportunity to remove blacks from voter rolls, and worship the holy slaveowner trinity of weak federal government plus states' rights, unlimited property rights, and gun rights? Even if the KKK was truly a patriot militia that won.
The mythologized good old days are strangling the blood flow to our brains. The myth must be destroyed or our future will be.
In my heart I'm probably even to the left of you, Elkern, but I realize I have to stay out of a concentration camp to even get to the Promised Land, and a large faction of the GOP has been drooling for years about removing people like me from the streets, so I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying.
As for Marsh's insult of Gore not winning his home state, hey, Taylor, you're talking about Tennessee! How much further to the Right would Gore have to had moved to win there? Well to the Right of Obama, if Harold Ford was any indication.
Everything you say about Obama is true, but you know nothing about what the modern right-wing movement is like. Very few liberals spend any time going to websites like talk2action.com or tracking the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or even opening up a sleazy gun-nut mag at your supermarket to find out how murderously intolerant the GOP has become.
I've been tracking it for the last 30 years, and I am certain, beyond a doubt, that the goal this entire time has been for a means to guarantee white Christian power regardless of economic or racial reality. The only way to do this is to reconstruct the entirety of 19th century law, unspoken law, culture, and economics. Which necessarily includes Jim Crow, prison slave labor, starvation of the poor, National Guardsmen gunning down strikers in the streets, and the end of all pollution, worker safety and child labor laws. It's all been pointing this way since the movement began, and there's no workable place to stop short of total implementation.
So until the Left is ready and willing to organize mass disruptions of a magnitude comparable to what it took to bring down the 19th century model in the first place, all we can do is frustrate the extremists' goal of implementing disenfranchisement before there are too many minority voters to hold back. By 2050 it will be too late for them, and that's why they have more urgency than us.
The impression I got was that Hillary began undermining Zelaya first, and Obama let her run the show. In fact, she's pretty much been an embarassment at State, which is why I think Obama put her over there - to finish her off. When's the last time a Secretary of State got anywhere in this country? Americans hate diplomats, hate diplomacy, and hate the notion that foreign affairs are a matter of negotiable interests instead of moral crusades. It's a dead-end job.
It looks like Putin is beginning to nail down the formula for preserving his naval base under the next Syrian regime. Which would be a pretty amazing concession on the part of the Arab monarchies bankrolling the resistance. It would be like international recognition of Russia's sphere of influence, at America's expense.
I guess authoritarian oil powers, whether pro or anti-US, will stick together.
Question is, are we looking at a political party, or a political movement? Movements can't deal with their problems by moving to the center, but to the extreme, because movements die in the center, while parties thrive there.
Especially since the success of those missions simply proves that Big War doesn't work anymore. Big War meaning, conquest, control of territory, occupation of populations, transformation of their political systems. Too expensive, too many variables, too much nationalism to overcome. Iran would have to be a Big War.
Word is, Ron Paul says he will not go independent.
If he ran, the GOP would face an electoral debacle of such a scale that it might complete the realignment of America in the direction it appeared to be headed in November 2008. Meaning a multicultural, multiethnic society reflecting the radically different ideas non-whites have about the role of government and business. Recall that Ron Paul got in trouble because his newsletter ran articles, under his name, claiming that pro-capitalist "sensible" blacks were being suppressed by the socialistic welfare black majority. So Paul, or whomever he trusted to use his byline, thinks most blacks are crazy pinkos. Which they are, compared to him. Maybe he'd rather live with the war machine than give it up and let the tax money go permanently to people he thinks are lazy and crazy.
Or, he will be well paid by his fellow capitalists to sit it out.
Stop to think in how many ways Israel has foreshadowed the US since that lurch began:
1. invasion and occupation excused by pre-emption
2. internal security and anti-terrorism measures
3. the combination of privatization and militarization of the economy
4. the fencing of the profits from #3 into a massive real estate boom, creating an asset inflation biased towards the rich instead of wage/price inflation
5. the acceptance of theocratic politics holding democracy hostage
6. the beginnings of a discussion of disenfranching the evil and disloyal minority group, slowly, steadily, to keep the current majority forever the electoral majority
There's just too much evidence that Israel was intended as a prototype for the US's future. There are people in common in both countries involved in all the above events.
The question might then be, what do these villains intend both countries to look like 50 years from now? How could such a Frankenstein society possibly function? Do they understand it will implode and thus arrange to steal as much as they can now before fleeing? Or worse, are they planning to be our feudal masters in the ruins of the future?
I can't say if the one-state solution or the two-state solution is more just, because they're both legalisms that might be used by wealthy, lawyer-besotted whites to enslave and entrap non-whites, as they've done all over the world. South Africa had plenty of criminal legalisms that the "free" world was satistfied to tolerate, and so did the Southern United States. The evil of those societies could not be solved by diplomats or lawyers or the way they define problems. People had to be convinced to look past the rationalizations for the peculiar institutions of those lands, and recognize the essential and intentional injustice of their practices. It meant looking at Afrikaners and Southerners as under the sway of evil.
But we don't do that lightly when it's people like us oppressing people like Them.
In those cases, outside opinion (the world in the RSA's case and the American electorate in the South's case) had to impose outcome-based criteria for a just solution. One-state and two-state are means, not ends. The ends in this crisis must be hammered into the minds of Americans - the existence of civil rights for all Arabs living under the sovereign power of the Israeli government. We grasp that concept plenty fine when we see protestors in Cairo, but cross over that magic Biblical line, and suddenly God's will beclouds our judgment.
Good for Zbiggy - it makes up a little for the harm he did knowingly provoking the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan because he wanted a Soviet "Vietnam". But the Lobby didn't hesitate to smear his ex-boss for telling the truth about Israel and its nukes, which facts simply disappeared from public discussion.
By even using the term "right of return", Gingrich is admitting that something was taken from the Palestinians. So why doesn't everyone ask him why Palestinians don't have the right to return?
A white man considers his home special, sacred, his birthright and his children's, and all that crypto-religious babble. But the Arab, like the black or the Mexican, is too inferior to have human feelings, so we can take their homes, and lives, without having done serious harm. Isn't that why it just goes without saying that we can routinely kill or imprison them as a matter of protecting what's important?
Of course, international law cannot exist on this basis, which is why the haters of racial equality were drawn inexorably to Israel's cause over the decades despite starting as anti-Semites. Re-establishing the hierarchy of the races and eradicating international law matters as much to American reactionaries as any faith in biblical prophecy. The successful erasure of the Palestinians is meant to set a precedent, and so was the invasion of Iraq as America's unique entitlement.
Should a political leader rely on religion when making policy decisions?
Conservatives - Yes 63% No 32%
Republicans - Yes 62% No 35%
Is the Bible literally accurate?
Evangelical Protestants - Yes 83%
National sample - Yes 55%
Will the world end in an Armageddon battle between Jesus and the Antichrist?
Evangelical Protestants: Yes 71%
They don't learn, they don't evolve, they don't share power, they just fight for every inch of territory forever or until they destroy all their enemies, district by district, state by state, judgeship by judgeship. And recall that their ancestors once stood with Supreme Court Justice Taney when he said that "a Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." What madness will their next Supreme Court enact?
I'm confident that ultimately, the owners of MSNBC want Romney to win. But the short-term greed of a TV news network dictates the manufacturing of a horse race. Think what their ratings would be like for the next six months if Romney had locked up the race in South Carolina.
Of course, I've just accused the media of lying not just for their corporate masters, but literally to manipulate people's behavior on a night-to-night basis. So this is not good news for America. Remember what the media was doing before, during and after the 2008 crash - trying to keep the public under control.
Same reason they worshipped divorced Reagan over Southern Baptist Carter, or drunken maniac Bush over Southern Baptist Gore. You're not really one of them unless you are willing to march them towards a monopoly of power, forever. The real religion is the restoration of America's old caste system as a solution for all their problems at our expense. Carter, Gore and Romney aren't authoritarian enough to do it.
America has been moved extremely far to the right since 1980, and packing the courts was part of the strategy for doing this. Did you bother to read my links? Every important official in the GOP, by your definition, is a wingnut. If they win big in 2012, they will get a Supreme Court further to the right than the one that officially made America a plutocracy with the Citizens United decision.
Are you going to claim that this country and its laws have never gone backward on a major social issue? Why is my freedom from religion any more guaranteed than a black man's right to vote in 1876 Mississippie?
Difference is, Uganda's Christians may have been heavily influenced by American Pentecostal extremists from the New Apostolic Reformation movement. The meme for executing gays may not be African at all.
There is an enormous campaign underway on the Right to claim that separation of church and state was never intended by the Founding Fathers and is thus completely illegitimate. David Barton, a fake right-wing revisionist historian featured on Fox News, is the public leader of the campaign. Members of the Texas state school textbook commission are also adherents to this view. Any Supreme Court justices appointed by a President in the future will be expected by the entire GOP religious activist faction to impose this revisionist history on Constitutional cases.
The last of these articles talks about the attempt by the governor of S. Carolina to claim that the Lord's Prayer is one of the bases for American law.
If GOP governors, congressmen, and presidential candidates all endorse Barton's lies, then separation of church and state is not a settled matter.
I think the drivers of Nissan Leafs and the tens of millions of owners of laptop computers are going to disagree that there has been no improvement in batteries since the invention of the flashlight. Have you not heard of lithium ion?
Some of the monarchies are so hungry for electricity that they burn their own oil to produce it, despite its high export value. Others are opening up natural gas and probably don't need anything else for electricity. Solar power would make sense for the former but not the latter. However, the poorer countries of North Africa all have solar potential, and if they could export the energy to Europe in some form, that would replace coal, which is the biggest boon of all.
This brings up a subject well-known to peak oil theorists, the Export Land Model. The countries that produce the most oil tend to build their economies around the consumption of it, not its conservation. They act like they will always have enough to export. But they often also have high birth and immigration rates, so their populations are exploding. Thus even if they find more oil in the future, it will be added to their domestic consumption, not their exports.
You are absolutely right that they will come back. Net Neutrality is the same thing all over again.
But punishment will not be enough. We are dealing with institutions whose basic interests are pathological to society. One day, it will be their survival or ours.
I personally am certain if the oil crisis hadn't angered Americans, Nixon would have tried to shamelessly bull his way through Watergate. They're politicians, they obsess over poll numbers. Are you seriously suggesting that gas lines and giant price hikes and consequent double-digit inflation and even rationing had no effect on Nixon's historically bad poll numbers that summer?
Besides, later presidents have done worse things than Watergate and the public showed no support for impeachment - even when it was attempted. I'm not counting all the other things Nixon should have been executed for.
Who knows? Maybe China and Saudi Arabia told Washington that they wouldn't lend us money to finance another war, or even hold onto the Treasuries they already own. Despite America's campaign to convince Arab monarchs of the Iranian threat, the monarchies don't want another destabilizing war in the region - it gives their subjects too many ideas.
Yes, it is very different than the way we were a century ago. There is almost a palpable fear in the hegemonic power that any change at all, in technology, in politics, in economics, in religion, in consciousness, will lead to its collapse. All progress is only permitted to act as band-aids on existing practices, just as vast improvements in engine efficiency have only led to bigger SUVs, and the Internet is forcibly harnessed to protecting obsolete concepts of intellectual property.
I swear, I cannot understand the visceral hatred that some people have for renewables. But I think there is some insight in Kevin Phillips' book "American Theocracy", where he argues that the Netherlands, Britain, and the US each in turn dominated the world with a particular type of energy (wind, coal, and oil), but that this form of energy also formed the rigid cultural norms that made it impossible for those societies to rationally consider alternatives later. He says that Britain practically made a religion of coal while the rest of the world was moving on.
I'm agnostic on various types of renewables. They're clearly improving in price. But each is limited by nature to certain environments. So the more varieties we have, the better. Scotland is one of the few places (along with Hawaii and Australia) where wave power is very attractive, therefore there are a limited number of researchers and financiers working to improve it. Dry rock geothermal is really neglected given that old oil and gas wells could be a useful starter for the industry in Louisiana and Texas.
The hallmark of every renewable-hater is that he singles out one particular type as being enforced by the enviro-Commies as the only solution that will be financed (by taxes), with the obvious problems that causes. Not one of these trolls talks about the complex interactions between multiple renewables in the same market.
However, I've kept an eye on flying wind turbines, operating at altitudes where wind is constant and transmitting energy down a tether to the ground by various means. A high-risk, high-energy density approach on which research has heated up in the last decade. We really need a fly-off between the current prototypes so we can nail down a cost estimate.
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So at least some Stratfor analysis is useful.
According to Richard Clarke's book "Your Government Failed You", he witnessed the US intelligence services catching Saudi Arabia in 1986 attempting to import an entire Chinese nuclear missile facility. We do not let Egypt and Saudi Arabia get nukes. We let Pakistan and South Africa and Israel get nukes. We have arbitrary power.
I wonder what would happen if Russia and China suddenly allowed Iran to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization? That means an Israeli attack on Iran might be treated as an attack on China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Currently the SCO will not allow a country under UN sanctions to join.
Amazing that all those Israeli leaders speak English and yet none of their later words ever get reported in America. Only their youthful lies, repeated over and over again until they've set our knowledge of history in stone.
"I knew John Kennedy, and you're no John Kennedy!"
What was true of Dan Quayle has been true of all extremist darlings who came after him. Yet the extremists keep trying to create worse ones.
While I don't totally disagree with you on your points, it's important to recall when we look downthread at the stuff about how bad Diem was, that the Republic of Vietnam was manufactured by the CIA for the purpose of being ruled by Diem. He was shacked up in a monastery in California when the CIA talked him into the gig. He and his supporters were mostly northerners, so the CIA had to evacuate them to the South to create a Southern ruling elite, and once there these bastards drove Southerners off their land to create their own (absentee) estates. South Vietnam was not a real nation that chose freely to ally with us, it was theft backed by our refusal to accept the Geneva Accords. If Diem was illegitmate, thus justifying our support for the coup, how could the country be legitimate?
One GOP candidate after another makes it clear: we're not in Afghanistan to help Moslems, but to punish them. Why else would it be wrong to apologize?
Well, it debunks the line Washington tries to put out that Afghanistan is not a deeply Islamic society, that they can all be persuaded not just to be our mercenaries du jour but really to see things our way, and that the Taliban are an aberration.
That might have been feasible in 1979 before the Soviet invasion and the Saudi-Wahhabi counterinvasion, but it looks like even Kabul (where the old Marxist regime had its only support) has gone pretty far to the right. This is not a unified nation, but if big chunks of it oppose the Taliban more for ethnic rivalries than because they disagree that apostates must be shot, I don't see what we can accomplish there.
Watch the documentary Restrepo. It seemed that many Americans who watched it thought that it portrayed GIs positively. But the elite Special Forces guys who are supposedly reknowned for communicating with the natives are really of two minds; the officers try hard to sling the propaganda to the tribal elders, but they don't really understand their own scripts. The enlisted men just don't regard Afghans as particularly human. And I'm sure those tribal elders could see that.
I expect among the garrison troops in Kabul it's far worse.
Maybe Romney's (semi-)homestate supporters are afraid to drive from the suburbs into the dark scary place.
He may have no chance, but his extremism appeals to tens of millions of mostly gun-owning Americans. They have the highest voter turnout, they control midterm elections, they get fascists elected for judge, sheriff, and the board that writes your kid's schoolbooks. They supply more of their sons for our wars than anyone else, and some of those sons come home ready to apply the Pentagon's violent methods to other Americans they don't approve of.
This is one of those moments when they are illuminated in our headlights, and we'd better learn who keeps cancelling out our votes for a better America.
Bill, Angel,
Twenty years ago I swore that I would go to war on this society rather than see it dragged back into the injustices of the 19th century. I could see it coming (which proves I understand capitalism), and now I have to look at candidates like Santorum, Gingrich and Paul who actually want to restore aspects of Jim Crow, States' Rights, and the former absolute tyranny of white Christian men of property under "limited government" and "laissez faire". If one of those men win, I'm going to do what I can to organize a violent revolution to overthrow the degenerate capitalism that produced them. This country deserves to die if it returns to its worst evils.
So I pretty damn well have to vote against them.
The People's Army of Vietnam, which defeated France, the United States, and the People's Republic of China and drove them from Vietnam in 30 years, was a local, organized resistance movement that did some pretty damn nasty things, but they killed far fewer civilians than American tax dollars did. If it were my country being conquered by overwhelmingly powerful hostile aliens, Phud1, I'd consider them my role model in what I'd do. Ditto the liberation movements in Algeria, Ireland, et al. Because capitalist imperialists rely on private wealth and control the jobs the masses need, it is not possible to defeat them without attacking civilians.
Thus the descendants of the Loyalists who were driven from America into Canada 240 years ago are still complaining about the atrocities committed against them by our Founding Fathers.
I just noticed the other pattern in this map.
The countries against Iran are generally the capitalist ones that still have bad economies. The economically strong regions right now seem to be backing Iran: China, Turkey, and Latin America. The old, declining white societies against everyone else.
I hope this map is not a foreshadowing of the combatants in World War III. I see no awareness in America that, like Germany in the early 20th century, we are making more enemies than we can handle.
I have read many, many accounts of the behavior of US troops towards civilians in Vietnam. Much of it was horrifying, but much of it was also friendly and well-intentioned. It's now unimaginable that US troops once rented dives off-base in Saigon and lived unsupervised among civilians. We should be alarmed that in Iraq and Afghanistan the balance has shifted towards unbridled hostility. The problem isn't the training; the problem is that something is changing inside of us, or at least of that portion of us that joins the Army and Marines to fight the rest of the world. There is a growing barbarism loose in our land that shows in a hundred little ways every day.
Gingrich is out to prove that the American people never really believed they were occupying Afghanistan to help the people there, but only to punish them for the sin of Islam. He might succeed.
Hillary Clinton seemed to generate her own policy backing the coup in Honduras, as well. But when it looked like she was in the bag for Mubarak, things turned around.
I think we are reaching the point where the supporters of these candidates are whom we have to confront; interchangeable demagogues can easily outhate each other for their support. The problem is, 8 years ago, I figured the Cheney gang's secret plan was that if the conquest of Iraq failed and the economy collapsed, they'd simply declare martial law and deputize those we now call The Tea Party to enforce it. Now, the whackos have deputized themselves and hunt for a trustworthy tyrant to do the declaring. You cannot negotiate with people who already have decided that their survival requires that you be stripped of the vote and equal protection (or lack of same) under the law. You can only show them that if they try to get their way, you are equally willing to burn down the country rather than live as their slave or their cannon fodder.
Didn't Cole refer to the debate as "squalid"? That's close enough to "disgusting".
Also, it might be time Rep. Paul realized that the price our society paid for centuries of blind embrace of private property and free enterprise as the only value of a man, while said systems were in fact totally rigged to favor white Christians and produce staggering national and global inequality, is that white Christian capitalist men must be viewed as superior to other kinds of humans. Thus the other kinds of humans, and anyone who dissents from the masters, has a life that is of so little value that it should simply be snuffed out at the first sign of a slave rebellion. The government exists to protect "our" property, right? That is how Western capitalism triumphed, and all those who have stood against it or its wars successfully have been those who demanded human equality in reality, not in bought-out 19th century bourgeoise cliches that libertarians still worship. That's why the yuppies love you until it's time to pull the lever, Ron.
My conclusion from reading the linked article is that when a person who is committed to a movement has more education and more sources of information, he uses it for nothing but to empower his movement. The survey was done in an America where the Left has many narrow single-issue movements, but the Right has a single overarching movement that is vague enough to allow factional contradictions: that America was a better land before the 20th century and its governmental, racial and economic features must be restored to that past state or it's not really America. Not surprising; there's more agreement about the past than about the future in a declining empire. Thus right-wing neo-confederates, neoconservatives, libertarians, and theocrats all have their special erudition in their own ideologies, but are bound together in a certainty that the modern world is an evil conspiracy by Reds, Moslems, queers, etc. to take away their birthright.
So these factions are predisposed to listen to each other's conspiracy theories to the extent that it reinforces their own fears, and the more educated persons are the faster they will adapt. Seeing global warming as a conspiracy to destroy capitalism started with the libertarians. As late as 2008 there were still neocons who backed energy conservation and measures to restrain CO2 emissions until further research could be completed. But after that, the fear that the "conspiracy" was defeating real America caused all the other factions to fall into line. We are seeing the homogenization of these different reactionary strains from their fear of a growing horde of young Americans with the wrong values overrunning the ballot box. So now far-right Catholics sound like far-right Pentecostals did in 2008, libertarians have adopted anti-immigration and anti-abortion positions from white natalists, corporate conservatives are screeching "interposition" and "nullification" like George Wallace, etc.
Comparing the advertising of the past to the sophisticated mind control techniques that multinational corporations spend fortunes on today is like comparing Tippecanoe & Tyler Too with Dr. Goebbels' Ministry of Information.
There have been articles recently about how Target stores track and study people's movements so they can predict their behavior. The evil wizards of Madison Avenue also claim that most people are sheep following a handful of influential, charistmatic types. The latter have been identified demographically and targeted. Of course, Karl Rove and his ilk keep up with this, which is how they are able to target black neighborhoods with harassing flyers that imply they should stay away from the voting booth unless they're absolutely sure all their "papers" are in order. The automation of personalized propaganda is being pioneered by the big Internet players.
They know too much about us, their knowlege is growing exponentially, and they are using it against us.
Actually, the problem is that advertising works.
Since there's no reason why any ad needs to be true, and advertisers are increasing their understanding and control of human thought faster than humans are evolving in intelligence, we must eventually lose control of our senses to those who pay for the ads.
That means Free Will, the entire premise behind Christian sin, liberal government, and free markets, is simply another technological problem that is being defeated by our plucky plutocrats and bureaucrats. That means our entire concept of freedom is potentially meaningless. We can't be sure that anything we do is not the product of contrived programming.
Every commercial you've ever seen, besides selling the product it's obviously about, sells one other thing: the idea that business, in general, has your best interests at heart, that it is the main source of goodness, prosperity and freedom. Government propaganda and religious theology at least shove that in your face for you to reject. But to reject that all those different products in our lives from all those businessmen represent some higher good is damn near impossible.
Solutions?
How do you think America gets the crappy Middle Eastern policy that it has? A lot of money is spent making us believe those policies are correct.
So really, you DON'T like Ike, who defended democracy, kept the military more firmly under civilian control than it has been since, and enforced a 99% marginal tax rate on the ultra-wealthy that he might not have agreed with.
In those days, voter turnout was higher than now, and government was generally improving.
Whenever foreigners criticize a conservative official in our government, our far right fanatics are immediately ready to go to war for him, to kill, to destroy, to terrorize everyone else into silence.
So now that foreigners have criticized an American general and his vaguely liberal boss for not being pro-war enough, will American peaceniks, pacifists, leftists, and Occupiers take to the streets to back them up?
No chance in Hell. And Obama gets the message from that, which us idealists will never understand. Politicians will go where the loyalty is, even if it's blind, bland, centrist loyalty. And that is why the Right gets away with its extremism and no one else does.
Iran isn't my enemy. Any Moslem who refuses to bown down to arbitrary demands, attacks and invasions from Israel is your enemy. Your boys have hundreds of nukes and it's time to admit it - meaning that you admit you don't really need to put settlements on stolen land as a "buffer zone".
Hooray! We're starving Iranians for a non-existent weapons program!
Mark, I'd have one tiny iota of respect for you if you were enough of a man to admit that your goal is illegal regime change. The second iota burned up in Iraq when we destroyed the place for its non-existent nuclear program.
The policy of the United States is to enforce regional hegemonies by backing a "friendly" dictator. The Shah of Iran was to serve that purpose in the region, but you saw the consequences. That left America falling back on the insane and impossible goal of making both Saudi Arabia and Israel the dominant powers. The oil lobby wanted the former and the Israel lobby the latter. But Saudi Arabia is founded on Wahhabism and obligated to use its wealth to expand it, while Israel wants all faithful Moslems stripped of any political power. Thus it's a zero-sum game between them and any help we give to either makes it worse.
As the Israel lobby grew in Washington, ex-Defense Secretary Cheney and his mad Neocons attempted to surmount this contradiction in both America and Israel by creating a single, far-right capitalist warmongerer ideology. They created the Clean Break manifesto for the Likud Party, and the matching Project for a New American Century for the GOP. The plan was to go to war on Moslem countries, install friendly govts in Iraq and Iran, and thus bypass those fundamentalist crazies in Saudi and transfer Big Oil's loyalties to these new regimes.
It was a total disaster. Now we're stuck keeping the mess from exploding.
The biggest military favor we perform for Israel is not exposing its open secret nuclear arsenal or treating it as a fugitive from nuclear arms control, while treating Iran as if it is. Our other favors consist of not treating its invasions and occupations as we would treat them if anyone else were perpetrating them.
I love it. The more crazy Santorum gets, the harder the far right will find it to reeducate themselves to live with Romney after the convention. Of course, Santorum could be the running mate; Palin II - Pentecatholic Boogaloo.
What's a blah person?
Well, Delia, you Canadians could get rid of Harper immediately by uniting your four left-of-center parties to stop his noisy minority from dismantling your healthcare system. This is the downside of multiparty systems; they don't know how to respond to a crazed high-turnout minority that wants to permanently overthrow the values of the society.
Answer, Ike?
The Saudis felt safe when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.
We removed Saddam. Then we told the Gulf states that our failure to stabilize Iraq was Iran's fault. So they're stuck having to help us manufacture a Sunni buffer zone. It's also a fantastic way for oil-free Jordan to get back on the US aid gravy train after the late King sided with Saddam Hussein against Kuwait.
But that creates mischief for America too. We handed the Saudis a vested interest in intervening in Bahrain and Syria. Since the Saudis keep OPEC operating in US dollars, which pressures the oil states to have to invest in the USA, we can't have everything our way with the Saudis.
In fact, the Gulf states have not shut down relations with Iran, which you would know if you read the Asia Times. It was there alleged that the Bush administration sabotaged a grand settlement Saudi Arabia had negotiated with Iran about 6 years ago to end all regional disputes between them. That made the current hysteria possible.
Where are all those Santorum apologists who blasted Prof. Cole and Obama last week over insurance coverage for contraception?
Maybe they see a little more clearly now which candidate is closer to a fascist?
You've made a point so important that I've been bedeviled by it for years. Why are fascists so willing to ally with libertarians when their agendas point in opposite moral directions?
I've come to the conclusion that the fascist trick is to divide Free Enterprise into "good" capitalists and "bad" capitalists. The good are the patriarchs and oligarchs, who rule over happy, isolated peasants and support the dominant church in controlling their minds. Catholic fascism modernized Catholic love of feudalism into the relationship of private or family-owned industry with their workers. This was called vertical syndicalism, which allowed workers to only have relationships with their superiors, not with workers from other oligarchies. Hitler took this into an even more modern Germany. His good capitalists invariably were those he needed to control Germany and build its war machine: manufacturers and certain bankers (who had connections to right-wingers like Prescott Bush in the US).
The bad capitalists, of course, are stereotyped as urban and Jewish. Their industries are hated for not producing hard goods: movies, music, and financial speculation. They also are accused of allying with Blacks to surround and destroy the righteous white Christian middle class and replacing their culture with a gutter culture with a danceable beat. Thus George Soros, Harvey Weinstein, and every Black rapper and NBA player who doesn't know his place are today rolled into a big Limbaugh snowball of liberal permissiveness/socialism.
It's ridiculous, but perfectly logical if one wishes to protect the fundamental evils of capitalism from their consequences. Speculators are a welcome part of "productive" capitalism in the good times, but when the inevitable crash happens, the fascists provide the rich with cover by isolating a scapegoat among the elites. The fascist solution is a capitalism entirely dedicated to war and profitable conquest, with the loyal masses pressured to give up certain cultural contaminants but not others (thus rap and Harry Potter are burned, but gas-guzzlers and guns are raised to a sacrament).
Don't forget Santorum's embrace of the Holy Crusades in front of a Protestant audience. That's truly the road to Hell.
The unification has already happened. Pentecostals hate Catholics and Mormons, Baptists hate Pentecostals, far-right Catholics still reject the legitimacy of Protestantism, Zionist Jews know perfectly well that Pentecostals and far-right Catholics still hate "cosmopolitan" Jews. Yet they're all falling over their feet to collectively worship whichever presidential candidate promises the most tyrannical Puritanism this week.
Is this sincere? Have they truly renounced their long-term agendas to sink consecrated daggers into each others backs? How do they intend to work together once in the White House? I literally don't see any way to do it but by actually starting World War III against the Moslems, which would give them the dictatorial powers to reorganize the government and economy to permanently subsidize their sponsors.
Longtime US intelligence official Richard Clarke, on page 103 of his book "Your Government Failed You", claims he was involved in an incident in 1988 when Saudi Arabia tried to import Chinese nuclear-capable long-range missiles and set them up at a secret base. George Schultz extracted a promise from the King that the base would be open for inspection, which apparently forced its closure.
In 1988, would the Saudis have been buying nukes to deal with Iran, or to deter an attack from an Israel that already had a nuclear arsenal and had America in its pocket? The US obviously felt the latter, and had the power to overrule Saudi Arabia. Whether it still has this power today is open to question. If it does, then the current Saudi threat is horseshit meant to give the US an excuse to act pre-emptively against Iran.
But if you recall any geography, Bill, there are no natural barriers to an invading force going in either direction in Eastern Europe. And we had a nuclear monopoly at first. So what choice did the Soviets have but to treat us as being capable of doing what Hitler did? Stalin was a mass murderer, but he didn't make the same mistake twice.
This isn't actually an argument I accept, but your refusal to even consider the other side's point of view is characteristic of why America blundered into the Cold War. George Kennan saw the entire problem in 1946: Stalin would demand to dominate Eastern Europe by right of conquest, America's crusader mentality would turn against the USSR, and each side would see the other as a Fourth Reich ready to strike.
His solution puts the lie to your justifications to America's actions and to Redshift's revisionism: Containment. Kennan's Containment was far more restrained and genuinely defensive than what the USA actually carried out. He wanted it to be strictly a European matter because he knew our aid to already-bourgeoise liberal societies would win. Our paranoia globalized the conflict to assume that any Communist anywhere who fought British, French and Dutch imperialism was a monster who wanted to rape our daughters in Kansas. The spread of the conflict was used to justify orders of magnitude increases in nuclear arsenals, power projection weapons, bases, and budgets. It also was used to purge America of radical thinkers who might have questioned that whole profitable enterprise.
Kennan became a bitter critic of the Cold War infrastructure and the developing US empire, which was never dismantled after the fall of the USSR, for reasons well outlined by Eisenhower in his farewell warning.
Our Titanic turns around by hitting iceberg after iceberg.
Read "The Shock Doctrine", for God's sake. We fully intended to turn the place into a colony, but the people fought back and Rumsfeld's mercenarized military was too weak and hated. Oil companies know international law as well as Prof. Cole does: contracts signed with a foreign occupation regime have no lasting validity. The US tried to manufacture an unelected regime under an Iraqi to satisfy those conditions, but Sistani's demand for elections scared the companies away. The Iraqi oil workers' union bravely declared that they would destroy all their facilities rather than turn them over to foreigners. Thus no elected Iraqi government dared give in to Occupation
"recommendations". The civil war resulting from our criminal incompetence (documented by the Lancet death study) made US corporate operations completely impossible, and that ran out the clock on our wretched Occupation.
To claim that we didn't intend to win control of Iraqi oil is as evil as claiming that Iraq was behind 9/11 or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction; a pretty lie to justify further holocausts.
Bill, isn't the point of an empire of bases in 130 countries that we can encircle anyone, anywhere, at any time, without any justification, leaving us an easy half-step from aggression?
You are being far too charitable to the US government in its reasons for spending more on its military than the rest of the world put together. Do you believe that America has a unique right to global hegemony, or don't you? Because that strikes at the heart of the concept of international law.
To all those here who claim proof that Iran is a terrorist nation, I throw down this challenge:
What is your damned solution?
We all know the wretched history of sanctions. If we had tried to slap Gadaffi with sanctions after he slaughtered an unaided rebellion and blew up half his cities, it would mean allowing no oil to escape his borders. So everyone else would starve, but he'd still have his fortune hidden abroad, and Libya's oil taken off the market would now have oil close to $150 again, at which point the whole global economy collapses again. How many people would die worldwide from a second crash?
In Syria, sanctions won't stop the killing either.
So now if Iran continues to do business with China and India, do we just hit all of them with sanctions? India, a democracy with millions on the brink of starvation, and China, which we soon will owe a trillion bucks to? That plus the loss of Persian Gulf oil, and how big an economic apocalypse are we talking about?
Don't pretend that there was no relationship between 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the '08 crash.
Didn't all the good warmongerers tell us that Saddam Hussein was acting as though he was engaged in a nuclear weapons program in '03, when in fact he wasn't? Who needs facts, when we feel like killing more Moslems?
Since you have no recent posts running that are specific to this, I will post this photo of the Marine sniper unit proudly displaying its Stars & Stripes with a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan:
http://godsownparty.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/scoutsniperflag_02.jpg
I am really upset about this and I want to provoke as much discussion about it as I can. If a context with the embassy attack story is needed, I guess I can ask the question, do you think that these Marines and their banner and their representation of the United States people and government bears any comparison with the accusations our media hurls daily against Iran of wanting to exterminate the Jews?
Who are these warriors fighting for? Do they consider me part of the America they wish to control the world for, or will they come hunting for me one day? I think these are bigger questions for the citizen of a democracy than the supposed threat of everyone who's not American.
Google "Lavon Affair" if you want to know how Israel operated 55 years ago.
Consider why Israel once helped Khomeini, and now claims Iran is an existential threat, once helped Hamas, and now claims it is an existential threat, etc. It doesn't care about Pakistan because all these threats are cultivated on schedule. After Israel nukes Iran, then it will tell us all that Pakistan is an existential threat. Or that someone else is an existential threat. Rinse and repeat.
Okay, so what you're saying is, when the Church is progressive, compassionate, egalitarian, and pacifist, it's always optional, but when it's bigoted, misogynistic, tyrannical, and Crusading, it's always mandatory.
So all the former is just window dressing and Roman Catholicism is in truth bigoted, misogynistic, tyrannical, and Crusading, like all the other monotheistic cults. Difference being that in working to drag civilization back to the Dark Ages, the Church has the advantage of actually being to BLAME for the Dark Ages.
Thank you, I thought there were still some good things about Catholicism but you've taught me otherwise.
And I bet you and Kate never, ever would vote for a truly liberal Catholic, no matter how air-tight his religious justifications are, and you'd be first in line to support his excommunication for failing to be a far-right bigot. How did you feel when Archbishop Romero was murdered for his "communism", using your tax dollars?
You obviously were already looking for an excuse to destroy Obama and vote in a murderous gangster like Gingrich. If you work for those who will take away my liberties, then your definition of liberty and my definition of liberty are in conflict. This has happened before, all the way up to civil war. I'm sick of the growing tyranny of Protestant fundamentalists, who bomb abortion clinics and get away with it, scheme to take the vote away from minorities a la Jim Crow, build armed militias and claim they have the right to restore the right of state governments to secede and discriminate and restore the unconscionable injustices of the past. I'm ready to fight them to the death. If you want to be their ally, just remember that once they've destroyed people like Prof. Cole, they will come for the Catholics and Jews.
Here is an article on how religious-run adoption services, due to the privatization fetish in Virginia, are getting the right to discriminate against gays.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/2/10/111037/386
See how this works, folks? The libertarians privatize all our social services to religious fanatics, in effect granting them hundreds of billions of $ in subsidies, and then exempt them from all anti-discrimination rules that conflict with their fallible, self-serving dogma. We will be paying as much in taxes as ever since the hypocrites will siphon it off to give to politicians and other theocratic projects, but we will suffer all the bigotry and inequality we had in the laissez-faire era they worship. Interesting to see who will be happy with that.
Prof. Cole, you must make these remarks by Santorum the subject of a posting. Crusade-apologism is monstrous in this day and age. And it ought to shut up the libertard Obama-bashers here - how you Ayn-boys feel about the church's right to order you to fight a war on Islam just 'cause?
It's insane. The Crusades are nothing but a list of crimes and aggressions, including the sacking of Christian Constantinople and the butchering of Jerusalem's population. The Crusades and the Inquisition are recognized by historians as being a coordinated effort by the papacy to restore its authority after its return to Rome from exile. Crusades = anti-Semitism, in the eyes of its authors.
Irony is, Prohibition was a Protestant-run movement that viewed alcohol as a "Catholic" drug, and looked to punish Catholic immigrants for their alieness. Catholics defended a freedom that Protestants and most of the GOP wanted to trash.
Bill Clinton already destroyed the welfare state in 1999 at the behest of capitalists and the GOP congress. Which is why the Bush economic collapse left tens of millions in suffering unprecedented since WW2. Are you going to seriously sit there and claim Obama is way to the left of Bill Clinton?
You want to go back to the good old days when censorship boards run by local Protestant churches chopped up books and movies in towns all over America? Or when private clubs and neighborhoods allowed no Jews? That's more totalitarian than who the hell pays for a woman's medical care, and you know it. The tyranny of landlords, robber barons, popes, superstition-mongering priests, all once Church-approved, was a hundred times worse than living in the modern America created by FDR. You don't like it, move to a Catholic country that still arrests gays and women who have abortions, like... uh, well, every Catholic country seems to be getting more advanced than the USA in gay rights and women's rights now, along with health care for the poor. I guess Catholics are a bunch of leftist totalitarians everywhere but Gingrich-land.
As a former Baptist and long-time critic of Protestant fundamentalism, I have never been able to understand the game being played between far-right Protestants and far-right Catholics to join forces while ignoring the differences in doctrine that justify their separate existences.
It's as if both groups are really part of a 3rd religion, extremist, violent Americanism, yet they must hide in their existing religions to obtain certain Constitutional advantages that they intend to deny to everyone they regard as un-American.
Pat Buchanan is the paragon of the Catholic-who's-really-a-Baptist. Like a quantum particle he exists in two religious states at the same time, embracing the Pope's anti-Communism and utterly ignoring his pacifism, because the Pope is himself just a tool to strengthen America.
I think every religion introduced into this country gets contaminated over several generations by the essentially Protestant aggression of its founding; the individual greedbag who claims that God approves of his rape of land and "lesser" peoples in the name of productivity, which will then fund further conversion and conquest. This entrepreneurial evangelism became first Manifest Destiny, then Imperialism, then the road to assimiliation for Jews and Catholics. Thus pro-war, pro-natalism, pro-rich, pro-pollution, pro-speculation, anti-Latino and anti-regulation.
Americanism is Protestantism twisted into a self-justifying tribal religion; people of other religions want to be part of the tribe too. But they will get shortchanged by ignoring an agenda that demands total conversion. Right-wing Catholics can support the destruction of the public school system, but Catholic schools are too expensive to compete with the vast fanatic-subsidized machinery of Baptist and Pentecostal schools and home-schooling. Is it so important to crush liberalism that you will hand your children over to enemies for conversion?
But a coup would normally mean the generals, who are wedded to the status quo. So it would happen because they think Assad Jr. isn't brutal enough to save their privileges. A coup by lower-ranking officers, meaning Sunnis looking for power redistribution, would be harder. Note that in most coups carried out by colonels, majors, etc, the overthrown regime was incompetently organized: Libya '69, Egypt '52. No surprise that Liberia and The Congo were conquered by former sergeants! If you're only a colonel and you want to take over a country, you need serious CIA backing.
I don't see how either this or Libya could be defined as genocides unless the population of a particular city were defined as an ethnic group. Mass murder is not the same thing as genocide.
I'm disappointed that there's not more response to this posting. Prof. Cole is broaching a provocative idea, that the 3rd world countries may be more objective about alternative energy than the US. After all, there's nothing more objective than being broke and having to solve a problem regardless. I've been reading about the idea that great empires are ideologically wedded to their sources of power, even when they become a liability. The British were in love, not with coal, but the power that coal brought them, and lagged behind the newer industrial states in adopting more modern hydrocarbons. Now the problem seems to be a culture of gasoline in America, such that the mere act of building an electric car gets one attacked in bizarre and deeply sociopathic ways. Many people seem to think that any change in how we transport ourselves is literally treason, even if our great-grandparents happily lived in cities and rode around on streetcars without equating it with communism.
Mancur Olson thought that a country might stand a better chance of modernizing itself by losing a war and getting badly destroyed, because the previously successful must be crushed to make it possible.
Wow, I'm reading all this bickering and realizing why the American left is beyond useless. We don't agree on definitions, we don't agree on facts, and we don't even admit our narrow agendas to each other, which mostly consist of backing one particular murderous tyrant in the hope that he, whether "Westernizing" Zionist, "Socialist" Arab, or "just plain ornery" Iranian will somehow turn the tide of evil that rules the world.
No wonder those Occupy kids won't say what their platform is. They've seen us all make fools of ourselves.
We're not defending Iran's hypothetical nuclear program, we're condemning the hypocrisy of people like yourself who deny that Israel has hundreds of nukes (the South African govt. has produced documents showing Israel tried to sell some to the apartheid regime) so that you can justify more wars for "defenseless" Israel.
Well sure, they've had America doing it for them. But China still benefits. You think China doesn't worry about Islamists? Or heroin smuggling from Afghanistan? When China's ideology-free cynicism leads them to oppose every popular uprising and every attempt at political change because it upsets Chinese shipping contracts, they are very happy to often share the interests of America, a declining status-quo power afraid of futher change.
The day will come when China will exert itself as a military power, and we will have to live with it because we made it so goddam easy by wasting our power on paranoid delusions. At that point, will we prefer a China that defends the status quo everywhere, or attacks it everywhere?
What's sickening to me about the slowly growing Chinaphobe meme is that China is actually propping up the US at some expense to itself, as are Saudi Arabia and Japan. You know the Saudis were somehow pressured into getting OPEC to denominate all oil purchases in US $ in 1971, which created permanent demand for a currency that was unlinking from gold due to its problems. The Arab $ had to be spent somewhere; OPEC knew a lot would be reinvested in the States. Japan in turn got stuck having to recycle its US $ back here to prevent our currency from collapsing to the point where we couldn't buy Japanese goods anymore, and now China has fallen into the same trap.
Perhaps China has a real strategy to make us pay for it long-term. But right now they must keep buying our T-bills. Neither of our parties dares announce an economic strategy designed to take advantage of a falling $ to return us into a exporter; it would ruin too many lives.
For all we know, all three of these countries also prop us up as a quid pro quo for our global military hegemony. As much as we at this forum hate what the US does with its power, the rulers of those countries are cynics, not human rights advocates. Saudi needs protection from its own people, Japan and China need the world made safe for commerce. Ironically, our ideologues built an empire of military bases in 130 countries that has doubtless gained our corporations many unfair benefits abroad. But now, our corporations can't be bothered to make things to export, or learn what foreigners think. China needs Islamism to be contained, it needs radicals and populists silenced, it needs Central Asia "stabilized"... why not let America foolishly spend its blood on these tasks, then Chinese corporations can move in and build factories and railroads and pipelines where Wall Street is too cowardly to tread?
Somehow, I doubt that back when Great Britain was cashing out its empire to survive the World Wars and going from the world's greatest creditor to its greatest debtor while the US was doing the reverse - because all the gold went from London to New York - any British politician would have run for office using this ad, with a friendly caucasian speaking the same message in a perfect Yankee accent.
The ad is meant to stoke anger. If we were losing our hegemony to a white country, we wouldn't be as angry. The British could bear handing their dominance over to us because we were the most "like" them, and we were trusted to protect them. No country will, or should, do this for us now.
I read the article. They think big, don't they? The Israelis and Arabs each think they can use China against each other, but China will just suck them dry and get them in debt, while advancing its economic juggernaut towards Europe. Still, that should be an improvement over the current madness.
I'm still having trouble with treason versus sedition.
So now can we all agree that there is no clear parting of the nations into good guys and bad guys? I've been cheering for the BRIC states to take down the US a peg just like many of you, but I knew they had their own agendas. It would be better if a social democracy were surpassing America because then we'd have to learn a lesson. But even the anti-American countries have needed cheap labor and weak pollution laws to attract capital and thus attain the growth rates that strengthen themn against America and the Pentagon. We should hope their options improve with success, as they did for the current 1st world states, and that they don't merely back every endangered dictator against his own people in the name of anti-intervention - which would make them ironic mirrors of anti-Communist America.
We need a world of balance of power, and that requires that the USA remain a player, not that it remain a hegemon.
How often have liberals, anywhere or at any time in human history, deliberately embraced the dismantling of their country's power when they thought they still had the resources to continue it? When have even leftists done that? Lenin gave up part of the Russian empire to the Kaiser fully expecting to get it back by revolution. Britain and France gave up their colonial empires not out of liberal enlightenment, but under pressure from the (leftist-despised) Truman and his newly superpowered America. Liberals, radicals, progressives, socialists and Marxists have all cynically backed the continued power of their homelands when it supported their goals. ESPECIALLY in democracies. They know voters hate them for being unpatriotic and weak.
The dark question is, when will human beings start rewarding leaders for walking away without a concocted claim of victory? I'm not going to vote for a peace candidate if I believe his foreign or domestic policies will ruin my country.
Actually, your evidence equally supports the idea that this is an unrepresentative dictatorship which favors a minority over all other citizens, and that minority will fight to the death to hold onto power. I bet the old apartheid regime could have put together a pretty good street march in Johannesburg in favor of white power, and it would have been sincere. Unfair distribution of wealth between population groups was also a cause of the Libyan revolution, and a source of conflict in many, many developing countries across the political spectrum.
Question is, how do you disarm this bomb when it's already going off?
Well, Mo, after Iran launches its only nuke against Tel Aviv (since nuking Jerusalem would be apostasy), Israel will still have 200 nukes left to launch against Iran. So the rest of your laughable scenario is invalid.
Oh wait, you actually believe Israel doesn't have nukes? Based on what? Israel NEVER denied having nukes! Anyone who accuses it of having nukes, like Jimmy Carter, is simply smeared as an Arab-lover without the accusation being addressed.
You want to believe Israel has no nukes to justify America going to war to kill every Moslem that Israel says is a threat, and then giving the wasteland to more Jewish settlers.
And the fact that Israel co-developed its bomb with apartheid South Africa (Mandela dismantled SA's program after he won) says so much that you don't want said.
But you're admitting, then, that after we attack the reactor, we will be in a state of war with a still-functional Iranian military, right? So logically, we will have to defeat that military to protect our client states in the region. And since we can't send troops to Tehran, we will have to bomb its command and control centers. To which Iran can reasonably retaliate with everything it has, if international law still means anything. So we really have no choice but to pursue regime change rather than spend a decade worrying about Iran's retaliation.
You're so 2003, Bill.
Some folks think Iran-Contra was a "two-off", or even a "three-off". I've read allegations that Reagan not only used Bush Sr. as a go-between (while still running for office) to talk Khomeini into holding the hostages just a little bit longer, but also that Israelis were present at those meetings. Israel was quite friendly with Khomeini that year; it wanted Persians to butcher Arabs that year. Other years, it wanted Arabs to butcher Persians.
I guess before 1972 our alliance with Taiwan was considered untouchable. However, only a schemer with Nixon's putrid witchhunting credentials could disarm his own party's extremists to abandon Taiwan.
I recall they actually did call it a Taiwan Lobby, but it was nothing compared to what we now merely call THE Lobby.
Your last paragraph is one of those Things Americans Aren't Supposed To Say, so I'm glad you did. How dare we imply that conservative culture yearns for a restoration of Jim Crow? Even if they do fly Confederate flags, piss on Abe Lincoln (still), look for every opportunity to remove blacks from voter rolls, and worship the holy slaveowner trinity of weak federal government plus states' rights, unlimited property rights, and gun rights? Even if the KKK was truly a patriot militia that won.
The mythologized good old days are strangling the blood flow to our brains. The myth must be destroyed or our future will be.
Herbert Hoover once said, "If you haven't made a million dollars by the time you're 30, you're not much of a man." (He had.)
We elected him president anyway. And paid for it.
If we don't punish them for these attitudes, they will keep screwing us.
In my heart I'm probably even to the left of you, Elkern, but I realize I have to stay out of a concentration camp to even get to the Promised Land, and a large faction of the GOP has been drooling for years about removing people like me from the streets, so I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying.
As for Marsh's insult of Gore not winning his home state, hey, Taylor, you're talking about Tennessee! How much further to the Right would Gore have to had moved to win there? Well to the Right of Obama, if Harold Ford was any indication.
Everything you say about Obama is true, but you know nothing about what the modern right-wing movement is like. Very few liberals spend any time going to websites like talk2action.com or tracking the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or even opening up a sleazy gun-nut mag at your supermarket to find out how murderously intolerant the GOP has become.
I've been tracking it for the last 30 years, and I am certain, beyond a doubt, that the goal this entire time has been for a means to guarantee white Christian power regardless of economic or racial reality. The only way to do this is to reconstruct the entirety of 19th century law, unspoken law, culture, and economics. Which necessarily includes Jim Crow, prison slave labor, starvation of the poor, National Guardsmen gunning down strikers in the streets, and the end of all pollution, worker safety and child labor laws. It's all been pointing this way since the movement began, and there's no workable place to stop short of total implementation.
So until the Left is ready and willing to organize mass disruptions of a magnitude comparable to what it took to bring down the 19th century model in the first place, all we can do is frustrate the extremists' goal of implementing disenfranchisement before there are too many minority voters to hold back. By 2050 it will be too late for them, and that's why they have more urgency than us.
The impression I got was that Hillary began undermining Zelaya first, and Obama let her run the show. In fact, she's pretty much been an embarassment at State, which is why I think Obama put her over there - to finish her off. When's the last time a Secretary of State got anywhere in this country? Americans hate diplomats, hate diplomacy, and hate the notion that foreign affairs are a matter of negotiable interests instead of moral crusades. It's a dead-end job.
It looks like Putin is beginning to nail down the formula for preserving his naval base under the next Syrian regime. Which would be a pretty amazing concession on the part of the Arab monarchies bankrolling the resistance. It would be like international recognition of Russia's sphere of influence, at America's expense.
I guess authoritarian oil powers, whether pro or anti-US, will stick together.
Excellent article. What more can we say?
Question is, are we looking at a political party, or a political movement? Movements can't deal with their problems by moving to the center, but to the extreme, because movements die in the center, while parties thrive there.
Especially since the success of those missions simply proves that Big War doesn't work anymore. Big War meaning, conquest, control of territory, occupation of populations, transformation of their political systems. Too expensive, too many variables, too much nationalism to overcome. Iran would have to be a Big War.
Word is, Ron Paul says he will not go independent.
If he ran, the GOP would face an electoral debacle of such a scale that it might complete the realignment of America in the direction it appeared to be headed in November 2008. Meaning a multicultural, multiethnic society reflecting the radically different ideas non-whites have about the role of government and business. Recall that Ron Paul got in trouble because his newsletter ran articles, under his name, claiming that pro-capitalist "sensible" blacks were being suppressed by the socialistic welfare black majority. So Paul, or whomever he trusted to use his byline, thinks most blacks are crazy pinkos. Which they are, compared to him. Maybe he'd rather live with the war machine than give it up and let the tax money go permanently to people he thinks are lazy and crazy.
Or, he will be well paid by his fellow capitalists to sit it out.
But I hope he runs.
Stop to think in how many ways Israel has foreshadowed the US since that lurch began:
1. invasion and occupation excused by pre-emption
2. internal security and anti-terrorism measures
3. the combination of privatization and militarization of the economy
4. the fencing of the profits from #3 into a massive real estate boom, creating an asset inflation biased towards the rich instead of wage/price inflation
5. the acceptance of theocratic politics holding democracy hostage
6. the beginnings of a discussion of disenfranching the evil and disloyal minority group, slowly, steadily, to keep the current majority forever the electoral majority
There's just too much evidence that Israel was intended as a prototype for the US's future. There are people in common in both countries involved in all the above events.
The question might then be, what do these villains intend both countries to look like 50 years from now? How could such a Frankenstein society possibly function? Do they understand it will implode and thus arrange to steal as much as they can now before fleeing? Or worse, are they planning to be our feudal masters in the ruins of the future?
I can't say if the one-state solution or the two-state solution is more just, because they're both legalisms that might be used by wealthy, lawyer-besotted whites to enslave and entrap non-whites, as they've done all over the world. South Africa had plenty of criminal legalisms that the "free" world was satistfied to tolerate, and so did the Southern United States. The evil of those societies could not be solved by diplomats or lawyers or the way they define problems. People had to be convinced to look past the rationalizations for the peculiar institutions of those lands, and recognize the essential and intentional injustice of their practices. It meant looking at Afrikaners and Southerners as under the sway of evil.
But we don't do that lightly when it's people like us oppressing people like Them.
In those cases, outside opinion (the world in the RSA's case and the American electorate in the South's case) had to impose outcome-based criteria for a just solution. One-state and two-state are means, not ends. The ends in this crisis must be hammered into the minds of Americans - the existence of civil rights for all Arabs living under the sovereign power of the Israeli government. We grasp that concept plenty fine when we see protestors in Cairo, but cross over that magic Biblical line, and suddenly God's will beclouds our judgment.
Good for Zbiggy - it makes up a little for the harm he did knowingly provoking the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan because he wanted a Soviet "Vietnam". But the Lobby didn't hesitate to smear his ex-boss for telling the truth about Israel and its nukes, which facts simply disappeared from public discussion.
By even using the term "right of return", Gingrich is admitting that something was taken from the Palestinians. So why doesn't everyone ask him why Palestinians don't have the right to return?
A white man considers his home special, sacred, his birthright and his children's, and all that crypto-religious babble. But the Arab, like the black or the Mexican, is too inferior to have human feelings, so we can take their homes, and lives, without having done serious harm. Isn't that why it just goes without saying that we can routinely kill or imprison them as a matter of protecting what's important?
Of course, international law cannot exist on this basis, which is why the haters of racial equality were drawn inexorably to Israel's cause over the decades despite starting as anti-Semites. Re-establishing the hierarchy of the races and eradicating international law matters as much to American reactionaries as any faith in biblical prophecy. The successful erasure of the Palestinians is meant to set a precedent, and so was the invasion of Iraq as America's unique entitlement.
From Kevin Phillips' book "American Theocracy":
(National surveys 2004-5)
Should a political leader rely on religion when making policy decisions?
Conservatives - Yes 63% No 32%
Republicans - Yes 62% No 35%
Is the Bible literally accurate?
Evangelical Protestants - Yes 83%
National sample - Yes 55%
Will the world end in an Armageddon battle between Jesus and the Antichrist?
Evangelical Protestants: Yes 71%
They don't learn, they don't evolve, they don't share power, they just fight for every inch of territory forever or until they destroy all their enemies, district by district, state by state, judgeship by judgeship. And recall that their ancestors once stood with Supreme Court Justice Taney when he said that "a Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." What madness will their next Supreme Court enact?
I'm confident that ultimately, the owners of MSNBC want Romney to win. But the short-term greed of a TV news network dictates the manufacturing of a horse race. Think what their ratings would be like for the next six months if Romney had locked up the race in South Carolina.
Of course, I've just accused the media of lying not just for their corporate masters, but literally to manipulate people's behavior on a night-to-night basis. So this is not good news for America. Remember what the media was doing before, during and after the 2008 crash - trying to keep the public under control.
Same reason they worshipped divorced Reagan over Southern Baptist Carter, or drunken maniac Bush over Southern Baptist Gore. You're not really one of them unless you are willing to march them towards a monopoly of power, forever. The real religion is the restoration of America's old caste system as a solution for all their problems at our expense. Carter, Gore and Romney aren't authoritarian enough to do it.
America has been moved extremely far to the right since 1980, and packing the courts was part of the strategy for doing this. Did you bother to read my links? Every important official in the GOP, by your definition, is a wingnut. If they win big in 2012, they will get a Supreme Court further to the right than the one that officially made America a plutocracy with the Citizens United decision.
Are you going to claim that this country and its laws have never gone backward on a major social issue? Why is my freedom from religion any more guaranteed than a black man's right to vote in 1876 Mississippie?
Difference is, Uganda's Christians may have been heavily influenced by American Pentecostal extremists from the New Apostolic Reformation movement. The meme for executing gays may not be African at all.
Bill,
There is an enormous campaign underway on the Right to claim that separation of church and state was never intended by the Founding Fathers and is thus completely illegitimate. David Barton, a fake right-wing revisionist historian featured on Fox News, is the public leader of the campaign. Members of the Texas state school textbook commission are also adherents to this view. Any Supreme Court justices appointed by a President in the future will be expected by the entire GOP religious activist faction to impose this revisionist history on Constitutional cases.
Here are some examples:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/11/24/105429/41/Front_Page/Gingrich_Appears_in_Video_Which_Claims_Constitution_Based_on_Old_Testament
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/11/7/8190/55149/attack_on_courts/More_Homeschool_Dominion
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/5/6/114253/5797
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/4/16/162432/056
http://www.examiner.com/atheism-in-fort-worth/exposing-david-barton
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/24/192424/912
The last of these articles talks about the attempt by the governor of S. Carolina to claim that the Lord's Prayer is one of the bases for American law.
If GOP governors, congressmen, and presidential candidates all endorse Barton's lies, then separation of church and state is not a settled matter.
I think the drivers of Nissan Leafs and the tens of millions of owners of laptop computers are going to disagree that there has been no improvement in batteries since the invention of the flashlight. Have you not heard of lithium ion?
Some of the monarchies are so hungry for electricity that they burn their own oil to produce it, despite its high export value. Others are opening up natural gas and probably don't need anything else for electricity. Solar power would make sense for the former but not the latter. However, the poorer countries of North Africa all have solar potential, and if they could export the energy to Europe in some form, that would replace coal, which is the biggest boon of all.
This brings up a subject well-known to peak oil theorists, the Export Land Model. The countries that produce the most oil tend to build their economies around the consumption of it, not its conservation. They act like they will always have enough to export. But they often also have high birth and immigration rates, so their populations are exploding. Thus even if they find more oil in the future, it will be added to their domestic consumption, not their exports.
You are absolutely right that they will come back. Net Neutrality is the same thing all over again.
But punishment will not be enough. We are dealing with institutions whose basic interests are pathological to society. One day, it will be their survival or ours.
I personally am certain if the oil crisis hadn't angered Americans, Nixon would have tried to shamelessly bull his way through Watergate. They're politicians, they obsess over poll numbers. Are you seriously suggesting that gas lines and giant price hikes and consequent double-digit inflation and even rationing had no effect on Nixon's historically bad poll numbers that summer?
Besides, later presidents have done worse things than Watergate and the public showed no support for impeachment - even when it was attempted. I'm not counting all the other things Nixon should have been executed for.
Who knows? Maybe China and Saudi Arabia told Washington that they wouldn't lend us money to finance another war, or even hold onto the Treasuries they already own. Despite America's campaign to convince Arab monarchs of the Iranian threat, the monarchies don't want another destabilizing war in the region - it gives their subjects too many ideas.
Yes, it is very different than the way we were a century ago. There is almost a palpable fear in the hegemonic power that any change at all, in technology, in politics, in economics, in religion, in consciousness, will lead to its collapse. All progress is only permitted to act as band-aids on existing practices, just as vast improvements in engine efficiency have only led to bigger SUVs, and the Internet is forcibly harnessed to protecting obsolete concepts of intellectual property.
I swear, I cannot understand the visceral hatred that some people have for renewables. But I think there is some insight in Kevin Phillips' book "American Theocracy", where he argues that the Netherlands, Britain, and the US each in turn dominated the world with a particular type of energy (wind, coal, and oil), but that this form of energy also formed the rigid cultural norms that made it impossible for those societies to rationally consider alternatives later. He says that Britain practically made a religion of coal while the rest of the world was moving on.
I'm agnostic on various types of renewables. They're clearly improving in price. But each is limited by nature to certain environments. So the more varieties we have, the better. Scotland is one of the few places (along with Hawaii and Australia) where wave power is very attractive, therefore there are a limited number of researchers and financiers working to improve it. Dry rock geothermal is really neglected given that old oil and gas wells could be a useful starter for the industry in Louisiana and Texas.
The hallmark of every renewable-hater is that he singles out one particular type as being enforced by the enviro-Commies as the only solution that will be financed (by taxes), with the obvious problems that causes. Not one of these trolls talks about the complex interactions between multiple renewables in the same market.
However, I've kept an eye on flying wind turbines, operating at altitudes where wind is constant and transmitting energy down a tether to the ground by various means. A high-risk, high-energy density approach on which research has heated up in the last decade. We really need a fly-off between the current prototypes so we can nail down a cost estimate.
Shame that the neocons haven't noticed those OWS protestors downtown demanding those same things in America.