Get yourself a war president!

A correspondent wrote in reply to today’s New York Times article by Patrick Healy, “Voters, Worried About Terrorism, Look for Leaders at Home on Silver Screen”:

The fact that the US is not actually at war defending its shores, but is simply an invading bunch of Huns destabilizing the entire planet for the further profit of billionaires, is somehow never realized. The US military is now [almost exclusively] being used as a private armed force for giant greedy corporations to clear the way for the exploitation and plundering of the unfortunate countries who have something they want. People have been brainwashed into accepting this “war president” crap and it’s pathetic.

I would only add the corporations/investors driving this ‘imperative’ represent the mad economy of war itself, a perpetual machine that not only takes the wealth of other nations, but also sucks up most of our own. It has gone so far that we can not imagine an alternative. Instead we are at war with ourselves as well, and the worst must inevitably triumph.

Coins of Palestine

Why was Palestine divided? Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived there together for centuries. The only time it was bad for Jews was when Christian crusaders made it bad for Muslims too. Here are some photos of coins from the post-Ottoman (post–World War I) era, before it was divided.

Bipartisan war on civil liberties

Glenn Greenwald writes on the congressional failure to rein in NSA spying:

... But perhaps the most significant and enduring change will be the erosion of the trite, tired prism of partisan simplicity through which American politics has been understood over the last decade. What one sees in this debate is not Democrat v. Republican or left v. right. One sees authoritarianism v. individualism, fealty to The National Security State v. a belief in the need to constrain and check it, insider Washington loyalty v. outsider independence.

That's why the only defenders of the NSA at this point are the decaying establishment leadership of both political parties whose allegiance is to the sprawling permanent power faction in Washington and the private industry that owns and controls it. They're aligned against long-time liberals, the new breed of small government conservatives, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, many of their own members, and increasingly the American people, who have grown tired of, and immune to, the relentless fear-mongering.

The sooner the myth of "intractable partisan warfare" is dispelled, the better. The establishment leadership of the two parties collaborate on far more than they fight. That is a basic truth that needs to be understood. As John Boehner joined with Nancy Peolsi, as Eric Cantor whipped support for the Obama White House, as Michele Bachmann and Peter King stood with Steny Hoyer to attack NSA critics as Terrorist-Lovers, yesterday was a significant step toward accomplishing that.

human rights, anarchism

As towns with fire: so won, so lost

Anthony C. West, As Towns With Fire (1968):

No one seemed to know how wonderful it was to wake and listen to trees talking to new mornings and it was disturbing, even frightening, to realise that these fellows couldn’t seem to hear a thrush or blackbird while they could look up and accept the physical reality of hundreds of loaded bombers rumbling eastwards to rendezvous on Germany.

Had he the mind, he was more free than in civvy street to call the war names, since all his companions disliked and mistrusted it now they were next door to the risk of operations. They had bluffed an early enthusiasm to cream off the doubtful disappearing glamour and were realising that press and politician had coaxed them into hazard: they had only wanted to fly and to experience flying much as young bucks wanted to roar about on motor bicycles and drive fast cars with innocent simulation of sexually mature importance, a pillion or a car seat a kind of bed with the ghost of a woman on it: sex and its impotent extensions.

But free as he was to name the war its dirty name or intimately to describe the erotic possibilities of a waafine nest, he couldn’t say: look, now, how lovely that old oak. It was an acorn when Shakespeare died in Stratford. To hate, to scorn, to be salaciously falstaffian and sexually cynical was legal and logical but to love the conversation of a branch with wind was abnormal: sex, some blood and something of the flag – although these lower bourgeois boyos knew nothing of it more than newspapers untold them.

He could see freedom and could see unfreedom and know how much he was free and was unfree and watching these others he could see how they were free and how, on their own terms and expectations, they couldn’t be free since no one had bothered how to teach them how to make thinking. He had slowly moved away from many elementary notions of existence, from most of the things these boys were trying hopefully to grow into before the hairs on their chins were able to stand up to a razor: the forcing-house of war had hurried them, miscalling them fighting men, mature martyrs to chauvinism disguised as patriotism. Nevertheless it was very lonely: he felt old and able if necessary to die, as of senility.

War was not unique and this one was only a little more concentrated, noisier, better bruited. Nature was incessant war and contained it even as space held stars. If he asked nature what life was, she immediately answered: it is death, the sum of death as life is total living and dying. Were he to mention death in a conversation he would never live down a morbid reputation: it was so unfair to teach the fellows how to kill and not also to teach them how to die. The ancient tribal priest-chiefs were more charitable.

Peace: it was much more difficult and diffuse to wage. Sometimes for seconds he was really peaceful, sweetly tense, not lax. Peace was a terrible thing to endure, everyone scared of it, scared of drowning in it, rather to get drunk. No one really wanted peace. They only wanted plenty, plus safe excitement. ...

The boys in the billets had often talked of a Butch Harris, Bomber Command’s top brass who wielded the whole air force like a whip and put all Germans, good bad and indifferent, women, aged and children, as much in the front line as battle-hardened soldiers, it being popularly assumed that an experienced soldier was not any longer a suffering human being. He often wondered what these aloof leaders and high-ranked officers were as fallible human beings, what hates and loves they had as children, what fears and snubbed frustrations; naked they were only men, two-legged, two-armed, headed, bald men with or without chest hair, they bathed, ate, shat, pissed, breathed, sweated in heat and shivered in cold, scratched themselves when itchy, cleaned their teeth, cut their nails, shaved, belched, were sometimes tipsy, laughed, swore, were angry, pleased, proud, boarded their wives or concubines in the laid-down way, pushed home their common phalluses and endured the passing storm; and yet the nation gave them zeus-powers, their signature sufficient to kill ten thousand men. Maybe they even went to church and prayed and took the Elements, had gracious children . . . and O what was this demonism of power to make them all so ruthlessly mad. Did they not know they would die and meet the faceless legions of their slain?

[[[[ || ]]]]
It’d be a hell of a thing, going about and meeting one’s mere estimations of people. Some saint has said that if we could really meet and listen to another instead of trying to murder him with preconceptions, we’d hear the voice of Jesus Christ, Himself. We all use each other like a gambler uses a deck of cards. If we don’t stop doing that, sooner or later we’ll have to put up with blokes like Hitler or Joe Stalin, the big professionals, their jokers regiments of secret police who really would act on their prejudiced psychopathic estimations.

[[[[ || ]]]]
Last daylight lingered slowly into moonlight as a rising moon in a green cirrus-ring rose swiftly – a moon-dawn reversing all the shadows’ leaning, autumn’s grey mist filling up the land’s shallows like a flooding tide, as if in memory of the days when seas broke their waves across this same sandy shore: time the long rememberer.

anarchism

When you put things in people’s heads

“I don’t understand why you’re saying these things ... It’s got to stop — can’t have it, mate. ... You don’t know how I feel — Mum is all upset. Is it attention for you ... is that what it is? I’m going to put you in a home, you know that I love you ... See what happens when you put things in people’s heads? You put it into their heads and it steamrolls on, and other people start to believe it. You’ve got to get these false thoughts out of your head, Tom, you’ve got to stop it — they’re wrong, you know they’re wrong. You’re not sick, you’re just, um, just going through your teens ... You see how you can put things into people’s heads? I suppose I’ll be doing it with him next? You can’t keep saying these things, Tom!”

— ¿Simon Chapman and his associated sociopaths ranting against doctors and acousticians who report infrasound and illness due to large-scale wind turbines, thereby challenging the authority of the industry and the self-delusions of its corporate cheerleaders?

— No, the quote is from the climactic scene in The War Zone, a 1999 film directed by Tim Roth, as the father of the family is confronted by his son and daughter, when the latter at last stops rationalizing to herself and denying to others the fact of his regularly raping her.

The sociopathic position is disturbingly similar: It’s all in her head, put there by the envious in a bid for attention and desire to hurt a rival. No ability to admit guilt, perhaps because the crime is so obvious and so egregious that denial is the only possible response, twisted into an effort to explain the witnesses as the sociopaths.

In one sense, though, they do indeed “put things into people’s heads”. They awaken the conscience, they give utterance to what was suppressed, by the victims and well as the perpetrators and their enablers. They give voice to what was kept unspoken. Both victim and attacker act for self-preservation. One of them must be silenced.

wind power, wind energy, human rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism

Pagan: not a soldier.

PAGAN (Lat. paganus, of or belonging to a pagus, a canton, county district, village, commune) ... It has long been accepted that the application of the name paganus, villager, to non-Christians was due to the fact that it was in the rural districts that the old faiths lingered. This explanation assumes that the use of paganus in this sense arose after the establishment of Christianity as the religion generally accepted in the urban as opposed to the rural districts, and it is usually stated that an edict of the emperor Valentinian of 368 dealing with the religio paganorum (Cod. Theod. xvi. 2) contains the first documentary use of the word in this secondary sense. It has now been shown that the use can be traced much earlier. Tertullian (c. 202; De corona militis, xi.), says “Apud hunc (Christum) tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infidelis.” This gives the clue to the true explanation. In classical Latin paganus is frequently found in contradistinction to miles or armatus (cf. especially Tac. Hist. i. 53; ii. 14, 88; iii. 24, 43, 77), where the opposition is between a regular enrolled soldier and the raw half-armed rustics who sometimes formed a rude militia in Roman wars, or, more widely, between a soldier and a civilian. Thus the Christians who prided themselves on being “soldiers of Christ” (milites) could rightly term the non-Christians pagani. See also Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Bury, 1896), ch. xxi. note ad fin.

—Encyclopedia Brittanica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911)

War is theft

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

—Dwight Eisenhower, President, USA, April 16, 1953, New York Statler Hotel, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors [click here to go to complete text]

Of course, he was crowing over the death of Joseph Stalin and hoping for capitulations from the Soviet Union. But still, this kind of rhetoric today gets you branded as a fringe leftist. Or, as in the case of Ron Paul, simply a nutcase.

human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

The Washington Post shakes things up

First, on Friday Jonathan Turley wrote "10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free":

Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.

Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state. The most recent example of this was the National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec. 31, which allows for the indefinite detention of citizens. At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves? ...

Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.

The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.

Assassination of U.S. citizens ... Indefinite detention ... Arbitrary justice ... Warrantless searches ... Secret evidence ... War crimes ... Secret court ... Immunity from judicial review ... Continual monitoring of citizens ... Extraordinary renditions ...

And the week before (and appearing in our local paper this past Sunday), John Tirman wrote "Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars?":

As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for “your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill your mission, your abiding commitment to one another,” and offering words of grief for the nearly 4,500 members of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq. He did not, however, mention the sacrifices of the Iraqi people.

This inattention to civilian deaths in America’s wars isn’t unique to Iraq. There’s little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place. Think about the memorials on the Mall honoring American sacrifices in Korea and Vietnam. These are powerful, sacred spots, but neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts.

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers. ...

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls “the frontier myth” — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America’s sturdiest national narratives.

When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as theIndians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplan wrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, “The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.”

Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military’s code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound? It was Geronimo. ...

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

Military spending: USA vs. the world

Military expeditures 2010 (in billion 2009 USD, as % of 2009 GDP, and per capita) according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:

Worldwide total:	1,604b	2.5%	$229
Non-USA total:	917b	1.9%	$137
USA:	687b	4.7%	$2,196
China:	114b	2.2%	$85
France:	61b	2.5%	$938
UK:	57b	2.7%	$915
Russia:	53b	4.3%	$371
Japan:	51b	1.0%	$399
Germany:	47b	1.4%	$575
Saudi Arabia:	43b	11.2%	$1,587
Italy:	38b	1.8%	$626
India:	35b	2.8%	$29
Brazil:	28b	1.6%	$146
South Korea:	24b	2.9%	$494
Canada:	20b	1.5%	$578
Australia:	20b	1.9%	$877
Spain:	16b	1.1%	$346
UAE:	16b	7.3%	$1,928
Turkey:	16b	2.7%	$217
Israel:	13b	6.3%	$1,667
Netherlands:	12b	1.5%	$714
Greece:	9b	3.2%	$833
Colombia:	9b	3.7%	$194
Taiwan:	8b	2.4%	$345
Poland:	8b	1.8%	$210
Iran:	7b	1.8%	$92
Venezuela:	3b	1.3%	$112

The military expenditures of the next highest 22 countries after the USA, including the two most populous nations, China and India, all together equal those of the USA alone.

Military expenditures by the USA account for 43% of the worldwide total, are equal to 75% of the rest of the world's combined, and per capita are 16 times the average of the rest of the world.

Iran's military expenditures are one one-hundredth of the USA's, Venezuela's four-tenths of one one-hundredth. Per person, the USA spends 24 and 20 times more than Iran and Venezuela, respectively.

House and Senate votes for NDAA, military dictatorship

House (283-136): http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2011-932

Senate (86-13): http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=s2011-230

More information: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:H.R.1540:

Vermont, anarchism

Greenwald: Ron Paul versus progressives

Glenn Greenwald has written an excellent piece on the discomfort of progressives with having Ron Paul saying what they should be screaming from the rooftops in opposition to Obama (excerpt below, click here for complete essay — well worth it):

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal’s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. ... The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. ... If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views. ... Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro–due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti–Wall-Street-bailout, anti–Drug-War advocate .... Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s. ... It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Paul harshly and point out the horrible aspects of his belief system and past actions. But that’s worthwhile only if it’s accompanied by a similarly candid assessment of all the candidates, including the sitting President.

The Deer Hunter

[New York Times, Dec. 30, 2011]

To the Editor:

In “Hunting Deer With My Flintlock” (Op-Ed, Dec. 26), Seamus McGraw says he has a responsibility to kill deer because there are too many. He has volunteered to kill a deer cruelly, ineptly and with an outdated weapon that causes additional suffering to the deer. I assume that the use of the flintlock is to enhance his self-image as a master of the woodland.

He says he hunts out of a need to take responsibility for his family, who evidently live where the supermarkets offer no meat. He says meat tastes more precious when you’ve watched it die. May I recommend a trip to a slaughterhouse?

I’m tired of hearing people who enjoy killing justify it with specious moral platitudes. Animals suffer when killed. No pearly phrases can make that any better.

MARIE BROWN
Baldwin, N.Y., Dec. 26, 2011

To the Editor:

Seamus McGraw mounts all the standard defenses: I am feeding my family; there are too many deer; I kill as mercifully as possible.

But whether with a flintlock or a modern rifle, hunting cruelly takes the life of a living, sentient being that has as much right to live as any hunter or writer. It is only the prejudice of our species that justifies culling the deer population while protecting our own.

STEPHEN F. EISENMAN
Highland Park, Ill., Dec. 26, 2011

To the Editor:

I don’t have all the answers concerning Pennsylvania’s burgeoning deer population (most of it caused by the burgeoning human population), but I want to comment on the self-serving tone of Seamus McGraw’s article.

For a man who claims not to enjoy killing, he takes considerable pride in his bloodletting. That his flintlock rifle failed him, and more important, the doe, because he flinched is reason enough to put down his antiquated weapon. It ought to be reason enough for such a firearm to be banned entirely.

Beyond that, though, is the tragedy of the doe’s sole contact with a human: a moment that could have initiated a communion between the two was instead reduced to carnage. Nothing noble there. No art in it either.

CYNTHIA A. BRANIGAN
President, Make Peace With Animals
New Hope, Pa., Dec. 26, 2011

To the Editor:

Please give me a break. Seamus McGraw tells us he has to kill deer in his section of Pennsylvania because “with no predators to speak of — the wolves were wiped out centuries ago and the last mountain lion in the state was killed more than 70 years ago — the responsibility for trying to restore a part of that balance fell to me.”

Who wiped out the wolves and mountain lions? Hunters like him.

JIM F. BRINNING
Boston, Dec. 26, 2011

human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

This Is What We're Talking About

Suzanne Goldenberg writes in today's Guardian about how green the U.S. Navy's base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is and the Navy's overall plans to be very green.

Thus the lives destroyed by imperialist aggression, exploitation, and fear are offset by the lives to be saved in reducing carbon emissions! Guantánamo Bay epitomizes Good!


(Also noted in the article is the rare follow-up of real-life wind turbine performance compared with projections. In April 2005, four 950-kW wind turbines, costing almost $12 million, began supplying electricity to the base. It was projected that they would provide 25% of the base's electrical power. Instead, they provide less than 5% on a good day — which means they are actually producing much less than that on average, probably only 2%.)

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
Rebel Against the Future

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, ecoanarchism

Which Side Are You On (Palestine edition)?

Wind industry decries "delegitimization"

The industrial wind industry is a lot like the state of Israel. Both began in an idealistic spirit of creating an vibrant alternative. Both soon came to antagonize their neighbors. As uncomfortable facts about their operations became undeniable, both have retreated to an aggressive self-righteous bravado and emphasize their important economic contributions: rural jobs and nanotechnology. Both rely on demonization of an imagined enemy behind all criticism: the coal lobby or Iran. Both can only answer their critics by calling them names: Nimby, climate science denier, antisemite.

Both have delegitimized themselves. The game is over.

What I Has Learned

The purpose of a government is to collect taxes from a group of people called a "nation" to fund wars for the benefit of corporations that do not themselves pay taxes because they instead support the careers of legislators. Such wars are not only against foreign "nations", but just as often against the very people (one's own "nation") funding them. As with the fasces, the populus is bound as one by its government to be wielded as a club by the corporations.

human rights, animal rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Patriotism, a Menace to Liberty

Emma Goldman, 1911:

WHAT is patriotism? Is it love of one’s birthplace, the place of childhood’s recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naïveté, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one “an eye should be,” piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother’s knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood?

If that were patriotism, few American men of today could be called upon to be patriotic, since the place of play has been turned into factory, mill, and mine, while deafening sounds of machinery have replaced the music of the birds. Nor can we longer hear the tales of great deeds, for the stories our mothers tell today are but those of sorrow, tears, and grief.

What, then, is patriotism? “Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels,” said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.

Gustave Hervé, another great anti-patriot, justly calls patriotism a superstition - one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man’s inability to explain natural phenomena. That is, when primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that, from early infancy, the mind of the child is poisoned with bloodcurdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood, he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition. It is for that purpose that America has within a short time spent four hundred million dollars. Just think of it - four hundred million dollars taken from the produce of the people. For surely it is not the rich who contribute to patriotism. They are cosmopolitans, perfectly at home in every land. We in America know well the truth of this. Are not our rich Americans Frenchmen in France, Germans in Germany, or Englishmen in England? And do they not squander with cosmopolitan grace fortunes coined by American factory children and cotton slaves? Yes, theirs is the patriotism that will make it possible to send messages of condolence to a despot like the Russian Tsar, when any mishap befalls him, as President Roosevelt did in the name of his people, when Sergius was punished by the Russian revolutionists. ...

But, then, patriotism is not for those who represent wealth and power. It is good enough for the people. It reminds one of the historic wisdom of Frederick the Great, the bosom friend of Voltaire, who said: “Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses.” ...

Let us take our own Spanish-American war, supposedly a great and patriotic event in the history of the United States. How our hearts burned with indignation against the atrocious Spaniards! True, our indignation did not flare up spontaneously. It was nurtured by months of newspaper agitation, and long after Butcher Weyler had killed off many noble Cubans and outraged many Cuban women. Still, in justice to the American Nation be it said, it did grow indignant and was willing to fight, and that it fought bravely. But when the smoke was over, the dead buried, and the cost of the war came back to the people in an increase in the price of commodities and rent - that is, when we sobered up from our patriotic spree it suddenly dawned on us that the cause of the Spanish-American war was the consideration of the price of sugar; or, to be more explicit, that the lives, blood, and money of the American people were used to protect the interests of American capitalists, which were threatened by the Spanish government. That this is not an exaggeration, but is based on absolute facts and figures, is best proven by the attitude of the American government to Cuban labor. When Cuba was firmly in the clutches of the United States, the very soldiers sent to liberate Cuba were ordered to shoot Cuban workingmen during the great cigarmakers’ strike, which took place shortly after the war.

Nor do we stand alone in waging war for such causes. The curtain is beginning to be lifted on the motives of the terrible Russo-Japanese war, which cost so much blood and tears. And we see again that back of the fierce Moloch of war stands the still fiercer god of Commercialism. Kuropatkin, the Russian Minister of War during the Russo-Japanese struggle, has revealed the true secret behind the latter. The Tsar and his Grand Dukes, having invested money in Corean concessions, the war was forced for the sole purpose of speedily accumulating large fortunes.

The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, With the result that peace is maintained.

However, the clamor for an increased army and navy is not due to any foreign danger. It is owing to the dread of the growing discontent of the masses and of the international spirit among the workers. It is to meet the internal enemy that the Powers of various countries are preparing themselves; an enemy, who, once awakened to consciousness, will prove more dangerous than any foreign invader.

The powers that have for centuries been engaged in enslaving the masses have made a thorough study of their psychology. They know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. And the more gorgeously the toy is dressed, the louder the colors, the more it will appeal to the million-headed child.

An army and navy represents the people’s toys. To make them more attractive and acceptable, hundreds and thousands of dollars are being spent for the display of these toys. That was the purpose of the American government in equipping a fleet and sending it along the Pacific coast, that every American citizen should be made to feel the pride and glory of the United States. The city of San Francisco spent one hundred thousand dollars for the entertainment of the fleet; Los Angeles, sixty thousand; Seattle and Tacoma, about one hundred thousand. To entertain the fleet, did I say? To dine and wine a few superior officers, while the “brave boys” had to mutiny to get sufficient food. Yes, two hundred and sixty thousand dollars were spent on fireworks, theatre parties, and revelries, at a time when men, women, and children through the breadth and length of the country were starving in the streets; when thousands of unemployed were ready to sell their labor at any price. ...

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.

Such is the logic of patriotism. ...

[click here for complete essay]

human rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

$1.22 trillion: feeling secure?

2012 budget request:

Pentagon base budget:  $558 billion
Iraq & Afghanistan operations:  $118 billion
Dept. of Energy nuclear weapons activity:  $19.3 billion
Pentagon miscellaneous:  $7.8 billion
State Dept. counterterrorism activity:  $8.7 billion
Non–Dept. of Defense homeland security activities (Depts. of Homeland Security, Health & Human Services, and Justice):  $53.5 billion
National Intelligence Program:  $53.1 billion (2010 figure)
Veterans' hospital and medical care:  $59 billion
Veterans' disability pensions and education programs:  $70.3 billion
Foreign military aid:  $6.6 billion
International peacekeeping:  $2 billion
Countering WMDs, combating terrorism, clearing landmines:  $0.7 billion
Military pensions:  $48.5 billion
Civilian Dept. of Defense pensions:  $20 billion
Interest on Pentagon debt:  $185 billion (estimate)

Total:  $1,219.2 billion, or $1.22 trillion

Unknowns:
Security-related activities of NASA
Security-related activities of State Dept.
Pensions of Non–Dept. of Defense security-related employees
Interest on Non-pentagon security-related debt

Meanwhile, in the land of the free

CNN reported this clip from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Feb. 15 speech at George Washington University on internet freedom as "Clinton interrupted by protester", stating that she was "interrupted by a heckler".

In fact, Ray McGovern had simply stood up and turned his back on her. And it is clear that Clinton did not consider the police-state response to be an interruption. She just keeps blathering away in her robotic lip service to freedom.

Kevin Zeese writes more about it at Counterpunch:

When Secretary of Clinton kept speaking about the importance of freedom of speech, as if nothing was occurring before her eyes, Ray McGovern's voice became even louder. The hypocrisy of the United States became thunderous. Free speech was being snuffed out right before her eyes but she kept talking about freedom of speech, doing nothing to protect it while criticizing other countries, U.S. client states like Egypt and those enemies like Iran, for their failure to allow their people to speak freely.

On the same day that McGovern was roughed up and left bleeding by the police, independent journalist Brandon Jourdan returned from Haiti after being on assignment documenting the rebuilding of schools. When he returned to the United States, he was immediately detained, questioned about his travels, and had all of his documents, computer, phone, and camera flash drives searched and copied. This is the seventh time Jourdan says he has been subjected to lengthy searches in five years, and he has been told by officials that he is "on a list." Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Did Secretary of State Clinton say anything? No. She remained silent.

And, on that same day, as he has for the last 8 months, Pfc Bradley Manning sits in solitary confinement, pre-trial torture, for the alleged crime of sharing with the media evidence of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as crimes committed by agents of U.S. foreign policy. Included in the documents he is accused of leaking are diplomatic cables that show Secretary of State Clinton issuing a memorandum directing U.S. diplomats to spy, including illegally spying on U.N. diplomats. During his long pre-trial punishment, has Secretary of State Clinton said anything about Pfc Manning's illegal punishment before trial? No, she has remained silent.

Finally, a last example of many that I will not describe here, while Secretary of State Clinton was speaking, agents of the U.S. Department of Justice were trying to find a way to prosecute Julian Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks. They claim this super-journalist, whose publication has released more classified documents than the Washington Post has in decades, is not a journalist. Some of the most recent publications of WikiLeaks helped to spark the revolution in Tunisia. And during the revolt in Egypt, WikiLeaks documents showing that Mubarak's newly appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman was the choice of Israel to be Mubarak's successor. This U.S.-trained military and intelligence officer tortured people at the request of the United States. While Secretary of State Clinton has remained silent about the trumped-up investigation of Assange, she did not remain silent about Suleiman. She made it clear, he was America's choice as Mubarak's successor.

Also at Counterpunch, Ron Jacobs describes State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush, a new book by Andrew Kolin:

Kolin begins his book with a brief look at the debates over the writing of the US Constitution and its eventual incarnation as a blueprint for a centralized authority whose intention was to keep government away from the hoi polloi. Adjunct to this endeavor was a desire to expand the nation. This was done by killing the indigenous peoples living on the land to be expanded into. In order to justify this genocide, it was necessary to delineate the natives as something other than human. According to Kolin, the need for such an "other" is essential to the development of an authoritarian state. The Native Americans and the African slaves filled the need quite nicely given their obvious physical and cultural differences.

Another aspect of Kolin's proposition that differentiates it from so many other commentaries that have been written on the police state tactics of the Bush administration is his contention that the US police state is not a future possibility. It already exists. We are living in it. He backs up this contention with an argument that dissects the elements generally considered essential to the definition of a police state and applies them to the present day United States. From torture to propaganda techniques; from the government's ability to eavesdrop on anyone to its ability to wage war at will — these are but a few of the indices Kolin examines in his study. According to Kolin, however, the ultimate indicator of a police state is defined by whether or not the leader of a particular government (in this case, that of the United States) exists above the laws of the nation and the world. In other words, if the leader does something, is it ever illegal? Kolin provides multiple examples of every administration since Abraham Lincoln's operating in a vein suggesting that they all operated in this way at times. However, it was not until the inauguration of George W. Bush and the events of September 11, 2001, that the word of the president became a law onto its own. When George Bush said he was "the decider" he wasn't joking. He and every president to follow him truly have that power. They can decide who to kill, who to spy on, who to lock up, and who to attack without any restriction other than their own morality. Furthermore, they can also determine how such actions are to be done. As far as the presidency is concerned, no laws — not the Bill of Rights nor the Geneva Conventions — apply.

The march towards this police state that Kolin describes is best characterized by the phrase "two steps forward, one step back". Historically, for every presidential administration where excesses occurred, there followed another that saw a relaxation of some of those excesses. The repression of the Palmer Raids was followed by a decade where the Communist Party became legal; the McCarthy Era was followed by a relaxation of the anti-communist hysteria in the 1960s; Nixon's attempts to subvert the democratic process were answered with convictions and a series of laws that were supposed to prevent similar excesses. Yet, the march towards authoritarianism continued its quiet goosestep. Nowhere was this more obvious than in U.S. foreign policy. After the U.S. turmoil around its war against the Vietnamese, Congress passed a War Powers Act that supposedly limited the president’s ability to send US troops to other nations. In answer, every single president afterward pushed the limits of that law so that by the 1980s it was meaningless. Other attempts to limit the White House's ability to make war, such as the Boland amendment which made arming the Nicaraguan Contras illegal, were just ignored. By the time Bill Clinton took power in 1991, the ability of the president to attack whenever and wherever was no longer seriously challenged by Congress, leaving the White House in sole control of the nations' military might.

The nation described in Kolin's book is a fearful one. It is a nation whose agents torture at will and whose military wages war for no apparent reason other than profit and power. It is a nation whose political police forces operate as both judge and jury and often fail to leave their personal prejudices at home. It is a nation whose judicial system rarely interprets a law differently from the chief executive, and when it does that executive ignores the ruling. It is a nation where so many of its citizens live their lives under the illusion that the authoritarian rule they increasingly live with is somehow protecting them. It is a nation that refuses to prosecute officials including the former president that were involved in torture that violated domestic and international laws. Finally, according to Kolin, it is a nation without redemption that will see the powers of the police state continue to grow unless its people wake up and dismantle it.

Take a Stand for Peace

Stop These Wars!

Veteran-Led Resistance to U.S. Wars

Dec. 16, 10:00 a.m., Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C.

March to the White House for civil resistance action

Also sign this open letter to the left establishment to protest the policies of President Obama.

"[The Obama administration] has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe."