Category Archives: anti-war

America’s War Party

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By Steven Lendman

Source: SteveLendman Blog

America is a one-party state with two wings, each virtually identical to the other, differing only in style and rhetoric.

They’re in lockstep on issues mattering most – notably supporting endless wars at the expense of peace, equity and justice.

America’s so-called war of independence changed little, afforded no benefits for “we the people,” did nothing more than substitute new management for old.

Civil war had nothing to do with freeing slaves, everything to do with keeping the nation intact and serving dominant monied interests. War assures huge profits.

19th century wars were waged to steal land and resources from America’s native people, annex Texas, then half of Mexico, followed by Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, Hawaii, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Canal Zone, Puerto Rico and other territories.

Peace candidate Woodrow Wilson manipulated public sentiment in office, turned largely pacifist Americans into raging German haters and got the war he wanted.

Senator Robert La Follette/later 1924 Progressive Party presidential aspirant said at the time “(e)very nation has its war party.”

“It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely.”

“It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition. It is just as arrogant, just as despotic, in London, or in Washington, as in Berlin.”

“The American Jingo is twin to the German Junker. If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another.”

Yesteryear’s “Jingo” is today’s bipartisan neocon, the curse infesting Washington, waging endless wars on humanity at home and abroad – risking another global one with super-weapons able to extinguish life on earth.

Socialist leader Eugene Debs was imprisoned for opposing America’s involvement in WW I. Ahead of his ordeal, his Socialist Party called the war “a crime against the people of the United States.”

He said “(t)hey tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people.”

“That is too much, even for a joke…Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder… And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.”

During the war my dad was conscripted to fight in, about 900 people were imprisoned for opposing it. Tens of thousands declared themselves conscientious objectors and refused to serve.

True to its tradition, The New York Times supported America’s war party, urged its readers to inform authorities of “any evidence of sedition” instead of denouncing the great war preceding the greater one two decades later.

Endless others followed, raging today in multiple theaters, much more likely coming, possible nuclear war today more threatening than perhaps any previous time.

Monied interests support America’s war party – benefitting hugely at the expense of most others.

Resisting tyranny is a universal right and obligation. We have a choice – resist or perish.

 

How The American Neoconservatives Destroyed Mankind’s Hopes For Peace

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: TruePublica.org

When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.

I know about this, because I was part of it. I helped Reagan create the economic base for bringing the threat of a new arms race to a failing Soviet economy in order to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the Cold War, and I was appointed to a secret presidential committee with subpeona power over the CIA. The secret committee was authorized by President Reagan to evaluate the CIA’s claim that the Soviets would prevail in an arms race. The secret committee concluded that this was the CIA’s way of perpetuting the Cold War and the CIA’s importance.

The George H. W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State James Baker kept Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev and achieved the reunification of Germany with promises that NATO would not move one inch to the East.

The corrupt Clintons, for whom the accumulation of riches seems to be their main purpose in life, violated the assurances given by the United States that had ended the Cold War. The two puppet presidents—George W. Bush and Obama—who followed the Clintons lost control of the US government to the neocons, who promptly restarted the Cold War, believing in their hubris and arrogance that History has chosen the US to exercise hegemony over the world.

Thus was mankind’s chance for peace lost along with America’s leadership of the world. Under neocon influence, the United States government threw away its soft power and its ability to lead the world into a harmonious existance over which American influence would have prevailed.

Instead the neocons threatened the world with coercion and violence, attacking eight countries and fomenting “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics.

The consequence of this crazed insanity was to create an economic and military strategic alliance between Russia and China. Without the neocons’ arrogant policy, this alliance would not exist. It was a decade ago that I began writing about the strategic alliance between Russia and China that is a response to the neocon claim of US world hegemony. http://www.rense.com/general77/tus.htm

The strategic alliance between Russia and China is militarily and economically too strong for Washington. China controls the production of the products of many of America’s leading corporations, such as Apple. China has the largest foreign exchange reserves in the world. China can, if the government wishes, cause a massive increase in the American money supply by dumping its trillions of dollars of US financial assets.

To prevent a collapse of US Treasury prices, the Federal Reserve would have to create trillions of new dollars in order to purchase the dumped financial instruments. The rest of the world would see another expansion of dollars without an expansion of real US output and become skeptical of the US dollar. If the world abandoned the US dollar, the US government could no longer pay its bills.

Europe is dependent on Russian energy. Russia can cut off this energy. There are no alternatives in the short-run, and perhaps not in the long run. If Russia shuts off the energy, Germany industry shuts down. Europeans freeze to death in the winter. Despite these facts, the neocons have forced Europe to impose economic sanctions on Russia. What if Russia responded in kind?

NATO, as US military authorities admit, has no chance of invading Russia or withstanding a Russian attack on NATO. NATO is a cover for Washington’s war crimes. It can provide no other service.

Thanks to the greed of US corporations that boosted their profits by offshoring their production to China, China is modernized many decades before the neocons thought possible. China’s military forces are modernized with Russian weapons technology. New Chinese missiles make the vaunted US Navy and its aircraft carriers obsolete.

The neocons boast how they have surrounded Russia, but it is America that is surrounded by Russia and China, thanks to the incompetent leadership that the US has had beginning with the Clintons. Judging from Hillary’s support in the current presidential primaries, many voters seem determined to perpetuate incompetent leadership.

Despite being surrounded, the neocons are pressing for war with Russia which means also with China. If Hillary Clinton makes it to the White House, we could get the neocon’s war.

The neocons have flocked to the support of Hillary. She is their person. Watch the feminized women of America put her in office. Keep in mind that Congress gave its power to start wars to the president.

The United States does not have a highly intelligent or well informed population. The US owes its 20th century dominance to World War I and World War II which destroyed more capable countries and peoples. America became a superpower because of the self-destruction of other countries.

Despite neocon denials that their hubris has created a powerful alliance against the US, a professor at the US Navy War College stresses the reality of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance. http://sputniknews.com/world/20160414/1037981155/russia-china-cooperation.html

Last August a joint Russian-Chinese sea and air exercise took place in the Sea of Japan, making it clear to America’s Japanese vassal that it was defenceless if Russia and China so decided.

The Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that the joint exercise illustrates the partnership between the two powers and its stabilizing effect on that part of the world.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that Russian-Chinese relations are able to resist any international crises.

The only achievements of the American neoconservatives are to destroy in war crimes millions of peoples in eight countries and to send the remnant populations fleeing into Europe as refugees, thus undermining the American puppet governments there, and to set back the chances of world peace and American leadership by creating a powerful strategic alliance between Russia and China.

This boils down to extraordinary failure. It is time to hold the neoconservatives accountable, not elect another puppet for them to manipulate.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1975 to 1978. Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy. After leaving the Treasury, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

War Pabulum: The Perils of War as a Master Narrative

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photo posted on post-gazette.com

By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

I was reading the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin and came across the following commentary by her:

“A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media … War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous.  By reducing the choices of action to ‘a war against’ whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.  This is puerile, misleading, and degrading.  In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance.  All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the ‘right’ side and therefore will win.”

This passage is copyrighted 2012, and surely Le Guin is commenting in part on the American political and war scene, even if these comments came as an afterword to her novel “A Wizard of Earthsea.”

The stories we tell ourselves – our driving narratives and metaphors – are very powerful.  I learned this almost three decades ago from one of my professors at Johns Hopkins.  We were talking about the scientific revolution, the label applied after the fact by historians to the era of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.  Did that era truly deserve the label of a “revolution” in thought?  On one level, yes.  A heliocentric vision replaced a geocentric one.  Newtonian physics replaced Aristotelian metaphysics.  But on another level, the label was misleading.  If you view this era only through a “revolutionary” lens, everything gets magnified and refracted through it.  You’re always looking for evidence of the “revolution” that you know is there.  The revolutionary narrative/metaphor, in other words, restricts and distorts your vision.  It also tends to answer questions before they’re even asked.  Certain historical figures get labeled as “revolutionaries,” others as “reactionaries,” some as winners, others as losers, almost without having to think about it.

That’s disturbing enough for a historian dealing with the “dead” past.  Think about how that distortion, that resort to easy categorization, applies to the living, to the present, in “wartime.”  Viewing everything through a war lens both restricts and distorts our vision.  We quickly force people to take sides, or we assign them a side regardless of their complexity (“You’re either for us or against us,” as George W. Bush noted in the aftermath of 9/11).  Just as quickly, the “heroes” adopt the violent methods of the bad guys (witness the bombing, the invasions, the use of torture, performed by the U.S. in the stated cause of “liberation”).  No ethical complexity is tolerated since “our” troops are on the right side (so we think).  Even when they embrace violence and lose control, deadly mistakes and even war crimes are readily excused as aberrations that should be forgotten, rare exceptions that do nothing to besmirch America’s exceptional and heroic nature.

The power of narratives is remarkable.  The United States continues to be driven by one that’s dominated by power, violence, and war.  Is it any wonder, then, that the two major party candidates for the presidency, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, fit so easily and readily into this narrative?  Hillary plans to continue to wage war even more aggressively than Obama has, and Trump is all about violent solutions and an “Us” versus “Them” mentality.  (Build a wall!  Biggest, baddest military!  Make America great again!  Punch the protesters!    Extreme vetting!  Throw the illegals out!)

Until we change our national narrative from one of constant war and violence to something more pacific and modulated, our political scene will continue to be, to borrow Le Guin’s words, puerile and misleading and degrading, with candidates serving up heroic violence as pabulum, as infantile reassurance.

Saturday Matinee: Jammin’ in New York

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George Carlin On War Transcript

“Jammin’ in New York” (1992) was Carlin’s 8th HBO special and was a performance he considered a career-best. The constant stream of jokes and wordplay are kept at a rapid pace throughout the show but the true highlights are his incisive commentary on the government’s war-like tendencies which bookend this classic.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2jpm7j

If you enjoyed Jammin’ in New York, you should also check out “It’s Bad for Ya” (2008), his final album and HBO comedy special. Some of the most memorable and enduringly truthful moments of both performances are still widely shared as video clips and meme quotes.

It’s Bad for Ya can be viewed in it’s entirety here:

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v6465331He5623cW

‘What It Takes to Be President of the American Police State: Anti-Big Money, Anti-War, Pro-Constitution, Freedom-Loving Candidates Need Not Apply’

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: A Government of Wolves

“The qualifications for president seem to be that one is willing to commit mass murder one minute and hand presidential medals of freedom to other war criminals in the next. One need only apply if one has very loose, flexible, or non-existent morality.”—Author and activist Cindy Sheehan

Long gone are the days when the path to the White House was open to anyone who met the Constitution’s bare minimum requirements of being a natural born citizen, a resident of the United States for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older.

Today’s presidential hopefuls must jump through a series of hoops aimed at selecting the candidates best suited to serve the interests of the American police state. Candidates who are anti-war, anti-militarization, anti-Big Money, pro-Constitution, pro-individual freedom and unabashed advocates for the citizenry need not apply.

The carefully crafted spectacle of the presidential election with its nail-biting primaries, mud-slinging debates, caucuses, super-delegates, popular votes and electoral colleges has become a fool-proof exercise in how to persuade a gullible citizenry into believing that their votes matter.

Yet no matter how many Americans go to the polls on November 8, “we the people” will not be selecting the nation’s next president.

While voters might care about where a candidate stands on healthcare, Social Security, abortion and immigration—hot-button issues that are guaranteed to stir up the masses, secure campaign contributions and turn any election into a circus free-for-all—those aren’t the issues that will decide the outcome of this presidential election.

What decides elections are money and power.

We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that our votes count, that we live in a democracy, that elections make a difference, that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, and that our elected officials are looking out for our best interests. Truth be told, we live in an oligarchy, and politicians represent only the profit motives of the corporate state, whose leaders know all too well that there is no discernible difference between red and blue politics, because there is only one color that matters in politics—green.

As much as the Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies, they are part of the same big, brawling, noisy, semi-incestuous clan. Watch them interact at social events—hugging and kissing and nudging and joking and hobnobbing with each other—and it quickly becomes clear that they are not sworn enemies but partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

The powers-that-be will not allow anyone to be elected to the White House who does not answer to them.

Who are the powers-that-be, you might ask?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be are the individuals and corporations who profit from America’s endless wars abroad and make their fortunes many times over by turning America’s homeland into a war zone. They are the agents and employees of the military-industrial complex, the security-industrial complex, and the surveillance-industrial complex. They are the fat cats on Wall Street who view the American citizenry as economic units to be bought, sold and traded on a moment’s notice. They are the monied elite from the defense and technology sectors, Hollywood, and Corporate America who believe their money makes them better suited to decide the nation’s future. They are the foreign nationals to whom America is trillions of dollars in debt.

One thing is for certain: the powers-that-be are not you and me.

In this way, the presidential race is just an exaggerated farce of political theater intended to dazzle, distract and divide us, all the while the police state marches steadily forward.

It’s a straight-forward equation: the candidate who wins the White House will be the one who can do the best job of ensuring that the powers-that-be keep raking in the money and acquiring ever greater powers. In other words, for any viable presidential candidate to get elected today that person must be willing to kill, lie, cheat, steal, be bought and sold and made to dance to the tune of his or her corporate overlords.

The following are just some of the necessary qualifications for anyone hoping to be appointed president of the American police state. Candidates must:

Help grow the military–industrial complex: Fifty-five years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the growth of the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, the partnership between the government, the military and private corporations has resulted in the permanent militarization of America. From militarized police and the explosive growth of SWAT teams to endless wars abroad, the expansion of private sector contractors, and never-ending blowback from our foreign occupations, we have become a nation permanently at war. As the New York Times pointed out, “themilitary is the true ‘third rail’ of American politics.” The military-industrial complex understands the value of buying the presidency, and has profited from the incessant warmongering of Obama and his predecessors. If money is any indicator of who the defense industry expects to win this November, thus far, Hillary Clinton is winning the money race, having collected more campaign contributions from employees with the 50 largest military contractors.

Police the rest of the world using U.S. troops: The U.S. military empire’s determination to police the rest of the world has resulted in more than 1.3 million U.S. troops being stationed at roughly 1000 military bases in over 150 countriesaround the world, including 48,000 in Japan, 37,000 in Germany, 27,000 in South Korea and 9800 in Afghanistan. That doesn’t include the number of private contractors pulling in hefty salaries at taxpayer expense. In Afghanistan, for example, private contractors outnumber U.S. troops three to one. Now comes the news that the U.S. is preparing to sendtroops to Libya on a long-term mission to fight ISIS.

Sow seeds of discord and foment wars among other nations under the guise of democracy: It’s not enough for the commander-in-chief to lead the United States into endless wars abroad. Any successful presidential candidate also needs to be adept at stirring up strife within other nations under the guise of spreading democracy. The real motive, of course, is creating new markets for the nation’s #1 export: weapons. In this way, the U.S. is constantly arming so-called “allies” with deadly weapons, only to later wage war against these same nations for possessing weapons of mass destruction. It happened in Iraq when the U.S. sold Saddam Hussein weapons to build his war machine. It happened in Syria when the U.S. provided rebel fighters with military equipment and munitions, only to have them seized by ISIS and used against us. Now comes the news that President Obama has agreed to sell weapons to Vietnam, lifting a decades-long embargo against the nation whose civil war claimed the lives of more than 90,000 Americans.

Speak of peace while slaughtering innocent civilians: Barack Obama’s campaign and subsequent presidency illustrates this principle perfectly. The first black American to become president, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize long before he had done anything to truly deserve it. He has rewarded the Nobel committee’s faith in him by becoming one of the most hawkish war presidents to lead the nation, overseeing a targeted-killing drone campaign that has resulted in thousands of civilian casualties and deaths. Ironically, while Obama has made no significant effort to de-escalate government-inflicted violence or de-weaponize militarized police, he has gone to great lengths to denounce and derail private gun ownership by American citizens.

Prioritize surveillance in the name of security over privacy: Since 9/11, the Surveillance State has undergone a dramatic boom, thanks largely to the passage of the USA Patriot Act and so-called “secret” interpretations of the mammoth law allowing the NSA and other government agencies to spy on Americans’ electronic communications. What began as a government-driven program under George W. Bush has grown under Obama into a mass surveillance private sector that makes its money by spying on American citizens. As Fortune reports, “In response to security concerns after 9/11, Americans witnessed the growth of a massive domestic security apparatus, fueled by federal largesse.” That profit-incentive has opened up a multi-billion dollar video surveillance industry that is blanketing the country with surveillance cameras—both governmental and private—which can be accessed by law enforcement at a moment’s notice.

Promote the interests of Corporate America and Big Money over the rights of the citizenry: Almost every major government program hailed as benefiting Americans—affordable healthcare, the war on terror, airport security, police-worn body cameras—has proven to be a Trojan Horse aimed at enriching Corporate America while leaving Americans poorer, less secure and less free. For instance, the so-called “affordable” health care mandated by Congress has become yet another costly line item in already strained household budgets for millions of Americans.

Expand the powers of the imperial president while repeatedly undermining the rule of law: George W. Bush assumed near-absolute power soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Unfettered by Congress or the Constitution, Bush led the “war on terror” abroad and championed both the USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security Department domestically. This, of course, led to the Bush Administration’s demand that presidential wartime powers permit the President to assume complete control over any and all aspects of an international war on terrorism. Such control included establishing military tribunals and eliminating basic rights long recognized under American law.

When Barack Obama ascended to the presidency in 2008, there was a sense, at least among those who voted for him, that the country might change for the better. Those who watched in awe as President Bush chipped away at our civil liberties over the course of his two terms as president thought that perhaps the young, charismatic Senator from Illinois would reverse course and put an end to some of the Bush administration’s worst transgressions—the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, the torture, the black site prisons, and the never-ending wars that have drained our resources, to name just a few. As we near the end of Obama’s two terms in office, that fantasy has proven to be just that: a fantasy. Indeed, President Obama has not only carried on the Bush legacy, but has taken it to its logical conclusion. Obama has gone beyond Guantanamo Bay, gone beyond spying on Americans’ emails and phone calls, and gone beyond bombing countries without Congressional authorization. As journalist Amy Goodman warned, “the recent excesses of U.S. presidential power are not transient aberrations, but the creation of a frightening new normal, where drone strikes, warrantless surveillance, assassination and indefinite detention are conducted with arrogance and impunity, shielded by secrecy and beyond the reach of law.”

Act as if the work of the presidency is a hardship while enjoying all the perks: The race for the White House is an expensive, grueling horse race: candidates must have at a minimum $200 or $300 million or more just to get to the starting line. The total cost for this year’s election is estimated to exceed $5 billion and could go as high as $10 billion. However, for the winner, life in the White House is an endless series of star-studded dinner parties, lavish vacations and perks the likes of which the average American will never enjoy. The grand prize winner will rake in a $400,000 annual salary (not including $100,000 a year for travel expenses, $19,000 for entertaining, $50,000 for “general” expenses and last but not least, $1,000,000 for “unanticipated” expenses), live rent-free in a deluxe, 6-storey, 55,000 square foot mansion that comes complete with its own movie theater and bowling alley, round-the-clock staff, florists, valets and butlers. Upon leaving the White House, presidents are gifted with hefty pensions, paid staff and office space, travel allowances and lifetime medical care. Ex-presidents can also expand upon their largesse by writing books and giving speeches (Bill Clinton was given a $15 million advance for his memoir and routinely makes upwards of $100,000 per speech).

Clearly, it doesn’t matter where a candidate claims to stand on an issue as long as he or she is prepared to obey the dictates of the architects, movers and shakers, and shareholders of the police state once in office.

So here we are once again, preparing to embark upon yet another delusional, reassurance ritual of voting in order to sustain the illusion that we have a democratic republic when, in fact, what we have is a dictatorship without tears. Once again, we are left feeling helpless in the face of a well-funded, heavily armed propaganda machine that is busily spinning political webs with which the candidates can lure voters. And once again we are being urged to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Railing against a political choice that offers no real choice, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson snarled, “How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?”

Remember, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Lament for Humanity: A 50 Year Reflection

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Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

By Robert J. Burrowes

Source: RINF

Deeply affected by the death of my two uncles in World War II, on 1 July 1966, the 24th anniversary of the USS Sturgeon sinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship Montevideo Maru which killed the man after whom I am named, I decided that I would devote my life to working out why human beings are violent and then developing a strategy to end it.

The good news about this commitment was that it was made when I was nearly 14 so, it seemed, anything was possible. Now I am not so sure.

Here is my report on 50 years of concerted effort to understand and end human violence.

In 1966 one of my immediate preoccupations was war. The US genocidal war on Vietnam was raging and, as a sycophantic ally of the United States, Australia had been drawn into it some years previously. Trying to understand what this war was really about was challenging, particularly given the limited (mainstream) sources of information available to me at the time.

But I was deeply troubled by another problem too. I had seen a photo of a starving African child in the newspaper when I was ten and I found this most disturbing. Why did adults let children starve? I wondered. And trying to make sense of this by reading newspaper reports or asking those around me was utterly unenlightening.

By the early 1970s the environmental crisis was starting to impact on my awareness too, including through environmental campaigns I heard about and the ‘limits to growth’ literature published by the Club of Rome, which I read at University.

So where are we today?

Well, the most casual perusal of the state of our world reveals the ongoing (and recently heightened) threat of nuclear war and obliteration (on top of the ongoing and rapidly spreading radioactive contamination generated by Fukushima and the use of Depleted Uranium weapons), ongoing phenomenal levels of military spending and the endless push from corporate and other elite interests for more wars. Hence, we are witness to and, through our taxes, active supporters of an endless sequence of wars, military invasions, occupations and coups, virtually all of them instigated by the US elite and its allies, as well as a sequence of ‘local’ wars, also instigated by western elites and supplied with weapons by western corporations.

The global economy teeters on the brink of collapse and, of course, from the viewpoint of those 100,000 people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve to death each day or those one billion people who live in a state of semi-starvation and abject poverty in many parts of the world, it has already ‘collapsed’. This all happens at the instigation of insane elites who continue to accumulate and hoard their wealth, much of it in illegal offshore tax havens. Given the enormous psychological damage that individual members of the elite have suffered, millions or even billions can never be enough.

And the environmental crisis has only become vastly worse with the synergistic impact of our combined assaults on the environment causing human extinction-threatening strain on the biosphere. These devastating assaults include those inflicted by military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), the emission of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and spreading radioactive contamination.

We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet and inducing the collapse of hydrological systems. Human activity drives 200 species of life (birds, animals, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone.

Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings, now or in the future.

In addition, you might have noticed the ongoing attacks on everything from our civil liberties and right to privacy to our right to eat healthy food that has not been poisoned and/or genetically mutilated.

So why does all of this happen? Well, 50 years of research and decades of nonviolent activism have had some rewards and particularly the research that Anita McKone and I conducted during our 14 years in seclusion (1996-2010) which fully explained why human beings are violent. In essence, it is an outcome of the visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by adults on children. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Moreover, this research also gave us enormous insight into the insanity of the global elite and those who serve them in order to maintain this worldwide system of violence and exploitation that is killing us all while destroying the biosphere. Whether it be the politicians who implement elite policies, the academics who ‘justify’ or remain silent about this violence and exploitation, the business people who manage it, the judges, magistrates, lawyers and prosecutors who defend and ultimately enforce it, the teachers and media personnel who teach and promote (or distract us from) it, or the soldiers, private military contractors, police and prison officers who inflict its most direct violence, the global elite is served by a ready stream of witting or unwitting people, many of whom are paid by your taxes to do its bidding. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.

And just to ensure that you are endlessly frightened into accepting this worldwide system of violence and exploitation, and to support its further encroachment into your life, the global elite conducts an ongoing terrorist campaign against you. See ‘Terrorism: Ultimate Weapon of the Global Elite’ and ‘Why Elites Love Drones’.

But there is another huge problem too: Lack of solidarity.

Elites know that they can divide us and that enables them to conquer us. Despite our efforts to build solidarity over recent decades, elites keep finding new ways to emphasize our ‘differences’. We need to start thinking of our selves as ‘We are all each other’. Does it matter if the ‘big’ difference between us is our gender, our race, our class, our religion, our nationality or something else (or even all of these)?

While elites can easily manipulate us, especially via education systems and the corporate media, into projecting our fear and self-hatred onto others who are ‘different’ and then inflicting violence on, or even killing, each other because, in effect, ‘I am an adult and you are a child’, ‘I am a man and you are a woman’, ‘I am non-indigenous and you are indigenous’, ‘I am a Christian/Jew/Hindu/Buddhist and you are a Muslim’, ‘I am working class and you are middle class’, ‘I am white and you are not’, ‘I am straight and you are LGBTQIA’, ‘I am one nationality and you are another’, ‘I am a feminist and you are a socialist’, or even ‘I am human and you are a bird/animal/fish/insect/reptile/amphibian/plant’ then we haven’t even begun to realize that the real issue is that we are all living beings and this insane elite is willing to do anything they can to exploit and, if necessary, kill us all.

Isn’t it time we started to see what makes us the same – victims of violence and exploitation – rather than focusing on what, after all, are the rather less significant differences in our bodily characteristics, in our beliefs or even the causes of our exploitation (which is not meant to diminish the significance of the outcomes of direct and structural violence which undoubtedly have variable impact)? Fear divides us.

One interesting personal outcome of this lifetime of effort, apart from the many arrests, terms of imprisonment (including once in a psychiatric ward where I was forcibly injected with ‘antipsychotic’ drugs), bankruptcy and seizure of my passport that have been direct results of my nonviolent activism, is that Anita and I have been homeless since 1999: conscience has its costs. Moreover, a worldwide search has failed to identify more than a handful of individuals (but pre-eminently my parents, James and Beryl, both veterans of World War II and now 93) or an organization of any kind that is willing to fund our research or our work to end human violence. Of course, there is a psychological explanation for this as well. See ‘Why Don’t We Try to Understand and End Human Violence?’

So what of human prospects? Not good. With an insane elite controlling the US (and other) military/nuclear arsenals and the highly exploitative global economy (with the secret corporate governance deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, designed to further consolidate corporate control of our world), as well as the dominant discourse via the education systems and corporate media, very few people have the emotional and intellectual capacities to critique this world order and then strategically and nonviolently resist the rush to extinction in which we now find ourselves. In short, most human beings are utterly (unconsciously) terrified and remain politically inert despite time and opportunities slipping rapidly away.

And those who do courageously resist this violent world order face a phalanx of violent institutions, ranging from psychiatry – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – and the pharmaceutical – see ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’ – and agribusiness – see ‘Monsanto, America’s Monster’ – industries to the corporate media – see ‘Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire’ – and the police, legal and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – designed to neutralize or stop us, one way or another.

So what do I suggest? Well, with the scientific evidence now indicating that near term human extinction is the most likely outcome – see ‘Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?’ – it is increasingly clear that if we are to end human violence in all of its many and complex manifestations, and prevent human extinction, then we need an integrated and comprehensive strategy for doing so that also provides many meaningful avenues for involvement by individuals and organizations who wish to respond powerfully: token gestures have no value. Over many years I have endeavoured to create this overarching strategy and I invite you to participate in it by doing one or more of the following.

If you are an adult, you might consider dramatically modifying your treatment of children in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. You might also find this article useful in better understanding how to do so: ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If these suggestions seem beyond you, then perhaps your own emotional healing should be your priority. Despite its title, this article explains what you need to do: ‘An Open Letter to Soldiers with “Mental Health” Issues’. And remember this: if you don’t believe that you are ‘important’ enough to spend time learning to know yourself more deeply, I disagree. You are important.

Separately from the above, you might like to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

And if you would like to learn how to make your nonviolent action campaign for a peace, environmental or social justice outcome more strategically effective, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’. To nonviolently defend against coups and invasions, remove a dictatorship or conduct a liberation struggle, check out ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.

I am not going to get another 50 years to try to create the world of peace, justice and sustainability for which many of us strive but I am going to use every single moment of the time I have left.

Why? Because I love the Earth and everything on it. And you?

 

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

 

Why Ajamu Baraka? Why Vice President? And Why the Green Party?

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What does the Green Party nomination of longtime Black Agenda Report contributing editor Ajamu Baraka for Vice President mean for the Green Party and the 2016 presidential election?  Is he just a black face on the ticket, or is it really time to begin organizing in black and brown communities outside the matrix of the bankrupt black and brown misleadership class?

By Bruce A. Dixon

Source: Black Agenda Report

In Houston on the first Saturday of August, the Green Party nominated Jill Stein, a Massachusetts physician, and Ajamu Baraka, a longtime human rights activists as its presidential and vice presidential candidates for 2016.  Stein’s nomination was a foregone conclusion, having been the Green candidate in 2012 and the only one of several aspirants to raise money, hire staff and campaign across the country full time for more than a year.

Ajamu Baraka followed a different road to the nomination, having been an interested observer but with no organizational connection to the Green Party till now.  Ajamu Baraka was the founding executive director of the US Human Rights Network, which still seeks to have the framework of internationally recognized human rights law applied to the victims of social and economic injustice in the US.  This is a truly radical concept because the supreme law in the US is the Constitution, which chiefly guarantees property rights and the rights of corporations but not necessarily the rights of human beings to a quality education, the vote, decent housing, health care, renumerative jobs and the right to organize, or to a safe and clean environment, none of which are mentioned.
Ajamu Baraka was among the first to demand, in the wake of the Katrina disaster, that the 300,000 or so persons uprooted, the majority of them African American, be classified as “internally displaced” under international law, a status which would have guaranteed them the right to return to the cities and towns from which they were displaced and dispersed to the four corners of the US.  Since the 1980s Baraka has been a consistent and principled critic of imperial US foreign policy over the years in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Middle East.  He’s served in and led fact-finding delegations to Central America, Cuba, Israel-Palestine, Colombia and other places.  In the wake of the 2010 hunger strike waged by Georgia prisoners, Baraka led an unprecedented civilian inspection team into two state prisons where they were able to interview staff and prisoners alike.

I should say here that I count both Jill and Ajamu as comrades and personal friends, that I was on Jill’s campaign staff for several months and that Ajamu Baraka has more than 50 articles published at Black Agenda Report.
So why Ajamu Baraka?

It’s not a simple matter of putting a black face on the ticket.  Greens have run black candidates in local and national races before without managing to make a significant dent in traditional black allegiances to the Democratic party.

Stein chose Baraka because one of her campaign’s objectives is to strengthen state and local Green parties.  As a result of his more than four decades of work in the movement, Baraka has longstanding personal ties with and has been mentor to many of the activists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement around the country.  If anyone can carry the message to these forces that now is the time for organizing alternative centers of struggle for political power, centers of struggle outside the two capitalist parties and outside the nonprofit industrial complex, that someone is Ajamu Baraka.

African American voters have long been the rock upon which the Democratic party’s voting coalition rests.  But since blacks vote Democratic mainly out of fear of the Republicans, they are a captive constituency whose votes are counted but whose demands are ignored.  Jill and the Greens know it will take more than running good black or brown candidates to make its black, Latin and working class captive constituencies climb out of the Democrats’ trunk.  Realistically that won’t much happen this election.  The candidacies of Greens like Joshua Harris in Baltimore and Ashley Flash Gordon in Travis County TX are signs that something new and unprecedented is peeking over the horizon, something that will challenge the vacuity and lack of vision of the black political class.  It’s not a challenge mature enough to accomplish a string of local electoral victories across the country.  But it’s real, it’s gaining ground, building experience and it’s not going away.

The present black political class and the leadership model that supports it have been in place pretty much since the days of Booker T. Washington twelve decades ago.  They won’t be displaced this election cycle, but their political bankruptcy is every bit as real and obvious as that of their white counterparts.

Why Vice President?

A frequently asked question is why Greens run candidates for president every year, but haven’t elected or even run candidates in many states for state reps and state senators, for county commissioners and members of congress.  The answer is really simple.

The two capitalist parties protect themselves against competitors with a briar patch, a minefield of provisions and conditions expressly designed to make it all but impossible for parties not financed by the one percent to appear on the ballot.  In many states, candidates who are not Democrats or Republicans are prohibited from appearing on the ballot until after their parties have scored one percent, two percent or five percent, depending on the state, in a statewide election.

This legal requirement in states like Georgia that Greens must score tens or hundreds of thousands of votes in statewide races before being allowed to run in local races is one more of the deliberate obstacles Democrats and Republicans have erected to competition from third parties at the ballot box.  And it’s why Ajamu Baraka is running for vice president and Jill Stein for president much of the country were Greens are not allowed to run for local office.

Why the Green Party?

For the last fifty years, Republicans have deliberately made themselves the party of white racists and nativists.  There’s simply in the Republican party or African Americans except a shorter line.  Democrats talk a different game, but are responsible to the same one percenters who fund Republicans, so once in office, Democrats govern pretty much like Republicans.  In fact Democratic presidents and governors frequently enact the oppressive policies we won’t allow Republicans to enact.

NAFTA came up twice during the first Bush presidency and failed.  It took a Democrat, a President Clinton to rally enough right wing Democrats to ally with Republicans to get it into law.  Ending public aid was also something no Republican could do, but Democrats only need  the support of the black and poor when they’re candidates, not so much when they’re governing.  The 2008 Bush bailout went before a Democratic Congress and it failed.  Barack Obama had to suspend his campaign for a week and come to DC and work the phones to flip the Congressional Black Caucus and enough other Democrats to pass the Bush bailout, which he quadrupled down on once in the White House.  Again it was a blow no Republican could have struck, though many wanted to.

Barack Obama used stimulus money to fund what he called “Race To The Top”, a drive to privatize public education that resulted in the closing and privatization of thousands of public schools, and pushed hundreds of thousands of qualified experienced public school educators out of the classroom.  This too was something no Republican could have accomplished, much as they wanted to.  There are many, many similar examples of Democrats accomplishing the right wing goals Republicans can only talk about on the state and local levels.
Republicans like Donald Trump talk about how they’d like to do mass deportations.  But our First Black President has deported two million people, more than any other three presidents combined, after promising Latino voters “a road to citizenship” in both his campaigns.

The only reason to vote for Democrats is our fear of Republicans, and as Jill Stein says, this politics of fear has delivered to us everything we were afraid of.  People voted Democratic to end the war in Iraq but we got more war in the Middle East and Africa.  People voted Democrat to raise the minimum wage and see millions of new jobs created.  But the minimum wage has barely risen and the only reason official unemployment figures are down is that his policies have pushed millions of people out of the formal workforce into increasingly precarious economic situations.

At the end of the reign of our first black president, a Democrat when blacks have been the rock and mainstay of Democratic voting coalitions for two generations, forty percent of black children are growing up in poverty.  Isn’t it time for some new questions?

Why must “progressives” ride to Hillary’s rescue if we don’t get progress?

Trump is a bumbling clown and a bogeyman.  He’s raising a fraction of the money Romney raised, four years ago.  Hillary Clinton has a billion dollars to campaign with and most of the corporate media. If she can’t beat this fool with all the resources available to her, why is it up to us?  Why?  Hillary ought to be, and ought to have been helping us, not the other way around.

I don’t expect the Greens to win the presidential election.  But the US system is almost 250 years old, one of the most elderly on the planet.  Its creaks and cracks are highly visible and aren’t going away.  Isn’t it time to start imagining and building what comes next, what comes after capitalism, what comes after genocide and ecocide, what comes after patriarchy and white supremacy?

Isn’t it time to start being the change we want to see?

That won’t happen inside the Democratic party.  It’s been tried again and again.  It’s time to build something different.  So why not the Green Party?
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.  He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

 

Saturday Matinee: Duck Soup

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“Duck Soup” (1933) reportedly opened to lukewarm reviews upon release but is now widely considered by critics to be one of the greatest Marx Brothers films. The film’s plot revolves around Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) who, after being appointed the leader of Freedonia by wealthy heiress Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), must defend his country from neighboring Sylvania whose ambassador (and romantic rival) Trentino seeks to conquer Freedonia through espionage, destabilization and war. Duck Soup is an enduringly hilarious anti-war satire with classic scenes full of non-stop wordplay and physical gags that have been imitated or referenced countless times since.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3fcmpl