Tag Archives: Vietnam War

The Other Side of the Post’s Katharine Graham

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By Norman Solomon

Source: Consortium News

Movie critics are already hailing “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes.

“The Post” comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

“I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications,” Graham wrote. However, Robert Parry — who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s — has shed some light on the shadows of Graham’s reassuring prose. Contrary to the claims in her book, Parry said he witnessed “self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures.”

Among Parry’s examples: “On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation.” (The 1996 memoir of former CIA Director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had the story right all along.)

Graham’s book exudes affection for Kissinger as well as Robert McNamara and other luminaries of various administrations who remained her close friends until she died in 2001. To Graham, men like McNamara and Kissinger — the main war architects for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — were wonderful human beings.

In sharp contrast, Graham devoted dozens of righteous pages to vilifying Post press operators who went on strike in 1975. She stressed the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began and “the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike.” It is a profound commentary on her outlook that thuggish deeds by a few of the strikers were “unforgivable” — but men like McNamara and Kissinger were lovable after they oversaw horrendous slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Graham’s autobiography portrays union stalwarts as mostly ruffians or dupes. “Only a handful of [Newspaper Guild] members had gone out for reasons I respected,” she told readers. “One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn’t cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired.”

But for Hanrahan (whose Republican parents actually never belonged to a union) the admiration was far from mutual. As he put it, “The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting ‘replacement worker’ strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers and that corporate America — in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and other strikes — used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and the ’90s.”

The Washington Post deserves credit for publishing sections of the Pentagon Papers immediately after a federal court injunction in mid-June 1971 stopped the New York Times from continuing to print excerpts from the secret document. That’s the high point of the Washington Post’s record in relation to the Vietnam War. The newspaper strongly supported the war for many years.

Yet Graham’s book avoids any semblance of introspection about the Vietnam War and the human costs of the Post’s support for it. Her book recounts that she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page in August 1966: “We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been.” Vast carnage resulted from such unwillingness to be “precipitous.”

Although widely touted as a feminist parable, Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seemed to exist in her range of vision; painful realities of class and racial biases were dim, faraway specks. Overall the 625-page book gives short shrift to the unrich and unfamous, whose lives are peripheral to the drama played out by the wealthy publisher’s dazzling peers. The name of Martin Luther King Jr. does not appear in her star-studded, history-drenched book.

Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was indeed laudable, helping to expose lies that had greased the wheels of the war machinery with such horrific consequences in Vietnam. But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for “The Post” will change that awful truth.

 

Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Ken Burns’ Vietnam War: An Object Lesson in the Failures of the Objective Lens

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By Reed Richardson

Source: FAIR

If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, written by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.

But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.

Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns rises to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, he has produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.

As a Washington Post article (9/18/17) on all the behind-the-scenes detective work that went into the film makes clear, Burns and Novick did an incredible amount of research and original reporting. However, the narrative shortcomings of the documentary mirror many of the same journalistic sins one finds in the corporate media’s coverage of the far-off wars of today. Much like the mainstream press, Burns suffers from inherent biases about objectivity that affect his storytelling.

In an insightful New Yorker profile (9/4/17) of Burns by Ian Parker, one can see the tendrils of the filmmaker’s can’t-we-find-a-consensus editorial viewpoint that longs for inviolable truths sure to exist somewhere in between the ideological extremes:

Burns frequently—almost hourly—says, “Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time,” paraphrasing a remark made by Wynton Marsalis, in Jazz. Burns uses the line less to acknowledge historical uncertainty than to advertise inclusiveness: a desire to guide all but the most sectarian or jaded viewers through an obstacle course of their own biases. He is not disengaged from his material, but his sense of a subject, and his sense of an audience’s reaction to that subject, seem to be fused. He once said, “I want to bring everybody in.”

Later in that story, Burns betrays more of this tendency for false equivalence when he makes a prediction about the bifurcated political reaction his documentary would receive. Sounding very much like a put-upon, but archly centrist editorial page editor, he makes clear that he sees angering both the right and the left simultaneously as an occupational hazard, if not a proxy for having arrived closest to the truth:

After The Vietnam War, I’ll have to lie low. A lot of people will think I’m a Commie pinko, and a lot of people will think I’m a right-wing nutcase, and that’s sort of the way it goes.

While this suggests little capacity on the part of Burns to engage in past criticisms of his work—chief among them, his tendency to overindulge in hokey American splendor-ism—that’s not to say there aren’t stark departures from his oeuvre in The Vietnam War. In just the first few minutes of the first episode, “Deja Vu,” over a squawling original Trent Reznor score, Burns literally pushes the audience backwards by spooling iconic footage of the war—and protests of it—in reverse. It’s a disorienting, but shrewd gambit; a recognition of all the baggage the Vietnam War still carries in the American psyche.

Right after this jarring sequence, though, the old Burns reappears. We see languid, gauzy shots of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, overlaid with Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and former US senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland talking philosophically about the tragedy of suffering and surviving war. As presented, Cleland’s connection to the war is inexplicably vague—he’s only identified on-screen by his name and “Army”—and, though he is a triple amputee because of wounds suffered from a grenade blast in Vietnam, he is filmed only in close up, as if Burns still wants to ease his audience into the full violence wrought by the war. (Burns repeats this ambiguous decontextualization of his interview subjects throughout the documentary.) Then, the film’s narration, once again voiced by longtime actor Peter Coyote, offers up what journalism would call the “nut graf,” the defining leitmotif of the 17 hours and 55 minutes yet to come.

America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended 30 years later in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions made by five American presidents belonging to both political parties.

There is a lot to unpack in this short passage, but it is accurate in its summation of Burns’ narrative focus throughout his film: that is, long on personal perspectives and documentary evidence of the chronological evolution, but short on broader conclusions about American foreign policy, or any real condemnation of the indescribable cruelty and dishonesty among policymakers who orchestrated it. In one telling anecdote, Burns confided to the New Yorker that his team debated saying “ended in defeat” in this section, but nevertheless chose “failure” instead.

Likewise, the film’s “begun in good faith by decent people” line doesn’t merely land like a false note, it deafens like a discordant symphony. As Veterans for Peace pointed out, Burns’ own documentary refutes this claim. Nearly every episode in the film offers up myriad examples of our elected officials, the military, or CIA willfully lying to the public (or each other) about the US’s involvement in Vietnam, often for personal or political gain.

Nor can you overlook the passive construction of the language, which helps to strip agency from the war’s cheerleaders. Burns’ equivocations here represent stunning intellectual cop-outs, pure and simple, and throw doubt on all that follows.

Relevant to such a compromised take is how Burns and Novick get funding for their projects. Less than a quarter of their money is provided by government sources; the rest comes from charities and the private sector. So perhaps it’s foolish to believe any Ken Burns documentary—partly paid for by the likes of David Koch and Bank of America, among other sponsors—would offer up a polemicized indictment of US politicians and war policy.

By all accounts, Burns and Novick maintain full editorial independence, but their funding pipeline for future projects also greatly depends upon the continued generosity of those same nonprofit and corporate benefactors, who don’t ordinarily court highly controversial filmmakers. As a result of this ongoing relationship, there’s an unseen, but unmistakable gravitational pull that serves to keeps the pair from wandering too far afield from conventional wisdom. Just like Bank of America, in other words, Ken Burns has a brand to protect.

To stay safely within the bounds of convention, Burns and Novick spend a great deal of their time “in-country,” so to speak, on a simple, universal theme: War is hell. And their ability to convey the visceral fear and pathos of battle at the human level is remarkable and poignant: “In war, nobody wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won or lost,” says Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese soldier Burns interviews. (Bao is no random grunt—he is also the author of The Sorrow of War, a novel of a soldier’s anguish—but, again, Burns identifies him only as “North Vietnamese Army.”)

When paired with the blunt, chilling lessons that combat taught US Marine Karl Marlantes, the combination has a powerful effect. “One of the things I learned in the war is that we’re not the top species on the planet because we’re nice,” recounts Marlantes about a firefight from 1969. “People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines and stuff, and I’ll always argue that it’s just finishing school.”

Feeding this seething killing machine on the American side was a wide-open, virulent streak of racism, which Burns, to his credit, delves into (finally) in the fifth episode. (A Washington Post podcast interview with Burns—9/22/17—delves further into this aspect of the war.) Still, the film can never quite make the leap between the countless tragedies on the tactical level and strategic policies that enabled them and then quickly metastasized.

The most famous battlefield atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre, which was mostly covered up and pinned on one Lt. William Calley, again shows Burns putting his directorial thumb on the scale. Rather than call the massacre “murder,” as it was originally described by Novick, Burns switched the script to read that “the killing of civilians has happened in every war.” While true, this statement is so banal that it is meaningless, and serves to inoculate My Lai and all the other atrocities committed in the war of their conscience-shocking power. In effect, the film’s stance is normalizing war crimes. And Burns all but confesses to this in a bizarre admission to the New Yorker: “‘Killing’ was the better word, [Burns] said, ‘even though My Lai ismurder.’”

These distinctions without differences betray a corrupted objectivity, one that can’t really reckon with the fact that the wanton destruction and unceasing, lawless violence seen at My Lai was more the rule than the exception. Perpetrating atrocities was, in fact, standard operating procedure for entire units on the US and Vietnamese sides throughout the war, not merely the work of a few deranged individuals. One academic who studies democide (murder by government) conservatively estimates North Vietnam killed 216,000 non-combatants between 1954 and 1975. (The Vietnamese government had been silent about the film until this week, when it issued a boilerplate response. But Vietnamese citizens have been able to watch a version of the documentary with Vietnamese subtitles on PBS online.)

To cite but one specific example of this lawless killing by the US military, the “Tiger Force” recon platoon of the 1/327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, committed a “wave of terror” in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1967. This bloodthirsty campaign was detailed in a 2003 series by the Toledo Blade (10/19/03). But for a more exhaustively comprehensive look at the tsunami of illegal killing by the US across the entire theater, you’re better off reading Nick Turse’s damning account: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. As an American Conservative (7/30/13) book review of Turse’s book makes clear:

The relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: It was policy. This was a war fought along Fordist principles—Robert McNamara had gone to the Department of Defense straight from the helm of the auto giant—and the slaughter was industrial in scale. Victory over the Viet Cong was to be achieved by quantifiable “kill ratios,” to reach that elusive tipping point where the insurgency could no longer replenish its troops. This approach hard-wired incentives to secure a high “body count” down the chain of command, with the result that US soldiers often shot civilians dead to pad their tallies and thereby move up the ranks.

Turse sent copies of his book to Burns’ team, and it is listed as a source in the show’s online bibliography. But while episodes two and three of Burns’ series do take time to cite McNamara’s chilling preference for quantifying enemy deaths as success (i.e., the infamous “body counts”), the film still fails to connect all the dots as to how this high-level political and military mindset—also propelled by racism—set the conditions for consistent, everyday atrocities, versus mere military operations, by combat units. (Thomas Bass’s highly critical essay covering the entire 18-hour documentary—Mekong Review, 8–10/17—discusses this.)

Ironically, Burns and Novick’s compromised framing also echoes much of the jingoistic reporting of the war as it was happening, which the film does an admirable job of debunking. Most TV media coverage of the early years of ever-expanding war, Burns notes, was almost willfully obtuse, invoking World War II newsreels that portrayed the war in terms that were “enthusiastic, unquestioning, good guys fighting and defeating bad guys.” At one point, Burns features a Marine, Roger Harris, telling his mother in 1967 that “she shouldn’t believe what she sees in the newspaper, what she sees on television, because we’re losing the war.”

There were a few, notable exceptions, however. While Vietnam was still fighting French colonial rule, on-the-ground reporters like Seymour Topping, the local Associated Press correspondent in Saigon, were warning that Western imperialist intentions in the country were doomed to fail. In 1951, Topping said as much to a young congressmember from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the nation for the first time.

Once the US began sending advisers, and then combat troops, in the early 1960s, Burns points to a handful of reporters—Neil Sheehan (who was an adviser to the documentary), the New York Times’ David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne of the AP—who dared to buck the party line. After spending time in the field, the film notes, they “were beginning to see that from the Vietnamese countryside, things looked very different than they did from the press offices in Washington or Saigon.”

But even intrepid reporters committed to telling the truth about the war were susceptible to creeping American bias. Sheehan, who had fought in Korea, acknowledges that he found riding along in US helicopters on an South Vietnamese Army air assault raid “absolutely thrilling.” Similarly, Joe Galloway, a UPI reporter who filed countless battlefield reports during the war, says in the film:

You can’t just be a neutral witness to something like war.… It’s not something you can stand back and be neutral and objective, and all of those things that we try to be as reporters, journalists and photographers. It doesn’t work that way.

Not coincidentally, when Galloway recounts a landmark 1965 battle in the Ia Drang Valley, where the Air Cavalry unit he was with faced a massive, frontal attack by the Viet Cong, he notably lapses into the first-person plural: “We had two things going for us. We had a great commander and great soldiers and we had air and artillery support out the yin-yang.” That Galloway later co-authored a New York Times bestselling book about the battle with its US commander, Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, and was later awarded a Bronze Star by the US Army for helping rescue a wounded soldier during that battle, goes unmentioned by Burns.

It’s this blindspot—the failure to see that one is adopting the point of view of one’s subjects—that ultimately dooms the film’s potential. Which is a tragedy, since the US is currently failing to learn the the same painful, sunk-costs lessons of Vietnam with its bipartisan, Groundhog Day war policy in Afghanistan. As Drake University political science professor, David Skidmore, noted in his review of the film (Military Times, 9/17/17):

Now Trump has also reneged from previous pledges to disengage from Afghanistan…the histories of US military involvements in Vietnam and Afghanistan should serve as warnings to future presidents who might be tempted to again jump onto the treadmill of perpetual war.

Burns has said he wants his film to act at as “some sort of vaccination” to war, to “get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored.” But by denying the role and agency of the people who lied us into the Vietnam War, and then kept lying to keep us from leaving, his film misdiagnoses the real problem.

Looking for an invading sickness or outside cause for the mayhem and destruction our country unleashed upon Vietnam, and itself, is a dodge. In the end, the answer to the fundamental question about the Vietnam War, “Why?,” cannot be found in any clinical or objective analysis—no matter how many hours of documentary footage you have—that stubbornly avoids placing blame where it is so richly due.

Saturday Matinee: In the Year of the Pig

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in-the-year-of-the-pig1

“In the Year of the Pig” (1968) by Emile De Antonio (Point of Order, Underground, Rush to Judgement) was one of the earliest Vietnam War documentaries and was often greeted with hostility during its run in theaters by pro-war audiences. It combines interviews with a wide range of journalists, politicians, activists and key military personnel (including Harry Ashmore, Daniel Berrigan, Philippe Devillers, David Halberstam, Roger Hilsman, Jean Lacouture, Kenneth P. Landon, Paul Mus, Charlton Osburn, Harrison Salisbury, Ilya Todd, John Toller, David K. Tuck, David Werfel and John White), international newsreels and archival footage to create a scathing portrait of America’ escalating involvement in Vietnam. Horrific images speak for themselves in the most controversial film of de Antonio’s career.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xm7wme_in-the-year-of-the-pig_shortfilms

Welcome to the Empire of Chaos

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Empire-USA-déclin

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When globe-trotting journalist and keen geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar refers to the United States as the “Empire of Chaos,” it may seem like hyperbole. But upon looking deeper at both Escobar’s coverage and the United States’ foreign policy itself, it is perhaps the most accurate title for this political entity and its means of operation, perhaps more apt than the name “The United States” itself.

In the wake of World War II, the US and its allies set out upon the reclamation of the West’s lost colonies, many of which took advantage of Europe’s infighting to either establish independence from their long-standing colonial masters, or begin the conflicts that would inevitably lead toward independence.

Perhaps the most well-known of these conflicts was the Vietnam War. The United States would involve itself in the dissolution of French Indochina at the cost of some 4 million lives in a conflict that would embroil not only Vietnam, but much of Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Covert coups and brutal insurgencies were underwritten by Washington across the planet, from the Middle East to South and Central America. And while this too seems chaotic, the goal always seemed to be the destruction of independent states, and the creation of viable client states.

These client states included the Shah’s Iran, Saudi Arabia, much, if not all of Western Europe and even to varying degrees, some of the enduring autocracies of the Middle East until for one reason or another they fell out of favor with Washington. The idea was to create an international order built upon the concept of globalization.

Globalization was meant to be a system of vast interdependencies governed by international institutions created by and for the United States and more specifically, the special interests that have long since co-opted America’s destiny.

However, the concept of globalization seems to have neglected any anticipation for rapid technological advances in both terms of information technology and manufacturing. There are very few real interdependencies left to stitch this vision of globalization together with many of them being artificially maintained at increasing costs. The idea of using sanctions to ‘starve’ a nation by isolating it from this global order has been exposed as more or less impotent by nations like Iran and North Korea who have sustained themselves for decades despite everything besides air and gravity being denied to them.

Indeed, nations understand the value of self-sufficiency in both terms of politics and the basic necessities which constitute any state’s infrastructure. Russia’s recent encounter with Western sanctions has caused it to look not only eastward, but inward, to secure its interests and to transcend sanctions wholly dependent on the concept of “globalization.”

As this “carrot and stick” method of working the world into Wall Street and Washington’s international order becomes less effective, some of the uglier and less elegant tools of the West’s geopolitical trade have taken a more prominent role on the global stage. It appears that if the West cannot rule this international order built upon the concepts of globalization, it will rule an international order built on chaos.

The Empire of Chaos 

The unipolar geopolitical concepts that underpin globalization have eroded greatly. Nations no longer have to pick between an existence of lonely isolation and socioeconomic atrophy or subordination within this international order. Instead, they can pick to associate with the growing community of what the West calls “rogue states.” So large has this list grown that the US may soon find itself and Western Europe the last remaining members of its failed international order.

The real danger for an aspiring global empire is to find a planet that has suddenly begun to move in tandem out from under its shadow and moving on without them in relative peace and prosperity. To prevent this from happening we have seen a concerted effort focused on disrupting and destroying this emerging multi-polar world.

In Europe, the refugee crisis is being used to polarize European society and allow governments to increase their power domestically and further justify wars abroad. Along Western Europe’s borders, facing Russia, a relative stable balancing act maintained by former Soviet territories attempting to benefit from associating with both East and West has been turned into outright war.

Throughout North Africa and the Middle East, any nation that even so much as slightly resembles a sovereign nation state has been undermined and attempts to violently overthrow them pursued. The goal is no longer to create viable client states, but rather to Balkanize and leave them in ruins so as to never contest Western ambitions in the region again. This can be observed clearly in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen where none of the groups backed by the US and its allies could ever realistically run a functioning nation state.

And in Asia, in state after state, those leading political parties marked by Washington for future client status are being removed from power and their leaders, long backed by the US, being either exiled or jailed.

Where these political gambits are crumbling, a steady stream of violence perpetrated by terrorist groups not even indigenous to the region has begun to build in strength.

Divide and Conquer

Divide and conquer is a geopolitical maxim that has served as empire’s bread and butter since the beginning of recorded human civilization. When the British could not subdue a targeted territory just beyond the grasp of its empire, it would divide and destroy them. A ruined nation that can be plundered and trampled may not be as desirable as a loyal client state run by a British viceroy, but it is better than a pocket of national sovereignty serving as an example for others of the merits of resisting “Great Britain.”

Today, it is clear that the idea of creating a client state in the midst of a general public increasingly aware of the features and fixations of modern empire is becoming ever more tenuous. Such client states are less likely to be accepted by a local population who, with minimum effort, can put up significant resistance against even the best funded of foreign proxies.

Globalism required more and more illusions to convince people they needed a global system controlled by far-off special interests to do what can now be done through advances in technology nationally and even locally. Now all that is left is the sowing of chaos to prevent people from leveraging this technology nationally and locally, to keep them divided and distracted for as long as possible, to perpetuate the West’s global hegemony for as long as possible.

Moving Beyond the Chaos

An empire built on chaos is not meant to last. Chaos, like the international order of globalization that preceded it, requires illusions and manipulation to perpetuate itself. Unfortunately, stirring chaos among a population is a lot easier than convincing them of the non-existent interdependencies of globalization.

Nations leading the way out of this chaos include those who have suffered the most because of it. Their leaders have realized the necessity of closing off the vectors through which the West feeds this chaos within their borders, which include socioeconomic disparity, foreign-funded propaganda, foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and of course extremist groups used to carry out the actual terrorism and agitation required to create the worst sort of chaos.

Russia and China in particular have been busy creating alternatives not only for the remnants of the West’s globalization racket, but alternatives for the unipolar world the West was trying to create. They are both looking within and across their borders to create a patchwork of nations ready to move beyond the chaos and toward a more widespread balance of power.

By in turn, placing sanctions on the West, Russia is forcing itself to not only produce raw materials for export, but to become a more capable producer of finished goods. By doing so, Russia has begun a process that turns America’s sanctions game back onto itself. While many believe Washington drives American policy, it is unrealistic to discount Wall Street’s role. By cutting the corporations trading on Wall Street down to size, one cuts down their unwarranted power they wield on the global stage.

Nations choosing to trade rather than being forced to because of an ungainly system of globalization ensures that any given people have more control over not only what they buy and sell, but how and where their natural resources are used.

With the Empire of Chaos in terminal decline and with a new multi-polar order emerging, the only question left to ask is; will chaos spread and destroy faster than this new multi-polar order can be built? It is certainly a close race pushing both sides into acts of increasingly unimaginable confrontation.

Sandy Hook One Year After

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By James F. Tracy

Originally published at the Memory Hole

As the nation approaches the first anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, mainstream media are predictably excluding from their tragedy porn any substantive analysis of the idiosyncratic, misleading, and in some cases flagrantly propagandistic reportage of the event that might call the official story into question.

As with a majority of scandals and coverups over the past several decades where powerful interests are implicated, American journalism has become more and more complicit if not actively involved in delivering dubious information that establishes a dominant narrative, while thereafter failing to vigorously interrogate and amend faulty coverage that leads to vast public misconceptions.

The assassination of JFK, the falsely-reported Tonkin Gulf incident that sparked the costly Vietnam War, and the similarly questionable events of 9/11 that have together brought the US to the present national and geopolitical impasse all come to mind. One is left to ponder how the behavior of a wholly government-controlled media system would differ from our corporate-run consciousness industry that routinely and shamelessly showboats its First Amendment protections.

The consequences of such a communication breakdown are vast, with countless lives and entire nations having been undermined and destroyed. Moreover, the “first drafts of history” become plagued by myth and distortion that eventually cohere as collective memory, thus robbing a people of their self-determination, nullifying their humanity, and ensuring that the cycle repeats interminably.

Those rationally dissenting from the official record and who occupy positions to alter public opinion are usually written off by establishment-controlled media outlets as “conspiracy theorists,” “wackos,” and so on. If such individuals cannot be neutralized through defamation or blackmail, and if they possess information or occupy positions where they are capable of posing a serious and immediate threat to official fictions and thus the power structure itself, they are prone to becoming oddly “suicidal,” (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), or are simply killed outright (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, and here and here).

What else won’t we see in the corporate media’s series of heart-tugging memorials devoted to the anniversary of Sandy Hook? The two most recent and obvious indications that the event itself is at the very least a coverup include, first, the wholly unreported story of the Obama administration’s $2.5 million payout (read: bribe) to state and local law enforcement agencies directly involved in responding to the incident, and second, what is by almost any measure the entirely illegal destruction of pertinent evidence in the demolition of the crime scene itself.

Empowered by the internet as their primary means of communication, a broad array of independent researchers have conduced an impromptu “truth commission” that together calls the Sandy Hook narrative presented by corporate news media into serious question. For those with eyes to see and the ability to think critically they have also shamed the mainstream journalists directly involved in (mis)representing the event to the American public.

Yet without a genuinely independent investigation of the incident apart from the oversight and influence of the [Governor Dannel] Malloy and Obama administrations, the broader public will likely never know what actually took place on December 14, 2012 in Newtown Connecticut. As has too often been the case throughout the last half century, the prospects are high that yet another “big lie” has again taken root in the ever-malleable and somnambulent public mind.

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