Tag Archives: war on terror

If Americans Truly Cared About Muslims, They Would Stop Killing Them by the Millions

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By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

In the most dramatic expression of insider opposition to a sitting administration’s policies in generations, over 1,000 U.S. State Department employees signed on to a memo protesting President Donald Trump’s temporary ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries setting foot on U.S. soil. Another recent high point in dissent among the State Department’s 18,000 worldwide employees occurred in June of last year, when 51 diplomats called for U.S. air strikes against the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad.

Neither outburst of dissent was directed against the U.S. wars and economic sanctions that have killed and displaced millions of people in the affected countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Rather, the diplomatic “rebellion” of last summer sought to pressure the Obama administration to join with Hillary Clinton and her “Big Tent” full of war hawks to confront Russia in the skies over Syria, while the memo currently making the rounds of State Department employees claims to uphold “core American and constitutional values,” preserve “good will towards Americans” and prevent “potential damage to the U.S. economy from the loss of revenue from foreign travelers and students.”

In neither memo is there a word of support for world peace, nor a hint of respect for the national sovereignty of other peoples — which is probably appropriate, since these are not, and never have been, “core American and constitutional values.”

Ironically, the State Department “dissent channel” was established during one of those rare moments in U.S. history when “peace” was popular: 1971, when a defeated U.S. war machine was very reluctantly winding down support for its puppet regime in South Vietnam. Back then, lots of Americans, including denizens of the U.S. government, wanted to take credit for the “peace” that was on the verge of being won by the Vietnamese, at a cost of at least four million Southeast Asian dead. But, those days are long gone. Since 2001, war has been normalized in the U.S. — especially war against Muslims, which now ranks at the top of actual “core American values.” Indeed, so much American hatred is directed at Muslims that Democrats and establishment Republicans must struggle to keep the Russians in the “hate zone” of the American popular psyche. The two premiere, officially-sanctioned hatreds are, of course, inter-related, particularly since the Kremlin stands in the way of a U.S. blitzkrieg in Syria, wrecking Washington’s decades-long strategy to deploy Islamic jihadists as foot soldiers of U.S. empire.

The United States has always been a project of empire-building. George Washington called it a “nascent empire,” Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France in pursuit of an “extensive empire,” and the real Alexander Hamilton, contrary to the Broadway version, considered the U.S. to be the “most interesting empire in the world.” The colonial outpost of two million white settlers (and half a million African slaves) severed ties with Britain in order to forge its own, limitless dominion, to rival the other white European empires of the world. Today, the U.S. is the Mother of All (Neo)Colonialists, under whose armored skirts are gathered all the aged, shriveled, junior imperialists of the previous era.

In order to reconcile the massive contradiction between America’s predatory nature and its mythical self-image, however, the mega-hyper-empire must masquerade as its opposite: a benevolent, “exceptional” and “indispensible” bulwark against global barbarism. Barbarians must, therefore, be invented and nurtured, as did the U.S. and the Saudis in 1980s Afghanistan with their creation of the world’s first international jihadist network, for subsequent deployment against the secular “barbarian” states of Libya and Syria.

In modern American bureaucratese, worrisome barbarian states are referred to as “countries or areas of concern” — the language used to designate the seven nations targeted under the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 signed by President Obama. President Donald Trump used the existing legislation as the basis for his executive order banning travelers from those states, while specifically naming only Syria. Thus, the current abomination is a perfect example of the continuity of U.S. imperial policy in the region, and emphatically not something new under the sun (a sun that, as with old Britannia, never sets on U.S. empire).

The empire preserves itself, and strives relentlessly to expand, through force of arms and coercive economic sanctions backed up by the threat of annihilation. It kills people by the millions, while allowing a tiny fraction of its victims to seek sanctuary within U.S. borders, based on their individual value to the empire.

Donald Trump’s racist executive order directly affects about 20,000 people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. President Obama killed an estimated 50,000 Libyans in 2011, although the U.S. officially does not admit it snuffed out the life of a single civilian. The First Black President is responsible for each of the half-million Syrians that have died since he launched his jihadist-based war against that country, the same year. Total casualties inflicted on the populations of the seven targeted nations since the U.S. backed Iraq in its 1980s war against Iran number at least four million — a bigger holocaust than the U.S. inflicted on Southeast Asia, two generations ago — when the U.S. State Department first established its “dissent channel.”

But, where is the peace movement? Instead of demanding a halt to the carnage that creates tidal waves of refugees, self-styled “progressives” join in the macabre ritual of demonizing the “countries of concern” that have been targeted for attack, a process that U.S. history has color-coded with racism and Islamophobia. These imperial citizens then congratulate themselves on being the world’s one and only “exceptional” people, because they deign to accept the presence of a tiny portion of the populations the U.S. has mauled.

The rest of humanity, however, sees the real face of America — and there will be a reckoning.

 

Fort Lauderdale Shooting: FBI Involvement in Another Act of Violence

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By James Henry

Source: Who.What.Why.

Two months before Esteban Santiago opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol at Fort Lauderdale’s airport Friday, killing five and injuring six, he underwent an “assessment” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

This procedure, which can involve intrusive investigations and interrogation, ended with the Bureau finding that Santiago had committed no crimes and had no ties to terrorism.

A growing number of these incidents exhibit the same disturbing feature: the FBI and/or other federal agencies had prior knowledge of the perpetrators. And there’s another common thread: the FBI’s ex post facto explanations of those interactions do not make a lot of sense. What is never raised is the possibility that the government’s actions are actually pushing already unstable people over the edge.

The phenomenon has become so common that even mainstream outlets like Fox News have taken to calling people like Santiago “Known Wolves.” However, the problem is usually framed as one of law-enforcement agencies “hamstrung” by “politically correct” culture and outdated “civil liberties” limits placed upon investigators. Issues of who should and who should not be given access to guns inevitably tops the discussion.

Despite all the focus on “known wolves” like Santiago, one line of questioning is seldom pursued: What exactly took place during their interactions with government investigators, and how likely is it that these government actions made violence more probable in the future?

Soon after the shooting, the FBI told reporters that two months earlier Santiago had walked into the Anchorage FBI office and made “disturbing” remarks about hearing voices, and being forced to watch ISIS videos. He seemed “agitated and incoherent,” while maintaining “that his mind was being controlled by a US intelligence agency.” They confiscated his gun, which was registered to him.

The FBI, after deciding he had broken no laws and had no terrorist ties, turned him over to the local police who had him hospitalized briefly.

Anchorage police Chief Chris Tolley said “Santiago was having terroristic thoughts and believe he was being influenced by ISIS.”  Nevertheless, after undergoing some sort of psychiatric evaluation, he “was not adjudicated mentally ill” — and they returned to him his 9mm Walther.

Federal law-enforcement sources told NBC News that they believe it was the same gun he allegedly used in the airport shootings.

After the FBI’s “assessment” was complete, Santiago flew from Anchorage last week, ultimately ending his trip at the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, airport.

Mind Control

While the very mention of “mind control” being conducted by a “US intelligence agency” conjures images of wild-eyed paranoia, and is thus discounted out of hand, there is in fact a long and sordid history of efforts by national security agencies to manipulate individuals for various reasons. “Psychological manipulation” may be a more apt term.

Indeed, there appears to be a pattern emerging: more and more disturbed individuals who commit mass atrocities had many prior interactions with national security agents.

Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the “UnaBomber,” was the victim of a CIA-funded MK-ULTRA psychological experiment when he was an undergraduate at Harvard University. Part of the experiment involved abusive and humiliating interrogations. Understandably, many familiar with the case have wondered whether this abuse led him to later commit acts of anonymous terror.

Similarly, is it possible that Santiago’s interactions with the FBI or some other federal agency pushed him to the tipping point?

The record shows that various federal agencies have taken investigative interest in Santiago over the last few years. He was investigated by “Homeland Security Investigations” for child pornography in either 2011 or 2012, law-enforcement sources told a local CBS affiliate in Miami. Three weapons and a computer were seized, but there was not enough evidence to prosecute.

A “US military official” also told NBC Nightly News that Santiago, a veteran who served during the war in Iraq, was “being tracked” by Army Criminal Investigation Command because of “psychological issues.”

The FBI, for its part, claims to have conducted an “assessment” of him after its interaction with Santiago in Anchorage in November.

We don’t know — and likely never will know — what those investigations looked like. The agencies involved almost never divulge “sources and methods.” We do know that as a result of his interaction with the FBI, Santiago was sent to an as yet unnamed mental health facility where he underwent some kind of “psychological treatment.” Since he was an Army veteran, it’s likely the Veterans Administration was involved.

An assessment, usually cited by the FBI as the “least intrusive” level of investigation done by the Bureau, can nonetheless be very intrusive. According to an ACLU fact sheet, FBI assessments can include:

• collecting information from online sources, including commercial databases.

• recruiting and tasking informants to gather information about you.

• using FBI agents to surreptitiously gather information from you or your friends and neighbors without revealing their true identity or true purpose for asking questions.

• having FBI agents follow you day and night for as long as they want.

The FBI can also conduct an assessment on an individual just to see if he or she would make a good informant — regardless of whether that person is suspected of a crime.

Could these government intrusions push an already unstable person further into paranoia or delusion? Conscientious investigators would surely take care not to “set off” paranoid individuals who have been targeted for investigation. But it is not hard to imagine careless or unscrupulous investigators pushing too hard — particularly if the investigation involved anything touching on “national security.”

Assessing What, Exactly?

It’s worth noting that the FBI had also conducted an assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the “mastermind” behind the Boston Marathon bombing who died in a gunfight with police.

Attorneys for his younger brother, Dzhokhar, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 2015, wrote in court documents that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s interactions with the Bureau “were among the precipitating events for Tamerlan’s actions during the week of April 15, 2013.” Family members and “other sources” told Dzhokhar’s defense team that the FBI tried to pressure Tamerlan into becoming an informant.

Dzhokhar’s lawyers suggested that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s interactions with the Bureau could have “increased his paranoia and distrust.”

We also know that an undercover FBI agent goaded Elton Simpson to “tear up Texas” shortly before he and his roommate, Nadir Soofi, shot up a “Draw Mohammed” contest in Garland, Texas, on May 3, 2015. Hours before the event, the FBI sent a bulletin to local police warning that Simpson was “interested in the event.”

Even more troubling, there was an undercover FBI agent at the event communicating about security measures with a third individual, whom agents knew had been in contact with one of the shooters.

All this information was only made public because some of the agent’s text messages were quoted in court documents.

Arun Kundnani, lecturer on terrorism studies at New York University, told The Intercept about the incident:

The FBI uses informants and undercover agents to pressure suspected ISIS sympathizers into committing acts of violence, so that they can then be prosecuted. The Garland shooter case is the most striking illustration yet of the dangers of this approach. Essentially, it suggests the government may be manufacturing the very threat it is supposed to be countering.

The list goes on: Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter; Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the NY/NJ bomber; Usaama Rahim, shot dead after he went after police with a knife in Boston; Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter; and Wasil Farooqui, who attacked two random people with a knife in Virginia  — all had interactions with the Bureau before seemingly going berserk.

FBI CYA

“The FBI failed there… The federal government already knew about [Santiago’s claim that the CIA was making him watch ISIS videos] for months, they had been evaluating him for a while, but they didn’t do anything,” the accused shooter’s brother Bryan Santiago told the Associated Press.

In what has become almost a boilerplate description of these assessments, the FBI told reporters that the FBI investigated Santiago, conducted “interagency checks” and did “database reviews.”

“During our initial investigation we found no ties to terrorism,” Special Agent Ritzman told reporters. “He broke no laws when he came into our [Anchorage] office making disjointed comments about mind control.”

But as we’ve seen time and again, it’s the FBI’s statements about its interactions with a soon-to-be-violent perpetrator that are disjointed. (Read this for an in-depth analysis and comparison of the FBI’s explanation of its interactions with one of the “Boston bombers” and the more recent “NY/NJ Bomber.”)

Note the specific reference to terrorism in the FBI statement. The implication is that Santiago could not have been investigated further because no direct link to terrorism was found. But he told them he had been watching ISIS videos, so there was a link.

In fact, the FBI routinely goes after people for similar activity. Since 9/11 the Bureau has been repeatedly accused of creating elaborate, time-consuming stings to entrap individuals who, the agency believes,,might commit an act of violence in the future — on no more evidence than social media rants and the like.

Another curious discrepancy in the FBI report: the agency claims that Santiago said in November he didn’t want to hurt anyone, but since he had recently been arrested for domestic violence, there was reason to suspect he was capable of such action.

Maybe “mind control” is too strong a term to describe what these individuals experienced at the hands of government investigators. But whatever is going on in the shadows, it is not ending well for the rest of us.

We Have Met the Alien and He Is Us

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By William Astore

Source: TomDispatch.com

We Are The Empire
Of U.S. Military Interventions, Alien Disaster Movies, and Star Wars
By William J. Astore

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Cartoonist Walt Kelly’s famed possum, Pogo, first uttered that cry. In light of alien disaster movies like the recent sequel Independence Day: Resurgence and America’s disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, I’d like to suggest a slight change in that classic phrase: we have met the alien and he is us.

Allow me to explain. I grew up reading and watching science fiction with a fascination that bordered on passion. In my youth, I also felt great admiration for the high-tech, futuristic nature of the U.S. military. When it came time for college, I majored in mechanical engineering and joined the U.S. Air Force. On graduating, I would immediately be assigned to one of the more high-tech, sci-fi-like (not to say apocalyptic) military settings possible: Air Force Space Command’s Cheyenne Mountain.

For those of you who don’t remember the looming, end-of-everything atmosphere of the Cold War era, Cheyenne Mountain was a nuclear missile command center tunneled out of solid granite inside an actual mountain in Colorado. In those days, I saw myself as one of the good guys, protecting America from “alien” invasions and the potential nuclear obliteration of the country at the hands of godless communists from the Soviet Union. The year was 1985 and back then my idea of an “alien” invasion movie was Red Dawn, a film in which the Soviets and their Cuban allies invade the U.S., only to be turned back by a group of wolverine-like all-American teen rebels. (Think: the Vietcong, American-style, since the Vietnam War was then just a decade past.)

Strange to say, though, as I progressed through the military, I found myself growing increasingly uneasy about my good-guy stature and about who exactly was doing what to whom. Why, for example, did we invade Iraq in 2003 when that country had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11? Why were we so focused on dominating the Earth’s resources, especially its oil? Why, after declaring total victory over the “alien” commies in 1991 and putting the Cold War to bed for forever (or so it seemed then), did our military continue to strive for “global reach, global power” and what, with no sense of overreach or irony, it liked to call “full-spectrum dominance”?

Still, whatever was simmering away inside me, only when I retired from the Air Force in 2005 did I fully face what had been staring back at me all those years: I had met the alien, and he was me.

The Alien Nature of U.S. Military Interventions

The latest Independence Day movie, despite earning disastrous reviews, is probably still rumbling its way through a multiplex near you. The basic plot hasn’t changed: ruthless aliens from afar (yet again) invade, seeking to exploit our precious planet while annihilating humanity (something that, to the best of our knowledge, only we are actually capable of). But we humans, in such movies as in reality, are a resilient lot. Enough of the plucky and the lucky emerge from the rubble to organize a counterattack. Despite being outclassed by the aliens’ shockingly superior technology and awe-inspiring arsenal of firepower, humanity finds a way to save the Earth while — you won’t be surprised to know — thoroughly thrashing said aliens.

Remember the original Independence Day from two decades ago? Derivative and predictable it may have been, but it was also a campy spectacle — with Will Smith’s cigar-chomping military pilot, Bill Pullman’s kickass president in a cockpit, and the White House being blown to smithereens by those aliens. That was 1996. The Soviet Union was half-a-decade gone and the U.S. was the planet’s “sole superpower.” Still, who knew that seven years later, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, an all-too-real American president would climb out of a similar cockpit in a flight suit, having essentially just blown part of the Middle East to smithereens, and declare his very own “mission accomplished” moment?

In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and the “shock and awe” assault on Iraq, the never-ending destructiveness of the wars that followed, coupled with the U.S. government’s deployment of deadly robotic drones and special ops units across the globe, alien invasion movies aren’t — at least for me — the campy fun they once were, and not just because the latest of them is louder, dumber, and more cliché-ridden than ever. I suspect that there’s something else at work as well, something that’s barely risen to consciousness here: in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.

Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the Terminator films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets, and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers!

In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.) Even as American leaders offer reassuring words to the natives (and to the public in “the homeland”) about the U.S. military being a force for human liberation, the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries: the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.

Other U.S. military officers have noticed this dynamic. In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.” Parmeter noted, “You have a bunch of epiphanies over the course of your experience here [in Iraq], and it made me think: How are we perceived, who are we to them?”

Americans may see themselves as liberators, but to the Iraqis and so many other peoples Washington has targeted with its drones, jets, and high-tech weaponry, we are the invaders.

Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first Independence Day movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life? That’s what the Carter Doctrine of 1980 was about: it defined the Persian Gulf as a U.S. “vital interest” precisely because, to quote former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt description of Iraq, it “floats on a sea of oil.”

Of Cold War Memories and Imperial Storm Troopers

Whether anyone notices or not, alien invasion flicks offer a telling analogy when it comes to the destructive reality of Washington’s global ambitions; so, too, do “space operas” like Star Wars. I’m a fan of George Lucas’s original trilogy, which appeared in my formative years. When I saw them in the midst of the Cold War, I never doubted that Darth Vader’s authoritarian Empire in a galaxy far, far away was the Soviet Union. Weren’t the Soviets, whom President Ronald Reagan would dub “the evil empire,” bent on imperial domination? Didn’t they have the equivalent of storm troopers, and wasn’t it our job to “contain” that threat?

Like most young Americans then, I saw myself as a plucky rebel, a mixture of the free-wheeling, wisecracking Han Solo and the fresh-faced, idealistic Luke Skywalker. Of course, George Lucas had a darker, more complex vision in mind, one in which President Richard Nixon, not some sclerotic Soviet premier, provided a model for the power-mad emperor, while the lovable Ewoks in The Return of the Jedi — with their simple if effective weaponry and their anti-imperial insurgent tactics — were clearly meant to evoke Vietnamese resistance forces in an American war that Lucas had loathed. But few enough Americans of the Cold War-era thought in such terms. (I didn’t.) It went without question that we weren’t the heartless evil empire. We were the Jedi! And metaphorically speaking, weren’t we the ones who, in the end, blew up the Soviet Death Star and won the Cold War?

How, then, did an increasingly gargantuan Pentagon become the Death Star of our moment? We even had our own Darth Vader in Dick Cheney, a vice president who actually took pride in the comparison.

Think for a moment, dear reader, about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.

I’m hardly the first person to notice this. As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in the New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.

American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in Star Wars. Such vehicles, my battalion commander friend noted drolly, were “not conducive to social engagements with Iraqis.”

It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a Star Wars storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries, and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.

Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue? Of course, in Star Wars terms, it went both ways in Iraq. A colleague told me that during her time there, she heard American troops refer to Iraqis as “sand people,” the vicious desert raiders and scavengers of Star Wars. If “they” seem like vicious aliens to us, should we be surprised that we just might seem that way to them?

Meanwhile, consider the American enemy, whether the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or any of our other opponents of this era. Typically unburdened by heavy armor and loads of equipment, they move around in small bands, improvising as they go. Such “terrorists” — or “freedom fighters,” take your pick — more closely resemble (optically, at least) the plucky human survivors of Independence Day or the ragtag yet determined rebels of Star Wars than heavy patrols of U.S. troops do.

Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The U.S. has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of Star Wars “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).

To navigate and negotiate the complex “human terrain” (actual U.S. Army term) of “planets” like Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops call on a range of space-age technologies, including direction-finding equipment, signal intercept, terrain modeling, and satellite navigation using GPS. The enemy, being part of that “human terrain,” has little need for such technology to “master” it. Since understanding alien cultures and their peculiar “human terrains” is not its forte, the U.S. military has been known to hire anthropologists to help it try to grasp the strange behaviors of the peoples of Planet Iraq and Planet Afghanistan.

Yet unlike the evil empire of Star Wars or the ruthless aliens of Independence Day, the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft, and motherships with it.

After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.

In a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Consider it an irony of alien disaster movies that they manage to critique U.S. military ambitions vis-à-vis the “primitive” natives of far-off lands (even if none of us and few of the filmmakers know it). Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.

We Americans, proud denizens of the land of the gun and of the only superpower left standing, don’t, of course, want to think of ourselves as aliens. Who does? We go to movies like Independence Day or Star Wars to identify with the outgunned rebels. Evidence to the contrary, we still think of ourselves as the underdogs, the rebels, the liberators. And so — I still believe — we once were, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

We need to get back to that time and that galaxy. But we don’t need a high-tech time machine or sci-fi wormhole to do so. Instead, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves. Like Pogo, we need to be willing to see the evidence of our own invasive nature. Only then can we begin to become the kind of land we say we want to be.

 

A TomDispatch regular, William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor. He blogs at Bracing Views.

Neoliberalism and The Globalization of War: America’s Hegemonic Project

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By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

The world is at a dangerous crossroads.  The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered  collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.

The economic dimensions of  this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific countries in all major regions of World.

Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of  economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments’ ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.

In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, etc, have been the target of  sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.

The global economic crisis is intimately related to America’s hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a  spiralling defense budget backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. “War is Good for Business”: the powerful financial groups which routinely manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war. A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.

Beyond the Globalization of Poverty 

Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the “globalization of poverty”: countries are transformed in open territories,

State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy,  all of which ultimately leads to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire populations (refugee crisis).

This “second stage” goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of  a process of outright destruction of human life.

In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.

The New World Order

Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are

• Wall Street and the Western banking conglomerates including its offshore money laundering facilities, tax havens, hedge funds and secret accounts,

• the Military Industrial Complex regrouping major “defense contractors”, security and mercenary companies, intelligence outfits, on contract to the Pentagon;

• the Anglo-American Oil and Energy Giants,

• The Biotech Conglomerates, which increasingly control agriculture and the food chain;

• Big Pharma,

• The Communication Giants  and Media conglomerates, which constitute the propaganda arm of the New World Order.

There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.

These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence.  The state structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the “Deep State”, integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks, secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate interests.

In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, political parties.

What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.

Media Propaganda

The corporate  media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.

Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.

Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.

Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development

There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era, the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.

In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union. Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.

The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians, civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It’s called corruption, co-optation, fraud.

Latin America: The Transition towards a “Democratic Dictatorship”

In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e. a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded. They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.

Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of  the entire Latin america region.

In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the “Dirty war” and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.

The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged. Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.

Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of “dirty tricks” including acts of infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money laundering and the protection of the drug trade.

 

The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)

New Era of Global Collective Psychosis

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

Anybody who has been unfortunate to be in a car or plane crash, but lucky enough to survive it and tell the story afterwards knows the inherent paradox: the event occurred in the blink of an eye, but seemed, in retrospect, to have unfolded in a dreadful slow-motion sequence. What can be called the crash time elasticity contradiction is an accurate metaphor for our era. It is the deep dichotomy of an intuitive knowledge that we, as a global collective, are on a deadly collision course while wearing the distorted slow-motion rosy glasses of projection, looking into some fictional eternal future. If time has, by essence, no end, our life span as a foolish megalomaniac species is about to reach an ugly curtain call. While the end times is a religious fiction, our looming apocalypse is entirely man-made and, as such, is a mere by product of ignorance and collective apathy.

For the very few of us still trying to impact the discourse, it has become incredibly challenging not to give in and surrender to the general entropy of crash time. With so many with their heads in the sand, ignoring an imminent systemic collapse, the effort to wake people up has become more than a Herculean task. The overall attention span is so minimal that ideas are almost never transformed into actions but are just ephemeral ripples on the deep water of forgetfulness. The constant media assault with its cacophony of  killing mayhem, spectacles staged as reality, and propaganda passing  for news has thoroughly brainwashed many people into a state of uncomfortable numbness. Meaningful ideas could, not so long ago, make waves and even change the tide of history. Now, the words of complex concepts have been gutted of all significance and served for idea consumption as trending hash tags. The media brainwasher/propagandists have powerful bullhorns and are always hard at work to keep their vast audience either uninformed, anxious, and feeling powerless or entertained. The news cycle has to spin so fast that critical thinking is never an option.

This deliberate aggression on our collective psyche, switching in rapid daily succession, is similar to the sleep deprivation torture technique known to induce psychosis in individuals. As an example, here is a frantic but accurately summarized version of a recent chain of events which was conveniently tucked in between two feel-good big media stories: Euro 2016 in the sports/entertainment division and the Democrats’ convention in the politics/entertainment category. A mass killing in Nice, conveniently justifying a three-month extension of the state of emergency in France; a failed military coup in Turkey, conveniently allowing PM Erdogan to assert a near absolute dictatorship in the country; an attack in Munich allegedly from Islamists, conveniently allowing Chancellor Merkel to reverse her previously generous Syrian migrants asylum policy; the killing of more than 200 Shiites in Kabul, Afghanistan, conveniently ignored by most Western media outlets.

It can reasonably be argued, and easily demonstrated, that a disease afflicting a person usually quickly affects a community. This goes of course for the middle-age plague pandemic called the Black Death which killed an estimated 50 percent of Europe’s population, and more than 120 million people worldwide. Beside its death toll, which reduced  the world population by more than 25 percent during the 14th century, the plague pandemic induced deep collective psychological turmoil in connection with the interpretation that it was God’s punishment on mankind, and the start of the apocalypse. The plague revived the intolerance of religious fundamentalism. The Black Death was a foray into collective psychosis, where affected people were quarantined to die by the million from starvation.

A lot more recently, another form of collective psychosis struck humanity. That one was not a disease brought by rats, contaminated by infected fleas, to the shores of Europe, it was the ideology of  the Nazis in Germany, and their fascist allies in Italy and imperial Japan. During the Weimar Republic, which  spanned from 1919 to 1933, Germany was a culturally vibrant country at the vanguard in art, music, sciences, philosophy and literature. Nobody could have forecast that such an advanced civilization would become literally hypnotized by a mad man like Adolf Hitler. The global collective psychotic episode which engulfed the world between 1939 and 1945 and is called World War II, killed an estimated 72 million people worldwide. When one studies the history of mankind, it appears that mental disease combined with unusual charisma in a leader can be even more contagious than the plague in the middle-age. Contemporary Germans and Japanese suffer, in large part, from a convenient historical amnesia, but the evidence proves that their ancestors living during World War II were, by an overwhelming majority, fanatic supporters of  Hitler and the emperor.

Hitler and the Nazis used the powers of seduction, decorum and elaborate brainwashing strategies to propagate their brand of madness, but in the summer of 1945, across the Atlantic, a seemingly quiet and normal leader did the unthinkable with two criminally insane decisions. On August 6, 1945, unassuming Harry Truman had no moral issue with ordering the killing of 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima, Japan with atomic bombs. Truman coldly did it again three days later and killed another 80,000 in Nagasaki. The quiet little man should be remembered as the lunatic who established terror as state policy. In August 1945, Japan was on its knees. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not about speeding up the end of World War II like American historic propaganda still claims, it was about asserting US hegemony and scaring the world into submission. It is not a coincidence that only the United States of America has used the atomic bomb in warfare; it has been the empire’s ultimate prerogative.

From August 1945 to the present, the biggest collective fear has been nuclear annihilation, but like lab rats are often exposed to unmotivated electric shocks, smaller doses of fear and paranoia are administered to the population almost on a daily basis. Mass killings in some part of the planet or another, have become extremely useful to condition people  into submission. In November, it will be a year since France has been under the boots of a state of emergency. Who would have thought that the country of revolution would have tolerated this? But again, who would have thought that Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia could fall into the darkness of collective psychosis almost overnight? Who would have thought that a little man with the charisma of an accountant could have been mad enough to go on a rampage and kill 220,000 Japanese in August 1945? In a world gone mad, perhaps letting the criminally insane run the asylum is not such a good idea after all.

 

Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire.

How Does Corporate Media Manufacture False Narratives?

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By Nauman Sadiq

Source: RINF

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don’t think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Moreover, I do concede that the rallying cry of “Jihad in the way of God” might have been one reason for the abundant supply of foot soldiers to the jihadists’ cause, but on an emotional level it is the self-serving and hypocritical Western interventionist policy in the energy-rich Middle East that adds fuel to the fire. When Muslims all over the Islamic countries see that their brothers-in-faith are dying in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, on an emotional level they feel outraged and seek vengeance and justice.

This emotional outrage, in my opinion, is a far more potent factor than the sterile rational argument of God’s supposed command to fight holy wars against the infidels. If we take all the other contributing factors, that I have mentioned in the second paragraph out of the equation, I don’t think that Muslims are some “exceptional” variety of human beings who are hell-bent on killing the heretics all over the world.

Notwithstanding, it’s very easy to distinguish between the victims of structural injustices and the beneficiaries of the existing neocolonial economic order all over the world. But instead of using words that can be interpreted subjectively I’ll let the figures do the talking. Pakistan’s total GDP is only $270 billion and with a population of 200 million it amounts to a per capita income of only $1400. While the US’ GDP is $18 trillion and per capita income is in excess of $50,000. Similarly the per capita income of most countries in the Western Europe is also around $40,000. That’s a difference of 40 to 50 TIMES between the incomes of Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, i.e. the Western powers.

Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $600 billion, which is three times the size of Pakistan’s total GDP. A single multi-national corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world owns assets in excess of $200 billion which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such business conglomerates are: Investment banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC, BNP Paribas; Oil majors – Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, RDS, Total, Vitol; Manufacturers – Apple, Microsoft and Google.

On top of that, semi-legit wealth from all over the world flows into the Western commercial and investment banks: last year there was a report that the Russian oligarchs have deposited $800 billion in the Western banks, while the Chinese entrepreneurs have deposited $1.5 trillion in the Western financial institutions.

Moreover, in April this year the Saudi finance minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets if Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. And $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add up Saudi investment in Western Europe, and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in the US and Western Europe.

The first and foremost priority of the Western powers is to save their Corporate Empire, and especially their financial institutions, from collapsing; everything else like eliminating terrorism, promoting democracy and “responsibility to protect” are merely arranged side shows to justify their interventionist foreign policy, especially in the energy-rich Middle East.

Additionally, the irony is that the neoliberal dupes of the mainstream media justify and validate the unfair practices of the neocolonial powers and hold the victims of structural injustices responsible for their misfortunes. If a Third World’s laborer has been forced to live on less than $5 a day and a corporate executive sits in the Wall Street on top of $18 trillion business empire, neoliberals are okay with this travesty.

However, we need to understand that how does a neoliberal mindset is structured? As we know that mass education programs and mass media engender mass ideologies. We like to believe that we are free to think, but we aren’t. Our narratives aren’t really “our” narratives. These narratives of injustice and inequality have been constructed for the public consumption by the corporate media, which is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments and the business interests.

Media is our eyes and ears through which we get all the inputs and it is also our brain through which we interpret raw data. If media keeps mum over some vital structural injustices and blows out of proportion some isolated incidents of injustice and violence, we are likely to forget all about the former and focus all of our energies on the tangential issues which the media portrays as the “real” ones.

Monopoly capitalism and the global neocolonial economic order are the real issues while Islamic radicalism and terrorism are the secondary issues and itself an adverse reaction to the former. That’s how the mainstream media constructs artificial narratives and dupes its audience into believing the absurd: during the Cold War it created the “Red Scare” and told us that communism is an existential threat to the free world and the Western way of life. We bought this narrative.

Then the West and its Saudi and Pakistani collaborators financed, trained and armed the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” and used them as their proxies against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared the former “freedom fighters” to be terrorists and another existential threat to the “free world” and the Western way of life. We again bought this narrative.

And finally, during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars the former terrorists once again became freedom fighters – albeit in a more nuanced manner, this time around the corporate media sells them as “moderate rebels.” And the lobotomized neoliberal audience of the mainstream media is once again willing to buy this narrative, how ironic?

 

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and MENA regions, neocolonialism and Petroimperialism.

ANOTHER TERRORIST, ANOTHER PAST CONNECTION WITH THE FBI

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By James Henry

Source: Who.What.Why.

Another terrorist attack in a major American city, more frightening images and talk of pressure cookers and ball bearings, BBs and pipe bombs, “lone wolves” and Christmas tree lights.

The latest alleged perpetrator is Ahmad Khan Rahami, a young Muslim man who grew up in America and likes souped-up cars. He became “self-radicalized” watching videos on the Internet that inspired him to blow up innocent Americans.

Some experts say the bombs he made show a high level of sophistication and training, but with more than a half a dozen bombs deployed, not a single person was killed. Some saw it coming — others say they can’t believe it.

He traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan — or both — in the years prior to the attack. Nobody seems to know what he did there, but authorities are pretty sure there’s no wider conspiracy.

Cornered and desperate after authorities released his picture to the public, it’s a small miracle the suspect is still alive after a wild shootout with police.

Sound familiar?

The Boston Herald understandably thinks so. In a piece titled “Attack had eerie resemblance to Boston Marathon bombings,” the Herald points out the many superficial similarities to the 2013 attack at the Boston Marathon. The lead paragraph reads: “From pressure cookers, the release of a suspect photo, to the subsequent manhunt and shootout with cops, yesterday’s arrests of Ahmad Khan Rahami in New York City and New Jersey has stirred echoes of blasts at the Boston Marathon in 2013, security experts said.”

But there are far more significant similarities.

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The reliably pro-law-and-order Herald left out the part about the FBI’s prior contact with the suspect. The New York Times, to its  credit, did inform us that the FBI conducted an “assessment” on Rahami in 2014, because his father told them he was a terrorist. Then dad took it back.

Interestingly, the Times also mentioned that the suspect’s father claims to have fought with the CIA-supported Afghan Mujahedin against the Soviets back in the 80s. The Times didn’t attach much significance to either revelation and probably won’t pursue the connections much further.

But, as with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, another recent “lone wolf” who suddenly started acting as a cartoonish Muslim fanatic, the FBI and CIA can be found lurking in the back story.

It is entirely possible that there are a lot of so-called lone wolves on the prowl — a sort of self-directed fifth-column of ISIS. But, according to investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, an alarming number of them are being pushed and prodded by provocateurs on the federal payroll. We don’t know if Rahami was similarly pushed, but it’s a valid question nonetheless.

The FBI claims to have sent undercover agents to “investigate” Rahami, but “didn’t find enough information to charge him,” according to theBoston Globe. What that investigation consisted of is still, and likely will remain, unclear. The FBI seldom reveals its “sources and methods.”

At the very least, the public should be told what this type of contact looks like and whether it is at least conceivable that such government actions can contribute to pushing young men to commit these types of crimes.

But despite these obvious concerns, the US government’s “war on terror” strategies are strangely absent from President Barack Obama’s Countering Violent Extremism program, which is currently grappling with the thorny issue of what might be provoking these desperate acts.

Will we get a legitimate investigation that delves into the precise nature of federal agents’ interactions with Rahami, or will we just get another whitewash that only looks at “intelligence failures.” It will most likely be the latter (here’s why).

History Doesn’t Repeat, It Rhymes

How likely is it that Rahami’s travel to Afghanistan, an active war zone, escaped the scrutiny of federal agents? Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled overseas to a geopolitical hotspot in the years before the Boston Marathon bombing, but the Feds claim to have ignored internal warnings about him and waved him through at the airport.

The FBI appears to be covering up their prior interactions with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Will we see the same thing with Rahami?

Authorities never nailed down exactly where the bombs the Tsarnaevs used were made and who made them. Will we get these details in the Rahami  case? The public would like to know who is making all these “sophisticated” explosives.

Like Rahami, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had many of the hallmarks of an individual the FBI routinely coerces to act as undercover informants. In fact, WhoWhatWhy has documented compelling evidence (see here, here andhere).

And what about that decision to release the photos of Rahami? As with the Tsarnaevs such an action almost guarantees a desperate reaction from the pursued — not surprisingly ending in a potentially lethal gun battle.

Former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis, who questioned the wisdom of releasing the Tsarnaevs’ photos after the Marathon bombing, again seems to be questioning the release of such photos. He told the Boston Herald: “Once those pictures go out, that’s when it’s most dangerous. … He [Rahami] attempted suicide by cop. It’s all very familiar.”

War Pabulum: The Perils of War as a Master Narrative

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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.