Usable Nukes

Dr. Strangelove in the Pentagon: Lowering the Nuclear Threshold and Other Follies of the New Nuclear Posture Review

by Rajan Menon - TomDispatch

February 25, 2018

 If you’re having trouble sleeping thanks to, well, you know who... you’re not alone. But don’t despair.

A breakthrough remedy has just gone on the market. It has no chemically induced side effects and, best of all, will cost you nothing, thanks to the Department of Defense.

It's the new Nuclear Posture Review, or NPR, among the most soporific documents of our era. Just keeping track of the number of times the phrase “flexible and tailored response” appears in the 75-page document is the equivalent of counting (incinerated) sheep.

Be warned, however, that if you really start paying attention to its actual subject matter, rising anxiety will block your journey to the slumber sphere.

Tomgram: Rajan Menon, Normalizing Nukes, Pentagon-Style
Despite the dystopian fantasies about nuclear terror and destruction that hit popular culture in the Cold War era and those “duck and cover” drills kids like me experienced in school in the 1950s, the American people were generally sheltered from a full sense of the toll of a nuclear cataclysm. Consider, for instance, the U.S. military’s secret 1960 Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, for loosing the American arsenal against Russia and China at the height of the Cold War. Three thousand two hundred nuclear weapons were to be “delivered” to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities, most of which would, if all went according to plan, essentially cease to exist. Estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and another 40 million injured (figures that undoubtedly underplayed the effects of both mass fires and radiation). Such a strike would, theoretically at least, only have been launched in retaliation for a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States, yet the figures don’t even include U.S. casualties.

And mind you, those estimates were offered almost a quarter of a century before we learned even worse news. Thanks to the phenomenon of nuclear winter, a “war” of that sort would have been likely to threaten human survival on this planet. Today, we know that even a far more localized and modest version -- say, a South Asian nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan -- could throw enough particulates into the stratosphere to block sunlight for significant periods and cause mass global starvation, threatening the deaths, it’s estimated, of perhaps a billion people across the planet.

In his new book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg, a man deeply involved in nuclear planning of the Cold War era (before he became the famed leaker of the Pentagon Papers), describes the situation:

“What none of us knew at that time -- not the Joint Chiefs, not the president or his science advisors, not anyone else for the next two decades, until 1983 -- were the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then or later would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most other large species).”

As you read TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon’s analysis of the first Nuclear Posture Review of the Trump era, think about the Pentagon’s urge to create ever more “useable” nuclear weapons and ever more advanced delivery systems for them. Then try to take in just what a path of folly we remain headed down -- especially with a president once reportedly eager for “a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal” and proud beyond belief of the size of his “nuclear button.”

This is indeed the road to hell and it’s paved with the worst intentions imaginable. Tom

Dr. Strangelove in the Pentagon: Lowering the Nuclear Threshold and Other Follies of the New Nuclear Posture Review

by Rajan Menon

 

Threats Galore

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that the United States devoted $611 billion to its military machine in 2016. That was more than the defense expenditures of the next nine countries combined, almost three times what runner-up China put out, and 36% of total global military spending. Yet reading the NPR you would think the United States is the most vulnerable country on Earth. Threats lurk everywhere and, worse yet, they’re multiplying, morphing, becoming ever more ominous. The more Washington spends on glitzy weaponry, the less secure it turns out to be, which, for any organization other than the Pentagon, would be considered a terrible return on investment.

The Nuclear Posture Review unwittingly paints Russia, which has an annual military budget of $69.2 billion ($10 billion less than what Congress just added to the already staggering 2018 Pentagon budget in a deal to keep the government open), as the epitome of efficient investment, so numerous, varied, and effective are the “capabilities” it has acquired in the 17 years since Vladimir Putin took the helm. Though similar claims are made about China and North Korea, Putin’s Russia comes across in the NPR as the threat of the century, a country racing ahead of the U.S. in the development of nuclear weaponry. As the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has shown, however, that document only gets away with such a claim by making 2010 the baseline year for its conclusions. That couldn’t be more chronologically convenient because the United States had, by then, completed its latest wave of nuclear modernization. By contrast, during the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s economy contracted by more than 50%, so it couldn’t afford large investments in much of anything back then. Only when oil prices began to skyrocket in this century could it begin to modernize its own nuclear forces.

The Nuclear Posture Review also focuses on Russia’s supposed willingness to launch “limited” nuclear strikes to win conventional wars, which, of course, makes the Russians seem particularly insidious. But consider what the latest (December 2014) iteration of Russia’s military doctrine actually says about when Moscow might contemplate such a step: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy.”

Reduced to its bare bones this means that countries that fire weapons of mass destruction at Russia or its allies or threaten the existence of the Russian state itself in a conventional war could face nuclear retaliation. Of course, the United States has no reason to fear a massive defeat in a conventional war -- and which country would attack the American homeland with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and not expect massive nuclear retaliation?

Naturally, the Nuclear Posture Review also says nothing about the anxieties that the steady eastward advance of NATO -- that ultimate symbol of the Cold War -- in the post-Soviet years sparked in Russia or how that shaped its military thinking. That process began in the 1990s, when Russian power was in free fall. Eventually, the alliance would reach Russia’s border. The NPR also gives no thought to how Russian nuclear policy might reflect that country’s abiding sense of military inferiority in relation to the United States. Even to raise such a possibility would, of course, diminish the Russian threat at a time when inflating it has become de rigueur for liberals as well as conservatives and certainly for much of the media.

Strangelove Logic

Russian nuclear weapons are not, however, the Nuclear Posture Review’s main focus. Instead, it makes an elaborate case for a massive expansion and “modernization” of what’s already the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal (6,800 warheads versus 7,000 for Russia) so that an American commander-in-chief has a “diverse set of nuclear capabilities that provide… flexibility to tailor the approach to deterring one or more potential adversaries in different circumstances.”

The NPR insists that future presidents must have advanced “low-yield” or “useable” nuclear weapons to wield for limited, selective strikes. The stated goal: to convince adversaries of the foolishness of threatening or, for that matter, launching their own limited strikes against the American nuclear arsenal in hopes of extracting “concessions” from us. This is where Strangelovian logic and nuclear absurdity take over. What state in its right mind would launch such an attack, leaving the bulk of the U.S. strategic nuclear force, some 1,550 deployed warheads, intact? On that, the NPR offers no enlightenment.

You don’t have to be an acolyte of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz or have heard about his concept of “friction” to know that even the best-laid plans in wartime are regularly shredded. Concepts like limited nuclear war and nuclear blackmail may be fun to kick around in war-college seminars. Trying them out in the real world, though, could produce disaster. This ought to be self-evident, but to the authors of the NPR it’s not. They portray Russia and China as wild-eyed gamblers with an unbounded affinity for risk-taking.

The document gets even loopier. It seeks to provide the commander-in-chief with nuclear options for repelling non-nuclear attacks against the United States, or even its allies. Presidents, insists the document, require “a range of flexible nuclear capabilities,” so that adversaries will never doubt that “we will defeat non-nuclear attacks.” Here’s the problem, though: were Washington to cross that nuclear Rubicon and launch a “limited” strike during a conventional war, it would enter a true terra incognita. The United States did, of course, drop two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945, but that country lacked the means to respond in kind.

However, Russia and China, the principal adversaries the NPR has in mind (though North Korea gets mentioned as well), do have just those means at hand to strike back. So when it comes to using nuclear weapons selectively, its authors quickly find themselves splashing about in a sea of bizarre speculation. They blithely assume that other countries will behave precisely as American military strategists (or an American president) might ideally expect them to and so will interpret the nuclear “message” of a limited strike (and its thousands of casualties) exactly as intended. Even with the aid of game theory, war games, and scenario building -- tools beloved by war planners -- there’s no way to know where the road marked “nuclear flexibility” actually leads. We’ve never been on it before. There isn’t a map. All that exists are untested assumptions that already look shaky.

Yet More Nuclear Options

These aren’t the only dangerous ideas that lie beneath the NPR’s flexibility trope. Presidents must also, it turns out, have the leeway to reach into the nuclear arsenal if terrorists detonate a nuclear device on American soil or if conclusive proof exists that another state provided such weaponry (or materials) to the perpetrator or even “enabled” such a group to “obtain nuclear devices.” The NPR also envisions the use of selective nuclear strikes to punish massive cyberattacks on the United States or its allies. To maximize the flexibility needed for initiating selective nuclear salvos in such circumstances, the document recommends that the U.S. “maintain a portion of its nuclear forces alert day-to-day, and retain the option of launching those forces promptly.” Put all this together and you’re looking at a future in which nuclear weapons could be used in stress-induced haste and based on erroneous intelligence and misperception.

So while the NPR’s prose may be sleep inducing, you’re unlikely to nod off once you realize that the Trump-era Pentagon -- no matter the NPR’s protests to the contrary -- seeks to lower the nuclear threshold. "Selective," "limited," "low yield": these phrases may sound reassuring, but no one should be misled by the antiseptic terminology and soothing caveats. Even “tactical” nuclear weapons are anything but tactical in any normal sense. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki might, in terms of explosive power, qualify as “tactical” by today’s standards, but would be similarly devastating if used in an urban area. (We cannot know just how horrific the results would be, but the online tool NUKEMAP calculates that if a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb, comparable to Fat Man, the code name for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, were used on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live, more than 80,000 people would be killed in short order.) Not to worry, the NPR’s authors say, their proposals are not meant to encourage “nuclear war fighting” and won’t have that effect. On the contrary, increasing presidents’ options for using nuclear weapons will only preserve peace.

The Obama-era predecessor to Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review contained an entire section entitled “Reducing the Role of U.S. Nuclear Weapons.” It outlined “a narrow set of contingencies in which such weaponry might still play a role in deterring a conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners.” So long to that.

The Shopping List -- and the Tab

Behind the new policies to make nuclear weapons more “useable” lurks a familiar urge to spend taxpayer dollars profligately. The Nuclear Posture Review’s version of a spending spree, meant to cover the next three decades and expected, in the end, to cost close to two trillion dollars, covers the works: the full nuclear “triad” -- land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ones, and nuclear-armed strategic bombers. Also included are the nuclear command, control, and communication network (NC3) and the plutonium, uranium, and tritium production facilities overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The upgrade will run the gamut. The 14 Ohio-class nuclear submarines, the sea-based segment of the triad, are to be replaced by a minimum of 12 advanced Columbia-class boats. The 400 Minuteman III single-warhead, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, will be retired in favor of the “next-generation” Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, which, its champions insist, will provide improved propulsion and accuracy -- and, needless to say, more “flexibility” and “options.” The current fleet of strategic nuclear bombers, including the workhorse B-52H and the newer B-2A, will be joined and eventually succeeded by the “next-generation” B-21 Raider, a long-range stealth bomber. The B-52’s air-launched cruise missile will be replaced with a new Long Range Stand-Off version of the same. A new B61-12 gravity bomb will take the place of current models by 2020. Nuclear-capable F-35 stealth fighter-bombers will be “forward deployed,” supplanting the F-15E. Two new “low-yield” nuclear weapons, a submarine-launched ballistic missile, and a sea-launched cruise missile will also be added to the arsenal.

Think of it, in baseball terms, as an attempted grand slam.

The NPR’s case for three decades of such expenditures rests on the claim that the “flexible and tailored” choices it deems non-negotiable don’t presently exist, though the document itself concedes that they do. I’ll let its authors speak for themselves: “The triad and non-strategic forces, with supporting NC3, provide diversity and flexibility as needed to tailor U.S. strategies for deterrence, assurance, achieving objectives should deterrence fail, and hedging.” For good measure, the NPR then touts the lethality, range, and invulnerability of the existing stock of missiles and bombers. Buried in the review, then, appears to be an admission that the colossally expensive nuclear modernization program it deems so urgent isn't necessary.

The NPR takes great pains to demonstrate that all of the proposed new weaponry, referred to as “the replacement program to rebuild the triad,” will cost relatively little. Let’s consider this claim in wider perspective.

To obtain Senate ratification of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty he signed with Russia in 2010, the Nobel Prize-winning antinuclear advocate Barack Obama agreed to pour $1 trillion over three decades into the “modernization” of the nuclear triad, and that pledge shaped his 2017 defense budget request. In other words, President Obama left President Trump a costly nuclear legacy, which the latest Nuclear Posture Review fleshes out and expands. There’s no indication that the slightest energy went into figuring out ways to economize on it. A November 2017 Congressional Budget Office report projects that President Trump’s nuclear modernization plan will cost $1.2 trillion over three decades, while other estimates put the full price at $1.7 trillion.

As the government’s annual budget deficit increases -- most forecasts expect it to top $1 trillion next year, thanks in part to the Trump tax reform bill and Congress’s gift to the Pentagon budget that, over the next two years, is likely to total $1.4 trillion -- key domestic programs will take big hits in the name of belt-tightening. Military spending, of course, will only continue to grow. If you want to get a sense of where we’re heading, just take a look at Trump’s 2019 budget proposal (which projects a cumulative deficit of $7.1 trillion over the next decade). It urges big cuts in areas ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the Environmental Protection Agency and Amtrak. By contrast, it champions a Pentagon budget increase of $80 billion (13.2% over 2017) to $716 billion, with $24 billion allotted to upgrading the nuclear triad.

And keep in mind that military cost estimates are only likely to rise. There is a persistent pattern of massive cost overruns for weapons systems ordered through the government’s Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP). These ballooned from $295 billion in 2008 to $468 billion in 2015. Consider just two recent examples: the first of the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, delivered last May after long delays, came in at $13 billion, an overrun of $2.3 billion, while the program to produce the F-35 jet, already the most expensive weapons system of all time, could reach $406.5 billion, a seven percent overrun since the last estimate.

Flexibility Follies

If the Pentagon turns its Nuclear Posture Review into reality, the first president who will have some of those more “flexible” nuclear options at his command will be none other than Donald Trump. We’re talking, of course, about the man who, in his debut speech to the United Nations last September, threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and later, as the crisis on the Korean peninsula heated up, delighted in boasting on Twitter about the size of his “nuclear button.” He has shown himself to be impulsive, ill informed, impervious to advice, certain about his instincts, and infatuated with demonstrating his toughness, as well as reportedly fascinated by nuclear weapons and keen to see the U.S. build more of them. Should a leader with such traits be given yet more nuclear “flexibility”? The answer is obvious enough, except evidently to the authors of the NPR, who are determined to provide him with more “options” and “flexibility.”

At least three more years of a Donald Trump presidency are on the horizon. Of this we can be sure: other international crises will erupt, and one of them could pit the United States not just against a nuclear-armed North Korea but also against China or Russia. Making it easier for Trump to use nuclear weapons isn’t, as the Nuclear Posture Review would have you believe, a savvy strategic innovation. It’s insanity.

Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse's Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2018 Rajan Menon

The Enemies Among US: FBI Head Sees Spies Among Chinese Students

A New Witch Hunt? FBI Calls Chinese Students a Threat

by TRNN

February 25, 2018

Calling China "a whole-of-society threat," FBI Director Christopher Wray recently claimed that Chinese students in the US may be conducting espionage. Law professor, author, and Committee of 100 chair Frank H. Wu, says the FBI is reviving a racist legacy.

Frank Wu is chair of the Committee of 100, a distinguished professor the University of California Hastings College of the Law and author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.  

Insult & Injury: Trump's Embassy Move Poke in Palestine's Eye

We See Hope in Their Eyes

by Mazin Qumsiyeh - qumsiyeh.org

February 25, 2018

It remains a remarkable era that we live in and it is getting more “interesting” every day. Take for example the poke in the eye that the Zionists did through their vassal president Donald Trump in deciding that the date to move the US Embassy to occupied Jerusalem will be May 15.

This is very significant because that date is Nakba Commemoration Day, when against the wishes of the vast majority of inhabitants, a Jewish apartheid state was created by force of arms. Before and after that date, the largest post-WWII ethnic cleansing happened. Most of the native people of Palestine (of various religions) were pushed out and 530 towns and villages were depopulated.

Today 7.5 million are refugees or displaced people. 6.3 million live under direct Israeli racist rule. None have sovereignty over their lands. Immigrant Ashkenazi White European elites rule the apartheid state.

The 1.6 million Palestinians who had lived under martial law until 1966 and then given some citizenship “rights” but are subjected to further ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, colonial settlement expansion just as much as the Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank.

There is a meticulous and vicious program of slow genocide in Gaza. In Jerusalem (West Bank), there are more and more pressures to Judaicize the city by programs of denial of residency and recently the escalation of pressure on Christian and Muslims to strip them of Church and Mosque property by overtaxing them to bankruptcy in order to take their church and mosque property.

This week the Christian Churches including the Church of the Sepulcher closed their doors in protest. To my knowledge, this has never happened before (in 2000 years!). The world politicians are silent and the Palestinian authority (representatives) issue feeble sounds of pleading for the world community to implement International law and also to protect the Palestinian people. Yet, they all continue their failed policies and do not admit they made any mistakes.

As any rational reader of history knows, rights are never begged for from your oppressor. Oppressors must be forced to give up their powers. Resistance must be built up in ALL its forms sanctioned by International law (also see 4th Geneva Convention). Mahmoud Abbas whose term expired years ago and whose health is deteriorating (wish him to finally retire!) gave a speech at the UN Security Council in which he admitted that his authority basically works for the Israeli occupiers. Thus, the first and main obstacle now to liberation, return of refugees, and self-determination in Palestine is the Vichy government in Ramallah.

It is long past time to end the charade of Oslo and create a real “Palestine Liberation Organization”. To be clear: PALESTINE is all of Palestine not to “disputed” (per Israeli language) 22% of it (WB & Gaza) for which they have been “negotiating” endlessly. LIBERATION as in Liberty not accepting apartheid or the racist notions of a “Jewish state” (this also includes right of native Palestinians to return to their homes and lands). ORGANIZATION as in people organizing at capturing the amazing energy of the 12.5 million Palestinians around the world. That requires participatory democracy not a clique of comprador elites (term limits of 6-8 years are good idea for all leaders).

Every day here as we work the land and work with people we see the incredible energy and incredible opportunities. Just this week we planted over 200 native trees (carob, oak, azarole, pistacia) and worked with children from age 3 to 83! We launched projects on climate change, on sustainability, on biodiversity, on ecotourism, and on permaculture (one funded by National Geographic!).

The struggle continues against difficult odds. We watch our friends in Israeli jail (like four members of the Tamimi family and Munther Amayra). We miss some who departed recently. For example we lost Gale Courey, a great friend of us and all of Palestine; we planted a tree in her honor & a mutual friend is donating money to the museum in her honor.

Life goes on in all its ingredients: good ones and bad ones, people who lie and cheat and people who help and donate and work and give of themselves of others. We in Palestine and visiting and volunteer friends from around the world remain “having joyful participation in the sorrows of this world.” We trim the dead branches and see growth of new ones.

Spring in Palestine is beautiful with a tapestry of colors of plants, smell of blossoms everywhere, taste of fresh winter crops from our garden and greenhouse, and a spirit of people who defied all odds. 60% of our people are under the age of 18 and we work with some of them  regularly. We see hope in their eyes. Life is still good. We savor it. Join us as we refuse to behave like like dead fish but indeed swim against the current!

Collectively, we feel alive by the effort and perpetuate humanity.

Palestinian man dies following beating by IDF soldiers
https://972mag.com/idf-soldiers-beat-a-palestinian-man-to-death-in-jericho-will-they-face-investigation/133346/

Nikki Haley: the U.S. Embarrassment at the United Nations
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/23/nikki-haley-the-u-s-embarrassment-at-the-united-nations/

[BRICUP] British Committee for the Universities of Palestine NEWSLETTER
http://www.bricup.org.uk/#nletter

Stay Human

Mazin Qumsiyeh
A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://palestinenature.org
Join me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/mazin.qumsiyeh.9

What to Make of It? Venezuela Launches Petro Cryptocurrency

Venezuela Earns $735m in a Day From Petro Cryptocurrency Sales

by TeleSur

February 25, 2018

“Today, a cryptocurrency is being born that can take on Superman,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

While cryptocurrency and blockchain experts said Venezuela's new digital currency, the "Petro", would not garner significant investment, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced on Tuesday that the country had earned US$735 million on the first day of pre-sales.

“Today, a cryptocurrency is being born that can take on Superman,” said Maduro, using the comic character as a reference to the United States, while giving an address on state television.

He added:

“For big problems, [we have created a] big solution... We Venezuelans are indomitable.”

Maduro noted that the Petro could be used to conduct sales in tourism, gasoline, and some oil transactions.

Venezuela's Cryptocurrency Superintendent, Carlos Vargas, stated that the Petro has already attracted investors from Qatar, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East, though Europeans and Americans will also participate.

The cryptocurrency, which will be backed by the country's oil resources, will bring in a new economic era in the nation. Maduro has stated that the goal of the new cryptocurrency is to combat sanctions, the “economic war,” waged by the U.S. government and its junior partners against Venezuela, all the while advancing “on issues of monetary sovereignty, to make financial transactions and “overcome the financial blockade.”

The launch of the Petro was announced in December. It is regulated by the Superintendence of Cryptocurrencies and Related Activities, as well as the Blockchain Observatory.

Cryptocurrencies typically are not backed by any government or central banks, nor are they regulated. However, the U.S. Security and Exchanges Commission has been increasingly tracking digital currencies, classing some tokens as securities, thus making them subject to oversight.

On this point, Maduro said:

"We have taken a giant step into the 21st Century... We are on the world’s technological vanguard.”

American Yearbook 2018

America's High School Yearbook: 2018

by Andy Myer - This Can't Be Happening

February 22, 2018

 American High School Yearbook: 2018 - Andy Myer, andymyer.com

(Creative Commons 2.0 copyright)

Here we are again. Another massacre in a school, this time in Parkland, Florida. Before we ultimately resign ourselves to this obscene state of affairs, shouldn't we at least see the actual crime scene photos? It's an argument made recently in Slate. Don't we deserve to have all relevant information and visual material as we debate the issue of guns in this country?

It's unlikely. In the meantime, let's close our eyes and imagine what the bodies of youngsters in Sandy Hook Elementary torn apart by assault weapon ammunition really look like. Conjure up the slumped figures peppered with slugs in the pews of the Sutherland Springs Church, the dead and wounded littering the campus of Virginia Tech, the concert grounds in Las Vegas, and the hallways and classrooms of Columbine and Stoneman Douglass High School. Think of the thousands of shattered families, whose lives surely will never be the same.

While we're at it, consider the injured survivors, some of whom will have lifelong disabilities, medical needs, and unalterably changed futures. Go on to contemplate the emotional distress of witnesses and first responders who may be physically unscathed, but will suffer PTSD for months, years, perhaps their entire lifetimes.

Don't stop there! Think of the millions of American schools students (elementary to high school) who are forced to participate in active shooter drills. They become wonderfully proficient in immediate responses to alarms, barricading doorways, picking up objects to hurl at an armed intruder, where they should assemble after the terror subsides, and how to properly exit their buildings in full view of heavily armed SWAT teams. Sweet dreams, kids!

Almost done. Now bring to mind the 30,000+ who die each year at the wrong end of a gun in far less spectacular ways, through suicide, in gang-related shootings, during marital disputes and drunken rages, or through accidental discharge of a gun. Tally up the astronomical emergency room costs we generate each year as the bodies — dying, dead and wounded — roll in.

Maybe now you have some vague notion of the cost our society pays for our inalienable right to fetishize and acquire millions of guns that give so many the illusion of enhanced power and imaginary safety.

Yep. It's time to see the photos, which will likely never see the light of day. In the meantime you have my pale rendition as a study aid.

Andy Myer is a cartoonist, writer, and published author/illustrator of three children’s books. His blog can be viewed at www.andymyer.com/blog. He generously offered this essay and drawing to ThisCantBeHappening!

McMaster's Less Than Heroic Battlefield Credentials

McMaster of War: Unrealistic war experience leads to Trump advisor overconfidence

by Dave Lindorff - This Can't Be Happening

February 21, 2018

This article appears in the London Review of Books

A number of military experts – including the defense secretary, James Mattis – have warned that a US war against North Korea would be hard, incredibly destructive and bloody, with civilian casualties in the millions, and could go badly for US forces.

But Lt. Gen. Herbert Raymond McMaster, President Trump’s national security adviser, is apparently insistent that ‘a military strike be considered as a serious option’.

One of Gen. McMaster’s claims to fame is a Silver Star he was awarded for a tank ‘battle’ he led in the desert during the so-called Gulf War of 1991.

As a young captain leading a troop with nine new Abrams M1A1 battle tanks, McMaster destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks in 23 minutes without losing any of his own or suffering any casualties.

McMaster’s exploit (later embellished with a name, the ‘Battle of 73 Easting’) was little more than a case of his having dramatically better equipment. His tanks were several generations ahead of the antique Russian-built T-72s of his Iraqi opponents.

They were protected by depleted uranium armour – a dense metal virtually impenetrable by conventional tank shells, anti-tank rockets and RPGs – and carried anti-tank munitions tipped with depleted uranium penetrators, which can punch through steel armour as if it were cardboard.

They then ignite a tank’s interior, exploding any ordnance inside and incinerating the crew.

The Abrams main cannon also has a significantly longer range than the tanks McMaster was confronting, meaning he and his men were able to pick off the Iraqi tanks while the shells fired back at them all fell short...

Turkey shoot: Capt. McMaster's vastly superior Abrams tanks were able to destroy these dug-in Iraqi tanks at a distance, out of range of any Iraqi returning fire


For the rest of this article in the LRB, please go to: London Review of Books [1]


Links: [1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/02/19/dave-lindorff/mcmaster-of-war/

Baltimore Ban on Oil Train & Terminal Expansion

City Council Moves Forward With Ban on Crude Oil Facilities 

by TRNN

February 23, 2018

The proposal would ban new crude oil terminals in Baltimore and prevent two existing terminals from expanding, which advocates say would stop the city from becoming a crude oil hub and mitigate the risk of an oil train explosion.

Five years ago, a crude oil train derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. The resulting fire killed 47 people. Environmental activists are attempting to avoid such a disaster in Baltimore. 

"Eco" of Germany's Fascist Past

Umberto Eco and Germany’s New Fascism

by Thomas Klikauer  - CounterPunch

February 23, 2018

With the rise of Germany’s new right-wing populist party, the Alternative for Germany or AFD [mocked as “A F**** Disgrace”], a heated debate is taking place. The debate is about whether one should call the AFD Fascist or the German equivalent Nazi. Mainstream academics and media label the AFD right-wing, right extremism, populists, etc. One of the very few who call a spade a spade is none other than Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel who has openly labelled AFD leaders “real Nazis”. Perhaps, one way to assess whether Germany’s AFD is a Nazi party or truly fascistic is to measure it against what became known as Ur-Fascism.

The AFG might fulfill the classical criteria of Ur-Fascism laid out by none other than Italian philosopher and creator of “In the Name of the Rose”, Umberto Eco.

Umberto Eco identified fourteen elements that make up Fascism. The cult of tradition is the first item on Eco’s 14-point list. The AFD fancies The Cult of Germanic-Mythical Traditions (1) glorifying Germany’s Nazi past in particular. The party wants to return to traditions such as a racially purified and a deeply Anti-Semitic society – the so-called Volksgemeinschaft. The AFD seeks to revive honoring the Nazi-Army’s soldiers that went on a murderous killing spree throughout Europe torturing and slaughtering millions of people. This became known as Crimes of the Wehrmacht. The AFD’s cult of tradition is less directed towards the mythical and elusive Germanic-Aryan race and more towards Germany’s recent Nazi period (1933-1945).

Secondly, the AFD rejects modernism (2) hating modern liberal society, its art and culture, same-sex marriage, homosexuality, feminism, trade unions, post-1789 democracy, progressive political parties, and most, if not all, international institutions and global NGOs. It longs for a romantic past that was never really romantic. Instead, the romantic nostalgia for the past often mirrored what British philosopher Hobbes once called “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Like the real Nazis, the hatred of modernity has never prevented Nazis from using modern means, from applying scientific management to the Holocaust. The modern right-wing uses modern means like Facebook and Twitter.

The AFD’s Cult of Action for Action’s Sake (3) is expressed in many ways. All too often the AFD is “action-guided” rather than “thinking-guided”. Favoring actions over thinking often come with a rejection of intellectual discourse and rationality. Perhaps in reminiscence of Hitler’s “deep fear of the thinking man and [his] hatred of the intellect”, the AFD too espouses rampant anti-intellectualism. This is, at least partly, signified in the stupidity of some of its leaders. Their acronym (AFD) might actually stand for “Alternative for the Dumb”. Virtually, the same can be seen in the AfG’s street fighters called Peglia and the violence expressed by the so-called (and well armed) 15.600 Reichsbürger – sovereign petit-bourgeois.

There might be a link between the rise of the AFD, its language of hate, and the rise of Nazi and racially motivated violence in Germany such as for example, the assassination attempt of Cologne mayor Henriette Reker in 2015 and a 2016 Munich mass shooting. Aligned to the even more violent and truly Neo-Nazis, it creates a political culture which supports the establishment of Anti-Semitic and racially cleansed “No-Go” areas (no Muslims, no Jews, etc.) recently extending to the East-Germany city of Cottbus.

Many inside Germany’s current pre-fascistic orbit – AFD, Pegida, Reichbürger, Neo-Nazis, Homeland Defense, Aryan Race, White Power, Freie Kameradschaft Dresden, etc. – believe that present day Germany is governed by the USA. They also fancy the annihilation of today’s Federal Republic of Germany in favor of a mythical Reich – a reactionary and militaristic Germanic empire. This is a quintessentially reactionary, fascistic or “fascistoid” idea. Here, the German language distinguishes between being outright fascistic and “fascistoid”. Fascistoid means showing fascistic tendencies, being similar to fascism and carrying elements of fascism without having yet reached the level of full fascism. Fascistoid denotes a pre-fascistic state.

For many fascists as for the AFD, Disagreement is Treason (4). This is found in the belief of extreme party loyalty – “them-vs-us”. Violate this and you are gone. This was most famously shown in the short-lived rise and demise of the AFD’s semi-Führer Petry. The party is plagued by in-fighting. Too many want to be the next Führer below Gauland. These changes come on the basis that one is getting the axe the moment one is slightly off the current party line.

Worst of all, once you have betrayed the AFD’s true Il Duce – Alexander Gauland – you are history. Next to strict party loyalty, the AFD calls everything critical about the AFG ‘fake news’. Much of this is mixed with a revival of an old Nazis idea of Joseph Goebbles’ Lügenpresse [lying press].

The xenophobic Fear of Difference (5) is standard repertoire of the AFD. Racial intolerance can almost daily be seen in the many xenophobic claims made by the AFD. Among the countless cases, recent instances are AFD-deputy and MP Jens Maier calling the son of tennis star Boris Becker “Halb-Neger” meaning half-negro or, more likely, “half-nigger”. Another case is AFD-boss Gauland’s personal assistant Shirley Borchardt’s “not so” personal racism. Hate speech remains a punishable crime in Germany. Many of these include not just the hallucination of an Anti-Semitic pure German race but also the demand to shoot and kill refugees at Germany’s borders. Much of this is linked to the aforementioned Volksgemeinschaft based on racial hatred of anyone looking not Aryan enough. The AFD is an active proponent of a planned return to the Volksgemeinschaft.

Sixth, the AFD does indeed Appeal to Social Frustration skillfully converting the negative impacts of neoliberalism’s cut of welfare provisions into racism. It re-directs these frustrations away from state and capitalism and against everyone foreign looking. Traditionally, fascism has always sought to overlay the vertical capital-vs.-labor conflict with the horizontal nation-vs.-nation conflict. The latter supports capitalism – the former challenges capitalism. Instead of exposing capital-labor contradictions, AFD racism sets worker against worker often German worker against non-German worker. As a consequence of the exploitation of social frustration, the AFD does well in disadvantaged geographical areas. It cleverly harnesses social frustration with capitalism and its adjacent political regimes currently expressed in a conservative-social-democracy coalition government.

The AFD also has a strong Obsession with a Plot (7). This comes largely through the right-wing and Neo-Nazi internet websites functioning as echo-chambers that mirror delusion about Islamic conspiracies seeking to infiltrate and destroy Germany. Never far away is the Jewish World Conspiracy. Inside the AFD, as one of its own members recently testified, there is a strong belief in the conspiracy of the Jewish banking family Rothschild and the Jew George Soros. Linked to such hallucinations is the idea that The Enemy is both Strong and Weak (8). This is found in the phantasm of a flood of Muslim refugees. They are accused of taking over Germany and eventually Europe.

In reality, Europe’s Muslims population numbers just 5.4% to 5.7% of Europe’s roughly 740 million people. Still, the AFD believes “Europe is full”. Many of these non-European and non-German people are presented as the enemy. Fascism thinks in strict friend and foe terms. The foe is to be exterminated. It is for them when AFD-sympathizers want to build a new railway from Berlin to Auschwitz. This sort of thinking is linked to the hallucination that Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy (9). AFD militarism strongly rejects pacifism. This particular fantasy feeds the media’s quest for the spectacle under the heading “when it thinks, its stinks – when it bleeds, it leads”. The AFD’s “Politics of Fear” focuses on the fear of Muslim terrorism. To defend Germans against that, a strong army is needed. The new enemy is Muslim terrorism of which virtually anyone non-German is accused. In some cases, 1950s anti-communist speeches can be re-delivered by simply swapping the word “communist” with the word “terrorist”.

Not surprisingly, AFD verbal militarism includes a call to arms to defend Aryan Germany and white Europe. Such calls have led to ‘racist murders as well as arson attacks against asylum seekers’. This is much in line with a Nietzsche-like Contempt for the Weak (10).

Those considered weak range from women, to refugees, handicapped people, LGBTQ and to those deemed surplus labor. In short everyone fitting the description of the Untermensch – the sub-human. Much of the defaming of the weak is geared towards de-humanization – a vital step towards Auschwitz as British philosopher Bauman has shown in his seminal masterpiece “Holocaust and Modernity”.

On the other side of current AFD ideology is the strong. The strong range from the sexually omnipotent African man (raping our blond women, in AFD mythology) to hero glorification (Wehrmacht soldiers and SS). For the AFD, this means Everybody is…to become a hero (11). Traditionally, such heroes are the Wehrmacht soldiers of Nazi Germany once engaged in a devastating race war in Eastern Europe. There is also an AFD call for a new Führer signified in the AFD’s very own demagogue Björn Höcke – the prominent AFD’s “would-like-to-be-Führer”. Like real fascism, the AFD links much of this to its own version of Machismo and weaponry (12). This can be seen, for example, in the AFD’s call for manliness. AFD-leader Höcke demands masculinity.

For the AFD masculinity leads to chauvinism and to Wehrhaftigkeit – a “culture of cruelty” spiced with violence and brutality and what Umberto Eco calls “weaponry”. Much of this is part of rampant AFD populism (13) with simple slogans for the simple minded. Fascism, Nazis and even the AFD features populism. The AFD is not an elite organization. Instead, it is based on what French sociologist LeBon calls “the crowd, the mass” or in Nietzsche’s terms ‘the herd’. The AFD fulfills the classical definition of populism as it promotes an ideology that claims to support the rights of ordinary people in their struggle against a privileged elite – the establishment. Its populism seeks to disrupt the existing social order by solidifying and mobilizing the bitterness of the common people against elites and the establishment. The AFD often portrays both bourgeois capitalists and socialist organizers as unfairly dominating the political landscape. As a consequence, the AFD claims to free Germany and the Germans from the rule of the elite.

Finally, Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak (14). Some of the AFD’s more educated leaders skillfully merge reactionary terminology with present political vocabularies. Most AFD language, however, simply signifies a return to semi-fascist and crypto-Nazi language. It is not exactly Orwellian Newspeak as the AFD has not –yet– invented a new language. AFD language is basically racist vocabulary, standard Anti-Semitism, nationalism and the like. Instead of creating new words and an entire new language as in Orwell’s “1984”, the AFD sticks to classic crypto-fascist language.

It regularly gets extremely close to what would qualify as “hate speech” – a punishable offence according to Germany’s criminal code. Hate speech is known in Germany as Volksverhetzung. While mostly avoiding outright hate speech, AFD language creates a pro-Nazi atmosphere in which talk of “concentrating refugees in camps” as a “final solution” for refugees have increasingly become mainstream. It is “mainstreaming fascism” as Canadian philosopher Henry Giroux calls it. AFD leader Jeanette Ihme is, for example, among those AFD personalities already convicted of such an offence. According to a leading weekly “Die Zeit” (2nd January 2018) there are more than 100 lawsuits against the AFD on grounds of hate speech.

Given these rather preliminary investigations into the AFD measured against Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, it is hard to avoid the impression that Germany’s new right-wing party AFD has indeed a fascistic ideology. It has very strong fascist tendencies. It is a fascistoid or pre-fascistic party. Despite all this, what the AFD is still lacking is a violent and brutish paramilitary street fighting organization like Italy’s blackshirts, Hungary’s Arrow-Cross, or Germany’s SA, HJ and later SS. These were running secret – and often not so secret – torture chambers between the 1920s and 1945. In many cases, this included rounding up, beating, and killing trade unionists, perceived non-Aryans, homosexuals, democrats, progressives, pacifists, liberals, communists, anarchists, Jewish people, gypsies, etc. Much of this was once so pointedly expressed in the magnificent words of Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Secondly, the AFD has not managed – so far – to convince Germany’s conservatives to appoint one of its own as the new Führer of Germany. In 1933, Adolf Hitler as the Nazi Reichskanzler came to power through a right-wing coalition government furnished by Germany’s conservatives. The Nazi Party simply never had the majority of German voters. Thirdly, and this is despite Gauland (the AFD’s ‘behind the scenes’ leader), the shiny front-women Alice Weidel, and semi-Nazi demagogue Björn Höcke, the AFD has not yet found a Hitler-style leader. Despite the many similarities to Fascism and Nazism, mainstream Germany refrains from calling Nazis Nazis preferring instead “right-wing populism”, “right extremism”, “nationalism”, “nationalistic right”, “far right”, “extreme right”, etc.

Beyond that, Germany’s powerful right-wing Springer press has decided to become somewhat the “semi-official” mouthpiece spreading AFD ideology. Its main outlet is, albeit declining but still with 1.8 million sold newspapers daily, the “Bild” tabloid. More often than not it broadcasts racism parroting AFD propaganda.

Bild still has an extremely large readership. Next to the massive support of the right-wing corporate press, AFD leaders are frequently invited to still very popular TV talk-shows where prominent TV-hosts such as Maischberger, Plasberg, and Lanz provide a mass broadcasting outlet for Nazi ideology.

The ideological goal of Germany’s version of Rupert Murdoch – Axel Cäsar Springer (1912-1985) and current bedfellows – is the normalization of the extreme right.

This is despite the fact that after Auschwitz there can be no political and cultural “normality” in Germany, as the eminent philosopher Adorno once said. This applies to Germany and the Germans.

The historical uniqueness of Auschwitz –factory style genocide– had two ingredients: Anti-Semitism and Germans. Even with the AFD’s very own court certified Holocaust denier, it is very clear by now that the AFD is not much more than a bunch of racists and Anti-Semitists. Many have already been called Offspring-Nazis [Nachwuchsnazis]. Certainly after the AFD’s latest party convention in 2017, the party has moved even more towards its racist and Anti-Semitic “völkische” side with the goal of an ethnically cleansed Germany based on a mythical Aryan race. Despite all this, there are at least five reasons why mainstream Germany avoids calling Germany’s new Nazis Nazis preferring instead to engage in “mainstreaming fascism”.

The first reason for not calling Germany’s new Nazis Nazis has something to do with the fact that Germany’s international image might be damaged by admitting that a new breed of Nazis has indeed entered Germany’s Parliament in 2017. Watching their eerie speeches in the legislature on YouTube is truly mind numbing. On election night, AFD Führer Gauland announced the AFD will “hunt Merkel”. These aren’t the positive images Germany’s industry (and its politicians) like to portray to the world. Much more than in 1933, today’s export oriented industry depends on a positive international image often presented as a clean, modern, scientific and technologically advanced. In 2016, German industry exports ranking just behind the USA and China. Any damage to this by telling the truth is to be avoided.

Unlike the days when Hitler was made Reichskanzler (30th January 1933), the majority of German industry today wants to avoid any damage to its carefully crafted image of simply being a machine-, pharmaceutical- and car exporting country. Corporations like Krupp, Porsche, BMWs, Mercedes, Volkswagens, Allianz, Deutsche Bank, SS-uniform-maker Hugo Boss, etc. although once heavily involved with Nazism, want to be seen to be distant to the newly rising image of Germanic Nazism. Instead, German corporations and Germany’s establishment pride themselves to be world champion of exports [Exportweltmeister]. Nazism might damage the pretense of a clean, modern, technology-driven and democratic Germany that has truly ended its recent Nazi past. As a consequence, mainstream Germany prefers populism under the propagandistic ideology “we are just like any other country” – even though it is the only country that has created Auschwitz.

Secondly, Germany’s establishment does not want to be reminded of its Nazi past, it also does not want to be reminded of what it did during the immediate post-Nazi years, namely the seamless integration of high-ranking – and not so high-ranking – Nazis into the legal (with 90 of the 170 top-bureaucrats being exNazis), political and economic apparatus of post-Nazi Germany. Even though the Allied Forces pushed the denazification of Germany between 1945 and 1949, it was soon wound down with the exception of a few high profile court cases carried through to make the world believe that Germany had broken with Nazism.

Meanwhile, Germany’s post-Nazi system was filled up with exNazis. Many of their names are listed in the seminal source: the Braunbuch. Still, there are some noteworthy Nazis: Waffen-SS Untersturmführer Hanns Martin Schleyer (later CDU and President of two powerful commercial organizations, the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations and the Federation of German Industries); SA Obersturmführer Theodor Oberländer (later: CDU and Minister); NSDAP member Karl Carstens and later President of Germany (CDU); Hans Globke’s extraordinary efforts in drafting the Nazi law for Anti-Semitism called “Protection of the German Blood” under Hitler, was later appointed undersecretary in Adenauer’s Chancellery.

There are many more.

These exNazis in politics, economy, law, education, culture, banking, sports, police, army, universities, the press, etc. were busy camouflaging Nazi crimes from the consciousness of Germans. At the same time, Germany’s film and TV industry assured that the past vanished into thin air. Nazi crimes and those responsible simply never appeared on German cinema and TV screens.

Noteworthy exceptions are, for example, Hildegard Knef’s Murderers Among Us (1948 released in Sweden!), East-Germany’s Naked Among Wolves (1963) and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1979). Not surprisingly almost all Holocaust films eventually shown (after most Nazis had died a peaceful death) in a few selected cinemas and in mid-night TV were foreign. These were mostly “foreign” movies like Spencer Tracy’s US classic “The Seventh Cross”.

The first time German mass audience (including me) who saw a little bit of Nazi history on German TV was when the US mini-series called “Holocaust” (with Meryl Streep) was shown on German television in 1978. Half a decade later, an Australian written (Thomas Keneally) and US-made film called Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg) was shown. It was as foreign as Claude Lanzman’s seminal masterpiece Shoah (France), Roman Polansky’s The Pianist (France, UK, Germany, Poland), Italy’s Life Is Beautiful, and Brad Pitt’s wishful Inglourious Basterds (USA). In other words, having successfully diminished Germany’s recent Nazi past in film and television, Germany’s establishment still seeks to avoid highlighting the “Germany-Nazi” link as much as possible. It simply carries on a long post-war tradition. The mainstream’s treatment of the AFD fits into the tradition of de-emphasizing Nazism.

Thirdly, the rise of the AFD, the upswing of its street fighters Pegida (the racist “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West”), the AFD’s entering of Germany’s federal parliament and its mass media engineered widespread support and appeal might have convinced mainstream media that both – AFD and Pegida – are just too big to be called Nazis. Even though this should be even more of a reason to call both Nazis as its danger grows the moment the AFD infiltrates Germany’s political institutions.

Not just institutions but also size matters. Nazism, militarism, dictatorship, and fascism always needed massive support to take over democracy to destroy it – one of the unspoken goals of the AFD when seeking its racist Volksgemeinschaft. Currently, the AFD is boasting that a renewed conservative-social-democratic coalition government would mean that the AFD is Germany’s largest opposition party. The AFD talks pride in this. It means more institutional power, more self-importance, and more opportunities to broadcasts its hate speeches.

Fourthly, the Potsdam Agreement of 30th April 1946, the Proclamation Number Two of 20th September 1945, and a subsequent law (10th October 1945) clearly state that the intention of the Allied Forces is “to prevent the revival or reorganization of German militarism and Nazism”.

The objective of the Allied Forces was “to destroy the National Socialist Party and its affiliated and supervised organizations, to dissolve all Nazi institutions, to ensure that they are not revived in any form, and to prevent all Nazi and militarist activity or propaganda”. Violation of these provisions is a punishable offence.

These are the things Germany and the Germans do not want to be reminded of. Furthermore, article 21(2) of Germany’s constitution notes that “parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional”.

Despite having clear legal and constitutional provisions, mainstream Germany still shies away from a possible court case against the AFD. Calling Nazis Nazis would inevitably be a first step towards such as legal case as it makes clear what the AFD actually is. One of the real dangers of Nazism is not seeing it as a danger.

Fifthly, calling Nazis Nazis may conjure up renewed calls to declare the AFD illegal as its political goals will lead to the destruction of Germany and its democratic constitution. In AFD politics, current democratic institutions are to be replaced with an authoritarian Volksgemeinschaft. Previous supreme court cases against the AFD’s smaller frontrunner, the NPD failed in 2001-2003 under the social-democratic Chancellor Schröder. Contemplating a second attempt for a renewed anti-NPD court case in 2013-2017 was also abandoned. The second attempt occurred in the wake of the neo-Nazi NSU killings – the National-Socialist Underground. It was never followed through. In the NSU case, young Neo-Nazis received generous support from Germany’s secret service financing and arming NSU killings. Ten people including a female police officer between 2000 and 2007 died.

Despite rampant racism and Anti-Semitism with violent attacks and killings, German officials shy away from a legal showdown with a party that holds parliamentary seats and has a large support base throughout Germany. Historically and with the exception of the immediate post-war SRP, taking on Nazis has never been the intention of the German state. All this might explain why German mainstream avoids calling Nazis Nazis. 

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave, 2013).

More articles by:Thomas Klikauer

My Talk with Andre (Vltchek)

A Conversation with Andre Vltchek

by Danny Haiphong - Dissident Voice

February 23rd, 2018

“Those who claim to be objective, like the BBC or The New York Times, are actually the most professional propagandists for the Western Empire.”

This week I spoke with philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist Andre Vltchek. Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to The Great October Socialist Revolution, a revolutionary novel Aurora and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: Exposing Lies Of The Empire. His other books can be viewed here.

Also be sure to watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world.

He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

I spoke with him about his work and his thoughts on the current imperialist attack on independent media.

*****

Danny Haiphong: Could you give readers a background of who you are and what influenced you to take the path of independent journalism and analysis?

Andre Vltchek: First of all, lately I do not define myself as a journalist. These days, journalism is synonymous with ‘the oldest profession.’ I document the world, I inform people, and I propagate my political ideas. I don’t believe in “objective reporting” – it simply does not exist, and those who claim to be objective, like the BBC or The New York Times, are actually the most professional propagandists for the Western Empire. I may be a propagandist, too, but for the left, for internationalism.

And I never hide who I am and where I am standing, politically.

Who am I? To simplify it: a Cuban-style unapologetic ‘Commie’ and internationalist. Russian-born, quarter Chinese, novelist, filmmaker, philosopher and revolutionary.

DH: In the years I’ve followed your media work, you have covered such topics as neo-colonialism, the role of the Soviet Union in the rise of internationalist politics, and the little known imperialist wars on Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name a few. Could you tell me more about what led you to seek the truth on these matters?

AV: I witnessed terrible suffering of people in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It often appeared that the Empire truly saw billions of human beings as ‘non-people,’ as some lowly beings who deserve to have no rights, who could be freely exploited, enslaved, even killed. This arrangement of the world made me sick, from my young age. It made me so sick, that I decided to get involved, to take action, to join the struggle against Western imperialism and neo-colonialism.

I never saw Western civilization or Western culture as something glorious or positive. It managed to literally slaughter hundreds of millions of human beings on all continents, for centuries.

I tried to understand the concept of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, in order to help to stop this deadly process. I went to Namibia to study the first Holocaust committed by Germans. I went to Congo (DRC), in order to understand extremity of European brutality, 100 years ago, and now.

At some point, I finally understood that the only way to reach permanent peace on Earth, based on justice, would be to force Western powers from the position of power, of controlling the world.

DH: In your bio, I’ve noticed that you have written for Russian and Chinese outlets such as RT, New Eastern Outlook, and The People’s Daily. What is the difference, in your opinion, in the quality of journalism that emanates from these countries as opposed to the US and West?

AV: Media outlets that you mentioned belong to the countries which are fighting against Western imperialism and its global dominance. These countries are my allies; therefore, I write for their media, I make films for them, and appear on their television networks. It is not only Russian and Chinese media, but also several outlets in Latin America and the Middle East.

What is different about them? They serve their nations, their people, not some corporate freaks. I like when people work for well-being of their countries: I like healthy patriotism, especially when it is combined with the internationalist principles.

DH: How has the media landscape in the US and West changed since you became a journalist and how have such changes affected broader efforts to understand the developments and changes occurring worldwide?

AV: Media landscape in the West is evolving in one direction only: it is being increasingly, now almost exclusively, controlled by the corporate interests. Corporate interests, in turn, are controlling the state, in both Europe and North America. There is no democracy in the West: governments are being selected, not elected.

Most of the media is upholding, glorifying this process. It is definitely not challenging it, philosophically and ideologically. In the past, long decades ago, there was at least some philosophical debate about the direction in which our civilization and our planet was evolving. Now it all stopped.

Mass media became synonymous with imperialist propaganda. It is all very well-orchestrated; choreographed. And people in the West are so thoroughly brainwashed that they stopped asking questions regarding the most essential issues.

DH: Since late 2016, the US and Western corporate press and political establishment has been obsessed with the notion that Russia has infiltrated US and Western democracy, influencing elections through the promotion of “fake news.” This accusation has produced grave consequences for alternative media outlets and journalists, as publications such as RT and Black Agenda Report have been labeled dupes of the Russians and subsequently censored by internet search engines such as Google and social media like Facebook. Has social media censorship affected your work at all and what would you say is the significance of this campaign against independent journalism?

AV: In the future, and may this future come soon, those who are performing this outrageous censorship, will be judged by history and labeled as collaborators with the Western imperialist regime, which in turn is synonymous with fascism.

In the meantime, we are now fighting information, or call it a media war. The Western media is directly and indirectly promoting Western imperialism, while some independent media outlets, including Black Agenda Report, and, of course, many non-Western television stations and publications are doing their best to expose the lies and crimes of Western regime and its journo collaborators.

Of course, internet search engines as well as social media are huge business organizations. We cannot expect them to be on our side.

But people, millions of them, even in the West, are now “migrating” to the alternative media sources, like RT, TeleSUR, PressTV, CGTV, but also those that are produced in the West, like TGP, Investig’Action, Black Agenda Report or Dissident Voice.

“The Western media is directly and indirectly promoting Western imperialism.”

And about Russia? Look, it is actually all very simple. And let us say it as it is, brutally: Many Russians look like whites, but they are not really whites, they have their own culture, which is more Asian than European. For centuries, Russia was attacked from the West, by Scandinavians, French, Germans, the US after the Revolution, by the UK, Czechs, Poles, and many others.

Russia lost tens of millions of people, but it never ended up on its knees. It became an internationalist power, siding with the oppressed, sponsoring countless anti-colonialist struggles in all corners of the world. One could say, it most likely saved the world from Western fascism, on more than one occasion.

The West never forgave Russians for this: white-looking ‘traitors’ who instead of joining the plunder, has been fighting for the oppressed! That is all there is to it; to that anti-Russian hysteria in the West.

DH: You recently wrote a piece criticizing the Western left for abandoning the principle of internationalism. Could you elaborate on your argument and relate it to the question of which way forward the alternative and independent media should go in the current political climate in the US and West?

AV: Yes, I wrote a very critical, some would say damning essay, basically claiming that the Western left is finished and has no right to give advice to any revolutionary country or government in Africa, Asia or Latin America. And if they give advice and are taken seriously, progressive countries end up being defeated, like Argentina and Brazil were defeated, recently.

I don’t even trust the Western left when it criticizes politicians like Zuma or Duterte.

The majority of people in the West are not able to commit themselves. They are too selfish, too egotistic. And they are full of nihilism: sweating and shitting nihilism.

They reject all ideologies and they do not want to govern. They despise those who are holding power. However, without ideology and without aiming at governing, no true revolution can take place. I don’t think Western left is serious: there is no revolutionary force there, no willingness to sacrifice anything for the struggle. It is all weak, spineless and boring: like shouting at the high definition television set, or insulting opponents in the pub.

The Western left wants more and more privileges for North American and especially European citizens. Who pays for these privileges? Devastated, raped nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as those ‘south of the border.’ But French, Italian, Spanish or US intellectuals from the so-called left do not want to talk about this. They are not and don’t claim to be, internationalists.

“The Western left is all weak, spineless and boring.”

I will say more, and this will hurt: they are, many of them are, racist. Not racist in traditional sense, no. They talk racial equality, they are politically correct. It is a different type of racism: they do not mind if millions of Congolese people are sacrificed, so the French workers could have shorter working day or better medical benefits. They are also convinced that countries like China with much greater culture than the West, could and should be judged and defined (“Is China really a Communist country?” For instance) from London, New York or Paris. It is so pathetically arrogant! It is grotesque.

The Western left hates those revolutionaries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East who still dare, who are fighting, who are not afraid to govern.

Independent political media? In the West? It should learn how to be revolutionary, again. Otherwise it will never inspire anyone, anymore. People are bored and tired of theories and clichés. In the West, people are often tired and depressed about themselves, and they’d welcome some mighty kicks into their own asses. In the exploited countries, people do not want to be appeased; they want to fight, to rebel, to have media on their side, carrying their voices.

DH: What are some projects and organizations, if any, that you are working on right now and where can we find your work?

AV: I cooperate with many internationalist media outlets all over the world, be they in Russia, China, Latin America, the Middle East or Africa.

Best way to follow my work is by going to my website. All my latest stuff is there.

As always, I’m running myself to the ground, working day and night, but it is as always great fun! In one month or so, my new book on revolutionary philosophy will be published with the title On Western Nihilism and Revolutionary Optimism. I’m making two documentary films about the absolute environmental devastation of Borneo Island, particularly its Indonesian part (called Kalimantan). And I’m collecting footage in Afghanistan for a low budget feature film.

I’m also writing a book about that wonderful but scarred country, and about how the West totally perverted modern Afghan history. I’m involved in a theatre project in Hamburg, and I’m writing two new books.

There is no time to lose. This is a great intellectual war against the West and its deadly imperialism. And for the first time in modern history, we are winning this war. And ‘they’ know it. That is why they are running amok, attacking, censoring. Soon, no one will be taking them seriously. This is our great chance. That is why we have to work day and night, every day and every night, until the final victory!

• First published in Black Agenda Report

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com.

 Read other articles by Danny.

Canada "Engaging" to Death in Honduras

Take Action: Canada "Engaging" to Death in Honduras

by MiningWatch Canada

February 22, 2018

Your support is needed in response to the dire situation facing Hondurans in the aftermath of national elections in late November that have been widely-denounced given evidence of electoral fraud and a campaign of state violence against hundreds of protests across the country since.

Not even the usually pliant Organization of American States was willing to accept the Honduras election results; nonetheless, on December 22nd, the Canadian government expressed its support when the electoral tribunal named incumbent Juan Orlando Hernández as President.


Activist Edwin Espinal is one of over twenty political
prisoners being held in a maximum security prison where
he could spend years before ever seeing a judge.

Please take action here, to write to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and your own MP calling for diplomatic action, urging that Edwin and others be freed.

Weakly, Canada also urged Hernández’ regime “to protect human rights and ensure that those responsible for violations are held accountable,” while failing to acknowledge that it is the Hernández regime that has been perpetuating the violence.

Canadian journalist Sandra Cuffe reports that, since the November 26 elections,

“More than 35 protesters and bystanders have been killed by security forces and other unknown perpetrators, hundreds injured, and more than 1,000 detained. At least 22 people remain in jail in different parts of the country on charges related to protests.” 

She has also noted that this is far worse than the state repression that followed the June 2009 military backed coup in Honduras, since which time the ultra-right National party in Honduras increasingly centralized power.

“This is state-led terrorism in Honduras, and the Canadian government is supporting it,” comments Jackie McVicar, coordinator of United for Mining Justice who participated in a faith-based delegation to Honduras in the lead up to Hernández’s inauguration on January 27th.

Not only did Canada come out in support of the recent election results; since 2009 the Canadian government has taken advantage of an increasingly authoritarian and violent context in Honduras to lobby for a new mining law that favours translational mining investments and to conclude a free trade agreement.

Honduras Solidarity Network coordinator Karen Spring notes that Canadian authorities have argued that Canada must “engage” with Honduras in order to influence the human rights situation. But she and others close to the ground, who accompany communities affected by Canadian-owned mines and tourism projects, and who have been reporting on intensifying criminalization and violence against social movement organizations since 2009, say continued engagement instead serves to empower the elite in Honduras and favour Canadian economic interests.

In other words, the support that Canada, the US and others lend to the Honduran government creates an enabling environment for Honduran officials to jail political opponents in maximum security prisons, execute protesters in the streets, and terrorize the population, while corruption festers and crimes such as the murder of Berta Cáceres in 2016 fail to be fully investigated, because there are few consequences to doing otherwise.

In an excellent two-part documentary series, Canadian filmmaker Jesse Freeston observes that while not a single country flew in a minister or head of state for Hernández’s highly militarized inauguration on January 27th, eleven countries - among them Canada - and several international financial institutions continue to send funds and weapons to the Honduras government.

Please respond by showing your solidarity with Honduran political prisoners, including Edwin Espinal and at least 20 others jailed on charges related to protests against election fraud in Honduras. Espinal has suffered state harassment since the 2009 coup d’etat and was detained on January 19th after a national strike. Family members and human rights organizations are being denied entry to visit him. Immediate action is required to push for Edwin’s release and to ensure his safety.

Visit this site to write to Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland and your MP urging they press Honduran authorities for Edwin's freedom.