John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY THE SAKER IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“Understanding Why They Lie and Why They Get Away with It”

 

I find the article somewhat jumbled, but its author has managed a few powerful truths on an important subject.

This phrase does hit the mark, “life in a reality-free world”

It is indeed a realty-free world when it comes to America’s activities abroad.

But perhaps there should be little surprise at the fact.

Empire is inherently oppressive and anti-democratic.

We have a tiny percentage of the world’s population (America has roughly five percent of world’s population, but America’s establishment, the people who truly count, represent a tiny fraction of one percent) telling everyone else what to do.

And America uses a great deal of violence to enforce its will – bombing, insurgencies, assassinations, wars, and coups. It cannot be otherwise.

In some cases, as with allies, it uses only the pressure of its globally-dominant financial institutions and markets, but that is still coercion, and it is very unwelcome.

Even granting American elections are somewhat democratic, the fact means nothing to those being forced to do what they do not wish to do.

Power is power no matter how granted, as by election, and abuse of that power is abuse no different than abuse by any other kind of government.

From the world’s point of view, America is a form of authoritarian government, and all authoritarian governments lie about what they are doing.

No one likes being openly credited with oppression and killing and theft. That is true even for governments as notorious in our memories as Stalin’s or Hitler’s or the former junta in Argentina, but it is equally true for America in its affairs abroad or for Israel in its affairs with its neighbors.

All that dirty work requires a lot of lying to cover over. America still likes to think of itself as descending from that small group of men pledging their sacred honors, and of course that is an absurd contradiction with today’s reality.

Despite those who work to inform themselves often recognizing the lies, they are a small minority of any society, and I think the lying, on the whole, does work. Much as with the tiresome and threadbare claims of commercial advertising, a sizable part of the population accepts them, or at least does not question them, having no motive for close examination.

And there is no need for guilt on the part of officials doing the lying. If you don’t feel guilty about killing and stealing, why would you feel guilty about some mere lies?

As crimes of empire, lies are just pocket change.

I’ve said many times that you can have an empire or you can have a decent country, but you cannot have both. America long ago chose empire.

You can take that principle a step further: you can have an empire or you can have a democratic state, but you cannot have both.

To say otherwise is as absurd as Israel’s claim to being a democracy while it occupies and abuses millions who enjoy no rights.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS

 

“‘Democracy-defining moment’: House representatives debate Trump impeachment”

 

Well, maybe.

I think it more likely the impeachment effort will reveal how deeply divided the United States is.

The White House refuses to cooperate.

Leadership in the Senate – where such trials occur – has talked about calling no witnesses and shutting down the whole thing quickly, leaving Trump exonerated.

Where does that take anyone that is worth going?

America is a deeply troubled country. Divided, seriously so.

You might not recognize that from the way it tyrannizes over so much of the world with its unceasing imperial demands, but real differences on empire and the military are simply not part of America’s political division.

Likely, Trump will prevail in the Senate. Despite a few dissenting Republicans, there is little evidence of a serious undercurrent against him. Conviction requires a two-thirds vote in a Republican-dominated body.

Yes, Trump’s behavior vis-à-vis Ukraine, trying to use it to influence American domestic politics, has been inappropriate, but it is only inappropriate in a country where people adhere to civility and the rule of law.

And that country is certainly not the United States. Running an empire, and an increasingly harsh one in response to growing awareness of its own relative decline in the world, is the polar opposite to civility and respect for rule of law, but running an empire is the business that America’s establishment is in full-time. All of its establishment, which includes the major figures of both parties, the wealthy interests they all faithfully represent, and powerful, almost unaccountable agencies like CIA assisting their efforts.

A situation arose in Ukraine only because the United States fomented and paid for a coup against an elected government there in 2014. All of the controversy which swirls around Joe Biden arises from the fact of his having served as Obama’s proconsul to demand certain directions for the new government.

Trump’s phone call was wrong, but in the context of all the dirt that the United States has been mired in with Ukraine, it does seem almost small.

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“U.S. House committee to start public impeachment hearings next week

“Republicans have so far shown little appetite for removing president”

 

I used to think they would not carry out the impeachment, but now I’m not so sure.

They have had some fairly powerful new testimony, especially concerning “Quid pro quo.”

There also have been a few signals from Republican ranks. Old line Republicans never did like Trump, and some still don’t. There are qualities about him that Old Money types undoubtedly view as vulgar and even squalid.

And the people Trump supported in recent state elections like Kentucky, Republican territory, just did badly, and after a big show by him seeking support.

In the United States, impeachment is always more of a political act than anything else. Presidents are never actually caught with their hands in the till taking wads of cash or having killed someone, although I have little doubt such acts have happened, the perpetrators just weren’t caught. Perhaps, even many would not want to catch them owing to its impact on national prestige.

Standards also have slipped badly in the close-to-totally corrupt atmosphere of imperial Washington with not a single President of the modern era leaving the White House without having become quite a wealthy person. The same goes for important Senators and other “public servants.”

But those impeached are caught in behaviors which, depending on your point of view, may be interpreted as overstepping Constitutional bounds. That plus the fact that every potential juror, members of the United States Senate, in the end answers only to his or her constituents, does make the process political in nature.

I do wish them good luck.

This man has proven himself a grotesque parody of a leader – a rude, ignorant, and frightening man, but you unfortunately can’t put him on trial for any of that.

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN INTERVIEW BY NICK LEHR WITH DAVID BROMWICH IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Why Barack Obama Was Particularly Unsuited to Live up to the Ideals of the Nobel Peace Prize

“A new book is unsparing in its assessment of Obama’s legacy”

 

I can’t believe how many people still are fooled by Obama’s boyish smile and baritone voice.

Perhaps the sheer contrast in style to the rude, incessant bombast and repulsive insults from his successor in office contributes to sustaining some illusion.

Perhaps also his being the first black man elected as president lends him a special aura, associations in people’s minds that do not really fit the man.

As though he were somehow associated with all those struggling people in the Third World and in the vast sprawl of ghettos which pockmark most of America’s cities.

(Of course, when he ran for office, he played off those very things, as when speaking to crowds of black Americans in the rhythms of old-style preachers with a much-repeated phrase like, “Yes, we can!”)

As though he weren’t at all associated with the brutal, soulless officials of Washington’s vast imperial establishment. Men who sit at meetings around large polished oak tables and decide the fates of others thousands of miles away. Who will live, and who will die. Men, women, and children.

Although much reduced from his earliest days in office, he does still have a following.

I agree with the author that early on he was seen as something of an anti-war figure. I saw him that way myself, briefly regarding him as almost heroic, but it really did not take very long to see how wrong that assessment was.

Indeed, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, it was already clear what sort of man he was. Of course, many of the Peace Prizes have been awarded on the basis of airy hopes, somewhat better than the numerous awards to outright killers and terrorists.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/on-obamas-nobel-peace-prize/

Not only did he not keep his own promises, such as closing that shameful place called Guantanamo, this man spent eight solid years killing people.

He bombed somewhere every day of his two terms.

And he holds the distinction of having created an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing system, incinerating people far away who were never legally charged or tried for anything. The method frequently kills bystanders, too, but even the targets are legally guilty of nothing.

All in the name of freedom, the same freedom as is used in the name of the medal he awarded to Joe Biden, his Vice President, a strong inside advocate for creating the mass hi-tech operation for “disappearing” people.

Obama turned an extremely well-run country like Libya – maybe not a democracy, but a place where no one did without clean water and housing and free education and health care, and a place that remained at peace for decades – into a vision from hell. It remains so to this day.

And he worked very hard to do the same for Syria, having his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, oversee the transfer of savage fighters and storehouses full of weapons from the ruins of Libya through devious channels to the beautiful, historic land of Syria.

We even know from one of our finest living investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, that she had a small amount of Libya’s stock of poison nerve agent shipped for ultimate use in Syria. Gaddafi, just as several Arab leaders had done, kept such stocks as a counter to Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.

They wanted to create an incident so that Obama’s public warning about Syria’s government “not crossing red lines” (in its fight against the terrorizing mercenaries sent to destabilize the country) could be used to bomb the crap out of the place, just as had been done in Libya.

He only failed because of immense efforts by others (especially Russia’s Vladimir Putin).

He signed off on a coup against an elected government in Ukraine, something done for no other reason than to threaten and harass Russia, creating a series of conflicts and problems we have to this day, including a civil war in the country’s East, the Donbass, that has killed thousands.

He once quietly joked with words to the effect, ‘Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff.’ I have no idea why he spoke in that strange way, but his words were recorded.

A penchant for brutal humor seemed to be part of the environment of his government. After the unspeakably grisly death of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (there is a video you could not pay me to watch), his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was recorded saying, “We came, we saw, he died! Ha, ha, ha!”

He pressed hard against the elected government of Venezuela with economic measures that served only to reduce the lives of millions of ordinary people.

In addition to the immense amount of violence Obama oversaw as President, he had a very strong tendency towards secrecy, and went after whistleblowers with a vengeance.

Poor dear Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under him, an ordeal she almost didn’t survive.

Edward Snowden was forced into exile under his watch.

John Kiriakou went to prison under him for revealing the CIA’s use of torture.

And it was in his time as President that Julian Assange sought asylum from Ecuador.

The intelligence community’s massive new Utah Data Center, designed to hold unholy amounts of secret data about people was opened under this President.

He often was remarkably arrogant, something not widely noticed, but you can see it clearly in his posture and finger-pointing in some old photos.

https://chuckmangrotesques.blogspot.com/2016/10/john-chuckman-grotesque-obama-best.html

This truly was a monster, just one with a deceptively pleasant face.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY WILL COLLINS IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Washington Imagines Itself the Master of the Globe but Its Military Is a Tiny Colonial Police Force

“As with Britain in the 1920s America’s global hegemony is resting on feet of glass”

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/washington-imagines-itself-the-master-of-the-globe-but-its-military-is-a-tiny-colonial-police-force/

 

There are interesting points here, but I find the piece unsatisfying and a bit disturbing overall.

The author focuses on America’s establishment having made some poor choices recently in its governance of empire – as, indeed, it very much has – rather than, what I think far more consequential, questioning the entire imperial enterprise itself.

I think a good argument can be made that such bad decisions in imperial governance always follow from the very nature of empire and the privileged class who run it largely for their own benefit.

And so many of America’s terrible problems at home are pretty direct fall-out from its imperial system, and the broad American public seems to have remarkably little grasp of the fact.

The money – borrowed, all of it, so that the spending is constantly building a terrifying future burden which everyone except the privileged who spend it will be responsible for, one way or another – squandered on the military and state security plus all the attention and focus and political will of the establishment leave the United States equipped to fix virtually nothing at home.

You have an almost unfixable decaying infrastructure of bad roads and bridges and urban sewer and water systems and transportation systems and schools.

You have one of the world’s strangest and most grossly unfair medical service industries with elites automatically getting the very finest and advanced care and so many others literally driven into bankruptcy, medical bills remaining as America’s single largest cause of personal bankruptcy.

You have a terribly violent social fabric with police killing an average of three citizens per day and generally not even being held accountable. You have the world’s highest rate of incarceration, and in some of the world’s more violent and ruthlessly-managed prisons, prisons in which many hundreds mysteriously die every year.

You have open squalor, indistinguishable from a Third World place, to be seen over vast stretches of the country’s cities and rural locations. Armies of homeless camping out on streets and in parks of great cities, reduced to defecating on the pavement, just as you might see in rural India.

You certainly have the complete end of all personal privacy in the country with a massive security apparatus that rivals anything the old East German Stasi. Everything from the made-legal intrusions of the FBI and NSA and Homeland Security to the backdoors built into various digital devices and to the unregulated gathering and distribution and use of sinful amounts of personal data by gigantic, unchallenged Internet monopoly firms.

It is interesting that a country which in its popular culture has long put such great emphasis on the individual has begun effectively to destroy many foundations of individuality, but of course the people running empires have little regard for individuality, beyond their own. It kind of “comes with the territory,” as they used to say.

You have the building of an elite class so separated from the mass of ordinary people by wealth and privilege that they really do represent a society within a society, a kind of Inner Party, one that pays almost no taxes to support the imperial edifice from which it benefits. It commands all the key political and social levers, effectively reducing the country to a plutocracy, with only a window-dressing of democracy and justice.

Well, there are many parallels, at home and abroad, not just to imperial Victorian Britain but to late 18th century France and even to Rome after the Empire ended the Republic.

Empire is intrinsically about privilege and extreme inequality and abuse of people, always and everywhere. Its effects are never just felt abroad. They always erode the very foundations of the society upon which the empire was built.

However much Americans may embrace the secular religious notion of their exceptionalism in the world, almost a contemporary parody of the Old Testament’s God’s Chosen People, America is demonstrably not free of the enduring stresses and forces and dangers of empire.