John Chuckman

EMPIRE OF HATE

 

Trump has begun a new campaign of hatred against China.

It is new only in its intensity and nastiness. Trump from the start has used China politically, accusing it of many evil trade and business practices in an effort to squeeze concessions from it while telling the folks back home he is fighting for them, for more benefits to good old America.

The truth is that the only evil practice of the Chinese has been to outperform and outcompete the United States on many economic and business fronts. You simply are not allowed to do that to the “indispensable” nation, embarrassing its “exceptional” leaders. It’s a form of lèse-majesté.

While China has worked to make itself the world’s factory, turning out almost every conceivable kind of good and machine, sending them, peacefully, everywhere across the seas, America has pretty much stopped making anything except an unholy number of weapons it uses in its ceaseless wars. It sells them, too, as the world’s greatest arms merchant, larger than all the other large ones combined. It sells them in captive markets to allies it pressures into buying them, and it sells them to many of the world’s worst tyrannies who support its policies.

The attack on Huawei has been until now the greatest single campaign in a virtual war of misinformation, unfair pressure, and uncompetitive practices against China – going so far as intimidating allies against using Huawei’s world-beating 5-G technology. But the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic brings a dazzling new opportunity, one much richer in possibilities to whip up fear and hatred than mere suggestions of spying, suggestions always a bit limp since everyone who counts knows America spies on everyone continuously, through the insidious NSA and the American hi-tech and on-line industries.

It is an unexpected political blessing from heaven. Perhaps it’s all those evangelical prayers for him being answered? After all, he is, in his own words, “the chosen one.” It provides the means for that most important task of all, getting himself re-elected. Everything he has ever said or done as President, a great deal of it very shabby, is dedicated to that task. Here is a man, with nothing to say worth hearing and who has done almost nothing worth doing, who insists on staying center-stage. Narcissism is his deepest quality.

Now, it very much appears he’s going to make China and his version of what China is supposed to have done in the pandemic the central focus of his re-election campaign. In brief, he’s saying it is a Chinese disease and that it’s quite possible China created it in a bio-lab and that in any event China has lied every step of the way and failed in its responsibilities to the World Health Organization (WHO), the same WHO Trump has recklessly cut-off from funding at a time of unprecedented world need owing to their asserted complicity and accommodation of China.

It is hard to imagine a more confused and dishonest stitched-together crazy quilt of stories. You might think they would convince few of anything, serving only as further evidence of Trump’s recklessness and viciousness. But, no, remember this is America, a country that has been almost continuously at war for decades without most of the people ever having any idea why they fighting, spending astronomical sums of money to kill people and destroy places they know nothing about.

Truly, anything is possible in America, and its first P. T. Barnum President is fully aware of the fact and ready to use it on a great new purpose, his re-election.

I am being unfair to Barnum who was indeed a grand-scale huckster and is credited with saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but he wasn’t foul-mouthed, and there is no evidence that he hated entire classes of people (refugees, many immigrants, Muslims, and those like China who embarrass America by their success) or that he abused tens of millions afflicted with both illness and illegal sanctions (Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and others) or that he carried on killing in any number of places (Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and others) and supported others killing in still other places (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and others) or that he promoted discord and distrust on a vast scale (China, Iran, Russia, and others).

When the United States finally finished its decade-long orgy of killing in Vietnam – having killed an estimated 3 million people and turned that lush country into a landscape of smoldering bomb craters and toxic deposits of Agent Orange and other chemicals – virtually no Americans even understood what it had all been about. Just vague stuff like fighting for democracy (in an artificially-created rump state run by dictators, but dictators loyal to America) and Old Glory, the very kind of stuff Trump likes to bellow about.

And there were great numbers of Americans who believed for many years that the evil Vietnamese communists secretly held still more American prisoners, without ever asking themselves “what would be the sense of a poor country doing that?” Paranoia and superstition held sway, and the believers constituted a large movement, and it even had its own flag, demonstrating convincingly how far Americans will go in their misconceptions and myths. America’s government made no serious effort to correct them because it had its own purposes in harnessing that hate and confusion against Vietnam.

As an aside, the real reason for the Vietnam War is nicely sketched by an anecdote from America’s last truly crass president, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was given to many obscene behaviors behind the scenes, like carrying on discussions with aides or interviewers while taking down his pants and relieving himself on the toilet with the door wide open. In those days, you could count on the press not to report such things. Once, when asked at a meeting just why America was fighting in Vietnam, Johnson promptly unzipped his pants and pulled out his (ample) penis, pointed to it, and growled something to the effect, “That’s the reason, Son.” (Johnson at least had the one grace of not displaying his crassness to the general public, a quality entirely missing in Trump’s makeup).

So, Trump has very fertile ground for sowing seeds of confusion and hatred and resentment, and sow them he will. It even provides him with a weapon directly against Joe Biden. He can associate Biden with dealings in China and thereby being a kind of shill for the communists. I’m sure we’ll hear the word “appeasement” introduced into the campaign against Biden.

There’s nothing like good old-fashioned fear and uncertainty, as of a dreaded disease, to whip your political constituency to a frenzy. And that kind of stuff will arouse those outside your own natural constituency too. At the same time, there is the added benefit for Trump of diverting public attention from the clearest series of blunders, misdirection, and just plain falsehoods in his own handling of America’s portion of the world crisis.

There is even the added benefit of stirring up America’s large murky pool of fear of foreigners – a theme for him from the beginning with the mater of immigration and refugees and walls – and all the better if they’re foreigners who look different.

Hatred is very elemental. It doesn’t need or seek elaborate explanations. Hitler well understood that, as I think all tyrannical temperaments do, and he used it skillfully as a tool for ruling.

Trump already has an orchestrated effort underway with various officials, including the Pentagon, making ugly assertions or suggestions. The assertions and suggestions will never require any proof – they couldn’t provide any in any case. For effect they just need the fact of high-level officials making them, echoing and re-inforcing each other. It is is enough in a time of fear.

We even have one of Trump’s smarmiest political allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, making loony statements about how China owes us reparations for all the misery and cost they’ve caused. Even if the coronavirus arose in China originally, something still not proved, since when is it a practice to charge nations for diseases which happen to arise within their borders?

The idea is intellectually ridiculous, but to people out of work and maybe losing their homes and afraid, it has an obvious vicious appeal. It’s a well-crafted piece of hate.

It’s the kind of thing you expect from Lindsey Graham, a man who matched John McCain in his unthinking enthusiasm for war and bloodshed and special interests.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK BUCHANAN IN ANTIWAR

 

“Will Trump Hold Firm on Syrian Pullout?”

 

Well, it is hard to see Trump being “firm” on anything, except in statements admiring himself.

He is a fickle man.

And he has amply demonstrated cowardice. We’ve seen that quality over and over, and especially in his bullying.

Apart from Trump’s fickleness and the powerful opposition already hard at work against this decision – you can tell from various leaks, such as the one intended to embarrass him that the decision was taken without any consultation with advisors and cabinet and allies – this whole affair may prove a kind of elaborate hoax.

There were reports yesterday that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are sending troops and weapons to Kurdish areas American forces now occupy.

We also shouldn’t forget that France has forces in the area, and they’re not leaving as far as we can tell.

Could it be that we are just seeing substitutions for the departing American forces?

That’s an entirely different matter than a clean break with the illegal and murderous activity America has been engaged in.

It would amount only to a “technical” fulfillment of Trump’s campaign words.

One fact that tends to work against this idea is the sudden resignation of Mattis, but even that could fit. He may have opposed such an effort at substitution. He is not known as an especially imaginative man.

I have been pretty sceptical about the whole matter because it so clearly opposes two very active and powerful forces at work in Washington.

One is the American establishment’s new drive for global power with all that stuff about “full-spectrum dominance” from the Pentagon.

And the other is the Israel lobby, which carries a great deal of weight in Congress, at the Pentagon, and with Trump. He has come to be viewed as a great benefactor to Israel. It is difficult to see Trump having the backbone to deal with them as opponents, and they are very much opposed to this decision.

Netanyahu has relished the war in Syria, grinding away at people he hates, Assad and his Iranian allies, always wanting to make the Syrian territory occupied since 1967 on the Golan Heights an integral part of Israel, and at one point he was even eager to grab another slice of land next to the Golan.

But having largely lost the proxy war to the Syrian Army and Russia and Iran, I’m pretty sure he was counting on a back-up plan of de facto separation of the Kurdish region in the northeast which would significantly weaken Syria for the future, given that region’s oil wealth. Independent Kurds there would also be natural allies on another Syrian border.

That’s I think the main reason why the American troops were put there. Of course, this plan comes into direct conflict with Turkey, which has no tolerance for a Kurdish state anywhere near its borders. Turkey’s Erdogan accuses Kurds fighting in Syria of just being a branch of the Kurdish separatist movement inside Turkey, a movement he has brutally suppressed.

Trump said that the United States would no longer be the “policeman of the Middle East,” but it has never served the role of policeman, except in its own imagination.

Its role has been as praetorian guard to regimes it favors and as open threat to those it does not favor. Police enforce laws, but the only “laws” that the United States enforces in the region are its own political biases.

Every regime America defends is at least as lawless and brutal as any it opposes, and I certainly count Israel in that category because the rule of law does not exist on the territory it occupies and is ignored in all of Israel’s efforts to bolster its position in the region, from several thousand assassinations to illegal bombing sorties by the hundreds in neighboring countries.

Law is in great part about stability and legitimacy, and Israel’s efforts have done little beyond promoting instability for others. That indeed has been a goal for much of Israel’s activity, to render others unstable or even chaotic while it sits in a heavily-armed crusader fortress. And where instability hasn’t been a goal, it has supported the relative comfort of absolutism in its neighbors, as in Saudi Arabia or Egypt.

The long war in Syria and several other ugly matters in the Middle East are largely Israeli projects, carried out in covert cooperation with Saudi Arabia and America and Britain and France. Syria’s War is not a true civil war.

Of course, there were originally elements of legitimate opposition, but their relatively small numbers were drowned out by mercenaries and foreign intervention by bombing, missiles, and special operations. Assad has always been supported by all the powerful segments of Syrian society and by a majority of people. He is a unifying and stabilizing force. Just look at the army’s long, grueling loyalty through all of this. And minorities, such as Christians, tend to see Assad as their protector.

Ever since Afghanistan, America has regularly adopted a strategy of using proxies. The Northern Alliance – the pre-existing local political opposition to the Taleban, one, mind you, containing much of the same brutality and backwardness as the Taleban – did most of the fighting on the ground in Afghanistan while the United States did what it does best, bomb people. Variations on the theme have been used in Libya and Syria.

The events at Benghazi, Libya, so embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, also were related to this concept of proxy war. The American Ambassador was involved in recruiting cutthroats and shipping weapons from war-torn Libya to promote more hell in Syria. Some of the cutthroats saw the Ambassador himself as a good target for whatever reason. That is the real reason the attack has never been scrutinized for the public.

In Syria, we have several phony jihadi groups, who are in fact paid mercenaries. Any genuine Islamic radicals would have had as their first targets Israel and the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, but we never see that. We see these groups – ISIS, al-Nusra, others – attacking only people Israel hates.

We also see weapons caches of stuff from Israel and the United States discovered, time and again, by the Syrian Army as it advances. We’ve even seen Israeli and American helicopters move some of the leaders of these thugs at critical moments. Some of the wounded have been treated at hospitals in northern Israel.

And we have the phony White Helmets, aligned with al-Nusra and effectively in the business of promoting increased American and British bombing through propaganda films and provocative acts, all done while carrying on with a much-publicized image of brave rescuers. This dirty outfit was formed by France and is financed by Britain, two governments pretty much as heavily influenced by the Israel lobby as the government of the United States.

It would be wonderful if the withdrawal proves honest, but powerful groups in Washington don’t just fold their tents and ride off because a proven erratic President makes a sudden decision against their interests.

 

AFTERNOTE:

I notice in news the next day a story on Trump’s having spoken of “the slow and highly coordinated pullout of U.S. troops from the area” as reported of a telephone conversation with Turkey’s Erdogan. That’s a rather worrying, courtroom-lawyer kind of phrase. We’ll see.

ADDITIONAL AFTERNOTE:

On the day after Christmas, Trump, making a visit to troops in Iraq said:  “In fact we could use this as the base if we wanted to do something in Syria,”  The United States has several bases in Iraq and is said to have about 5,000 troops.

The number being withdrawn from Syria is about 2,000. Whether they also will go to Iraq is not known, but NATO fairly recently called for a larger effort at stabilization in Iraq.

ADDITIONAL FOOTNOTE:

It has been reported that the American military recently built two new bases in Iraq along the Syrian border.

So, it does appear that Trump’s controversial decision about leaving Syria has a lot less to it than meets the eye.

But that would be in keeping with the noise and lack of substance of virtually everything the man does.