John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SAM HUSSEINI IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Film ‘Official Secrets’ is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg

“A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but the story is not over”.

 

Good gripping tale.

As we can see from so very many modern instances, it matters not at all that truth is on your side, if what you are doing is attacking those with money and power.

And there’s an entire American establishment dedicated to keeping things just that way.

America’s public history of the last half century, at least so far as foreign relations and control of an empire are concerned, is almost entirely an artificial construct.

Absolutely no truth in everything from John Kennedy’s assassination, which was intimately connected with America’s schemes in Cuba, and the despicable Vietnam War to 9/11 and the despicable Neocon Wars in the Middle East which promptly followed.

From hundreds of millions of printed newspapers and television broadcasts to speeches from prominent American politicians, you have a gigantic fabric of lies not unlike that that was constantly being woven and altered by Oceania’s Inner Party in 1984.

That’s not even the slightest exaggeration, but, truly, are Americans in general the least concerned or bothered?

We have no evidence of significant concern. None.

The Democratic Party just weeded out of its debates for leadership the only candidate whom it had brave and informed enough to speak to truth in some of these matters, Tulsi Gabbard.

The ten left just represent varying degrees of hopelessness. On and on with describing dreams about this or that creative social program while the resources and close official attention dedicated to destruction in a dozen lands make all the dreams impossible.

At the same time, there is an almost complete lack of knowledge, and the courage to find out, about what America has been actually doing in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Israel, and in such massively important countries as China, Russia, and Iran.

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are brave contemporary examples of the American establishment’s methods for shutting down truth and punishing severely those who reveal it. While they have followers and supporters, I am always amazed at how relatively small their numbers are.

And we have remarkably few individuals like Manning or Assange themselves, especially when you consider the scale and scope of America’s many dark works which involve huge numbers of workers. Mostly, we see only “willing helpers” carrying on with their sensitive, secretive, well-paid careers in government.

In the Democratic nomination contest, the “star” liberals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are virtually no different in these absolutely critical matters than a confirmed old puke of a war criminal like Joe Biden, someone who probably deserves recognition as father of Obama’s industrial-scale extrajudicial killing project with drones and Hellfire missiles making thousands of legally-innocent people in a dozen countries just disappear.

Biden has a long record of smarmy deeds and lack of courage and principles. He is, of course, the most likely to get the nomination.

Acts of killing by America’s CIA are no different in principle and in law than those of the old Argentine military junta’s massive efforts at dragging people they disliked off the streets, drugging them, and throwing them out of airplanes over the ocean, something they did to thousands.

Oh, and during that wonderful project in Argentina, there were no objections from the people in America who had detailed knowledge of what was happening, as at the State Department and the CIA. Only silence.

_______________________

Response to a comment expressing concern that America was going to be lost:

Sorry, but, oh please, America is lost, and has been so for a very long time.

Only tremendous, virtually revolutionary influences such as depression or war or the growth of competing states with the loss of the dollar’s privileged status, are going to change what has become reality.

America’s feeble democratic political system is capable of changing almost nothing. After all, it was constructed with just that in mind.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

America always believes it did everything worth doing, so it is true to form for it to think it won WWII. I once caught the most abysmally ignorant error in a major American newspaper. It had an article about how the Battle of the Bulge was the greatest battle of the war.

In fact the Battle of the Bulge, though sizable, was almost insignificant compared to the size and horrors of Stalingrad, the greatest battle in all of human history.

And just ask any American about Kursk, the greatest tank battle in history, and you will get a complete lack of recognition of the name.

America’s total losses, on all fronts, in WWII were about 300,000.

Compared with the Soviet losses of 27,000,000 in a grisly total war for survival, American losses seem blessedly light. Even a century before, in the American Civil war, America lost twice that number.

The truth is Americans have never experienced the horrors of total war, yet they like to think they have been incomparably brave and met challenges no one else could have met.

It is a fantasy mentality which prevails in America and this helps the government in its many ugly colonial wars and dark operations because the public largely simply can’t even imagine what is happening. In Vietnam, America lost over 60,000, a pretty small number over ten years, but those losses at their height are what instigated all the riots in the streets of America in the late 1960s. No one knew, or cared, that America killed an estimated 3,000,000 Vietnamese, a true modern holocaust.

I do believe in WWII that there was a tacit agreement to let Russia and Germany bleed each other. The U.S. has followed that concept a number of times including in the 1980s with the Iran-Iraq War.

America avoided starting the important second front in Europe until very late, and I do believe even then, when Russia was clearly defeating Germany, the motivation had to do with fear of Russia rolling through Europe.

In the Asian Theater, America used the most horrific methods to bring the Japanese to their knees. First, there was endless firebombing and then the only actual use, against civilians, of nuclear weapons.

It is an established fact that the Japanese were ready to surrender before the atrocity of Nagasaki. They had put out feelers through third parties. All they wanted was to keep their emperor. But the U.S. wanted absolutely unconditional surrender, an attitude reflecting the same kind of triumphalism we see from America today.

The final decision on the atomic bombs also related to Russia. America was sending a message to Russia that it not only had a working nuclear bomb and a number of them, but it was very willing to use them, American thinking again being to stop the victorious Russian Army from going too far. The original plan for the atomic bombing of Japan included the dropping of twelve bombs at intervals on different cities. These were not military targets. The plan was utterly cynical and immoral.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALEXANDER HIGGINS IN HIS BLOG

No, the true toll is tens of thousands of Afghans, not to mention the Pakistanis now being killed.

One could throw in the million dead Iraqis since the Afghan adventure was used as an excuse for that adventure.

Americans tend always to measure the impact of their wars by the number of Americans killed.

That is neither accurate nor ethical.

How many times did we hear about the 60-odd thousand Americans killed in Vietnam?

And it was the rate of those deaths which ended the war.

But the real toll was 3 million Vietnamese killed, many horribly, millions made homeless, an ancient society torn apart, and a sea of Agent Orange and landmines left to kill and maim for decades.

You could fairly add, too, the horrors of Cambodia, for America’s incursions and secret bombing were responsible for the neutral government’s fall. America is doing much the same today in Pakistan.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

I’m not sure what else anyone could expect, Mr. Crook.

The cast of characters on the national political scene, especially those on the right, makes mighty poor material out of which to shape a civil political life.

Winning is everything, sophomoric arguments are common, and insults are basic building blocks of American politics, not to mention election fraud.

This political phenomenon is not new to America.

Perhaps many abroad have no real feeling for the history of America’s national politics.

Abraham Lincoln, now the nation’s most beloved president, was commonly called an “obscene ape” during his campaigning. Grotesque cartoons and vicious commentary played regularly on the theme.

There was an undercurrent in all that hatred of Lincoln’s having been believed to be an abolitionist. He most decidedly was not, but that mere fact didn’t stop the hate and excess of opponents just as facts do not stop the hate and excess of today.

Hatred was so intense, Lincoln went to Washington for his inauguration hiding his identity.

Andrew Jackson, as near a mad president as ever there was, fought duels, horse-whipped one politician, and threatened anyone who said anything he regarded as an insult.

Thomas Jefferson had a full-time paid hack to dig up dirt on his opponents, including the man he worked for as Secretary of State, George Washington. When the hack didn’t feel fairly treated by Jefferson, he sold his services to others, disseminating such dark facts he had discovered as Jefferson’s liaison with a teen-age slave girl, Sally Hemmings.

Look at the way the opposition treated Senator McGovern’s running mate, Senator Eggleton, a thoroughly decent man who had experienced some depression. Look at the way nasty graffiti artists treated Senator Muskie during his campaign, reducing him to public tears. Look at the words of Tom Delay – now a convicted felon – about Bill Clinton’s big trip to Africa, words dripping with hate and racism.

There are countless examples of this political insanity in America just during my lifetime. There was the idiot Republican Senator who accused the Clinton administration of running a concentration camp after the poor Cuban boy, Elian, was taken from his kidnappers and sent to a quiet place of refuge following months of being held to ransom and hearing his loving father regularly insulted by shouting voices.

And this stuff is not without real consequences, sometimes far greater than the recent shooting in Arizona. Richard Nixon made a career early on of defaming his opponents – his early election to Congress featured insults and lies toward the woman against whom he ran. Nixon accused her of being “pink down to her underwear.” His reputation as a gutter fighter was so established that President Johnson, in sending the beginnings of an army to Vietnam, was known to be motivated by political fear of being castigated for “losing Vietnam” the way “China was lost.”

The late Governor George Wallace and serious presidential candidate had a famous quote justifying his extreme actions towards desegregation: he famously said he would never be “outniggered” again after losing in an early political fight owing to his then moderation.

America is simply too young a society to have developed genuinely civilized political customs, and there is a raw quality to it that almost encourages the kind of behavior of a Sarah Palin having a cross-hair sight over a politician’s face on her web site.

The effects of this rawness are reinforced by America’s wealth because wealth enables people to publish and disseminate filth and stupidity in vast quantities. They are also reinforced by the totally dominant ethos of, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

I see little hope for any change, except after the passage of a century or so.

America’s now-certain relative decline in the world should help a bit along the way: nothing is unhealthier for manic behavior than quasi-religious faith in being number one.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DANIEL FINKELSTEIN IN THE TIMES

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil. He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America’s penchant for obsessions, its Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it’s Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls.