"The best and the brightest" is a crock: The U.S. Military as a form of welfare and a cult of the dead

I have never understood this: our men and women in uniform as supposed to be the best and the brightest people in our nation, yet I think we all know that this is just more rhetoric, more lies. We all know it's bullshit and that the best and the brightest aren't rushing out to join--with noteworthy exceptions like a Pat Tillman or a Sergeant York-- they're heading to where the good paying jobs are. There is also the dark side of the military in our culture: People like Lt. William Calley, the commanding officer present at My Lai during the Vietnam conflict who told his men (Calley was under orders himself) to slaughter the entire village, every man, woman, and child--and they complied. And how many movies have we seen with crazy veterans killing when they get home? For many, all this changed the perception of American soldiers across the world forever, never mind America.

Interestingly, Calley recently apologized for this atrocity at a Knights of Columbus gathering in Ohio, his home state where he's worked in a cushy job as a jeweler since at least the early 1970s. Hardly anyone noticed and it was barely reported. Most of the men who served under him haven't been so lucky, so pampered, which is a matter of race as well as class. Speaking of class, a huge percentage of our homeless are veterans, most from the Vietnam War. The claims regarding all of our troops are wildly distorted claims. They are lies the occlude the reality on the ground. Like a lot of things in modern American culture, this over-adulation begins with the First World War and has more to do with motivating the domestic population towards another, future war then it does in actually honoring the dead. It's about money and power.

The Cult of the Dead Solider is about creating a false history where our troops have always held to the rules of war and where every conflict is a just one. Even very recent history must be misrepresented. In the official story, all of our troops are noble young men and women who heard the call of their nation and joined to defend it and its environs for the common good. The reality--as we should know by now--is far less glamorous and any person capable of independent thought should view such assertions with the utmost suspicion. Life in the modern world is a minefield. After 1973, we switched over to what is now euphemistically known as the "peacetime army," and the rest applies to the other branches, they're all-volunteer now too. Yet, economic conscription is still conscription and we all know that many Americans join--as they are right now in large numbers--when the economy is bad and there are few other alternatives. In other cases, it's simply a matter of individuals who couldn't hack it in civilian society and literally had no other options regardless of the state of the economy. If you think I'm kidding, look at the lives of retired military and how rapidly they become unraveled after discharge. So why are they all "heroes"? They sound desperate to me, and I grant that this isn't the entire story, but it's the bulk of it.

In 1991, noted historian George Mosse published his seminal Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, a book that details how the Cult of the Dead Soldier came into being and what its purpose is. Frequently, our soldiers have been painted in our culture as young, nubile, and brave, having come to the military out of pure patriotism and a sense of sacrifice for the group. Again, while there is some truth to this, I think we all know that many people--in the past and the present--have joined because they had nowhere else to go, something that's been a truism well before 1973 when the draft was ended. There was a good reason for this that has a lot to do with the current version of the Cult: the myths weren't true and the very real perception that the children of the poor were fighting the wars of rich men was commonplace and hasn't gone away entirely. As a matter of fact, it's alive and well. This healthy and cynical contention came out of the revelations of war crimes, the Pentagon Papers, but really out of ground level experience. People knew they were being screwed and lied to.

The enthusiasm of going to war is a normal prelude to reality setting-in: at the end of WWI in Germany there was no talk of glory, no celebrations over the war dead, no parties celebrating the loss. The reaction of many after any war is to want to forget and to cling very tenaciously to the myths of warfare and nationalism--that there was glory in it, that the sacrifices were necessary for the group, and that it was all a worthy cause that enriched all. That's a hard sell nowadays, but the desire to believe it is still very much alive, and it's part of a pathology. This dynamic was played-out in many different ways in our culture since 1973, from Sylvester Stallone's "Rambo" movies where the muscle-bound actor went back to Vietnam to "win this time," to the the equally bad "Top Gun," Reagan's exhortations to get us involved in Central America during the 1980s, and the depictions of military men and women in recruiting ads as young, vital, cleanly-scrubbed, and pure in intentions and behavior.

The enthusiasm which youth had once felt for war as adventure and personal fulfillment was difficult to sustain after experiencing the reality of war, but the nation, using the Myth of the War Experience, was able to keep the flame alight. ...Yet it was the political Right and not the Left which was able to annex the cult and make the most of it. The inability of the Left to forget the reality of the war and to enter inot the Myth of the War Experience was a gain for the political Right, which was able to exploit the suffering of millions for its own political ends. The Myth of the War Experience helped to transcend the horror of war and at the same time supported the utopia which nationalism sought to project as an alternative to the reality of postwar Germany. (Mosse, 106)

The true costs of war and the endless suffering and repercussions have been all-but-forbidden except with noteworthy exceptions. During this conflict, so little suffering and carnage is being shown to the public that the culture had to do catch-up with endless displays of gore in CSI programs on network television. But, generally, Vietnam has posed too much of a challenge, and so, damage control has been the approach since that sordid conflict. The domestic information war was like this before Vietnam, but the methods have had to become more subtle, which makes them more insidious, from lousy xenophobic action films to video games. Our troops should never be viewed as angels nor our causes automatically "just" or "necessary," but that's the message being spoon-fed to our children.

In a democracy, talk of war should always be highly contentious and there should be a very serious debate over its necessity and what its real world costs are going to be. "Will we be better off?" should be at the top of the list. Have we been better off since the Vietnam War? The invasion of Panama in 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991? The Balkans during the rest of the 1990s? When does it end? It depends on who you ask. The shift from classical depictions of our troops has shifted to that of the victim: recall when it was alleged that American POW Jessica Lynch was mistreated and raped by her Iraqi captors. It was a total lie concocted by propaganda chiefs at the Pentagon.

Lynch once stated, "They used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things."

The Pentagon went as far as to coerce Lynch into lying about what happened while she was being held by Iraqi troops and doctors during the invasion in late March 2003, even including the allegation in her ghost written biography; Lynch has since accused the military of using her in a propaganda effort to sell the war and that they embellished her own account. Less than one year after her ordeal, the Pentagon-backed "Saving Jessica Lynch" aired, selling more lies. Instead, she was used as a pawn on several levels, not merely including the lie that she was raped by Iraqi troops, it being a bald appeal to classic American racism as well as sexism. But why did the West Virginian Lynch join the military? She needed money for college...

There are much better and efficient ways to care for our young people, to give them a real shot at the future, and it would behoove us to begin the process of demilitarization within our economy. Patrick Tillman is another stellar example in the deification-through-victimhood of our troops. The irony is, Tillman really was a hero, but not for the reasons that the Pentagon's propagandists told us. He was a hero because he saw the war in Iraq as a lie, as a violation of international law, and I believe he went overseas to bear witness to the crimes so that he could testify about them when the smoke had cleared. I also believe that his fellow troops and possibly some officers figured this out as well. They had to use him in death for their ends because...you do the math. They destroyed his uniform and his diary. Why did they stop at that? Bad press.

Right wing cries of "Socialist" are nothing more than racist Cold War red-baiting

In case you haven't noticed, some of your friends and neighbors are acting more than a little strange lately--even strange for Republicans or your garden variety Libertarian. Some of them are crying out--pathetically and impotently since it's their lot to do so--that, "There are socialists taking over!" What does that mean?

It doesn't make a lot of sense, even to those exclaiming it since they don't tend to know much at all about American history. Such are the vagaries of the ignorant and the terminally afraid.

According to Webster's newest edition, the term "red-baiting" arose around 1928, only eleven years after the Bolshevik counterrevolution in Russia against a revolutionary coalition (mostly of the left) that had deposed the Tsar in February 1917 (hence, the Bolsheviks called their own seizure of power, "The October Revoultion"). In many respects, 1928 was a flush year, a time when the bloated markets and an unregulated economy seemed to offer a "permanent" prosperity, which seems as laughable today as it did then. Systematic regulation of the economy was almost unheard of at the time, and the good times seemed to have no end. We know what happened after that: the Great Depression and another world war. Cries of "socialist" were being heard everywhere after 1933, just as they had at the end of WWI.

1928 was part of the tail-end period of Republican rule that began with the end of the Progressive and Wilsonian eras, meaning a feeding frenzy for the financial and business sectors, it being a venerable (and convenient) cycle in American politics and economy. But Republicans didn't invent red-baiting: It has a long and sordid history in America that reaches as far back as the labor clashes of the late-1870s, well into the 1900s, and came out of key events like the Haymarket bombing and the countless strikes, clashes, and protests that came afterward.

Today, we're hearing it come from the mouths of former presidential candidate John McCain, conservative pundits like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, and free market extremists of every stripe inside and outside of the beltway. That they're reactionary nuts is a given, but they are part of a very sad tradition in American politics and culture. They're no different than the scabs, the lynch mobs, Indian killers, the company goons and Pinkertons, and the bought newspaper editors, writers, and journalists of America roughly one hundred years ago.

Some moments truly define our times, and 1886 was one of those years.

1886 is one of those flashpoint years that tend to define the next few decades. There would be other key years that would contribute to the genesis of red-baiting, and the Haymarket bombing was one of those catalysts that come along and change everything, and sometimes for generations.

On the night of May 4th, 1886, several hundred Chicago immigrant workers assembled at Haymarket Square to protest the shootings of locked-out workers by the police the day before. Their radical demands? A call for an eight-hour workday. Many of the same police "shooters"were there to meet them that night and ordered the workers to disperse. Sometime after 10:00 PM, someone threw a bomb close to the police lines and the shock waves have reverberated ever since, partly in the form of future red-baiting. The reaction couldn't have been stronger, and many innocent workers were stripped of their rights and detained illegally if not outright killed in the subsequent hysteria. Sound familiar? It wasn't to be the first or the last time.

The newspapers of the time wrote that the organized immigrant workers were anarchists (in reality, a tiny minority were) who were ..."long-haired, [and were] wild-eyed, bad-smelling atheistic, reckless foreign wretches, who never did an honest hour's work in their lives, but who, driven half-crazy with years of oppression (before coming to 'the land of the free') and mad with envy of the rich... [came to America]."(Albany Law Journal, 15 May 1886) A cultural theme was created out of events like the Haymarket bombing, but its roots came from an already prevalent racism and anti-immigrant nativism, not unlike today's, but with its hands untied and its mouth un-gagged, so it ran riot. Was it all really about "radicals" and "anarchists" threatening the status quo? We don't know this entirely, but we can see from the results of this social behavior over the decades that red-baiting was once a very effective tool in limiting organized labor and movements working for civil rights.

In essence, the GOP is trying to play an old game that has--for all intents--ended. But who threw that bomb on May 4th, 1886?

Ironically (or not), nobody ever discovered who threw the bomb that harmed dozens of workers (killing a policeman, wounding seventy others--police shot four workers to death during the melee) that day, but the red-baiting that followed has continued into our own era. There's a good reason for this. Until very recently, red-baiting worked, keeping down efforts of immigrants, minorities, and workers, from organizing to protect their basic rights from employers and ownership. With the Soviet Union gone, the game has become a dead one, not that the truth ever stopped the Republican Party from doing something inadvisable. Their love of "the good old days" (that never were) is legendary.

To the current GOP, it's still 1919, the Cold War generally, 1949 specifically, or even 1889. But never mind that, there are careers to be made as well in our market economy, even in the ranks of the police:

As the city [of Chicago] writhed in fear, kept at a high pitch by a frenzied press, [Police Captain Michael J.] Schaack took center stage as a detective-hero, casting himself in the role of master detective, a figure that in the nineteenth century gripped the popular imagination, whose daring and skill would unlock mysteries and bring him acclaim as the man who had not only solved "the crime of the century" but rescued the city and nation from destruction. How could his vision be marred by such piddling details as apprehending the actual bomber? Instead, he bragged unceasingly of his cleverness and courage in rooting out secret conspiracies, confident that no one in the fear- ridden city would dare challenge his boastful disclosures, however absurd or incredible.

This self-styled master detective left no stone unturned to keep himself in the public eye. Not only did he falsely announce the discovery of bombs, but he actually sought to set up anarchist cells on his own. (Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22.)

We've heard similar bragging and a general lack of results in our own era. The effect of Haymarket and the media hysteria that was whipped-up virtually destroyed the first genuine national union, the Knights of Labor, founded out of the bloody railroad strikes of 1877. Later, elements of the Knights would go on to form the radical I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) in 1905, the first American union to admit women, immigrants, and African-Americans. Sometimes, there are unintended consequences to repression, and sometimes things simply happen on-accident.

The 1901 assassination of big business ally President William McKinley by the lone (and deranged) anarchist Leon Czolgosz also inflamed the passions of a racialist and anti-immigrant, nativist America against the progressive left and unionization. It was a short walk. Ongoing and brutal labor violence and economic downturns only aggravated things, and the situation continued to feed on itself, and the cops and the politicians were there to fan the flames. It should sound familiar that there was a feeling by the end of WWI that things were coming-apart in America. In the backdrop of this were the ongoing public lynchings of African-Americans, often created and attended by the same mobs that were hanging union organizers. This escalated at war's end. The tone of the time was one of incredible violence and anger, and scapegoating was commonplace.

Just one hundred years ago, Americans were still working 10-14 hour work days, sometimes as many as 16 hours if they were working in immigrant-filled sweatshops and factories for starvation wages. To say that there were plenty of reasons for American and immigrant workers to be angry about would be understating the issue, and change was long-in-coming. It wasn't until 1916 when the Adamson Act made an eight hour workday national law, affecting private workplaces. But this didn't end things...

A 1917 Supreme Court decision confirmed the Adamson Act's constitutionality, but most Americans didn't get that eight hour workday until 1938 with the New Deal and the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 29 U.S.C. Ch. 8). There would be many more labor battles and more unnecessary violence in the years between the wars, and it was all avoidable. After decades of brutal back-and-forth between organized labor, politicians, the police, goons, and ownership, things started coming to a head during WWI. This became particularly acute in its aftermath when an economic downturn brought the Seattle General Strike in early-1919, a national coal strike, the Boston Police Strike, and a national steel strike. Ever wonder why you were never taught about any of this?

Strikes in solidarity with American workers also broke-out in several parts of Canada, especially in its Northwest provinces. To America's wealthiest, it seemed that things were coming apart and that their position was endangered. This wasn't necessarily true, but it's an indicator of how tenuous American elites have viewed their position as for some time. They still do. There were definitely warning-sings back in 1919.

True, small-scale bombings by anarchist groups had gone on for decades without much attention given to them, but in the postwar climate of fear and paranoia, all it took was a series of them to set things off like never before. These acts came first at the end of April, and once again on June 2, 1919 in a wave of bombings that targeted America's wealthiest, including the home of President Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer (FDR's neighbor at the time), major banker J.P. Morgan, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, and numerous other "captains of industry"and government.

Out of this general state of paranoia and an anti-immigrant and racialist hysteria came the first national Red Scare. Race riots and lynchings of unionizers, immigrants, and African-Americans would also occur during the panic, showing that a significant portion of the fear was racially-inspired, including a specific racism directed at Eastern European immigrants thanks to the Russian Revolution. The irony is that several of the bombing attacks probably came from Italian "Galleanist" anarchists, many of them operating out of New Jersey, and that they were actually known to law enforcement at the time.

All these kinds of confrontations were avoidable through the passage of progressive legislation that would merely give the working-class some marginal breathing room, but they met strenuous opposition, and from both major parties until the advent of the New Deal. As one can imagine, the Republican Party was violently opposed to these kinds of pieces of social legislation at the time, and still are today. Republicans labeling the New Deal as "socialist," "communist," and even went so far as to later label them as "Kremlin inspired" during the Second Red Scare of late-1940s into the 1950s, the era of Joe McCarthy and HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee, an apt name) and the communist witch hunts. For some reason, the GOP of today thinks this is going to work again in a climate where they're disgraced, where the public is fully-aware of their primary responsibility for the current economic crisis.

But what red-baiting really constitutes are attempts at keeping the "little people" at the bottom by dividing them and diverting them from their own economic interests through scapegoating, by throwing the attention off of ownership and big money. Issues of racism and hollow nationalism fit that bill nicely in the past, and many chomped at the bit of bigotry and ignorance to their eternal shame. How little has changed since then, but ignorance is a double-edged sword: the kids don't remember most of this, or red-baiting's emotional appeal to earlier generations.

For most young Americans of this historical moment--many-of-whom weren't even alive during the Cold War--little of this registers or matters and red-baiting has not only lost its effectiveness, but its original context and meaning. It's a dead horse. Nowadays, red-baiting is just the babbling of scared racists and bigots who are becoming more and more culturally and demographically isolated. The reality is, that that's all it ever was, ultimately: little people who felt their way of life was being threatened throwing the ugliest fit imaginable and accomplishing their own downfall.

To most Americans now, it's weird watching footage of Dixiecrats and Republican politicians of days old calling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and desegregation activists "communists," "pinkos," "commies," "socialists," and much worse. And that's exactly how weird Republicans yelling "socialist" sound today. Not only do they sound out-of-touch, they sound as demented and bizarre as they all really are. It was a long road to this present state of affairs, but one thing's certain: red-baiting no longer works, and the GOP and red-baiters everywhere are obsolete examples of those still living in the back alleys of America's very dark racialist and classist past.

If the Republican Party wishes to continue engaging in this self-flagellation, why not cut to the chase? Why not call our new president what you're thinking he is--that he's a "socialist" (check) and a "nigger" (unchecked)? Because, that's become unacceptable to the average person in the United States. But leave it to the GOP to channel the black heart of where our culture has been for the new age, they're doing the lord's work, they'll tell you. Thanks for the reminder, and thanks for letting us know where you really stand. Time's up, but at least there's Google so that they can spell "socialist" correctly. Fat chance.

29 U.S.C. CH. 8:

http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/29/ch8.html

"The First Red Scare: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article," Absolute Astronomy.com, 2009: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/First_Red_Scare

Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp.12-22. : http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/history471/Frank%20Donner%20brief.htm

Terrorism 100-years-ago: The Rider Named Death (2004) review

Indeed, the Russian film industry is not dead! Karen Shakhnazarov's take on the novel by Boris Savinkov, who could be equated with the main-character "Georges", is nearly flawless! Evoking Moscow during the 1905 Revolution, we are given access to the very secret world of a terrorist cell. It is unlikely--and Shakhnazarov's film illustrates this--that terrorism hasn't changed much at all, just some of the technologies.

From the lushness of Tsarist-circles, to the beggars in the alleys of Moscow, it's a vivid recreation of a time that is gone--and yet still alive with Chechen bombings in the heart of European Russia. The director notes astutely how minor acts of violence accumulate into a senseless bloodbath for its own sake.

The Revolution of 1917 (February by the Social Democrats, then October by the Bolsheviks) began what would be a civil war that didn't really end until Stalin's consolidation of power in the late-1930s. Tens-of-millions were murdered or died of starvation, and it all began with the Socialist Revolutionary Party--a party whose members included Lenin, Stalin, and "Georges."

Shakhnazarov's eye for composition is wonderful, and there are sweeping crane-shots, dollies, and static ones that would make Ozu proud. Most importantly, however, are the close-shots that capture the intimacy of the cell and its inhabitants. Georges dominance (and distance) over his cadre is made clear in every scene the character inhabits. Much of the history of Russian film is on-display here and it is breathtaking.

As part of the Socialist Revolutionary Party's underground, Georges and his cell anticipate Bolshevik terror and a complete surrender to nihilism and a worship of power that was common to that period. This nihilistic philosophy is most evident in cell leader Georges, with gradations in the members of the cell--yet they all yearn for some transcendence in revolutionary suicide. They all share an obsession with Georges and with death itself. Ultimately, Georges represents the human personification of death.

While his compatriots have their own very personal reasons for joining the cause of terrorizing the aristocracy, Georges appears to have no other reason for directing his terror attacks than a desire to kill and to stir Russian society towards...what? Even Georges seems to be unsure why he does what he does, and he doesn't care upon reflection of this fact. That is not an uncommon feeling for terrorists and insurgents, as the Weather Underground sometimes displayed during the late-1960s and early-1970s at times (it should be noted that the Weathermen were just one-of-many groups during the Vietnam war who bombed government buildings, there were thousands of incidents).

But unlike Savinkov and his co-conspirators, the Weathermen never targeted people for death, only property was to be destroyed to weaken an illegal and genocidal war in Southeast Asia. International examples are almost endless.

In-short, a cell leader is responsible for harnessing all these different reasons for why these individuals have "come to the cause." He channels these various agendas towards a few fundamental goals: the destruction of other human beings for some abstract ideology, some abstract end, and the instilling of terror and fear in a population for political ends. There are so many powerful moments in this film which convey these aspects of terrorism that you really must watch it carefully to appreciate the scope of what it's saying, making it an allegory, and one based-on Savinkov's real life experiences. Very few thrillers are this tense, this precise and studied.

There is a very sad poetry here that speaks-directly to the issues facing our own tortured era.

From the rapid-editing in the assassination attempt scenes, to the incredible atmosphere in the making of the bombs, we're treated to the best of Russian cinema. It appears that no-expense was spared in the recreation of early-1900s Tsarist Russia, down to the beggars and the filthy-streets, the uniforms of the Russian Gendarmes ("Отдельный корпус жандармов"). The acting is also of the highest order here, and the sumptuousness of Tsarist physical culture is breathtaking.

It's criminal that this film was not nominated for an MPAA award for Best Foreign Film, it's completely absurd. Without the DVD release by Kino in North America, would we even know it exists? Likely, this was the best-film of all of 2004!

Very few outside of the Slavic-speaking world know about Boris Savinkov and his exploits. There were once some English-language editions of the novel he wrote that was the basis of this great film. It's time to understand the phenomena of terrorism more fully: its genesis, its cultural contexts, and the individual agendas and motivations that spur those peopling its ranks into action. Usually, it's to right a perceived wrong.

The roots, then, of most terrorism, come from injustices committed by the powerful. Savinkov and his cohorts in the SR were hardly the only guilty parties, and they exist in a netherworld where switching sides is a formality. The motivations have a rational-basis, yet murder and death become the final goal and the end-result.

Savinkov was thrown from a window (defenstration) by his Bolshevik interrogators in 1925, crashing onto the cobblestone pavement below. His goal was accomplished: he was dead, and Russia was in ruins, to his eternal shame.

Three centuries of Tsarist oppression, indifference to the plight of the average person, and the devastation of WWI (Russia lost to Germany), gave would-be revolutionaries all the tinder they needed to create a new conflagration. Savinkov and the Bolsheviks were the spark. Russia burned throughout the entire 20th century. Shakhnazarov gives us the weight of Russian and human history in one film. The ultimate source of terrorism--then--is the State and the power backing it. For power, nothing succeeds like failure.

Revised 11.17.2008

Bush ruminates on the failure of 60 years of GOP excesses at NYC's Federal Hall

Wall Street--Meeting at the venerable Federal Hall where the Bill of Rights he's despoiled as much as he and his vice president could get away with was penned and debated, soon-to-be ex-President George W. Bush made some remarkably stupid comments that are only going to cement his legacy as our era's Herbert Hoover.

One imagines that you could cut the irony with a butter-knife: "I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown,""It would be a terrible mistake to allow a few months of crisis to undermine 60 years of success," and the capper of, "It is true that this crisis included failures, by leaders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." The final quote is paradox-ridden.

Do any of these statements jibe with each other at all? Maybe if you're comatose. Does he even know what the hell he's saying? Did he ever? Do economists? Does the lame duck president sound like he knows what he's talking about? Does the Treasury Secretary or the Fed chair? No to all of them, but bozo is on his way out anyway and there will be investigations into the corruption of his administration regardless of how many pardons he hands-out. Why? The public's going to scream for it in-the-midst of general strikes and rioting that will not be quelled. Nobody can pacify a sociological explosion.

Whenever the Democrats fail to achieve that coveted 60 seat, filibuster-proof majority, the Republicans have had the opening they've needed to obstruct a social-dividend, being the traditional minority party of obstructionism. They should be good at it: they remained in the minority after the Great Depression for good reason for over 50 years. You get good at being the minority under those conditions, and they're going to get more practice again. What was happening 60-years-ago? It was when the Republican Party began their endgame against the New Deal and progressive politics in-general, sweeping into the Halls of Congress, ultimately bringing us such friendly lights as Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, and Joseph McCarthy (he sneaked in during the 1946 elections). Would we all be where we are now without the tragic-results of the 1948 national elections?

Barry Goldwater would enter the Senate in 1953. McCarthyism--a misnomer since HUAC was formed before his entry into Congress--grew to monumental proportions during the 1950s, and thousands of lives were wrecked. The "Eisenhower era" is synonymous with repressiveness and secrecy, just like this one, and free-thinking was discouraged. Conglomerates and the interstate highway system were created during this period, thanks to the GOP and the Eisenhower administration.

The postwar "economic miracle" smothered dissent with a runaway consumerism that's finally crashing. Rather than blaming Americans for the global recession, Europeans and the rest of the developed world should be happy--they now have an opening to escape concentrated American capital, and they should take it. People with differing opinions tended to keep them to themselves. Nearly everyone in Washington was running amok, but the Republicans took center stage, eventually pushing Truman into military action in Korea by implying he and his party were "soft on communism" and "pink." It's amethod that has now run out of steam, along with race-baiting. Gay-baiting and the attacks on rationality, science, and secular culture, are now losing any of their sting. "Sixty-years-ago," is a distant past, an antique of another era. Who were some of its architects? Right in-front of your face, even today.

The Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the rest of the American business and financial community, did their best trying to crush any remaining dissent through the red-baiting of the "McCarthy era," and through every single communications medium available at the time. The same methods achieved the Vietnam war, a more bipartisan affair than is normally acknowledged. Any notion of JFK pulling-out troops from Vietnam permanently is a political mythology that flies-in-the-face of the now declassified internal record. Yet, it all fits-into a false narrative--a false consciousness that has been fostered for decades--that the two party system represents the will of the American people. It does not.

A massive propaganda campaign selling what we know today as the postwar "American Dream" was concocted and sold beginning in the late-1940s. Some of the key to this was to detach the American people from a consciousness of their history, of their past. A consumerist culture reflects this drive where the individual is stripped of any past...or any future, only a perpetual present. In Europe, the Marshall Plan was beginning, and it entailed the same aims towards pacification: to impose American-style capitalism on a freshly-radicalized Continent that was definitely disposed towards heading left politically and economically. Now do you understand the anti-Americanism of the postwar era? I thought not. America offered the carrot-and-the-stick in George Marshall's rebuilding program and in the creation of paramilitary groups and CIA intimidation of legitimate domestic political parties, acting suspiciously as the Nazi occupiers had.

My own grandfather watched in horror as his own superiors--U.S. Army officers--were ordered to reinstall a Nazi Burgomeister (it's like a mayor) in a German village they were occupying under General George S. Patton's 3rd Army. A lot of WWII veterans experienced these things and saw them as a betrayal just as my grandfather did then and for the rest of his life. "What the hell were we fighting for?" he asked me. "Big business," I replied. He agreed. Never underestimate the intelligence of the average man, and heed their warnings. The warning-sings were boldly apparent in the shattered ruins of postwar Europe.

The joint CIA-Mafia crushing of the dock strikes in the Port of Marseille in 1947 (and later in 1950), the destruction of the Communist Army (also former anti-Nazi partisans) in Greece that same year, the assassinations of Communist Party leaders in Sicily and Italy, and the assassinations of former partisan leaders throughout the rest of Western Europe were the opening-shots of a campaign of violent pacification by American power. The State Department revived international organized crime and and their drug smuggling operations to facilitate this.

Many of the individuals these operatives and criminals tortured, murdered, and intimidated had been part of the resistance movements under German occupation, and were frequently their leadership. In France, Italy, Germany, and other European nations, former fascist politicians and judges were reinstalled into their former positions of power. Such are the origins of the "Christian Democrats." The natural political-shift that was to alter Europe into a more leftist model was blunted considerably, but not entirely.

The wheel turns, and history and its forces will not be denied forever, and Europe blaming us for this mess is ultimately appropriate. This is how the current international economy came into being.

The 1950s was an unusually repressive decade, thanks mostly to the GOP. Loyalty oaths had to be signed, religion was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance (and still there!), and the hunt for essentially nonexistent "fifth columnists" continued in-earnest until HUAC was laughed down in the mid-1960s. Enough has been written and stated on the criminal behavior of the GOP during the 1960s-70s, but can be summed-up in the name of one man: Richard M. Nixon. If it weren't for the creation of a Republican majority in the Senate in 1948, it's doubtful that the last sixty years would have played-out quite the way they did, and that would be just fine.

"Sixty years of success" was their success and the success of the two party monopoly over our political system; but it was big business and finance that truly won, the real power behind the throne, the faceless dictatorship. But without the Democrats, they couldn't have done it. Make no mistake about it: these bastards will do anything in their power to preserve their position--just as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, the Hollenzollerns, and the Romanovs did, giving us the war that ruined the entire 20th century, WWI. If they have to drag us all down into hell to do it, they'll make the attempt. The key is knowing this and consciously refusing to serve their interests. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but the alternatives are far worse--we could just continue-on like before, finally reaching that real catastrophe that's been awaiting us.

The market system never worked, and it was much closer to Marxist-Leninist forced production, with both the Soviet and American approaches embracing Frederick Taylor's "scientific management."

Really, they were just two-sides of the same coin of an authoritarianism poised to extinguish humanity from the earth. The Soviet Union and its order fell leaving the U.S. without a viable enemy, so we created as many of them as possible throughout the world to feed the war machine that maintains our hold on the seaways and markets of the world. This was a forced arrangement more than it was a natural one, and still is.

This crisis is the end of Empire, which gives hope to those who desire life in a real democracy; but it doesn't mean the powerful are going down without a fight. That's what the war on terrorism is for, and it's not going to work. All the last eight years have done is to erode American power in the world, and to isolate us diplomatically. The economic part is coming soon, maybe tomorrow.

George W. Bush didn't make this postwar order, he was just instrumental in wrecking it. Thanks George, our first Socialist--on-accident, mind you--president. I've been wondering when two generations of business domination were going to end. It truly is a new day in America, a time for the working man (and woman) to seize unique historical opportunities and to take all that concentrated power and wealth away from a class of privileged criminals who have used violence to get and keep what they stole from the rest of us. If the American public don't start using their heads, we're going to see another world war, it's coming otherwise.

The Forgotten Genocide: Stalin's Purges

Russia/Central Asia--Why don't we hear about this more often? Why are we constantly inundated about the Shoah/Holocaust, but not the liquidation of tens-of-millions of ethnic and dissident groups and individuals under Stalinism?

The answer should be pretty obvious, and saddening: they don't have advocacy groups with the resources, they are history's losers without any voice because they were powerless then and are today.

In this world, the weak are to be scorned, if remembered at all. During the Cold War, our government used these victims of Stalin as propaganda, a secondary abuse and exploitation of their lives (and deaths). Did we ever care? Of course not, the State Department of the United States of America didn't care at all, and welcomed the rise of a 'strong man' in Russia just as they did in Germany around the very same time.

Historians estimate--though we will never truly know--that somewhere around 20 million human beings were murdered under Stalin's orders by the NKVD/KGB. Today, we're hearing that it was all about "ideology," which is partly true, but what it was really just a human disaster. The West not only didn't care, but was responsible for some of the depredations and couldn't be bothered to intervene (there are no humanitarian invasions), let alone to stop the slaughter indirectly.

Yes, today, we're being told it all began in 1937, but it's not true. The slaughter's beginnings were significantly earlier if one considers Lenin's and Trotsky's use of 'the terror' against all enemies of Bolshevism--even the Soviet councils in the cities, as they were the first to be targeted by Lenin and his gangsters. The terror began during the Russian Civil War in which millions died, and even more would perish during the collectivization programs in the Ukraine during 1932-1933.

Grain was taken from the peasants and sold on the international market to pay for a disastrous process of rapid industrialization. Western nations had no problem accepting the transactions of grain for equipment and other resources. Estimates for this particular period are six-to-seven million dead alone, and it was most certainly "systematic."

The murdering would continue, with entire villages disappearing into the night until the invasion June 1941 by Nazi Germany. Some of these victims are finally being discovered, sometimes in mass graves in public parks, with the numbers in the tens-of-thousands at just one location. By now, any fool should know that this happened, but few care or want to learn from it. FDR's attitude towards the Soviet Union merely echoed that of the rest of political and economic class he was a part of. Rhetoric is meant to be deceiving.

Even after 1933 (the year of Soviet Russia's recognition by the US State Department) there would be a continuation of mass murder during the years of Stalin's reign of terror. Was it all on Stalin and his accomplices? Yes and no. WWI devastated the Russian Empire, and Tsar Nicholas II's decision to command the army during the war--and subsequently losing it--left a power vacuum in the region. The legitimacy of the Tsar was forever tarnished, and what infrastructure there had been in Russia was destroyed and social networks were fragmented. Chaos ruled. This created a very fertile soil indeed for anyone who claimed to have answers and who showed sureness, decisiveness, and who offered order and certainty.

But once you make extreme violence part of your approach, it's almost impossible to end it, it continues-on and spreads like a plague. Weep for the dead, they were like us.

Because of the ubiquitous uncertainty gripping Russia, and the divisiveness of the Civil War, few people trusted each other. A culture of informing on one another began to catch like a wildfire, and one's loyalty to the State under the control of the Bolsheviks became the central contention: did you support order or not? A chain reaction took-hold. History isn't simply about "bad guys" and "good guys," and people do terrible things when they're desperate. If you want a good analogy, imagine a society eating itself from the inside out, just as Germany was also doing at the same time. Both nations were socially and economically devastated thanks to WWI, the war that ruined the 20th century. Our options become radically limited once we have unleashed extreme violence on others. Consider this when reflecting on our current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The Great Purge' of 1937-38 (with the subsequent "show trials") was a purging of the Communist Party's inner circles. Stalin was finishing the job of his consolidation of power, and like Hitler, he enjoyed pitting others against each other. What's unfortunate is that this purge is probably going to be confused as being the overall purge that continued unabated from Lenin and Trotsky, into Stalin's bloody-hands. Stalin was just following in their footsteps, and it's not hard to fathom that many of the millions-of-deaths also occurred simply because he was incompetent and had no idea how to rule a nation at all.

Lenin surely didn't know how to rule either, and as crazy as it sounds, he probably died of stroke brought-on by too much paperwork. We focus too much on these acts of destruction as being a sign of "power," when more often they're a sign that a Stalin's or a Hitler's reign are really bumbling tragedies of those clearly unfit to rule. Strong leaders avoid such calamities, and understand the art of compromise, the give-and-take. Destruction doesn't always mean power, but it can mean the avoidable deaths of millions. At least Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood this.

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S LAWYER URGES INTERNATIONAL BLOCKING OF HANDOVER TO IRAQI AUTHORITIES

"According to the international conventions, it is forbidden to hand a prisoner of war to his adversary." --Khalil al-Dulaimi, attorney for Saddam Hussein, 12.27.2006.


"What's clear is that the Iraqi government won't be able to protect the Sunnis from Iranian-backed militias if American troops leave. Its army and police cannot be relied on to do so, as tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen have infiltrated their ranks. ...There is reason to believe that the Bush administration, despite domestic pressure [Ed.-The American midterm-elections have only increased this pressure.], will heed Saudi Arabia's advice [demands]. "
--Nawaf Obaid, security advisor to the House of Saud, 09.27.2006, writing in the Washington Post.

Baghdad--It appears the Bush administration's desperation for any kind of break in Iraq has put them on a course towards the execution of their former client, Saddam Hussein. ' "I urge all the international and legal organizations, the United Nations' Secretary General, the Arab League and all the leaders of the world to rapidly prevent the American administration from handing the president to the Iraqi authorities," he [Khalil al-Dulaimi, Hussein's attorney] told The Associated Press.' Well, that's fine, but did they prevent the still illegal invasion of Iraq? Yes, things have definitely changed, but Hussein's execution (and the inevitable upsurge in social chaos and violence) seems assured.
(http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061228.wsaddam1228/BNStory/Front/home)

Nonetheless, the UN, the Hague and a constellation of Human Rights groups have chimed in, though it's unclear what would actually induce the Bush administration from altering their course regarding Hussein, let alone a phased withdrawal of American troops. It should be remarked, however, that UN and global opposition made the run up to war very-difficult for the Bush administration at a time when their powers were at their zenith. It's still mind-boggling to think that the Bush administration had approval ratings in the 90s, but this was only possible due to the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Strident opposition to Bush administration aims could still work, particularly in light of the November 7th midterms that were essentially a plebiscite on the war (and the GOP scandals in general). In an October 30th LA Times article, Al-Dulaimi warned that a full-blown civil war would erupt in reaction to Hussein's execution, so his point on this factor has been ongoing for months. It's likely Hussein will be executed anyway. (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-saddam30oct30,1,7585188.story?coll=la-headlines-world)

How many days will the execution buy the Bush administration? Probably just the ones leading-up to the execution, though the insurgency already seems emboldened by the news. When you're a hydra-headed national liberation front, and you're capable of kidnapping over 100 people in broad daylight, one can assume order has collapsed. Remaining elements of the Baathist Party have vowed a full-fledged uprising upon the execution, but maybe they know something the Bush administration doesn't (not a stretch here): Iraq ends as a nation state with the death of Saddam Hussein, and the grab for power will accelerate. Again, something even a casual observer could notice. But, why wouldn't the Bush administration notice? Bald ignorance, and frequently the wilful variety.

Most of the gaffes spring from this because Iraq was never a real country, and was created after WWI by the British as a conglomeration of various religious and ethnic groups (capped with an unsuccessful occupation during the late 1930s). Like Afghanistan, there was little concern by British planners for the subtleties of these geopolitical creations. In this sense, Iraq and Afghanistan are very similar to the former Yugoslavia. Marshall Tito knew full well that only a dictatorship could maintain order within such a conglomeration, proving as much by his decades-long rule (as did Hussein). Is Baghdad the next Sarajevo? Possibly. It seems fragmentation is becoming a fact, the "reality on the ground." Didn't British intelligence and members of their diplomatic circles warn the Bush administration of these "subtleties"? In fact, they did on several occasions and were rebuffed. This is well-known.

Because of the aforementioned subtleties, Saudi Arabia is vowing they will support Iraqi Sunnis if there is a "phased withdrawal of [American] troops". The fear is more Iranian influence in Iraq, and in the region. All of this would be by "proxy forces", yet we know that Saudi-nationals are already streaming into Iraq for similar aims, so the statement's thrust is a little peculiar (if not Janus-faced, which is how Middle Eastern politics work). Many of them are simply supporting the general insurgency, and one has to wonder how many of them are there on deep cover missions for the House of Saud, or other elements of the ruling clans. Saudi Arabia rarely ever states issues of security openly, so we don't know the details. It's likely Mossad has a better picture than the public. One can imagine other Muslim states like Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey (over the Kurds), various Gulf states, and even Pakistan following suit. Russia could also exhibit valid security concerns, making for a toxic mix at best, with economic ties to Iran being very deep.

Kuwait might also turn on her American allies in the State Department on this one for similar reasons, mostly concerning the security and stability of the current regime (along with sectarian loyalties). Security will be the prime-motivator of any Arab nation intervening into Iraq, with the factor of sectarianism and tribalism thrown in. Add Israel with potential aerial attacks on Iran, and we have a major war developing into a region-wide conflagration where everyone is reacting based on security and religious concerns. This is shockingly similar to the context that brought the Great War, and evokes images of timetables and trains. Voicing these kinds of security concerns in an interesting echo of the US immigration debacle, the Saudis announced in late September they were building a fence along the 560-mile border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq to keep out insurgents and immigrants (Shiite refugees? They're the minority in Saudi Arabia at 15%). 

Like its counterpart in the Americas, the fence will also take "5-6 years" to construct. One has to wonder whether the same contractors will be used. Ironically, one proposal by the Saudis is to increase oil production to hurt Iran with rock bottom prices.

The impact of this would be a global one to other producers, who would likely decrease their production to continue reaping the profits of the last few years. Venezuela's Bolivarist regime would certainly consider this option, as would numerous other producers and refiners. The irony of all this? Prolix, I know: ..."the current malaise in Iraq is simply vindication of King Abdullah’s warning that invading to topple Saddam would cause more problems than it would solve." This has come to pass, after repeated warnings before the March, 2003 invasion, from all quarters. Executing Saddam Hussein will only accelerate the disintegration of the existing order in the region. For even the most casual observer, this is incredibly dangerous, possibly making the unthinkable thinkable. It is just another wrong path. 

Much of this quagmire is based on the ignorance of tribal clan networks in the Middle East, and Hussein is tied to them. These networks know no border and extend throughout the Middle East--the execution will amount to a rallying cry for many of them. When he is executed, those clans will respond, and violently. It seems the White House feels it must take orders from Mecca, rather than from the American public. This is treason. Still want to be President? This is the cost of "winning", and ample proof that the aims for Iraq were incoherent from the beginning.


King Abdullah, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL (you haven't built yet):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092701214.html

The Recent Threat of Saudi Intervention into Iraq (by proxy):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR2006112801277.html

A Great Overview by Tony Karon:
http://tonykaron.com/2006/12/01/rehabilitating-osama-and-other-iraq-remedies/