The American Art of War

Reviews of Boggs, Rogers, Atwood

Carl Boggs, The Crimes of Empire: Rogue Superpower and World Domination
Paul Rogers, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st century
Paul Atwood, War and Empire: The American Way of Life (Pluto Press 2010)

Three new publications from the leading radical British press are the tip of a growing iceberg of passionate pleas for sanity in international affairs. Most of us prefer to stick our heads in the sand as the world goes to hell in a hand-basket, but there are works that can fascinate and uplift, perhaps even inspire us to do something before it is too late.

If what you need is a reference book for your own writing, with all the gory details of just how disreputable the world’s hegemon is, The Crimes of Empire: Rogue Superpower and World Domination by Carl Boggs is what you pull down from your shelf. He has slogged through all the filth of “collateral damage”, “humanitarian warfare”, “client-state outlawry”, “perpetual war”, “biowarfare”, “space imperialism”, Guantanamo — the Orwellian list is seemingly endless — to provide a litany of horrors that will convince even the most sceptical of observers as to who is the real problem in the world.

Not a pretty read, but a commendable labour on the author’s part.

More rivetting than Boggs’s list of the empire’s sins is the justification for them, as revealed by such neocons as Robert Kagan, who sees American force as necessary “to restrain the chaotic tendencies of a Hobbesian world”, and who thus rejects any global restraints on US flexibility. “Human rights intervention”, the latest buzzword to condone imperial ventures — it once was called the “white man’s burden” — is for use by the big guns against the little ones. But Boggs’s list of crimes is proof in itself that the imperial project actually creates “a comprehensive lawless whole”.

This belies the Dawkinsian claim of evolutionary improvement in society’s “moral zeitgeist”, which sees an upward trajectory from the slavery of yore to racial, gender and political correctness today, as “proved” by post-WWII multilateral treaties signed at the New York UN HQs or in Geneva. The New World Order is based on “sovereignty of nations”, though Boggs points out that some nations are more sovereign than others, undermining the whole farce. The Kagans justify this as “US exceptionalism”. But a sobre evaluation of today’s world reveals that Reagan’s “peace through strength” is really nothing but medieval “might makes right”.

Anyone with even a smattering of US history can see that the Indian wars and Manifest Destiny of the 18th and 19th centuries were based on the same philosophy of “pre-emptive war” that solemn conferences on security today spout in defence of the indefensible.

This makes for frustrating reading, though it pushes you to make sense of the hypocrisy of world affairs, if nothing else. My own rule of thumb in considering how to resolve social problems is that only when the overwhelming majority wants something and are blessed with a charismatic political leader (take your choice in today’s world — they are there) does a real change for the better have a chance. This has nothing in common with a Darwin/Dawkins rational/natural evolutionary process. It is more like a Kuhnian revolutionary paradigm change, a combination of force majeure and luck, once a point-of-no- return is reached.

Corollary: No number of treaties will make for a just and equitable world order if one country overpowers all the others and seeks to impose its will. Another corollary is that the only evolutionary “moral zeitgeist” is the historic-economic order itself — in our case, capitalism — no matter how the dominant “culture” portrays itself for mass consumption. Hurt Locker may be a clever and gripping film by a talented woman director, but it is nonetheless a chauvinistic apologia for a criminal war, with the real victims largely airbrushed out of the picture so as to concentrate on the occupiers’ angst. It does nothing to illuminate any possible “moral zeitgeist”apart from the chilling reality of US imperialism itself.

Finally, what the mass of horrors Boggs documents implies is that the only measure of human rights is “How many died?” If that is your rule of thumb, then there can be not one iota of doubt that, despite all the pious words of its leaders, the US is one of the worst offenders that the world has ever witnessed. And that its allies — accomplices — are no less to blame for illegal wars, war crimes, genocides. Thus the so-called pariahs — Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba — for better or worse, are direct products of US imperial actions, lumped together because they oppose the hegemon. Whatever crimes they may commit pale in comparison to the nobler-than-thou US. This is not to defend mistreatment of people anywhere, but to put things in a just light, so that we can navigate the treacherous tunnel we find ourselves globally rushing down.

*****

Here in the Middle East, the US and its “client”, spoiled offspring or whatever you want to call Israel have done nothing to lessen the Hobbesian chaos; on the contrary, they are the source of it. This is the message that Paul Rogers sets out calmly and compellingly in the third edition of Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st century, which has become a popular text for those trying to chart a way through the darkness, and is much more a book to be read and to inspire than Boggs, though it too has lots of useful nitty-gritty for aspiring writers of contemporary politics and economics.

As a veteran peacenik, I found eloquent confirmation for what I and millions of others intuit about the deadend approach of writers who function within the dominant paradigm of international relations.

People’s eyes glaze over at the mention of “peace”. It’s a bit like heaven: nice but boring. Rogers’s argument, however, is compelling and his book readable. In the first edition, before 9/11, he presciently argued that US-NATO military posturing and war-mongering in the face of the growing rich-poor divide, environmental constraints and asymmetrical warfare was self-defeating and would only accelerate the collapse of the comfortable elite Western order.

A widely accepted argument, considered a truism, is that the US “won” the Cold War, that NATO helped the West survive through a “necessary and essentially safe process of maintaining very large military forces”, an unpleasant but unavoidable balance of terror that ended with the collapse of the “enemy”. Rogers deconstructs this fallacy, arguing that the Cold War was “highly dangerous and inordinately wasteful”, that it created “a momentum in the development of a range of military technologies that has lasted well beyond the end of the Cold War itself”, making present and future conflicts exponentially more devastating for victims and destabilising for the world as a whole.

This professor of peace studies at Bradford University provides telling examples from the North Ireland insurgency, which like the 9/11 attacks but for most of the 20th century penetrated to the very heart of the nation — the nation in this case being Britain. Ireland is still divided, but the insurgency did not fail. Even after the cease-fire collapsed in 1996 with the Canary Wharf bombing, “the British and Irish governments commenced a new drive for peace within hours of the incident. A modern urban-industrial state was certainly vulnerable to political violence, even though most of the explosive devices used were home-made fertiliser bombs.”

Rogers appeals to progressive thinkers in Britain, hoping that the Thatcher legacy of sabre-rattling elitism will eventually give way to an enlightened policy of promoting real security, which means rejecting military force and building a complex, multi-faceted foreign policy of economic assistance to undermine the logic of insurgents and “terrorists”. It really boils down to rich countries voluntarily giving up their (imperial) privileges in the present world order, and effectively redistributing income through proactive trade policies benefitting poor farmers and third world producers, clamping down on huge international corporations, and controlling the excesses the “market” gives rise to.

He has little faith that this will happen soon, but his strategy is a compelling one: for one or more “north” countries to take the initiative to break with the status quo and lead the way, working with the more enlightened “south” political and intellectual leaders. A bono fide truism in human affairs is the parable of the 99 monkeys: that at some point — the “tipping point” — the actions of the few will lead to rapid change, the Kuhnian paradigm shift. Regarding the world’s future, this is what Rogers is staking his bets on.

Once we enter the shift period, the bits and pieces of peace- promotion of the past — UN treaties, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the anti-personnel landmine treaty, the Non- proliferation Treaty, various STARTs — will gain a new lease on life, and lead to a truly multinational drive towards a non- nuclear world and the conversion of arms industries to environmental and other beneficial production, “part of a wider agenda of actions to ensure a persistent programme of cooperative and sustainable development”.

Rogers provides a check-list of the essential steps, and argues compellingly that “There Is No Alternative”. When you are faced with the daily horrors of the current world, in which the raging US bull flails madly at one and all, dipping into Losing Control provides some solace. Security can only mean common security, truly global security. It is an elusive vision, but there are concrete steps we can take to work towards it: TINA.

*****

Paul Atwood’s War and Empire: The American Way of Life is a stimulating revisionist romp through American history, though I found the first two chapters too depressing — the deception and betrayal of the innocent natives and their ruthless massacre by greedy settlers is just too close to the tragedy of the Palestinians for comfort. I got hooked with the post-1776 integration of the “revolutionaries” into the corrupt world of international intrigue, and became fascinated with how US history has been a circus, if a nasty one, ever since, at times aping European revolutionaries and at other times the glamorous aristocracy. The hodge-podge that calls itself American culture today is a mix of all this, and its shallowness is no surprise.

War and Empire is based on the author’s history lectures at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he regularly asks students why the US entered any of its many wars and is greeted by quizzical looks and a vacuous “Freedom? National security?”, blissfully unaware of “the centrality of war to the creation and evolution of the US”. The decline in literacy standards depresses Atwood; one of his students earnestly explained to him that “communists employed ‘Asian Orange’ herbicides on American troops” in Vietnam.

The author shows how in the 19th century the drive for suffrage was feared by the Hamiltonian elite as a threat to the goal of creating “an industrial society with centralised banking and control of money”, and made expansion necessary to Democrats and Federalists alike “to provide the growing white population with at least a small stake of property in the new system”. When the shores of the Pacific were reached, this meant building a navy to reach across the Pacific and later the Atlantic, dabbling in Europe’s follies, to feed the hungry capitalist beast and keep the dogs of populism at bay. There is no room in this gruesome march of death for the paper ideals that the “founding fathers” penned. The “permanent war” of today has its genesis in the “permanent war” of yesterday.

Atwood turns up many fascinating tidbits. Arab regimes beware: as early as 1805 the American consul in Tunis asked permission from the (supposedly anti-imperialist) Jefferson to overthrow its ruler and replace him with one more inclined to US interests, thereby out-Hamiltoning his elitist federal rivals.

The presidency is a veritable rogues’ gallery. Andrew Jackson, who killed at least one adversary in his wild youth and was an unapologetic racist to the end, is still unsurpassed as the most bellicose president in US history, having made his name invading the Spanish colony of Florida in pursuit of escaped slaves and pesky natives, doing President Monroe’s dirty work for him. He became Florida’s first governor and went on to win the presidency, benefiting from the extension of the vote to all white males — an appropriate role model for Jeb and George Bush. To the horror of the elite, he scuttled the central bank created by Madison, fighting the bankers’ plans for a centralised industrial state with them in control, and allowed local and state banks to issue money, the last such American- style Don Quixote.

The US has always enjoyed playing European rivals off against each other, using the Napoleonic wars as an opportunity to snatch colonies from both England and France, all the while smuggling goods to both sides. Finally the US Congress declared war against England, the War of 1812, which American history books insist — falsely — that they won. The attempts to annex Canada and Florida failed and the White House was burned to the ground. The most obvious results were the “Star-spangled banner” and the unifying role the war played for the still anarchic settler-state.

No American hero emerges untarnished. Even the saintly Walt Whitman cheer-led probably the most sordid of America’s wars — Polk’s invasion of poor Mexico: “Yes! Mexico must be chastised. America knows how to crush as well as expand!”

The hallowed Civil War was not at all about abolishing slavery, but a direct result of the insatiable hunger for more land, about keeping the increasingly unwieldy and fractious union together, about whether or not the North or South should prevail in extending their economic systems westward. Lincoln’s famous emancipation proclamation was issued only in 1863, two years after the start of this suicidal conflagration, and only because the North, despite its overwhelming advantages, was losing and needed to inspire its own blacks to join in the slaughter. They did, and they turned the tide, though there was no “emancipation” for them or their southern brothers, but only the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, lynching, debt servitude, and a legacy of racism still alive and well.

Draping itself hypocritically in anti-slavery rhetoric, Britain watched smugly as its obstreperous ex-colony tore itself apart over which elite would have its way. The weaker America was, the better for the British empire. The tragedy is hard to fathom: the death toll is still unsurpassed in (white) America’s history at 600,000 dead vs WWII’s 400,000, the South was devastated, the phenomenon of “soldier’s heart” (post-traumatic stress disorder) was widespread, with tens of thousands of soldiers homeless and psychologically or physically incapacitated, reduced to begging as there was no social support system.

Atwood’s diligent expose of the seamy side of America’s past reveals striking parallels between US and Israeli history — the importance of war and expansion, the genocide of the native people justified by racism and a chauvinistic religion, the playing off of European powers against each other, the arrogant nationalism that characterises both states, unconcern for the resentment and hatred that their bellicose behaviour inspires. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 — the updated version of the Monroe Doctrine — acted to extend US dominance over the world, including the Middle East, and was closely followed by the creation of Israel in 1948, with strong backing by the Truman administration. A telling coincidence.

We all know that the pretext for the entry of the US into WWI was the sinking of the Lusitania. But I never knew that this ocean liner was carrying war materiel to England, that the German government warned secretary of state Bryan that it would be sunk, that Bryan’s plea to president Wilson to prevent Americans from embarking was overruled. Bryan resigned and the rest is history — the terrible nightmare history of the 20th century.

My immediate thought was “Eureka!” This is exactly the way the US people were tricked into entering WWII, with Pearl Harbour the perfect pretext. Atwood hints at but demurs from exploring the willful refusal of the FDR to nip this well- known plan in the bud — no doubt because his “Asian Orange”-spouting students would denounce him as a mentally unbalanced traitor. Nor does he venture into the 9/11 literature hypothesising US (and other) government involvement in our current “Pearl Harbour”.

But that is not to detract from his cogent reasoning that the entry of the US into both wars was to prevent the rising German behemoth from dominating Europe and posing a threat to US imperial interests around the world. The consensus in ruling circles was “for a more rationalised world system open to American economic penetration. American entry to [WWI] would be sold as making the world ‘safe for democracy’.” He understands well that current US wars have a similar logic — to reinforce US hegemony around the world.

For those who bemoan that a once pristine America is now descending into an Orwellian dictatorship with its infringements of the Constitution and illegal wars, it is at least some comfort to recall that such moments in US history abound. The Sedition Act of 1918 made any speech against the government’s wartime policies illegal; the “Red Scare” following WWI led to the creation of the FBI and allowed the deportation of thousands of immigrants because of their political views. US troops assisted British, Czech and Japanese in the invasion of Russia in 1917 to crush the communist revolution, though Russia was already devastated, ensuring that the revolution would be born in blood and war.

The Korean war was so unpopular that by the end 90 per cent of troops hospitalised were from self-inflicted wounds. To soften up the Koreans, the US Air Force carpet bombed the north’s dams and dikes — a direct violation of the new Geneva Convention — until two months before an exhausted North Korea finally agreed to an armistice in 1953, pressured by the new post-Stalin Soviet leadership anxious to reduce East-West tensions, fearing a nuclear war. “The West can and does vilify communist crimes. But there is nothing in the communist record not matched by capitalist societies in terms of crimes against humanity.”

For those who admire Jimmy Carter as the peacenik president, Atwood reminds us that he extended the Monroe Doctrine with his own corollary: “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the US.” But, bless his heart, Carter fails to state the corollary to his corollary: that the only threats to the Persian Gulf were and are the Kissingers and Brzezinskis of US foreign policy. Atwood quotes Nixon and Ford’s witty secretary of state during the post-1973 oil embargo: “Pick one of those sheikhdoms, any of them, and overthrow the government there, as a lesson to the Saudis.”

Atwood valiantly fights the “Disney version” of his nation’s past and his work is to be commended. It’s hard to imagine how anyone who acquaints himself with the basic truths of US history can come away uncommitted to fighting its trajectory today. The US was born in war and has thrived by the sword. And its actions are more than adequate confirmation that, “War has never made the world safe for peace but only for more war.”

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

10 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. bozh said on May 15th, 2010 at 9:09am #

    The first wars on civilized clans, groups, ethnoses of mesopotamia ended by [according to historians] ca 7k yrs ago. At that time first ever ‘rule’ was set up by priests!
    Ever since we live in an extremely uncivilized or lawless world. And from that time, the hell-on-earth descended upon us.
    It seems now worse than ever; not beacause of ideological changes, but solely because of ‘better’ weaponry.

    And we can conclude that both russians and chinese know this. So, for them, et al, it is question of to be or not to be.
    To remain, china and russia wld seek to make even ‘better’ weapons than the west possesses.
    If they succeed, the US first n-strike might not occur. But the chance of an accidental n-war is real; i.e., an ergodic event [having zero chance of not happening] tnx

  2. Mulga Mumblebrain said on May 16th, 2010 at 12:00am #

    When one contemplates the two hundred year plus record of Yankee jingoism, genocide, duplicity and narcissistic self-adoration (so exactly alike England before them and Israel today) one must remember that all these countries, or to be more precise, their psychopathic ruling elites,imagine themselves as ‘Chosen People’. This derives from the Judaic fallacy, communicated through the ‘Christian’ Old Testament, and provides the bedrock motivation for the ruthlessly racist, xenophobic and genocidal policies each state has followed. Add to this quasi-religious ethos of cultural, racial and civilizational supremacism the further poison of capitalism, a system that selects the most avaricious, unscrupulous, vicious and unprincipled (ie the psychopaths who hate others) and advantages them, and you have the current world dominating system. The chances of evolution to a non-destructive, benign, just and sustainable system are next to zero. It is already, at least in my opinion, too late to do anything to avert ecological collapse and system imploding resource depletion or to ameliorate the unfolding economic depression brought on by Brobdinagian debt. The psychos know this, which is why their army of the night, the Pentagon, has been assiduously planning for future warfare where vast masses of deprived and starving ‘niggers’ of various hues and beliefs, are kept imprisoned in a global archipelago of festering Bantustans, ravaged mega-slums like Gaza, and the overlords of planetary apartheid cull the ‘useless eaters’ with Hellfire missiles launched from drones, hypersonic space planes, killer robots and novel plagues cooked up at Fort Detrick. The real horror would be if this infernal breed of insatiably destructive and murderous robopaths ever escaped this ravaged planet and set out to inflict their religion of death on the cosmos.

  3. mary said on May 16th, 2010 at 12:03am #

    Prof Rogers will be waiting for some time for the maj0rity of the British public to wake up to what their leaders are doing in the name of ‘the war on terror’. Murdoch’s rags and the BBC have conditioned their minds extremely well.

    As long as we have this MOD inspired bilge in the Guardian extolling the bravery and prowess of the Queen’s grandson, and the public support of the weekly theatrical that takes place in a Wiltshire village where the streets are lined with ghouls watching the procession of hearses bearing the coffins of the bodily remains of the cannon fodder, we are doomed and the carnage will continue. This weekly procession obviously has the hand of the MOD media unit behind its initiation and continuing production.

    The Guardian – beyond satire
    Prince Harry and an Apache pilot’s awesome power

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/15/prince-harry-apache-helicopter?showallcomments=true#end-of-comments

    Extracts from one of the comments thereon from a Lester Jones.

    Dear Prince Harry

    Good luck with your training as a figurehead for the establishment’s whole hearted support of violence and state sanctioned murder in what you rightly describe as an awesome helicopter…the true power of helicopters’ ability to righteously murder can be seen perfectly in the recent Wikileaks video which uncannily appears to be a whole lot like a PlayStation game.

    While your primary role will be to protect the geopolitical power gamers back in the West…You may sometimes find yourself in the role of a judge, two-man jury and executioner ? and you must pray to God that the press don’t get hold of anything that you might have to answer to afterwards because as John Pilger recently said “the spectacle of children’s limbs hanging in trees” never sounds as good as rhetoric about being a god fearing good guy…

    You have shown yourself to be a compassionate human being and this is an admirable quality…but unfortunately not quite compassionate enough to understand the role that you play in justifying and normalising the horror of war and the spectacle of economic motivations that fundamentally underscores it…

    If you kill one or more of the enemy you will be just another killer…but you will be able to say that this murder was justified and so will a very appreciative press corp who will go into overdrive to establish the unquestionable righteousness of the killings in a continuous cycle of violence and horror that you are now readily encouraging…

    Personally I am disgusted with your actions and in no way do you represent me as a British citizen and human being.

    May you one day come to your senses.

    ~~~~~~

    My PS Last time P Harry went off to Afghanistan, he played around with machine guns for photographic opportunities and tested a few of the whizzy gizmos. When he got back, he was wearing a baseball cap over his shaggy red hair and the motto on the back of the cap read ‘We do bad things to bad people’. Enough said.

  4. mary said on May 16th, 2010 at 12:14am #

    Apart from anything else, there is complete lack of care for the combatants by the state.

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/woundedplatoon/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=proglist&utm_source=proglist

    The Wounded Platoon – Since the Iraq War began, soldier arrests in the city of Colorado Springs, Colo., have tripled. At least 36 servicemen based at the nearby Army post of Fort Carson have committed suicide, and 14 Fort Carson soldiers have been charged or convicted in at least 11 killings. Many of the most violent crimes involved men who had served in the same battalion in Iraq. Three of them came from a single platoon of infantrymen.
    /…..

  5. Rehmat said on May 16th, 2010 at 4:01am #

    The Canadian war correspondent, Eric Margolis, in his latest book, American Raj: Liberation or Dominatio, exposes the current colonial power which uses NATO and foreign soldiers to fight its wars in the Muslim countries, from Balkans to Iran and Pakistan. Eric begins with the struggle of Muslims to get independence from over 150 years of western colonialism (Turkey and Afghanistan were the only two Muslim nation-states which were not occupied by the western colonial powers during 19th-20th century). Then he discusses the Palestinian problem created by the western leaders. His views on western-created instablity in Muslim lands, such as, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosova, Bosnia and Lebanon are worth reading.

    Eric Margolis lauds both Islamic Resistance groups Hizb’Allah and Hamas by saying that these two organization distinguish themselves from Arab governments by establishing a reputation for honesty and public service: “After the highly destructive Israeli bombing in the brief 2006 war, Hezbollah astounded everyone by swiftly setting about rebuilding of shattered buildings and bridges, cleaning up rubble and caring for homeless civilians while in the US-backed regime in Beirut dithered and did nothing.”

    http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/western-wars-on-islamic-world/

  6. bozh said on May 16th, 2010 at 6:32am #

    Only facts [descriptive statements] lead to an enlightenment at a point in time.
    In other words, enlightement of today must suffice; for tomorrow we wld surely have a different one.

    Calling names people explains nothing. Desribing what people do. Explains at a point of time everything! {as per necessary truth}.
    Yes, i use categories like “socialist” and “asocialist”, but only after i have
    accurately-adequately described how each category behaves or acts.
    But even accurate descriptions of what people do, does not suffice nor enlighten us, w.o. also adequacy.

    Some ‘jewish’ dissenters like atzmon, zinn, and chomsky do describe events; however never explain why.
    In short [and in order to deceive], give us in perpetuum sensation but sans causation.

    An honest description wld include also why one describes what one describes. In case of chomsky [and may be zinn], it seems, causative factor [s] for their writings was saving zionism or even a state for ‘jews’ only!
    Yes, many have been deceived. To this day they cannot accept these facts i have just posited. tnx

  7. bozh said on May 16th, 2010 at 6:38am #

    After i sent my comment i saw two mistakes. I shld have said that only desriptive, that includes also why, statements lead to an enilghtement.
    The second mistake is corrected by saying: describing what people do, explains everything [for that moment only] tnx

  8. Mulga Mumblebrain said on May 17th, 2010 at 11:13pm #

    mary, the Wootton Bassett abomination, so cynically manipulated to stoke xenophobic jingoism and brainwash the chavs into the required head-space of violent hatred for the ‘rag-heads’, reached its predictable nadir when a bunch of ‘Islamist’ (probably SIS stooges, useful for agit-prop)agitators demanded that some notice of the multitudinous Afghan civilian casualties be paid at Wootton Basset by the professional mourners. This demand, that innocent women and children, slaughtered in cowardly manner, in dead of night, by murderers from a land thousands of miles away, be remembered in the same manner as their paid, foreign,assassins, was met by a storm of vicious, racist,outrage. Clearly the decades of Zionist brainwashing into Islamophobia has had its intended effect, and unprecedented acts of genocide in the near future cannot be ruled out. The Colorado Springs story was featured some time ago, and it was explained that soldiers ‘debriefing’ after ‘service’ in Iraq, were reporting truly hideous atrocities committed by themselves and their colleagues against the Iraqi population, (many plainly imitating the atrocities committed in horror movies) abominations that were haunting them. Remember,too, that USQuakersrevealed a network where images of ‘death porn’, eviscerated, decapitated and immolated Iraqis, obliterated by US violence, were being swapped by the US troops who filmed them, for sexual pornography from back ‘home’.Apparently death porn is Big Business in the US, just like child porn.I remember, also, seeing brief mention that the psychiatrist who killed a dozen would-be ‘patriotic’ killers at Fort Hood,Major Hasan, had also been treating US soldiers with PTSD from their experiences in Iraq, and had heard similar stories, which, to my mind at least, explains and justifies his actions.
    In dealing with US fascism we must never forget that we are dealing with a society that worships murder, horror and death. You need only look at history, at the recurrence of murder, torture and terror as US tactics in every war that they have waged, at the brutality of US police methods, the sheer sadism of sentencing and prison conditions, the vast disproportionality of sentencing against minorities, and at the ‘cultural’ manifestations of death-worship, the psychopathic cult of extreme horror movies, the violent and horrific video-games and brutal mass entertainments like the steroid festival of ‘professional wrestling’,to see that the US is a truly deranged society. All manner of terrifying human villainies, from the genocidal injunctions of the Judaic God, transmitted through the Old Testament, the fallacy of imagining themselves a ‘Chosen People’ with a ‘Manifest Destiny’ to rule the planet, the notion of American Exceptionalism, the worship of guns and other methods of destruction, have all combined to produce a society, and, in particular a ruling elite, who, in league with other such psychotic elites, particularly that of Israel, represent a very pure and undiluted form of evil, a real and growing menace to every society on earth and to the very existence of humanity.

  9. mary said on May 18th, 2010 at 7:37am #

    More of the stinking mess. Note the officer is a ‘special forces commander’. Proof that the old methods are the best!

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/afghan-prosecutor-arrest-warrant-us-officer

    Afghan prosecutor issues arrest warrant for US army officer over police killing
    • Kabul prosecutor seeks ‘outlaw militia’ for killings
    • Hamid Karzai’s brother denies link to accused group

  10. Mulga Mumblebrain said on May 19th, 2010 at 3:48am #

    mary,every war the Yanks have fought, since the settler genocides in the 17th century, has been a war of mass murder,or extermination.They actually exterminated the Californian indigenous completely.Always targeting women and children, as that is the essence of genocide, always harking back to the Old Testament and the Hebrew genocides in Canaan, as justification. Why would they change now, as perverted,monstrous religious fascism dominates both Israel, the not so secret controller of US policy, and the Right in US politics. One needs only look to the sick,psychopathic,fantasies of the Rapture crowd, with their horrific depictions of the slaughter of God’s enemies in the coming Apocalypse, just like the crudest horror movies, so popular in the US, to see that these evil, insane, fiends are just itching for a big bloodbath. That their ‘God’, with his injunctions to genocide, his pitiless cruelty,his incessantly demanding disposition and his endorsement of a hierarchy of humanity,with the Jews, the Yanks and some deluded Pommies,jostling for top spot, is simply a projection of their own psychopathy and spiritual evil, is as plain as a pikestaff.