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(ANTIMEDIA) United States — “I think Smedley Butler was onto something,”Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former George W. Bush administration heavyweight, told Salon in an exclusive interview.

Major General Smedley Butler earned the highest rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, accumulating numerous accolades as he helped lead the United States through decades of war. He later became an ardent critic of such militarism and imperialism.

“War is a racket,” Butler famously said, and Wilkerson — who has also turned critical of U.S. imperialist policy — agrees with and admires the esteemed Marine.

Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state, Colin Powell, has grown tired of “the corporate interests that we go abroad to slay monsters for.”

Of the profiteering scheme that wars have come to embody, Wilkerson quoted Butler:

“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

Noting Butler’s brief but accurate characterization of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, Wilkerson added that today’s war machine “is more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought it would be.”

The willingness of such weapons and military equipment corporations to excuse the transgressions of repressive and abusive regimes in the Middle East and Asia for the sake of profit, Wilkerson asserted, stands as evidence Eisenhower underestimated the extent the to which the problem would manifest.

“Was Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO — after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn’t go an inch further east — was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and others, to increase their network of potential weapons sales?” Wilkerson asked.

“You bet it was,” he answered his own question.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Erdogan: Democracy, Freedom Have ‘Absolutely No Value Any Longer’

March 18, 2016

Erdogan: Democracy, Freedom Have ‘Absolutely No Value Any Longer’

Vows to Turn Military on Political Opposition

Concerns about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian leanings have been at the fore in the nation’s political dialogue since he assumed the presidency, and appear to have been well founded, as in a televised speech today he declared “democracy,, freedom, and the rule of law have absolutely no value any longer.”

Rather, Turkey is about one thing in 2016, and that’s wars, with Erdogan insisting anyone who supports his wars is a friend and anyone “on the opposite side are our enemy,” insisting the nation will treat them all with an iron fist.

Erdogan also vowed to turn the nation’s military against the opposition HDP, which opposes the war against the Kurds, saying that “wherever you run, our soldiers, police, and village guards will find you there and do what is necessary.” Erdogan had previously pushed for the HDP’s parliamentarians to lose their legal immunity so they could be charged as terrorists.

“I no longer see as legitimate political actors the members of a party which is operating as a branch of the terrorist organization,” Erdogan reiterated today, demanding parliament take quick action against opposition MPs from the Kurdish-dominated southeast.

Erdogan has increasingly sought to charge political opponents as terrorists, and has in the past few weeks not only arrested academics as “terrorists” for their positions on his government, but nationalized the nation’s largest newspaper for publishing articles critical of his ruling party.

The History of Hollywood: Propaganda for White Supremacy at Home and US Militarism Abroad

March 16, 2016

The History of Hollywood: Propaganda for White Supremacy at Home and US Militarism Abroad

shutterstock_190940342

turtix | Shutterstock.com

For more than a century American film has been one of the most important apparatus used for perpetuating American white supremacy and justifying American military adventures.

Racism in film and white supremacy are so intricately interwoven into the fabric of America that they have become virtually undetectable, much like carbon monoxide, until the deadly damage has occurred. Film is a reflection of society and society in turn is influenced by film.

Ever since the Lumiere brothers first developed film in 1896, it has been an astoundingly effective racial propaganda tool. As the first universal mass medium it efficiently utilized high drama through the fixation of emotional sequences. Put simply, effective propaganda starts precisely where critical thinking ends.

To create drama, particularly in action and war movies, Hollywood needs bad guys, and through the consistent use of racial stereotypes these enemies have included the Vietnamese during the Vietnam war, the Russians throughout the Cold War, Muslims during the ongoing War on Terror and the Japanese after Pearl Harbor.

In American film and media, during the “Yellow peril” the widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human created an emotional context which formed a justification for the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that instantly slaughtered 140,000 innocent people, as well as the establishment of concentration camps for Japanese-Americans on US soil.

The first group in Hollywood history to have been depicted as dangerous savages is Native Americans.

The gross misrepresentation of Native Americans has been a longstanding problem for American film makers ever since the rise of 19th-century Western frontier literature, which portrayed pioneers as struggling with restless natives, without acknowledging the genocide committed by white men.

Despite vast evidence of Native American technological advances and complex civilization, Hollywood films depict native culture as a “blanket ethnicity,” thereby pigeonholing the various groups and cultures into one group defined by stereotypical tropes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

World’s Climate Threatened by Greed and Militarism, Official Canada Remains Part of the Problem, Not Solution

January 18, 2016

World’s Climate Threatened by Greed and Militarism, Official Canada Remains Part of the Problem, Not Solution

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A leading columnist in Canada’s Globe and Mail daily newspaper known in the past to voice concern about the global warming emergency has penned two columns recently in support of Alberta tar sands pipelines, including praising the efforts of the premier of Alberta to sell the construction of these project to an increasingly sceptical and wary public in Canada

Jeffrey Simpson has argued for years for a more rational capitalist approach to energy production in which some account would be made for the global warming emergency. He co-authored a book in 2007 with several climate scientists titled Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge.[1] But his columns in the January 14 and 15 editions of the Globe reveal him as just a born again shill for the Alberta tar sands industry.

Simpson begins his Jan 14 column (accessible online to Globesubscribers only) with, “Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, to her government’s great credit, has tried for the first time to outline a comprehensive and serious plan for the province to curb greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.”

Simpson is referring to Premier Notley’s fanfare announcement on November 22, 2015 purporting to be an energy “plan” with greenhouse gas reduction components. The “plan” includes a few piecemeal promises such as reducing coal-fired electricity production in Alberta over the next few decades (presently, the province generates 50 per cent of its electricity from coal). But the centrepiece of her “plan” is to green light an increase in tar sands production in the coming years by as much as 43 per cent, most of which would be sold in foreign markets. A plan to “curb greenhouse gas emissions”, indeed.

Edmonton writer Gordon Laxer explained in a commentary published in the Edmonton Journal on December 3:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Left and Right Must Stop the Establishment’s Perpetual War Machine

November 21, 2015

The Left and Right Must Stop the Establishment’s Perpetual War Machine

antiwar

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, some of us tried to raise questions of U.S. foreign policy. I got my mic cut on O’Reilly’s show. Others got far worse — a friend basically felt he had to move out of his neighborhood he was so reviled for criticizing the U.S.’s militarism. Oh, yeah, and hundreds of thousands of people got killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The root causes of the 9/11 attacks were hardly discussed — unless it was people deriding Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell for blaming gay folks.

Now, there’s no meaningful peace movement. Partly as a result of that, we’re not having a serious discussion we should be about foreign policy after the Paris attacks: How U.S. — and Western — foreign policy manifests hatred and all that brings.

One might have thought that would be possible — the target of this attack was not the U.S., though it could be the next target. But that should give us some breathing room as well as a measure of urgency to think things through.

The major policy debate now is about Syrian refugees.

This is part of a political pattern: The two party establishment agrees on a series of issues and those issues are largely ignored. (Perpetual war.)

Then, there’s something they disagree on and that’s vociferously debated. (Refugees.)

Problem is, sometimes what they agree on (perpetual war) is what causes the other issue (refugees).

Right now, both the Democratic and Republican establishments both agree on a course of perpetual war. There’s virtually no remorse about having pushed for regime change in Syria and Libya and that leading to enormous human suffering that we’re mostly blind to.

When the Obama administration made an overt push for war in Syria in 2013, the left and right united and stopped it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When The Advanced Keynesian Disease Afflicts A Nation—–Japan’s Abe Goes Full Fantasy-tard With 3 New ‘Arrows’

September 27, 2015

When The Advanced Keynesian Disease Afflicts A Nation—–Japan’s Abe Goes Full Fantasy-tard With 3 New ‘Arrows’

Having completed his militarist plans, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appears to have gone full fantasy-tard with his latest “plans” for the demographically-dead and debt-destroyed nation. “Creating a strong economy will continue to be my top priority,” Abe said, a goal he has stunningly under-achieved as Japan heads for its 5th recession in 4 years, but, as Bloomberg reports, it is his new “arrows” of economic hope that has left analysts scratching their heads – 20% economic growth(when its gone nowhere for years), a higher birth rate (as theaging of the nation accelerates and interest in sex plunges), and allegedly a goose that lays golden eggs (well why not?). The collapse of Abe’s approval says it all about his ‘plan’.

As Japan heads for a Quintuple Dip recession…

Abe proposes three new policy pillars without tying them to his previous plan. As Bloomberg reports, it has left analysts scratching their heads…

Speaking Thursday after his reappointment as leader of Japan’s ruling party, Abe unveiled three new “arrows” of his so-called Abenomics plan — a strong economy, child-care support and social security. When he took office in 2012, he had championed another trio — monetary stimulus, flexible fiscal policy and structural reforms.

But with the new policies sounding more like objectives rather than measures to achieve them, the risk is this fresh framework muddies his communication battle to encourage Japanese households and companies to spend rather than save.

“Investors like details, but all he’s done is announce targets,” said Mari Iwashita, chief market economist at SMBC Friend Securities Co. in Tokyo. “The growth strategy, one of the original three arrows, has branched off into three new arrows.”

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Abe avoided mentioning monetary or fiscal policy, as well as tricky regulatory reforms that many economists say are already too slow. Instead, he focused on his new three objectives:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Abe Reaches his Militarist Goal

September 26, 2015

Abe Reaches his Militarist Goal

Japan’s House of Councilors Briefly Transforms into Rada Outpost

Pictures such as those below used to primarily reach us from Ukraine’s Rada, back before Poroshenko’s “lustration law” banned about four million Ukrainian citizens from the political process forever. In Ukraine, brawls regularly broke out between Western Ukrainian nationalists and representatives of Eastern Ukrainian ethnic Russians.

Last week we received similar imagery from the upper house of Japan’s Diet, a.k.a. the House of Councilors.

qpv5e6d6 A brawl breaks out in the usually quite reserved upper house of Japan’s Diet
Photo credit: Toru Hanai / Reuters

A few close-ups:

jcype7ll Alain Delonakawa dishes out an an uppercut
Photo credit: Yuya Shino / Reuters

9ucf15jb Take that you bastard! Lawmakers are piling on in scrum-fashion
Photo credit: Yuya Shino / Reuters

So what has happened? Why are Japan’s notoriously consensus-prone and bushido-inhibited lawmakers suddenly trading fisticuffs and one presumes, matching verbal insults?

Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori?

As our long-time readers know, we have posted a portrait of Japan’s nationalist-socialist prime minister Shinzo Abe a while back, entitled “Shinzo Abe’s True Agenda”. In brief: “fixing” Japan’s economy with even more inflation and deficit spending is only a side-show for Abe. He is convinced that he has a quasi-divine mission to bring Japan back to its glorious militaristic past. In this, he appears to be influenced by the philosophy of his grandfather Nobusuke Kichi, who actually served as a minister in Japan’s war cabinet during WW2 and became prime minister in the late 1950s.

Are Neocons an Existential Threat?

September 16, 2015

Are Neocons an Existential Threat?

Exclusive: Despite a record of unprecedented error, American neocons remain the dominant foreign policy force in Official Washington, demanding more “regime change” in the Middle East and a new Cold War that could heat up and end all life on the planet, writes Robert Parry.

The neoconservatives arguably have damaged American national interests more than any group in modern history. They have done more harm than the marginal Communists pursued by Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, more than the Yippies of the 1960s, more than Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars in the 1970s or the Iran-Contra conspirators in the 1980s.

The neocons have plunged the U.S. government into extraordinarily ill-considered wars wasting trillions of dollars, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and destabilizing large swaths of the planet including the Middle East, much of Africa and now Europe. Those costs include a swelling hatred against America and a deformed U.S. foreign policy elite that isno longer capable of formulating coherent strategies.

Yet, the neocons have remained immune from the consequences of their catastrophes. They still dominate Washington’s major think tanks as well as the op-ed pages of virtually all the leading newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They hold down key positions in the State Department, and their “liberal interventionist” pals have the ear of President Barack Obama.

Clearly, the neocons are skilled operatives, knowing how to arrange a steady stream of funding for themselves, from military contractors donating to think tanks, from U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, and from ideological billionaires set on aligning U.S. foreign policy with hard-line Israeli desires.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Enemy Is Within

September 7, 2015

The Real Enemy Is Within

Steve Mann / Shutterstock

If you are not dedicated to the destruction of empire and the dismantling of American militarism, then you cannot count yourself as a member of the left. It is not a side issue. It is the issue. It is why I refuse to give a pass in this presidential election campaign to Bernie Sanders, who refuses to confront the war industry or the crimes of empire, including U.S. support for the slow genocide carried out by Israel against the Palestinians. There will be no genuine democratic, social, economic or political reform until we destroy our permanent war machine.

Militarists and war profiteers are our greatest enemy. They use fear, bolstered by racism, as a tool in their efforts to abolish civil liberties, crush dissent and ultimately extinguish democracy. To produce weapons and finance military expansion, they ruin the domestic economy by diverting resources, scientific and technical expertise and a disproportionate share of government funds. They use the military to carry out futile, decades-long wars to enrich corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. War is a business. And when the generals retire, guess where they go to work? Profits swell. War never stops. Whole sections of the earth live in terror. And our nation is disemboweled and left to live under what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Libertarians seem to get this. It is time the left woke up.

“Bourgeois society faces a dilemma,” socialist Rosa Luxemburg writes, “either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome—annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism—the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either-or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

There Goes Europe

September 7, 2015

There Goes Europe

The desperate wish in what is loosely called the West to at least appear morally correct is unfortunately over-matched by the desperation of people fleeing unstable, overpopulated places outside the West, and it is a fiasco beyond even the events of the moment.

The refugee / immigrant crisis around the Mediterranean is a preview of a horror show to which there is no end in sight, and is certain to escalate. So anyone who indulges in fantasies about organizing an orderly, rational distribution of displaced persons for the current wave, is badly missing the point. Wave beyond wave awaits after the this one. And then what will the well-intentioned sentimentalists say? We wanted to do the right thing… we meant well… we cried when we saw the little boy dead on the beach….

Yes, the tragic intrusions of the US military in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere have been reckless and stupid. But that is not the whole story. The desert nations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have populations abnormally swollen by a century of oil-and-gas-based agriculture, really by the benefits of Modernity in general. Now that the oil age is chugging to an unruly crack-up, and Modernity with it, and the earth’s climate is doing wonky things, and the rich nations to the north have faked their finances to the point of bankruptcy, well, circumstances have changed.

In the years ahead, populations will be fleeing and shifting from many more unfavorable corners of the world. The pressures are mounting all over. Alas, the richer nations in which the fleeing poor aspire to gain a foothold, will also be contending with the disabling effects of a universal economic contraction — the winding down of the techno-industrial system and the global economy with it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Future of War and Peace at Stake in Streets of Japan

September 5, 2015

Future of War and Peace at Stake in Streets of Japan

The United States and its European allies have launched wars on the Middle East that have created an enormous refugee crisis. The same nations are threatening Russia. The question of maintaining peace with Iran is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Even in Asia and the Pacific, not to mention Africa, the biggest military buildup is by the United States.

So why does Japan, of all places, have streets full of antiwar demonstrations for the first time since the U.S. war on Vietnam? I don’t mean the usual protests in Okinawa of U.S. bases. I mean Japanese protests of the Japanese government. Why? Who did Japan bomb? And why do I say the future of war and peace in the world is at stake in Japan?

Let’s back up a little. Japan went through a period of relative peace and prosperity between 1614 and 1853. The U.S. military forced Japan open to trade and trained Japan as a junior partner in imperialism, a story told well in James Bradley’s The Imperial Cruise. The junior partner chose not to stay a junior partner, challenging U.S. dominance in World War II.

At the end of World War II, the war’s losers in Japan and Germany were put on trial for an act that had been perfectly legal until 1928, the act of making war. In 1928, the global peace movement, led by the U.S. movement for the Outlawry of War, created the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty that prohibits all war, a treaty to which most nations of the world are party today. This is a story I tell in my book When the World Outlawed War. President Franklin Roosevelt used the Kellogg-Briand Pact to create prosecutions of war.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Insouciance Rules The West

August 20, 2015

Insouciance Rules The West

Europe is being overrun by refugees from Washington’s, and Israel’s, hegemonic policies in the Middle East and North Africa that are resulting in the slaughter of massive numbers of civilians. The inflows are so heavy that European governments are squabbling among themselves about who is to take the refugees. Hungary is considering constructing a fence, like the US and Israel, to keep out the undesirables. Everywhere in the Western media there are reports deploring the influx of migrants; yet nowhere is there any reference to the cause of the problem.

The European governments and their insouciant populations are themselves responsible for their immigrant problems. For 14 years Europe has supported Washington’s aggressive militarism that has murdered and dislocated millions of peoples who never lifted a finger against Washington. The destruction of entire countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, and now Syria and Yemen, and the continuing US slaughter of Pakistani civilians with the full complicity of the corrupt and traitorous Pakistani government, produced a refugee problem that the moronic Europeans brought upon themselves.

Europe deserves the problem, but it is not enough punishment for their crimes against humanity in support of Washington’s world hegemony.

In the Western world insouciance rules governments as well as peoples, and most likely also everywhere else in the world. It remains to be seen whether Russia and China have any clearer grasp of the reality that confronts them.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency until his retirement in August 2014, has confirmed that the Obama regime disregarded his advice and made a willful decision to support the jihadists who now comprise ISIS. ( https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/officials-islamic-state-arose-from-us-support-for-al-qaeda-in-iraq-a37c9a60be4 )

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pentagon Plans to Boost Drone Flights 50% as Bernanke Warns Cutting Defense Spending Could Hurt Economy

August 18, 2015

Pentagon Plans to Boost Drone Flights 50% as Bernanke Warns Cutting Defense Spending Could Hurt Economy

In the event you were becoming concerned that the U.S. government might be backing away from its longstanding policy of endless violence, militarism and bloodshed, fear not. If we know one thing for sure, it’s that defense contractors and the military-intelligence-industrial complex must earn. And continue to earn it will.

So despite the Air Force having a hard time finding pilots for its drones, the Pentagon still plans to ramp up drone flights by 50% over the next four years.

We learn from the Wall Street Journal that:

The Pentagon plans to sharply expand the number of U.S. drone flights over the next four years, giving military commanders access to more intelligence and greater firepower to keep up with a sprouting number of global hot spots, a senior defense official said.

The plan to increase by 50% the number of daily drone flights would broaden surveillance and intelligence collection in such locales as Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, the South China Sea and North Africa, said the official, who provided exclusive details of the plan to The Wall Street Journal. It would be the first significant increase in the U.S. drone program since 2011, reflecting pressure on military efforts to address a cascading series of global crises.

While expanding surveillance, the Pentagon plan also grows the capacity for lethal airstrikes, the most controversial part of the U.S. drone program and its rapid growth under President Barack Obama . Strikes by unmanned aircraft have killed 3,000 people or more, based on estimates by nonpartisan groups.

Of course, the most offensive part about all of this, is that the “cascading series of global crises” mentioned by the WSJ, are the direct result of incredibly inept and destructive U.S. foreign policy in the first place. Recall the post from earlier today titled, Additional Details Emerge on How U.S. Government Policy Created, Armed, Supported and Funded ISIS. Here’s an excerpt:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

GCHQ’s Rainbow Lights: Exploiting Social Issues for Militarism and Imperialism

May 19, 2015

GCHQ’s Rainbow Lights: Exploiting Social Issues for Militarism and Imperialism

Over the weekend, the British surveillance agency GCHQ — the most extremist and invasive in the West — bathed its futuristic headquarterswith rainbow-colored lights “as a symbol of the intelligence agency’s commitment to diversity” and to express solidarity with “International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.” GCHQ’s public affairs office proudly distributed the above photograph to media outlets. Referring to Alan Turing, the closeted-and-oppressed gay World War II British code-breaker just memorialized by an Oscar-nominated feature film, Prime Minister David Cameron’s office celebrated GCHQ’s inspirational lights:

This is so very moving. Gay Brits are now just as free as everyone else to spy on people, covertly disseminate state propaganda, and destroy online privacy. Whatever your views on all this nasty surveillance business might be, how can you not feel good about GCHQ when it drapes itself in the colors of LGBT equality?

This is all a stark illustration of what has become a deeply cynical but highly effective tactic. Support for institutions of militarism and policies of imperialism is now manufactured by parading them under the emotionally manipulative banners of progressive social causes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Military Keynesianism And The Merchants Of Death

April 15, 2015

Military Keynesianism And The Merchants Of Death

Militarism and military spending are everywhere on the rise, as the new Cold War propaganda seems to be paying off. The new “threats” that are being hyped bring big profits to military contractors and the network of think tanks they pay to produce pro-war propaganda.

Here are just a few examples:

The German government announced last week that it would purchase 100 more “Leopard” tanks – a 45 percent increase in the country’s inventory. Germany had greatly reduced its inventory of tanks as the end of the Cold War meant the end of any threat of a Soviet ground invasion of Europe. The German government now claims these 100 new tanks, which may cost nearly half a billion dollars, are necessary to respond to the new Russian assertiveness in the region. Never mind that Russia has neither invaded nor threatened any country in the region, much less a NATO member country.

The US Cold War-era nuclear bunker under Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, which was all but shut down in the 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is being brought back to life. The Pentagon has committed nearly a billion dollars to upgrading the facility to its previous Cold War-level of operations. US defense contractor Raytheon will be the prime beneficiary of this contract. Raytheon is a major financial sponsor of think tanks like the Institute for the Study of War, which continuously churn out pro-war propaganda. I am sure these big contracts are a good return on that investment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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