The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.
What did you think of Hedges defining Putin as a war criminal, and has him on the same level with Bush? "Haul Russian President Vladimir Putin off to The Hague, but only if Bush is in the cell next to him." He mentions FOX, and identifies them as having a republican supported base, but in regard to the NY Times that pushed that war as well, he doesn't indicate 90% of their readership are democrats. I in no way disagree with what he said about our Middle Eastern wars, other then he really didn't define with clarity why we were held bent on devastating the Middle East, and the philosophy that caused it to materialize. George Packer sounds like a total narcissist who tries to understand himself in glorified terms. His rationalization of war is sick.
Yes, they are. Bush illegally invaded Iraq and Putin did the same with Ukraine. Though their motivations and consequence of their actions were different. Though they are cut from the same bloody cloth, I consider Bush a greater murderer.
Your comments are spot on. Sad truths, but well written. Wish I could speak like this at parties when my friends agitate for me to “stop with your whataboutism!” It’s lonely when people I want to have a beer with tell me Putin is using the exact same playbook as Hitler.
"What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power."
This is a ubiquitous problem. Name any top-level official that has been held accountable for their mistakes that have caused significant human harm. I cannot. There is no accountability. It used to be our press that would at least nudge the popular opinion in the direction of justice, but that went away too. Now it is all just part of the power cabal that protects itself.
I read that some old database that listed all the lies cataloged by the W administration related to the Iraq war had been recently deleted. Because of course if you no longer have the evidence, the perp is innocent.
Great article, but Obama is not mentioned. He had the best chance by far to go after the war criminals (victory by significant margins, both houses of Congress with democratic majorities), but chose not to. For this reason alone I'd consider him to be one of the worst presidents the US has had. And shame on him for aiding and abetting the worst of the worst!
Obama is now in our growing hall of infame. He was the executioner murdered with drones and he, like St George W. and company, cannot be brought to justice because our corrupted congress decreed that we would attacked any country that had the audacity to charge them with war crimes.
Nice point about Obama. What might be mentioned regarding Obama had been his deliberate goal to serve the oligarchs by murdering people in foreign lands, ala Libya and Syria as prime examples, and elsewhere... he had proven he was no different than those who came before him.
Obama chose to ignore the problems faced at home, whereby Flint, Michigan in 2023 still with potable water problems, that came to light in 2015, under his, Obama's watch. Obama wanted to serve the ruling elite - the oligarchs of the USA and the Collective West, and become one of them...
And that is only a small sample of his stunts. He bailed out the bankers that had bankrupted millions of Americans and left them homeless without any help. He was a true American president for the elites.
Americans should be shocked at the idea that a ceasefire, under any terms, is unacceptable in Ukraine . They are not. Goebbels said that If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. The propaganda machine in the U.S. has worked and now people believe that war is preferable to peace, because peace without "Democracy" is not acceptable, or some such idiotic indoctrination. When those who advocate peace are considered the enemy, the outlook for the future is grim indeed.
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
• In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)
The United States is a republic, but an oligarchic republic featuring unlimited political bribery for those who can afford pricey lawyers, and not a democratic republic, as it is at times advertised.
"Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion." Matthew 10:36: And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
The world needs to sanction us, freeze our oligarchs assets, block our international banking access, give us a piece of our own medicine, kick our military installations off their land.
Compliment and criticism: love your tireless efforts against the War Machine - keep up the good work! Speaking (with the benefit of hindsight) as an avowed atheist and voluntaryist who loathes Right or Left authoritarianism, your 2007 book “American Fascists” seems to have overestimated the threat from the Christian right while missing the rise of the Woke fascists and their Antifa shock troops. Maybe time for another book?
You think Hedges "overestimated the threat from the Christian right"? Are you kidding me? Check out Florida or the US Supreme Court lately? Or Republican State legislatures?
There are too many Republican War Pigs and Big Pharma bootlickers that should be condemned, and in some cases jailed, for their atrocities against humanity (plenty of Democrats as well). While I am neither Christian nor Right, I can recognize that the Christian Right is now anti War Machine and anti Big Pharma, and is not in the streets rioting, looting, and burning businesses, police stations, and other government buildings.
We were so close to getting stuck with a theocracy. I've not forgotten when during the reign of St. George W. his attorney general, St. John Ashcroft, covered the seminude statue of justice at the Justice Department. I also remember seeing government vehicles clearly marked as Decency Police or something similar at the public park where I walked my dogs and where new evangelicals sprouted like weeds everyday and everywhere.
ANTIFA are the fascists, or at least one flavor of them. When one is in the streets burning things down and hitting people over the head with bricks, they no longer are on the side of truth, beauty, and righteousness, no matter the anodyne acronym.
Trump became an easy target and many on the left showed no sense of balance in regard to the man. Amy Goodman, bought Russia-gate, hook line and sinker, as they say, and now she has lost a significant part of her journalistic credentials and no doubt her base. Journalism was biased and self serving before Trump, but is far worse now. The Christian right also is an easy target, and I'm not saying some things said are not true. Right now it's absolutely taboo to go after the woke. I read an article where a college professor mixed up the names of two of his black students which they reported and he was fired, because they claim he's saying all blacks look alike. The woke culture is extreme, authoritarian, and hides behind the guise of liberalism, and too few have the guts to tell it like it is.
As you may recall, I am far from a Trump supporter. I did not vote for him in 2016 or in 2020.
But for years, it has been abundantly obvious that Team D and its allies in law enforcement/the Deep State are seeking any pretext on which to imprison the man. The only thing that has surprised me is that it has taken this long. The Stormy Daniels Affair was what, seven years ago?
I always wondered why Trump moved our embassy to Jerusalem. On democracynow.org Amy interviewed J Bamford that allowed me to understand it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jim Bamford, we want to have you back on to talk about your book, but we want to thank you so much for being with us now. James Bamford, longtime investigative journalist. We’ll link to your new cover story for The Nation, “The Candidate and the Spy.”https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion/
Trump can't be allowed to exist unfettered because, like Elon Musk and Tucker Calson, he is not jew-owned, or jew-impressed. The trbe that runs the U.S. can't leave Trump alone because others might get similar ideas from his example.
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 either, always the registered democrat although sometimes I voted third party. I certainly wouldn't vote for Clinton. I took a lot of hate for that even though the people who spewed it knew little about Trump and less about Clinton. That's your voting public, who just don't give a damn. Assange in an interview with Pilger felt she was a very sick woman in her love of war, her need for power, but felt compassion for her psychological pathology. I don't give a damn! No new wars under Trump really good, but I disagreed with many of his policies, like his sanctions on Venezuela, but the democrats went along as they did when he destroyed the Iran deal. They backed him on many things. What I came to understand is how autocratic the democrats have become, and were even willing to lie a president out of office no matter what they needed to do. They'll even let the deep state in to lend a helping hand, and turn a riot into an insurrection playing a bigger hand then I think many will acknowledge. Their pretext at caring, and Biden's, is nauseating. The lies of Russia-gate was not only to remove Trump but intended as a bridge to where we are now in regard to Russia. If you watched the twitter files their decline was on full display.
I didn’t vote for him either, but on the night he was elected I remember thinking that as deplorable as he may be, we probably just averted an invasion of Iran, a crime that H. Clinton seemed poised to commit.
I agree and that's the reason I wouldn't vote for her. Also when Obama supported the coup in Ukraine in 2014 things were going on in my like that didn't give me much time for thought about this issue, then later on I saw Oliver Stone's documentary, Ukraine on Fire, and realized what our long term goals were going to be in Ukraine. Obama was literally playing with fire when he supported that coup and implemented the helping hands of neo-nazi's. Why would we do that unless we had further plans for Ukraine which is right in Russia's backyard. A very confrontational move on his part. Merkel said the minsk accords were never to be taken seriously, but simply to give Ukraine time to build herself up militarily. I thought if Clinton won in 2016 she was going to push Russia into a confrontation. The lie of Russia-gate, which I never believed, and along with how he was put down for wanting to get along with Russia, and their concerted effort to remove him from office made me suspicious, and I began to see it as a bridge to war. What was sickening was to see so many on the left vilify Trump, and actually help validate the lies the democrats spewed. I never knew so many on the left that proclaim their liberalism were so elitists as well.
You mean finish up on Syria. What a disgusting and tragic mess that is but I'm not sure about Iran although all the democrats supported Trump overturning the Iran deal. However, Ukraine, in my opinion was number one on the list, and why else would Obama support a coup, using the abusive tactics of the neo-nazi's? Lots of quite protests there too. It was the neo-nazis that implemented the violence. People never want to give Obama his full due, like he was no liberal and he implemented a number of wars during his reign and they say he loved to drone, well, he did become the droner and chief.
If you are talking to me? Once again your assumption has made an ass out of you. No one ever said there was a significant difference between the two, not now, you would have to go back 50 years to see a difference, and as you said, not a big one.
Fran: "Amy Goodman, bought Russia-gate, hook line and sinker, as they say, and now she has lost a significant part of her journalistic credentials and no doubt her base" Perhaps for you but not for me and any independent no-partisan consumer of news. Could you please reply telling me one date or a particular report where democracynow.org bought the Russia-gate so that I can search their archives, and I promise in turn, to reply with the results of that search? Perhaps everything depends on your particular definition of Buying.
Mate worked there and notes the pull of Russiagate even at DM. Nor were they alone. The Intercept was similarly enchanted with the russiagate story. In fact, except for Mate, Greenwald and Taibbi (and a few of their friends like Halper) everyone bought into the BS.
Thank you for the link, Norbert. What I see there is that Amy is reporting the facts, like any good journalist should do, informing us of what the congress had concluded about Russia-gate but in no place she is affirming that Russia-gate was true. And this is what I consider professional journalism.
What DN did was fail to put any Russiagate skeptics on her show, but had many enthusiasts as guests. The people that failed to appear had been long standing fixtures of the show. Now gone. Including people like Stephen Cohen. Mate himself, a critic of Russiagate and former staffer of DN was also not interviewed. There are others as well. So what DN did was advertise one perspective on the affair and avoided another more skeptical view. Is this misreporting? I believe it is, but you may not. What ended up being sympathetically reported was one side of a story, and, imo, the wrong side as we discovered. No mention of the Steele dossier being funded by Hilary, no mention that most of the Putin scares proved false, etc. So was DN pro Russiagate? Dunno. But it certainly did little to question the narrative despite considerable grounds for skepticism.
Norbert, we all have our own ways to evaluate the news. I didn't see one-sided the report on the Russian gate by Masha Gessen broadcasted at democracynow.org on 02/23/18 nor on DN interview with Katrina Vanden Heuvel when on 12/08/21 Katrina said "...that we need to sort out a relationship with Russia, that China is the great challenge in the next century, if not beyond. And those demand a full, robust debate, which you do have on Democracy Now! But the one-sided coverage — and it’s not even commentary — in the U.S. media about U.S.-Russia is, I think, debilitating and dangerous for our security and thinking."
The reason why I respect and believe Amy is that there are very few reporters that can speak truth to the powerful like in the occasion that president Bill Clinton called her on election day 2000 in an attempt to get out the vote for Hillary for senator and what he got from Amy was a barrage of the necessary questions a good journalist has to ask. I'm transcribing the dialog that you can check on DN broadcast of 12/25/21 when they were celebrating their 25th. anniversary:
AMY GOODMAN: Can I say what some people —
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Let me just finish.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me just say —
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Let me — now, wait a minute. You started this, and every question you’ve asked has been hostile and combative. So you listen to my answer, will you do that?
AMY GOODMAN: They’ve been critical questions.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Now, you just listen to me. You ask the questions, and I’m going to answer. You have asked questions in a hostile, combative and even disrespectful tone, but I — and you have never been able to combat the facts I have given you. Now, you listen to this.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Clinton in a surprise call to WBAI on Election Day 2000. The White House would later call me and say they were thinking of banning me from the White House. I said, “But he called me. I didn’t call him.”
She turned me off too, and I know others who were turned off as well. Aaron Mate, and Blumenthal have called her out on this issue. Look it up. Many on the left lost their journalistic perspective, and integrity. Greenwald had to leave the group he started, The Intercept, a left wing site because they wouldn't permit him to publish an article on Hunter's laptop less it lowered Biden's chances of a win in 2020. Why do you think Substack has become such a hit?
OK, but my question was directed to you and not to Mate or Blumenthal. Have you ever watched Ami's program, and therefore, have an authentic reason to libel her? I'm still waiting for your answer.
Watch your tone, and how dare you call my opinion libelous. I am not libeling her, and as far as I know I can express my opinion on substack. I was once a big fan of hers, loved her, listened to Democracy Now all the time, and saw her a few times in person. Then she turned, and I turned away. The reason was already provided by myself and confirmed by someone else.
After I saw how Amy Goodman treated the representative from the Great Barrington Declaration, I realized that her allegiance is to her tribe---and the filthy shekel. Not to truth. Not to justce. Not to the U.S. Similarly Rachel Maddow. Similarly Elena Kagan.
Ms. Murray, I wonder about the kind of shekels Amy could have won during her professional reports related to the pandemic which included the views of the majority of the scientific community. Perhaps you don't know that although she is an ethnic jew she has been, in occasions, denied entry to Israel because she truthfully reports on the abuses to the Palestinians by the the Israel theocracy. No need of shekels.
The following is a partial transcript from Wikipedia.
"The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[10][11] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions.[12][13] As of October 2020, they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[11][14] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.[11][14] They say that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[13] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous".[10] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.[15][16][17]"
I respect your absolute belief in the WHO. For me, the WHO and Wikipedia were both discredited a long time ago. I appreciate your fairness in reporting that the Great Barrington Declaraton did receive support from some quarters.
Anna, it is Wikipedia that reported both sides of the issue on the Barrington Declaration. I didn't even have any idea about that declaration. I have noticed that some folks don't like WHO, Wikipedia, Democracy Now, etc. and that's OK with me since we humans have the great advantage of enjoying our own opinions. For my part, I tend to believe in those three entities much more than in any any network news outlet specially Fox News. Thanks for you comment.
That's a kind of prejudice that is unacceptable to me, and shame on you for pushing it. When did Jesus push the idea of slaughtering people on a global level? Never is the answer, but people may go to war and feel they have the backing of Jesus, but it is no more then a a rationalization for the horrors they commit.
You fail however to make the very significant distinction between his teaching and the rationalizations people use to justify their carnage. However do learn to make that distinction between what Jesus taught, and how people will justify their brutality in his name. The end.
Jon Carver, Jesus came down hardest on the Pharisees, the priestly class of time, saying that they closed the kingdom of heaven to others but did not go in themselves. He said that they went about like whitewashed tombs, but inside were full of dead men’s bones. You appear unable to distinguish between people doing things in Jesus’ name, say, like running to a Washington church during a protest and holding up a bible which you’ve likely never read; or others might do things which are actually Christlike. Your own thinking is pretty shit if you can’t discern a difference there. Jesus disciples came to him and told him men were calling him this or that. He replied: But who do you say that I am ? I would ask you the same question. Put in terms of secular philosophy, what is the thing in itself? And Jesus didn’t go anywhere except a few places around the Sea of Galilee by the way. Except Egypt, and his parents didn’t even bring back a lousy tee-shirt.
Roland, truly spirituality is the greatest achievement of evolution and there have been authentic virtuous people in all religions everywhere but... the demands of organized religion especially those that consider themselves the only owners of truth are designed to make war to the others. About the historical Jesus we know very little except that He was a Zealot teacher in an obscure rebel apocalyptic sect whose goal was to finish the roman dominance and return to a Jewish theocratic state and the romans tried and executed Him for sedition. The rest of what we know of Him is a matter of faith on what the gospels, written generations after his death, tell us about him and his teachings.
Professor Huston Smith in his book "The World's Religions, Revised and Updated: A Concise Introduction" writes so beautifully about the spirituality of the traditional religions of the world that makes, even an agnostic like myself, to love them. Following is a quote from his book:
"Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.”"
Thanks for that, Julio. I like the fable about tempting the man who laid hold of the truth to institutionalise it.
When you talk about what we know historically about Jesus you aren’t focussing on his personhood. When we say we know someone it is because we know the way they think; their mind makes repeated choices based on an understandable guiding principle, from which we can anticipate what they would do in a given situation. From the basic agreement of the four gospels we get to know through Jesus’ actions which he attributes to God, that God is love. People come to know and love Jesus because of this. A lot of critics get hung up on the apparent exclusivity of the statement: “no-one comes to the father but through me”, which I interpret as meaning that only through his suffering of his life on Earth which still did not fall away from the truth while suffering what other humans suffer, can humanity be reconciled to itself as the creation of a good God, and expect to find the God of Love. I don’t think we’ll ever look upon God in some kind of filmic Nazi ark of the covenant moment, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. I would never expect to comprehend being in the presence of a God immanent in a universe of stars, but self-knowledge in the light of the life of Christ can be a searing judgement on what we may have failed to become. Take perhaps when you spend $83 Bn on defence and everybody becomes less secure, especially where you buy your own gun as well and become seven times as likely to kill a member of your own family with it; or if you spend another few billion to overthrow your enemy through mercenaries and a corrupt proxy. I might be content with a cold dead hand to comfort me if I had done those things. My living hands being all the colder for my having no Russian natural gas with which to heat them.
The judgement being that light has come Into to the world and that mankind has preferred darkness. Yet evil is not a thing in itself, it is an absence of a virtue in a particular individual. It is an absence of character, which makes it such a nameless influence. In the particular being, first the person loses sight of or is never shown the goal to pursue, and then, having lost sight of a rational goal to pursue, the individual falls into absurdity and in so doing loses motivation (or Kantian freedom of the will power) to pursue a goal, ultimately taking the position: I’m alive, I’m dead, ha ha ha! This is why the integrity of the personality of Christ and the focus of his life is so important. It’s not enough to say that all we know is where he lived and who of all those who wanted to, actually killed him.
Thank you for your post, Roland. It seems that you want people to focus on the Crist of faith and not too much on the historical Jesus who, after all, was a rebel that perhaps we would call him a terrorist today. On the contrary, the Crist of faith is a beautiful dream of love but just imaginary. We all are made of stardust and it seems to me (metaphorically) that we want to return to our origins, and so, we create religions that satisfy that desire. Unfortunately, we have to face reality and study history to evaluate the usefulness of those lofty dreams, and the result is IMHO that religion has impeded the moral advancement of mankind, hampered the progress of sciences and fomented continuous wars specially since the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths that introduce the element of intolerance that didn't exist in older religions. This is what I believe is the contribution of the peoples of faith, but there are glorious individual exceptions. We inherited the fire from the stars that is so beneficial but also extremely destructive. On the good side there are examples of virtuous persons like Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and mother Theresa. The other side contains villains like the great inquisitor of Seville, Osama Bin Laden and our born again Cristian Richard the Lionheart that recently launched a crusade against Iraq.
All of these people were deeply religious but the difference in their actions was due to the way they understood their spirituality.
This is my understanding of good and evil. We all are made of the same stardust and keep the same fire. It is up to us to use that fire in a good way without any help from organized religion. I agree with Epicurus: "If God wants to abolish evil, but cannot, He is impotent. If He can, but doesn't want to, He is wicked."
Roland, we see the world from two different perspectives. You accepted the Axial Age legacy that "We live in this world but we are not from this world" and ,I feel very comfortable in this world. When our time comes to depart, you and the other good believers will die with the hope that you will be in heaven. When it is our turn, I and the other agnostics will die with the satisfaction of having enjoyed our lives to the full and following our conscience.
And you and I will end being a great soil fertilizer to contribute to the developing evolution of all creatures.
Well, since I’ve caught your attention, the only half arguable point you might have is that St Paul, not Jesus, being the foundation of the Catholic Church, the Catholics in misplaced admiration for his single-minded attempt to drop everything in favour of mission work, have instituted celibacy for priests, which to my mind contradicts their excellent formal Thomist doctrine of the balance of the natural inclinations. Their inability to switch that false doctrine off is a terrible thing. They should seriously just cancel that tomorrow, a bit like you just see the stupidity of what you’re doing and cancel the Second Amendment tomorrow and throw away your gun.
If you’re going to just rail at people and call them shit thinkers and worse, try keeping shit insults out of your texts and attempt to construct your own actual doctrine which will deconstruct Christianity and reveal your true guidelines for human action. And once you’ve done that maybe they’ll build three buildings in every town in which to celebrate you. And then sit back and see if you’re ever tempted, like the pastors of the Prosperity Gospel, to say, I deserve to be rewarded for showing people the true faith, bring me my private jet, and we’ll go and buy out the poor people on that ranchland I’d like to buy with all the cheques my followers sent me. But you’re talking about Jesus now, not Jim Jones. You need to up your game, Jesus didn’t fall into the traps of the Pharisees and you’ve yet to set one for him. “Without a parable he spake not into them.” Jesus only gives analogies in parables as to what the Kingdom of Heaven is, the parable of the mustard seed, for example, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God is “like” a father, but no, a being that transmits its will through the luminiferous aether and sustains the universe from moment to moment does not have “kids”, people are putting labels on everything. In the US a man who wanted money and power stuck a Maga label on his hat and came within an hour or two of making the system of government into a formal dictatorship. All kinds of people followed him and still do. You seem to be content to accept that anything done in the name of something is that thing itself. Have you not heard the term false gods? Why do you think that the first commandment is to have no other gods but the one true God? It all seems a bit naive on your part. You’ll never know who Jesus was and is and be able to write anything credible about Christianity if you can’t consider what something, Jesus, is in itself, rather than thinking you’ve found another radical way to annoy people to the level that you’re annoyed, and a suitably unarmed target at which to vent your inner rage. You still have not answered my first question, who do you say that he is, because it appears that you can’t answer as to who or what you think Jesus was. Knowing Jesus is never a bad thing, it gives you an idea of who you yourself really might be once you burn away all the misconceptions and propaganda of the society you’re living in. Let’s have your manifesto, then. What’s your life’s work, beyond the destruction of Christianity which by your slagging off and trying to humiliate people will doubtless keel over immediately in awe at the magnitude of your understanding of its absurdity, and disappear in a puff of logic?
Well I’m disappointed in Jesus to find out from you that he’s been running around impersonating Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay. I suspected he might have been living out his dark side when I saw him impersonating JFK, but on that occasion he got his lines muddled and said “Ask not how your country can traffic you into war, that‘s just how we roll, but rather, ask how you can meekly go along with that plan and blame it all on me. I’ll give you this cross I borrowed off your real role models and you can lay it all at the feet of that, you whining, grievance-ridden, deluded advert for Armeggedon“.
Each keeps its own nature. We are all part of the body of God, suspended in a lattice of harmonies formed from the luminiferous ether. A being whose will propagates through the highest tenuity of matter doesn’t generally have kids; I don’t think Jesus ever limited the manifestations of God to three, so I‘m of the opinion that the doctrine of the Trinity is a derivative of some midrashic or numerological thinking, but the closeness of Jesus to the Creator makes him talk in terms of being one with God. What happened to you ? If you don’t like God or Jesus, “who you gonna call? “Must sleep, I may address your other specifics tomorrow. Good luck to you meantime.
Agreed. The whole madness starts with Deuteronomy chapter 20 where among other niceties Jehovah commands that (verse 16th) "it is only in the cities of these peoples that Jehovah your God is giving you as an inheritance that you not must preserve any breathing thing alive because you should without fail preserve to destruction..." and so for, and much later Jesus said that he had not come to change the law of Moses.
Not just the Abrahamic religions but most organized religions have fomented wars.
I was simply replying to @KurtOverley - the suggestion for another book
"... rise of Woke fascists and their Antifa shock troops. Maybe time for another book?"
Chris included the Ennio Flaiano quote in the chapter titled "Hate". I believe this chapter provides clear a explanation and references the supporting evidence that is lacking in my replies.
Below are additional related quotes from "America: the Farewell Tour" (I encourage you to read the book).
"The left is no more immune to these pathologies than the right." pg. 183
"Antifa seeks to justify its violence by arguing that the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s could have been halted if antifascist groups had attacked fascist groups when they were first forming. This is a huge distortion of history." pg. 187
"The violent left revels in the hypermasculinity that enthralls the alt-right." pg. 191
"The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous work of building relationships, alternative institutions, and community organizing that alone will make effective resistance possible." pg. 199
"The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anticapitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists." pg. 200
"There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false arguments of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents." pg. 200
You're right, I haven't read that chapter. But the last paragraph you quoted says it all.
"There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false arguments of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents."
The argument here seems to be only about tactics. Personally I think fighting fascists any way one can takes primacy, while worrying about how the corporate media will paint one's actions is vastly less important. The corporate media will always paint the left's actions negatively anyway, as it is part of the right wing duopoly! If you let worry about how the corporate media depicts one's actions affect what you do you are playing right into their hands.
Suppression of free speech at almost every college. Government collusion with Big Tech to suppress any facts or opinions contrary to the Establishment Narrative. Antifa rioting, burning, looting, and violence in almost every city through the Summer of Love. Antifa domestic terrorism burning Cop City in Atlanta…
Not sure what you mean by woke here. Do you just mean liberals? If so, I agree that liberals are doing terrible, terrible things. And antifa just means antifascist--from what you are saying, you are antifa too. I support all efforts to combat fascism. Down with fascism in all forms, up with anarchocommunism, the fairest, most democratic form of governance of all.
Antifa is the name of a loose collection of domestic terrorist groups that have a penchant dressing in all black gear, looting and burning businesses, police stations and government buildings (such as Minneapolis in 2020 and the recent attack on “Cop City” in Atlanta), injuring scores of police officers in the process, often in the name of “Black Lives Matter” or “Defunding the Police”.
I'm in favor of all antifascism, "Antifa" included (the right inflates to ridiculous levels the violence antifa uses, which makes me think you belong to the right). Whatever tactics are needed to fight fascism are positive. There is no compromising with it, period. It seems that for you, real fascism (a right wing phenomenon) is benign in comparison with the struggle against it by anti-fascists. It's clear where you stand.
Do you believe in looting and riots, and robbing stores and the destruction of property, even hurting people to make a point? There are many ways to combat fascism without implementing violence. I suspect if it was your property, or the welfare of your family to make their point your perspective would do an about face.
I absolutely agree and if you notice those willing to back them up come across as a bunch of fascist themselves, and simply discredit your claims without ever questioning their own, or adopt a patronizing tone. Don't listen.
Bob, I cant speak for Kurt but suugest the choice of words accurately describes, #1, the silencing of opposition opinion and #2, the use of physical intimidation/vandalism. A simple enough parallelism.
One of the wars chief cheerleaders (the insufferable David Frum) just published a monstrosity of an article in a reputable media outlet ("The Iraq War Reconsidered" in The Atlantic) which insists that as gruesome as the Iraq War was it somehow managed to become a net positive for Iraqis (at least for those who weren't murdered, raped, tortured or maimed and who don't object to living in a failed state riven by violence and corruption). The U.S. wrecked Iraq with the enthusiastic support of useful idiots like Frum who remain fixtures in polite society. Shameful.
I do not understand how the myth of U.S. military supremacy has survived our military debacles in the Middle East where we were badly beaten by home grown crews of ill equipped fighters. After our ass was handed to us in Afghanistan, we provoked a proxy war in Ukraine against a peer nuclear power. We are doing the same with China.
A dangerous madness has infected our ruling class.
George Carlin (1937-2008) said that the politicians we get come from the people that elect them. They are a reflection of who we are. The lack of public support for the anti war movement gave Bush (the younger) almost a blank check for any war he wanted. The corruption of our culture from a compliant news media to country singers wanting a war so they could write song about putting a boot up their @%& and the masses of people numbed by the phony patriotic euphoria and rejection of war critics, allowed this colossal mistake to happen.
Cheney was at the center of this tyranny. When Cheney was asked by Barbara Walters, "What about the 4,000 [KIA], Cheney the chicken s**t replied, "Well, they volunteered!" And for such insidious, cruel inhumanity we the people paid for his new heart.
Funny how Cheney went from Team D Boogeyman to Elder Statesman And Bona Fide Hero Of The Republic in just a few short years. Same with Romney and that turd, McCain.
Oh, Cheney had his fortunes visualized, aiding Haliburton gaining billions. Cheney is cold and callous. Speaking of Romney, when asked if one of his FIVE sons might serve in our Military, he replied, "No. They are too busy serving me." As to McCain, I am less harsh on him. I am aware of his shenanigans as a young Naval officer, son of an Admiral. Before his unfortunate journey into the Hanoi "Hilton", he was a reckless Lieutenant. And, then, there is the story about his first wife.
Adam Smith: “In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war”.
This behavior is enabled, and cultivated by a compliant, servile press that come to journalism like eunuchs in a harem. They’ve seen how it’s done, they know how it’s done, but unable to do it themselves.
I marched before the war, and then I placed wooden crosses on the beach with Veterans for Peace during the war. The expression shoveling shit against the tide comes to mind. The massive protests against the war around the world were impotent.
I agree that if Putin is put on trial by the ICC, so should Bush. I would add a few others, such as Cheney, Clinton, Obama, Trump and Kissenger. But that would cause the US to attack Brussels the ICC location. A law has already been passed authorizing this.
Nice comment. But you leave out so many others, such as Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, amongst many others...
I am not familiar with the law you mention, might I inquire about the specifics of the law? My gut feeling says the US would attack the ICC, and whichever location it had US citizens indicted as criminals against humanity.
I’m curious if anyone has an explanation for the hard shift towards warmongering among some people who were loud and courageous about Iraq at the time. For example, Sean Penn. Think what you like about him, he stood on the stage at the Oscars, and called out for the imprisonment of George Bush and Co. Even then that wasn’t a very popular position. Today he’s falling in line with the neocons, somehow glorifying Zelenskyy, and Ukraine. He’s not alone. It mystifies me. Anyone understand this?
The propagandists have improved somewhat since then and changed their messages a bit, they try to sell war moreso as if it's nice and moral, they exploit people's psychology and natural tendencies to want to support what is "right" and just (among other things), and so they frame the war with that in mind while framing its opponents and those on the other side as the opposite. They place emphasis on the victims of war, exploit people's senses of sympathy and empathy. Etc.
A lot of it is psychological (our governments and intelligence agencies openly hire and make use of psychologists; they weaponise them), simple techniques like creating positive and negative "pair associations" and exploiting how people learn by repetition. As a result, they've successfully managed to get a lot of the kind of people who would normally be against war on moral grounds to support it by using arguments that turn reality upside down.
Besides that, propaganda is more pervasive in people's lives than ever. Most people are hooked to their devices and social media, which are very powerful transmitters of propaganda, and because people are so exposed to what others around them think, people are more prone to peer pressure and groupthink conformity that affects their judgement. They don't want to feel like (or actually be) social pariahs, or like they are worse, less moral people. The propaganda and conformism reinforces those worries. People who follow the mainstream view come to think of themselves as in the know, and everyone else is seen as being the ones falling for propaganda, or for misinformation or disinformation (two of the State's favourite new words; their vocabularies are quite small, so most in our governments only learned them recently).
I think also, people are bombarded with so much information now, and overwhelmed by stress and all of the societal issues most of us are facing every day, that it causes a lot of people to shut down critical thinking. Society has become so complex, there are so many factors interacting and so many people have all gone crazy or tuned out from everything in these past years. It's often sad to see, with the people like you describe who fall for it all.
I'm sure there's more to it all, but that's the short of it off the top of my head, from what I can tell anyway. Well, I *attempted* for it to be short anyway!
Meanwhile, a State Department official today stated that the United States does not support any Chinese sponsored peace plan for Ukraine.
So much for the idea that Ukraine is a sovereign state with any agency and not a puppet regime.
The United States also is not at all happy that Saudi Arabia and Iran have improved relations, including an end to the War On Yemen.
So much for the nonsense that only American hegemony can keep the peace.
And that's before noting that none of the architects of The War On Iraq suffered any consequences, while truth-tellers such as Chris Hedges suffer.
So much for the bullshit styled "the rules based international order".
US madmen simply can't give China credit for anything.
The corporate media spinners were even denying China's role in the middle east deal, implying that it was UN and US influenced.
What did you think of Hedges defining Putin as a war criminal, and has him on the same level with Bush? "Haul Russian President Vladimir Putin off to The Hague, but only if Bush is in the cell next to him." He mentions FOX, and identifies them as having a republican supported base, but in regard to the NY Times that pushed that war as well, he doesn't indicate 90% of their readership are democrats. I in no way disagree with what he said about our Middle Eastern wars, other then he really didn't define with clarity why we were held bent on devastating the Middle East, and the philosophy that caused it to materialize. George Packer sounds like a total narcissist who tries to understand himself in glorified terms. His rationalization of war is sick.
I will let Mr. Hedges speak for himself.
I will say that the war is entirely intentional on the part of the United States.
I agree, but you didn't answer the comment of hedges aligning Putin with Bush. No opinion of your own on that?
As I said, the war is entirely intentional on the part of the United States.
The idea was to put Russia in a situation in which it had no choice but to react. Ukrainians were the patsies.
Agree,
Instead of providing a one liner why don't you explain how Bush and Putin are cut from the same cloth.
Yes, they are. Bush illegally invaded Iraq and Putin did the same with Ukraine. Though their motivations and consequence of their actions were different. Though they are cut from the same bloody cloth, I consider Bush a greater murderer.
Your comments are spot on. Sad truths, but well written. Wish I could speak like this at parties when my friends agitate for me to “stop with your whataboutism!” It’s lonely when people I want to have a beer with tell me Putin is using the exact same playbook as Hitler.
Chris Hedges knocking it out of the park. Share broadly, more people need to read writing like this.
"What is disturbing is not the cost to me personally. I was aware of the potential consequences. What is disturbing is that the architects of these debacles have never been held accountable and remain ensconced in power."
This is a ubiquitous problem. Name any top-level official that has been held accountable for their mistakes that have caused significant human harm. I cannot. There is no accountability. It used to be our press that would at least nudge the popular opinion in the direction of justice, but that went away too. Now it is all just part of the power cabal that protects itself.
I read that some old database that listed all the lies cataloged by the W administration related to the Iraq war had been recently deleted. Because of course if you no longer have the evidence, the perp is innocent.
Exactly right. Failing Upward should be a new Master Class taught by Fauci ... or Biden ... or Nuland ... or any number of these corrupt evil clowns.
Chris, personally grateful for your work and the effort it takes to voice your critically invaluable perspective.
Such a rare yet consummately American breed.
I worry who will succeed him. The Wokeness (and supine acquiescence to power) seems to be a generational thing.
Great article, but Obama is not mentioned. He had the best chance by far to go after the war criminals (victory by significant margins, both houses of Congress with democratic majorities), but chose not to. For this reason alone I'd consider him to be one of the worst presidents the US has had. And shame on him for aiding and abetting the worst of the worst!
Obama is now in our growing hall of infame. He was the executioner murdered with drones and he, like St George W. and company, cannot be brought to justice because our corrupted congress decreed that we would attacked any country that had the audacity to charge them with war crimes.
showbama.
Nice point about Obama. What might be mentioned regarding Obama had been his deliberate goal to serve the oligarchs by murdering people in foreign lands, ala Libya and Syria as prime examples, and elsewhere... he had proven he was no different than those who came before him.
Obama chose to ignore the problems faced at home, whereby Flint, Michigan in 2023 still with potable water problems, that came to light in 2015, under his, Obama's watch. Obama wanted to serve the ruling elite - the oligarchs of the USA and the Collective West, and become one of them...
And that is only a small sample of his stunts. He bailed out the bankers that had bankrupted millions of Americans and left them homeless without any help. He was a true American president for the elites.
Truth.
Obama followed the leads of every previous president.
Completely agree.
Americans should be shocked at the idea that a ceasefire, under any terms, is unacceptable in Ukraine . They are not. Goebbels said that If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. The propaganda machine in the U.S. has worked and now people believe that war is preferable to peace, because peace without "Democracy" is not acceptable, or some such idiotic indoctrination. When those who advocate peace are considered the enemy, the outlook for the future is grim indeed.
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
• In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)
The United States is a republic, but an oligarchic republic featuring unlimited political bribery for those who can afford pricey lawyers, and not a democratic republic, as it is at times advertised.
"Reporters and editors I had known for years would lower their heads as I passed, fearful of any career-killing contagion." Matthew 10:36: And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
1965-66 TV series “Branded”. Here are the lyrics:
Branded!
Scorned as the one who ran.
What do you do when you’re branded, and you know you’re a man.
Wherever you go, for the rest of your life
You must prove, you’re a man.
Branded!
Marked with the cowards’ shame.
What do you do when you’re branded,
Will you fight for your name?
He was innocent,
Not a charge was true,
But the world will never know….
Stripped of all his rank,
Stripped of all his pride,
Still he held his head up high!
Branded!
Friends are a thing unknown,
What do you do when you’re branded?
Can you go it alone?
Branded!
That’s not the way to die!
What do you do when you’re branded?
Can you live with a lie?
The world needs to sanction us, freeze our oligarchs assets, block our international banking access, give us a piece of our own medicine, kick our military installations off their land.
Compliment and criticism: love your tireless efforts against the War Machine - keep up the good work! Speaking (with the benefit of hindsight) as an avowed atheist and voluntaryist who loathes Right or Left authoritarianism, your 2007 book “American Fascists” seems to have overestimated the threat from the Christian right while missing the rise of the Woke fascists and their Antifa shock troops. Maybe time for another book?
You think Hedges "overestimated the threat from the Christian right"? Are you kidding me? Check out Florida or the US Supreme Court lately? Or Republican State legislatures?
ANTIFA fights fascists.
There are too many Republican War Pigs and Big Pharma bootlickers that should be condemned, and in some cases jailed, for their atrocities against humanity (plenty of Democrats as well). While I am neither Christian nor Right, I can recognize that the Christian Right is now anti War Machine and anti Big Pharma, and is not in the streets rioting, looting, and burning businesses, police stations, and other government buildings.
No, the Christian fascist right is just burning books, imposing a religious ideology by law (American Taliban) and literally killing women, see:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/17/fascists-in-the-courts-and-the-need-to-abandon-liberal-surrender-and-complicity/
We were so close to getting stuck with a theocracy. I've not forgotten when during the reign of St. George W. his attorney general, St. John Ashcroft, covered the seminude statue of justice at the Justice Department. I also remember seeing government vehicles clearly marked as Decency Police or something similar at the public park where I walked my dogs and where new evangelicals sprouted like weeds everyday and everywhere.
ANTIFA are the fascists, or at least one flavor of them. When one is in the streets burning things down and hitting people over the head with bricks, they no longer are on the side of truth, beauty, and righteousness, no matter the anodyne acronym.
Trump became an easy target and many on the left showed no sense of balance in regard to the man. Amy Goodman, bought Russia-gate, hook line and sinker, as they say, and now she has lost a significant part of her journalistic credentials and no doubt her base. Journalism was biased and self serving before Trump, but is far worse now. The Christian right also is an easy target, and I'm not saying some things said are not true. Right now it's absolutely taboo to go after the woke. I read an article where a college professor mixed up the names of two of his black students which they reported and he was fired, because they claim he's saying all blacks look alike. The woke culture is extreme, authoritarian, and hides behind the guise of liberalism, and too few have the guts to tell it like it is.
As you may recall, I am far from a Trump supporter. I did not vote for him in 2016 or in 2020.
But for years, it has been abundantly obvious that Team D and its allies in law enforcement/the Deep State are seeking any pretext on which to imprison the man. The only thing that has surprised me is that it has taken this long. The Stormy Daniels Affair was what, seven years ago?
Contemplate "Three Felonies A Day".
I always wondered why Trump moved our embassy to Jerusalem. On democracynow.org Amy interviewed J Bamford that allowed me to understand it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jim Bamford, we want to have you back on to talk about your book, but we want to thank you so much for being with us now. James Bamford, longtime investigative journalist. We’ll link to your new cover story for The Nation, “The Candidate and the Spy.”https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion/
Trump can't be allowed to exist unfettered because, like Elon Musk and Tucker Calson, he is not jew-owned, or jew-impressed. The trbe that runs the U.S. can't leave Trump alone because others might get similar ideas from his example.
Fuck that noise.
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 either, always the registered democrat although sometimes I voted third party. I certainly wouldn't vote for Clinton. I took a lot of hate for that even though the people who spewed it knew little about Trump and less about Clinton. That's your voting public, who just don't give a damn. Assange in an interview with Pilger felt she was a very sick woman in her love of war, her need for power, but felt compassion for her psychological pathology. I don't give a damn! No new wars under Trump really good, but I disagreed with many of his policies, like his sanctions on Venezuela, but the democrats went along as they did when he destroyed the Iran deal. They backed him on many things. What I came to understand is how autocratic the democrats have become, and were even willing to lie a president out of office no matter what they needed to do. They'll even let the deep state in to lend a helping hand, and turn a riot into an insurrection playing a bigger hand then I think many will acknowledge. Their pretext at caring, and Biden's, is nauseating. The lies of Russia-gate was not only to remove Trump but intended as a bridge to where we are now in regard to Russia. If you watched the twitter files their decline was on full display.
I didn’t vote for him either, but on the night he was elected I remember thinking that as deplorable as he may be, we probably just averted an invasion of Iran, a crime that H. Clinton seemed poised to commit.
I agree and that's the reason I wouldn't vote for her. Also when Obama supported the coup in Ukraine in 2014 things were going on in my like that didn't give me much time for thought about this issue, then later on I saw Oliver Stone's documentary, Ukraine on Fire, and realized what our long term goals were going to be in Ukraine. Obama was literally playing with fire when he supported that coup and implemented the helping hands of neo-nazi's. Why would we do that unless we had further plans for Ukraine which is right in Russia's backyard. A very confrontational move on his part. Merkel said the minsk accords were never to be taken seriously, but simply to give Ukraine time to build herself up militarily. I thought if Clinton won in 2016 she was going to push Russia into a confrontation. The lie of Russia-gate, which I never believed, and along with how he was put down for wanting to get along with Russia, and their concerted effort to remove him from office made me suspicious, and I began to see it as a bridge to war. What was sickening was to see so many on the left vilify Trump, and actually help validate the lies the democrats spewed. I never knew so many on the left that proclaim their liberalism were so elitists as well.
I suspect that she would have started with Syria, then moved on to Iran.
You mean finish up on Syria. What a disgusting and tragic mess that is but I'm not sure about Iran although all the democrats supported Trump overturning the Iran deal. However, Ukraine, in my opinion was number one on the list, and why else would Obama support a coup, using the abusive tactics of the neo-nazi's? Lots of quite protests there too. It was the neo-nazis that implemented the violence. People never want to give Obama his full due, like he was no liberal and he implemented a number of wars during his reign and they say he loved to drone, well, he did become the droner and chief.
If you are talking to me? Once again your assumption has made an ass out of you. No one ever said there was a significant difference between the two, not now, you would have to go back 50 years to see a difference, and as you said, not a big one.
Fran: "Amy Goodman, bought Russia-gate, hook line and sinker, as they say, and now she has lost a significant part of her journalistic credentials and no doubt her base" Perhaps for you but not for me and any independent no-partisan consumer of news. Could you please reply telling me one date or a particular report where democracynow.org bought the Russia-gate so that I can search their archives, and I promise in turn, to reply with the results of that search? Perhaps everything depends on your particular definition of Buying.
See here: https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1154791948764504065?lang=en and here: https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1486088112778268675?lang=en.
Mate worked there and notes the pull of Russiagate even at DM. Nor were they alone. The Intercept was similarly enchanted with the russiagate story. In fact, except for Mate, Greenwald and Taibbi (and a few of their friends like Halper) everyone bought into the BS.
Thank you for the link, Norbert. What I see there is that Amy is reporting the facts, like any good journalist should do, informing us of what the congress had concluded about Russia-gate but in no place she is affirming that Russia-gate was true. And this is what I consider professional journalism.
What DN did was fail to put any Russiagate skeptics on her show, but had many enthusiasts as guests. The people that failed to appear had been long standing fixtures of the show. Now gone. Including people like Stephen Cohen. Mate himself, a critic of Russiagate and former staffer of DN was also not interviewed. There are others as well. So what DN did was advertise one perspective on the affair and avoided another more skeptical view. Is this misreporting? I believe it is, but you may not. What ended up being sympathetically reported was one side of a story, and, imo, the wrong side as we discovered. No mention of the Steele dossier being funded by Hilary, no mention that most of the Putin scares proved false, etc. So was DN pro Russiagate? Dunno. But it certainly did little to question the narrative despite considerable grounds for skepticism.
Norbert, we all have our own ways to evaluate the news. I didn't see one-sided the report on the Russian gate by Masha Gessen broadcasted at democracynow.org on 02/23/18 nor on DN interview with Katrina Vanden Heuvel when on 12/08/21 Katrina said "...that we need to sort out a relationship with Russia, that China is the great challenge in the next century, if not beyond. And those demand a full, robust debate, which you do have on Democracy Now! But the one-sided coverage — and it’s not even commentary — in the U.S. media about U.S.-Russia is, I think, debilitating and dangerous for our security and thinking."
The reason why I respect and believe Amy is that there are very few reporters that can speak truth to the powerful like in the occasion that president Bill Clinton called her on election day 2000 in an attempt to get out the vote for Hillary for senator and what he got from Amy was a barrage of the necessary questions a good journalist has to ask. I'm transcribing the dialog that you can check on DN broadcast of 12/25/21 when they were celebrating their 25th. anniversary:
AMY GOODMAN: Can I say what some people —
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Let me just finish.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me just say —
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Let me — now, wait a minute. You started this, and every question you’ve asked has been hostile and combative. So you listen to my answer, will you do that?
AMY GOODMAN: They’ve been critical questions.
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: Now, you just listen to me. You ask the questions, and I’m going to answer. You have asked questions in a hostile, combative and even disrespectful tone, but I — and you have never been able to combat the facts I have given you. Now, you listen to this.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Clinton in a surprise call to WBAI on Election Day 2000. The White House would later call me and say they were thinking of banning me from the White House. I said, “But he called me. I didn’t call him.”
I'm not on Twitter, so thanks for links.
She turned me off too, and I know others who were turned off as well. Aaron Mate, and Blumenthal have called her out on this issue. Look it up. Many on the left lost their journalistic perspective, and integrity. Greenwald had to leave the group he started, The Intercept, a left wing site because they wouldn't permit him to publish an article on Hunter's laptop less it lowered Biden's chances of a win in 2020. Why do you think Substack has become such a hit?
OK, but my question was directed to you and not to Mate or Blumenthal. Have you ever watched Ami's program, and therefore, have an authentic reason to libel her? I'm still waiting for your answer.
Watch your tone, and how dare you call my opinion libelous. I am not libeling her, and as far as I know I can express my opinion on substack. I was once a big fan of hers, loved her, listened to Democracy Now all the time, and saw her a few times in person. Then she turned, and I turned away. The reason was already provided by myself and confirmed by someone else.
Disregard my tone, it is insignificant. But don't elude my question. Still waiting.
After I saw how Amy Goodman treated the representative from the Great Barrington Declaration, I realized that her allegiance is to her tribe---and the filthy shekel. Not to truth. Not to justce. Not to the U.S. Similarly Rachel Maddow. Similarly Elena Kagan.
Ms. Murray, I wonder about the kind of shekels Amy could have won during her professional reports related to the pandemic which included the views of the majority of the scientific community. Perhaps you don't know that although she is an ethnic jew she has been, in occasions, denied entry to Israel because she truthfully reports on the abuses to the Palestinians by the the Israel theocracy. No need of shekels.
The following is a partial transcript from Wikipedia.
"The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[10][11] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions.[12][13] As of October 2020, they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[11][14] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.[11][14] They say that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[13] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous".[10] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.[15][16][17]"
Julio,
I respect your absolute belief in the WHO. For me, the WHO and Wikipedia were both discredited a long time ago. I appreciate your fairness in reporting that the Great Barrington Declaraton did receive support from some quarters.
Anna, it is Wikipedia that reported both sides of the issue on the Barrington Declaration. I didn't even have any idea about that declaration. I have noticed that some folks don't like WHO, Wikipedia, Democracy Now, etc. and that's OK with me since we humans have the great advantage of enjoying our own opinions. For my part, I tend to believe in those three entities much more than in any any network news outlet specially Fox News. Thanks for you comment.
That's a kind of prejudice that is unacceptable to me, and shame on you for pushing it. When did Jesus push the idea of slaughtering people on a global level? Never is the answer, but people may go to war and feel they have the backing of Jesus, but it is no more then a a rationalization for the horrors they commit.
You fail however to make the very significant distinction between his teaching and the rationalizations people use to justify their carnage. However do learn to make that distinction between what Jesus taught, and how people will justify their brutality in his name. The end.
Jon Carver, Jesus came down hardest on the Pharisees, the priestly class of time, saying that they closed the kingdom of heaven to others but did not go in themselves. He said that they went about like whitewashed tombs, but inside were full of dead men’s bones. You appear unable to distinguish between people doing things in Jesus’ name, say, like running to a Washington church during a protest and holding up a bible which you’ve likely never read; or others might do things which are actually Christlike. Your own thinking is pretty shit if you can’t discern a difference there. Jesus disciples came to him and told him men were calling him this or that. He replied: But who do you say that I am ? I would ask you the same question. Put in terms of secular philosophy, what is the thing in itself? And Jesus didn’t go anywhere except a few places around the Sea of Galilee by the way. Except Egypt, and his parents didn’t even bring back a lousy tee-shirt.
Roland, truly spirituality is the greatest achievement of evolution and there have been authentic virtuous people in all religions everywhere but... the demands of organized religion especially those that consider themselves the only owners of truth are designed to make war to the others. About the historical Jesus we know very little except that He was a Zealot teacher in an obscure rebel apocalyptic sect whose goal was to finish the roman dominance and return to a Jewish theocratic state and the romans tried and executed Him for sedition. The rest of what we know of Him is a matter of faith on what the gospels, written generations after his death, tell us about him and his teachings.
Professor Huston Smith in his book "The World's Religions, Revised and Updated: A Concise Introduction" writes so beautifully about the spirituality of the traditional religions of the world that makes, even an agnostic like myself, to love them. Following is a quote from his book:
"Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man’s success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” he yawned. “I’ll tempt him to institutionalize it.”"
Thanks for that, Julio. I like the fable about tempting the man who laid hold of the truth to institutionalise it.
When you talk about what we know historically about Jesus you aren’t focussing on his personhood. When we say we know someone it is because we know the way they think; their mind makes repeated choices based on an understandable guiding principle, from which we can anticipate what they would do in a given situation. From the basic agreement of the four gospels we get to know through Jesus’ actions which he attributes to God, that God is love. People come to know and love Jesus because of this. A lot of critics get hung up on the apparent exclusivity of the statement: “no-one comes to the father but through me”, which I interpret as meaning that only through his suffering of his life on Earth which still did not fall away from the truth while suffering what other humans suffer, can humanity be reconciled to itself as the creation of a good God, and expect to find the God of Love. I don’t think we’ll ever look upon God in some kind of filmic Nazi ark of the covenant moment, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. I would never expect to comprehend being in the presence of a God immanent in a universe of stars, but self-knowledge in the light of the life of Christ can be a searing judgement on what we may have failed to become. Take perhaps when you spend $83 Bn on defence and everybody becomes less secure, especially where you buy your own gun as well and become seven times as likely to kill a member of your own family with it; or if you spend another few billion to overthrow your enemy through mercenaries and a corrupt proxy. I might be content with a cold dead hand to comfort me if I had done those things. My living hands being all the colder for my having no Russian natural gas with which to heat them.
The judgement being that light has come Into to the world and that mankind has preferred darkness. Yet evil is not a thing in itself, it is an absence of a virtue in a particular individual. It is an absence of character, which makes it such a nameless influence. In the particular being, first the person loses sight of or is never shown the goal to pursue, and then, having lost sight of a rational goal to pursue, the individual falls into absurdity and in so doing loses motivation (or Kantian freedom of the will power) to pursue a goal, ultimately taking the position: I’m alive, I’m dead, ha ha ha! This is why the integrity of the personality of Christ and the focus of his life is so important. It’s not enough to say that all we know is where he lived and who of all those who wanted to, actually killed him.
Thank you for your post, Roland. It seems that you want people to focus on the Crist of faith and not too much on the historical Jesus who, after all, was a rebel that perhaps we would call him a terrorist today. On the contrary, the Crist of faith is a beautiful dream of love but just imaginary. We all are made of stardust and it seems to me (metaphorically) that we want to return to our origins, and so, we create religions that satisfy that desire. Unfortunately, we have to face reality and study history to evaluate the usefulness of those lofty dreams, and the result is IMHO that religion has impeded the moral advancement of mankind, hampered the progress of sciences and fomented continuous wars specially since the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths that introduce the element of intolerance that didn't exist in older religions. This is what I believe is the contribution of the peoples of faith, but there are glorious individual exceptions. We inherited the fire from the stars that is so beneficial but also extremely destructive. On the good side there are examples of virtuous persons like Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and mother Theresa. The other side contains villains like the great inquisitor of Seville, Osama Bin Laden and our born again Cristian Richard the Lionheart that recently launched a crusade against Iraq.
All of these people were deeply religious but the difference in their actions was due to the way they understood their spirituality.
This is my understanding of good and evil. We all are made of the same stardust and keep the same fire. It is up to us to use that fire in a good way without any help from organized religion. I agree with Epicurus: "If God wants to abolish evil, but cannot, He is impotent. If He can, but doesn't want to, He is wicked."
Roland, we see the world from two different perspectives. You accepted the Axial Age legacy that "We live in this world but we are not from this world" and ,I feel very comfortable in this world. When our time comes to depart, you and the other good believers will die with the hope that you will be in heaven. When it is our turn, I and the other agnostics will die with the satisfaction of having enjoyed our lives to the full and following our conscience.
And you and I will end being a great soil fertilizer to contribute to the developing evolution of all creatures.
Well, since I’ve caught your attention, the only half arguable point you might have is that St Paul, not Jesus, being the foundation of the Catholic Church, the Catholics in misplaced admiration for his single-minded attempt to drop everything in favour of mission work, have instituted celibacy for priests, which to my mind contradicts their excellent formal Thomist doctrine of the balance of the natural inclinations. Their inability to switch that false doctrine off is a terrible thing. They should seriously just cancel that tomorrow, a bit like you just see the stupidity of what you’re doing and cancel the Second Amendment tomorrow and throw away your gun.
If you’re going to just rail at people and call them shit thinkers and worse, try keeping shit insults out of your texts and attempt to construct your own actual doctrine which will deconstruct Christianity and reveal your true guidelines for human action. And once you’ve done that maybe they’ll build three buildings in every town in which to celebrate you. And then sit back and see if you’re ever tempted, like the pastors of the Prosperity Gospel, to say, I deserve to be rewarded for showing people the true faith, bring me my private jet, and we’ll go and buy out the poor people on that ranchland I’d like to buy with all the cheques my followers sent me. But you’re talking about Jesus now, not Jim Jones. You need to up your game, Jesus didn’t fall into the traps of the Pharisees and you’ve yet to set one for him. “Without a parable he spake not into them.” Jesus only gives analogies in parables as to what the Kingdom of Heaven is, the parable of the mustard seed, for example, because the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning. God is “like” a father, but no, a being that transmits its will through the luminiferous aether and sustains the universe from moment to moment does not have “kids”, people are putting labels on everything. In the US a man who wanted money and power stuck a Maga label on his hat and came within an hour or two of making the system of government into a formal dictatorship. All kinds of people followed him and still do. You seem to be content to accept that anything done in the name of something is that thing itself. Have you not heard the term false gods? Why do you think that the first commandment is to have no other gods but the one true God? It all seems a bit naive on your part. You’ll never know who Jesus was and is and be able to write anything credible about Christianity if you can’t consider what something, Jesus, is in itself, rather than thinking you’ve found another radical way to annoy people to the level that you’re annoyed, and a suitably unarmed target at which to vent your inner rage. You still have not answered my first question, who do you say that he is, because it appears that you can’t answer as to who or what you think Jesus was. Knowing Jesus is never a bad thing, it gives you an idea of who you yourself really might be once you burn away all the misconceptions and propaganda of the society you’re living in. Let’s have your manifesto, then. What’s your life’s work, beyond the destruction of Christianity which by your slagging off and trying to humiliate people will doubtless keel over immediately in awe at the magnitude of your understanding of its absurdity, and disappear in a puff of logic?
Well I’m disappointed in Jesus to find out from you that he’s been running around impersonating Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay. I suspected he might have been living out his dark side when I saw him impersonating JFK, but on that occasion he got his lines muddled and said “Ask not how your country can traffic you into war, that‘s just how we roll, but rather, ask how you can meekly go along with that plan and blame it all on me. I’ll give you this cross I borrowed off your real role models and you can lay it all at the feet of that, you whining, grievance-ridden, deluded advert for Armeggedon“.
Each keeps its own nature. We are all part of the body of God, suspended in a lattice of harmonies formed from the luminiferous ether. A being whose will propagates through the highest tenuity of matter doesn’t generally have kids; I don’t think Jesus ever limited the manifestations of God to three, so I‘m of the opinion that the doctrine of the Trinity is a derivative of some midrashic or numerological thinking, but the closeness of Jesus to the Creator makes him talk in terms of being one with God. What happened to you ? If you don’t like God or Jesus, “who you gonna call? “Must sleep, I may address your other specifics tomorrow. Good luck to you meantime.
Agreed. The whole madness starts with Deuteronomy chapter 20 where among other niceties Jehovah commands that (verse 16th) "it is only in the cities of these peoples that Jehovah your God is giving you as an inheritance that you not must preserve any breathing thing alive because you should without fail preserve to destruction..." and so for, and much later Jesus said that he had not come to change the law of Moses.
Not just the Abrahamic religions but most organized religions have fomented wars.
Have you read "America: the Farewell Tour"?
"There are two kinds of Fascists," the Italian writer Ennio Flaiano said, "Fascists and anti-fascists."
Hedges, Chris. America: the Farewell Tour. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2018, pg. 186
So, one person said that. So what? Means nothing without a clear explanation and backing evidence. Personally I think it's complete and utter BS.
I was simply replying to @KurtOverley - the suggestion for another book
"... rise of Woke fascists and their Antifa shock troops. Maybe time for another book?"
Chris included the Ennio Flaiano quote in the chapter titled "Hate". I believe this chapter provides clear a explanation and references the supporting evidence that is lacking in my replies.
Below are additional related quotes from "America: the Farewell Tour" (I encourage you to read the book).
"The left is no more immune to these pathologies than the right." pg. 183
"Antifa seeks to justify its violence by arguing that the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s could have been halted if antifascist groups had attacked fascist groups when they were first forming. This is a huge distortion of history." pg. 187
"The violent left revels in the hypermasculinity that enthralls the alt-right." pg. 191
"The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous work of building relationships, alternative institutions, and community organizing that alone will make effective resistance possible." pg. 199
"The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anticapitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists." pg. 200
"There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false arguments of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents." pg. 200
You're right, I haven't read that chapter. But the last paragraph you quoted says it all.
"There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false arguments of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents."
The argument here seems to be only about tactics. Personally I think fighting fascists any way one can takes primacy, while worrying about how the corporate media will paint one's actions is vastly less important. The corporate media will always paint the left's actions negatively anyway, as it is part of the right wing duopoly! If you let worry about how the corporate media depicts one's actions affect what you do you are playing right into their hands.
Woke fascists? Antifa shock troops? Please explain.
Suppression of free speech at almost every college. Government collusion with Big Tech to suppress any facts or opinions contrary to the Establishment Narrative. Antifa rioting, burning, looting, and violence in almost every city through the Summer of Love. Antifa domestic terrorism burning Cop City in Atlanta…
Kurt, you've been a victim of some serious propaganda and lies.
Not sure what you mean by woke here. Do you just mean liberals? If so, I agree that liberals are doing terrible, terrible things. And antifa just means antifascist--from what you are saying, you are antifa too. I support all efforts to combat fascism. Down with fascism in all forms, up with anarchocommunism, the fairest, most democratic form of governance of all.
Antifa is the name of a loose collection of domestic terrorist groups that have a penchant dressing in all black gear, looting and burning businesses, police stations and government buildings (such as Minneapolis in 2020 and the recent attack on “Cop City” in Atlanta), injuring scores of police officers in the process, often in the name of “Black Lives Matter” or “Defunding the Police”.
I'm in favor of all antifascism, "Antifa" included (the right inflates to ridiculous levels the violence antifa uses, which makes me think you belong to the right). Whatever tactics are needed to fight fascism are positive. There is no compromising with it, period. It seems that for you, real fascism (a right wing phenomenon) is benign in comparison with the struggle against it by anti-fascists. It's clear where you stand.
Do you believe in looting and riots, and robbing stores and the destruction of property, even hurting people to make a point? There are many ways to combat fascism without implementing violence. I suspect if it was your property, or the welfare of your family to make their point your perspective would do an about face.
I absolutely agree and if you notice those willing to back them up come across as a bunch of fascist themselves, and simply discredit your claims without ever questioning their own, or adopt a patronizing tone. Don't listen.
See the Twitter Files. That should explain it.
Bob, I cant speak for Kurt but suugest the choice of words accurately describes, #1, the silencing of opposition opinion and #2, the use of physical intimidation/vandalism. A simple enough parallelism.
One of the wars chief cheerleaders (the insufferable David Frum) just published a monstrosity of an article in a reputable media outlet ("The Iraq War Reconsidered" in The Atlantic) which insists that as gruesome as the Iraq War was it somehow managed to become a net positive for Iraqis (at least for those who weren't murdered, raped, tortured or maimed and who don't object to living in a failed state riven by violence and corruption). The U.S. wrecked Iraq with the enthusiastic support of useful idiots like Frum who remain fixtures in polite society. Shameful.
I do not understand how the myth of U.S. military supremacy has survived our military debacles in the Middle East where we were badly beaten by home grown crews of ill equipped fighters. After our ass was handed to us in Afghanistan, we provoked a proxy war in Ukraine against a peer nuclear power. We are doing the same with China.
A dangerous madness has infected our ruling class.
a pox on them.
George Carlin (1937-2008) said that the politicians we get come from the people that elect them. They are a reflection of who we are. The lack of public support for the anti war movement gave Bush (the younger) almost a blank check for any war he wanted. The corruption of our culture from a compliant news media to country singers wanting a war so they could write song about putting a boot up their @%& and the masses of people numbed by the phony patriotic euphoria and rejection of war critics, allowed this colossal mistake to happen.
Cheney was at the center of this tyranny. When Cheney was asked by Barbara Walters, "What about the 4,000 [KIA], Cheney the chicken s**t replied, "Well, they volunteered!" And for such insidious, cruel inhumanity we the people paid for his new heart.
Funny how Cheney went from Team D Boogeyman to Elder Statesman And Bona Fide Hero Of The Republic in just a few short years. Same with Romney and that turd, McCain.
Oh, Cheney had his fortunes visualized, aiding Haliburton gaining billions. Cheney is cold and callous. Speaking of Romney, when asked if one of his FIVE sons might serve in our Military, he replied, "No. They are too busy serving me." As to McCain, I am less harsh on him. I am aware of his shenanigans as a young Naval officer, son of an Admiral. Before his unfortunate journey into the Hanoi "Hilton", he was a reckless Lieutenant. And, then, there is the story about his first wife.
Adam Smith: “In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war”.
This behavior is enabled, and cultivated by a compliant, servile press that come to journalism like eunuchs in a harem. They’ve seen how it’s done, they know how it’s done, but unable to do it themselves.
I marched before the war, and then I placed wooden crosses on the beach with Veterans for Peace during the war. The expression shoveling shit against the tide comes to mind. The massive protests against the war around the world were impotent.
BEING the shit HITTING the fan comes to mind.
I agree that if Putin is put on trial by the ICC, so should Bush. I would add a few others, such as Cheney, Clinton, Obama, Trump and Kissenger. But that would cause the US to attack Brussels the ICC location. A law has already been passed authorizing this.
Nice comment. But you leave out so many others, such as Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, amongst many others...
I am not familiar with the law you mention, might I inquire about the specifics of the law? My gut feeling says the US would attack the ICC, and whichever location it had US citizens indicted as criminals against humanity.
I’m curious if anyone has an explanation for the hard shift towards warmongering among some people who were loud and courageous about Iraq at the time. For example, Sean Penn. Think what you like about him, he stood on the stage at the Oscars, and called out for the imprisonment of George Bush and Co. Even then that wasn’t a very popular position. Today he’s falling in line with the neocons, somehow glorifying Zelenskyy, and Ukraine. He’s not alone. It mystifies me. Anyone understand this?
I think it's a combination of things.
The propagandists have improved somewhat since then and changed their messages a bit, they try to sell war moreso as if it's nice and moral, they exploit people's psychology and natural tendencies to want to support what is "right" and just (among other things), and so they frame the war with that in mind while framing its opponents and those on the other side as the opposite. They place emphasis on the victims of war, exploit people's senses of sympathy and empathy. Etc.
A lot of it is psychological (our governments and intelligence agencies openly hire and make use of psychologists; they weaponise them), simple techniques like creating positive and negative "pair associations" and exploiting how people learn by repetition. As a result, they've successfully managed to get a lot of the kind of people who would normally be against war on moral grounds to support it by using arguments that turn reality upside down.
Besides that, propaganda is more pervasive in people's lives than ever. Most people are hooked to their devices and social media, which are very powerful transmitters of propaganda, and because people are so exposed to what others around them think, people are more prone to peer pressure and groupthink conformity that affects their judgement. They don't want to feel like (or actually be) social pariahs, or like they are worse, less moral people. The propaganda and conformism reinforces those worries. People who follow the mainstream view come to think of themselves as in the know, and everyone else is seen as being the ones falling for propaganda, or for misinformation or disinformation (two of the State's favourite new words; their vocabularies are quite small, so most in our governments only learned them recently).
I think also, people are bombarded with so much information now, and overwhelmed by stress and all of the societal issues most of us are facing every day, that it causes a lot of people to shut down critical thinking. Society has become so complex, there are so many factors interacting and so many people have all gone crazy or tuned out from everything in these past years. It's often sad to see, with the people like you describe who fall for it all.
I'm sure there's more to it all, but that's the short of it off the top of my head, from what I can tell anyway. Well, I *attempted* for it to be short anyway!
What happened was the election of Obama.
His continuation of the stupid wars (and starting a host of new wars) neutered the antiwar movement.
Beautifully-written truth telling. Thank you for having the courage to write it.