Cold War

America: Addicted To War

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SteveLendman August 14 2013

AirLand Battle
Admiral Hyman Rickover

It’s been that way from inception. America’s history reflects violence. It’s blood-drenched. It glorifies war. It does so in the name of peace.

America believes war is peace. It’s part of the national culture. Eventually it’s self-destructive. Today’s super-weapons make the unthinkable possible.

Hyman Rickover knew. He knew decades ago. He founded America’s nuclear navy. In 1982, he told Congress:

“I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation.” Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships?”

“That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country.”

That’s why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits – attempts to limit war have always failed.”

“The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.”

“Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years.”

“I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”

In his Der Ring des Nibelungen operas (the Ring), Richard Wagner portrayed his apocalyptic version. He did so musically. Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods) prophesied the end of the world.

Einstein feared it. He didn’t know what WW III weapons would be used. He said “World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Bertrand Russell was an Einstein contemporary. He knew. He warned. No one listened. He asked:

“Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war.” It’s the only way to live in peace. The alternative is annihilation.

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Scott McConnell ~ Israel’s Iran Agenda

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The American Conservative August 2 2013

cartoon_aipac

When is pointing out an opponent’s motivation an effective tactic in foreign-policy debate? During the Cold War, I published my first large article documenting that E.P. Thompson (a leading proponent of the “nuclear freeze”) was not merely (as he was customarily presented) a pleasantly “utopian” socialist with a charming shock of white hair, but a figure with a somewhat hardline Marxist history and a long record as an opponent of NATO and advocate of accommodating the Soviet Union. Thirty years later I have white hair myself, E.P. Thompson has passed on, and all are grateful that the Cold War concluded without nuclear bombs going off. As to whether or not my type of argument—made in countless variations by hundreds of writers during the rhetorical Cold War—was effective, many thought it was. The piece was quoted, circulated, and advanced the professional aspirations of its author. And in fact it was an easier argument to make than to wade into the impossible-to-calculate unknowables about how a strategy of non-belligerence might save Europe from both the threat of war and Soviet dominance.

This issue of motivation arises because of the House’s vote on Wednesday to ramp up sanctions on Iran. The vote was rushed to floor before recess not so that sanctions can be escalated anytime soon (the Senate won’t take up the bill till the fall, if ever) but because AIPAC—representing in Washington the perspectives of Israel’s current government—wants to short circuit any chance of meaningful negotiation between the Obama administration and Iran’s newly elected president. One goal of the bill is to demonstrate to Iran’s leaders, through a landslide House vote, that America is deeply, almost inherently, hostile and to undercut whatever small gestures of peaceful diplomacy that Obama and the new Rouhani team have each been making since the latter’s election last June.

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Patrick J. Buchanan ~ Exporting Democracy Is Why the World Resents Us

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The American Conservative June 7 2013

A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years in an Egyptian prison.

And U.S. interventionists are in an uproar.

“Appalling and offensive,” said Sen. Pat Leahy of the verdicts.

“The 2011 revolution was supposed to end the repressive climate under Mubarak,” said The Wall Street Journal of our ally of 30 years whom Hillary Clinton called a family friend.

This “crackdown,” decries the Washington Post, was defended with “cheap nationalism and conspiracy theories.” As for Egypt’s proposed new law for regulating foreign-funded groups promoting democracy, it is “based on … repressive and xenophobic logic.”

Yet the questions raised by both the Cairo and Moscow crackdowns on U.S.-funded “democracy” groups cannot be so airily dismissed.

For these countries have more than a small point.

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Mind Control, The Shell Game, And The Stealth Gods

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Jon Rappoport April 9 2013

collectivismOf the many definitions of collectivism, this simple one is my favorite: “The practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.”

When I was starting out as a reporter 30 years ago, one of my first editors sat down with me and said, “ In America, collectivism is what the government does to people to make them deaf, dumb, and blind, so the corporations can steal everything from them.”

He went on to tell me, off the record, that his paper wasn’t interested in collectivism, only the corporations. That was his line in the sand.

An early assignment was interviewing a congressman. As I sat in a tony cafe with him, an idea kept buzzing in my head: he was giving things away that weren’t his to begin with.

I couldn’t make that idea sharper. It was a stray thought, and it kept nagging at me, long after the interview was done. It somehow reminded me of the classic shell game. Three shells, one pea. Guess which shell is hiding the pea. What if the pea isn’t there at all?

I realized I was trying to understand something about collectivism, the psychology of it. Another image struck me: the old telephone game, where one person whispers a phrase to another, and that person passes it on, until the last person announces what he’s heard; and of course now it bears no resemblance to the original message.

How about starting the game with no message at all? You just make a kind of hissing mumble. And the last person in the circle emerges with “life is good.”

That’s a metaphor for collectivism.

Collectivism is a system by which people give each other what they don’t have.

If this seems like a magic trick, it is. It’s magic founded in mind control.

Collectivism is rife with contradictions. That’s why it bedevils the incurious mind and comes to dominate it.

People who don’t have freedom, because they renounced it, somehow give it to each other. People who don’t have money give it to each other. People who don’t have power give it to each other.

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The Rich Are Not Like The Rest Of Us

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Jonathan Turley March 2 2013

Cold WarOne of America’s greatest novels in my opinion is “The Great Gatsby” and I think many literary critics feel the same. If you’re not familiar with it, the short synopsis is that it is the tale of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious figure of self made wealth who arrives on Long Island’s North Shore, known as the “Gold Coast”, back in the “Roaring Twenties”. His life intertwines with Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a “golden” young couple with inherited wealth and the best social pedigrees. The interplay between these three leads to ultimate tragedy for Gatsby and more than a few other characters swept into the social vortex surrounding the Buchanan’s. On the last page of this magnificently crafted book, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrator Nick runs into Tom and Daisy who are gaily embarking on a trip to Europe after some cataclysmic events of their causing and he says of them:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Now lest you think I’m about to deliver a polemic about all wealthy people let me disabuse you of that notion. I know and have known many wealthy people who were also exemplary human beings and have my respect and affection. “The Rich” I refer to are people like the Koch Brothers who were born into great wealth and somehow believe they are among the anointed of the world. So strong is that belief that they are willing to do just about anything to maintain their power in this world and their anger at those who oppose them is the “righteous” anger of the permanently entitled. These groups of people generally have fortunes beginning in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Mitt Romney perhaps, and are far removed from the merely wealthy. The see themselves as Aristocrats of the world and in reality they would like to return us to the time of feudalism. In some respects we have returned, when we think of our Justice Department refusing to criminally prosecute banks like HSBC, which has admitted to partaking in clearly illegal activities. The germ for this guest blog came from a link supplied by one of our most prolific commenters. What it shows, I think with great effectiveness, is how the Rich are not like the rest of us and why they need to be stopped before they will destroy us and our country with it.

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