Or …
Admiral Mike Mullen, the Pentagon boss, whom I admire, is worried about the declining character of the armed forces:
“We’ve learned a lot about ourselves in the last decade; some of it’s been pretty unpleasant stuff,” Admiral Mullen said in an interview. “I want us to understand what we’ve seen, to a depth that we can ensure that our moral compass stays true, our ethical compass stays true.”
Mullen’s worries bear relation to the mass assassinations yesterday in Tucson, in that across the past decade the society has being trained to accept perpetual war as a way of life.
Our kids, our soldiers, growing up, are trained to envision life as a video game. And Obama’s Secretary of Education spent most of the past decade turning five Public Schools in Chicago into military academies.
The Spectre of the Gun haunts the society’s blood, born as we were coeval with Industrialism, with no time, as in Europe, to prepare for that onslaught, in a protracted war for control of the continent against nature and its natives.
Armies destroy countries — often their own.
Japan and Bismarck’s Germany — reduced to cinders by 1945, having provoked with their martial successes and crimes the remainder of the industrialized world into alliance.
The Russian empire in its Soviet phase — an elephantine Military-Industrial Complex riding the backs of an impoverished and well policed working class, an inverted pyramid, an unstable equillibrium nevertheless held in place for several generations by secret police, radio and television.
For people like Gore Vidal, whom I admire, it’s a given: the American empire was born in 1898 with our adventurism contra Spain in the Philipines and the Caribbean. We then built a huge permanent army to help win the world wars. That work done, the monster turned upon Dr Frankenstein. The republic’s cancer exhibited itself in 1963. We’ve been watching it die all our lives. The installation of Bush-Cheney, in retrospect, seems the end. The full-page tombstone in the New York Times.
However one might parse our history, no Western society could withstand in perpetuity the things we’ve done here and abroad for the reasons we’ve done them since October 2000. Mullen seems to sense this, and indeed, almost to be saying as much out loud.
And the eloquent Sheriff Dudnick of Pima County yesterday echoed him:
“This has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in and I think its time we do the soul-searching,” he said. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately, Arizona has become the capital. We have become the mecca of prejudice and bigotry.”
Hero Mark Lane will have a documentary this year featuring hero Abraham Bolden, former Secret Service agent and author of THE ECHO FROM DEALEY PLAZA, who was imprisoned for trying to publicize the story of the attempted assassination of JFK in Chicago in early November 1963.
Here’s the two of them speaking.
And here — perhaps more informative — is Mr Bolden with Thom Hartmann (three clips total there on youtube).
And here’s a panel with James Douglass, author of the excellent JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE – Why He Died and Why It Matters (2008), with Oliver Stone and Lisa Pease (latter whom has dropped here a few times in the past …) Five clips total.
The VOICE will now be nothing but Special Lefty whining, petty bickering for crumbs, as the fascist shift accelerates.
It’s a generational thing as much as anything. American society no longer breeds Universalists.
“The left has disemboweled itself,” Nader said. “It doesn’t even have a strategy every four years like a good poker player. The best example is Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO. Obama has given them nothing. Therefore, they are demanding nothing. … And now wait till you see what they will do to the public employee unions. … Everybody is ganging up on them. You have new class warfare. It is non-unionized lower income and middle class taking it out on the unionized middle-income public employees. It is a classic example of oligarchic manipulation.”
One irony is that the undermining of Universalism in American society was the work of people in Academia calling themselves Leftists: Feminists. Progressives. The theorists of the war on the White Male Hegemony.
This new struggle replaced, in hearts and minds Left of center, the traditional class struggle, central to modernity, which was basically about money. Thirty years on, the working class cannot afford to educate or medicate its children and the slide into the Third World seems at this moment inexorable.
The Progressive campaign not only splintered the Democratic Party, taking it out of power in Washington and the state capitols, but also diverted and diluted education. People raised on television and Identity Politics are now shaping the society. The results are plain: 96% of the population is politically powerless.
“We’ll GIVE them civil rights,” Midge Decter once said in my cab, in the late 80s. “But not economic rights. Economic rights are not civil rights.”
So-called Progressives continue to play right into that hand.
Out of the darkness thanks to Mssrs Bradley, Assange & co:
Israel told U.S. officials in 2008 it would keep Gaza’s economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis, according to U.S. diplomatic cables
Arabs in rubble. That’s the policy.
Meanwhile Netanyahu calls on Obama to release from prison the Israeli spy Pollard.
Ed Note: See comments below to follow this strange story as it evolves — or more likely disappears in a cloud of web nonsense and, perhaps, professional disinformation.
JOHN WHEELER was the leader of the Vietnam Vets Memorial movement, among other things.
Career Air Force with sensitive assignments.
Showed up murdered in a dumpster the other day.
Meanwhile thousands of birds have been dropping dead out of the sky in Arkansas.
Now Inteltrends publishes a report that claims to have seen a Russian intel report saying that Wheeler was killed, by the Americans, because he
threatened to expose a U.S. Military test of poison gas that killed hundreds of thousands of animals in Arkansas this past week.
“The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions, are tasked to act on them.”
– Julian Assange, 2007 blog entry
Having looked into the Wikileaks a bit, one sees that Julian Assange is a new-age hero, and reaffirms that the American republic is dead.
New Yorker profile of Assange from earlier this year — must read.
Ron Paul’s reaction on the floor of the House — hear, hear him.
The great cache of pieces at The New York Times
Hackers of the World Unite in attacks on corporate and other sites in reaction to harassment of Assange
An overview of the American Empire’s lying machine
Upcoming data dump will focus on one of the big banks, perhaps the great zombie Bank of America:
“It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” Assange said in the November 2010 interview with Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.”
It’s a familiar question — Who was right, Orwell or Huxley? 1984 or Brave New World?
And the answer “both” is familar.
Here Chris Hedges updates the view for the new year.
