Kamala Harris and Nuclear War

I disagree with RFK, Jr. about the need to elect Donald Trump. IMO, he is not a good choice for President based on his unprofessional rhetoric, his unstable personality and his poor decision-making on many issues. I agree with everything else RFK, Jr. says in this video. Voting for Kamala Harris and her neocon buddy Dick Cheney (along with current Biden administration neocons, including Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland) is a vote for non-ending wars of discretion and an existentially high risk of nuclear war. I know we have tragically limited bad choices in this election, but based on this one issue alone, I am convinced that a vote for Harris is self-destructive

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War is Murder

I'm to the point now where I don't think I fought for the country. I fought for some politician's view on something. I remember one dude in particular that I killed him. I shot his buddy, and then I came through his room. I killed him in front of his wife in a bedroom because he went for a gun.

And I think about him now, and it's like, all right, why did I kill that guy? Well, because he went for a gun. Okay, but why did he go for a gun? Well, because I was in his fucking room at two in the morning. Well, why was that in his room at two in the morning? Well, because George fucking Bush was pissed that Saddam Hussein allegedly wanted to kill his dad. So we invaded.

And then I start to think, was this guy funny? What if I met him in Paris over a coffee? Would we actually have liked each other? I just killed him because a politician sent us here for weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.

War is Murder. Time to kill the euphemism

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Chris Hedges Comments on the U.S. Security State and the DNC

Chris Hedges was recently on Glenn Greenwald's System Update offering a wide-ranging analysis of current events. I copied the following excerpts concerning the U.S. Security State and the disturbing transformation of the DNC:

G. Greenwald: Anyone covering foreign policy and covering wars as you did for so long, obviously has to deal with, in all sorts of ways, the U.S. security state, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and sort of how it influences a lot of these policies. There's no way to understand one without the other. After 9/11, we saw this series of whistleblowers from within the U.S. Security State, and people like William Binney, Thomas Drake, and, of course, culminating with Edward Snowden, all have the same grievance, namely, that the whole foundation of this secret part of our government that would act without democratic accountability and outside of any transparency would be the one taboo would ever be turning their power inward to manipulate the American population and domestic population. And a lot of that came forward primarily based on their grievance, that that was the thing that they thought would never happen. And they were seeing that more and more and more and more, that almost as much as these agencies were focused on foreign governments, they were focused on our domestic politics as well. I know there's been a lot of that since the creation of the U.S. Security State, but do you agree that that has gotten worse and more dire, more evident – the idea that the U.S. Security State now plays a bigger role than ever before in our domestic politics?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it's completely unaccountable and you can't control it. That's the problem. And Arnold Toynbee when he writes about the decline of the Empire, talks about these rogue intelligence, military complexes, institutions that essentially can no longer be regulated, can no longer be constrained. All of the people who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, you know, there should be accountability there. Not only is there no accountability, but the same people are leading us into the disasters in Ukraine and funneling weapons to sustain the genocide in Gaza. And that's very dangerous because, at the beginning of an empire, empires are very judicious, usually about the use of force. What characterizes declining dying empires is military adventurism, where they seek to gain a diminishing or a loss to Germany through a military fiasco. And I think we can start with Vietnam and go basically right through just one military debacle after another. What we've done in the Middle East is probably the greatest strategic blunder, you know, in American history.

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Where Did All of Those Blue and Gold Flags Go?

Those blue and gold flags used to be all over social media, on front porches and on car bumpers. Where did they go? It demonstrates the shallowness of our reasons and the strength of our tribalism.

Next time we are thinking about going to war, we should keep in mind the U.S. track record for "success" through war:

The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.

Also from Chris Hedges: The biggest problem with war it that it generates an illusion that war provides its own meaning:

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war’s appeal.

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.

It is part of war’s perversity that we lionize those who make great warriors and excuse their excesses in the name of self-defense

As war gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists.

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What is a Neocon?

One of today's bravest, most principled journalists, arguably the person best able to consistently and clearly analyze complex issues is Glenn Greenwald. I've followed his work for twenty years and I am repeatedly impressed with his ability to see the forest as well as the highly detailed trees. Glenn was a practicing civil rights attorney early in his career, which helps to explain his ability to discuss the intersection of current events within the existing legal framework. But he also has an outstanding understanding of history, which is a stark contrast with most journalists, who seem to thing that the only thing that matters is what happens today. If you haven't yet seen Glenn's show, System Update, I highly recommend that you give it a try.

I find myself writing recognition of Greenwald's talents and accomplishments today because I am about to rely on his work once again. Today, I found myself frustrated with nonstop U.S. warmongering, muttering to myself about the "neocons." I then stopped to ask myself "What, precisely is a neocon?" I'm going to quote Glenn Greenwald extensively here. He traces the history of neocons from their earlier peak of power, embedded as Republicans, plunging us into the tragic invasion of Iraq in 2003. They seemed to disappear after that abject failure, but somehow they are back in control in Joe Biden's Cabinet. Two prominent Iraq War architects, Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken, are now wearing Democrat costumes. They are in the process of plunging the U.S. into two (or more) new major wars of discretion? Why? Because they are neocons. Here's Glenn Greenwald, explaining the term:

One of the most extraordinary, alarming and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives. Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq. The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly, of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack, namely that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through the application of superior military force, in essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attacks, invasions, bombings, regime change, coups and much more. This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.

This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new. The U.S. fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world, on every continent, during the Cold War and after but what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities:

First, they have no other politics beyond their quest for endless war. Many neocons in fact began as liberals or even leftists and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be as long as doing so served the only issue they really cared about: placing the US in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own. Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9/11 attacks – that attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq – they have supported every new and proposed American war since then. "Neocons" is a polite euphemism for "bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers."

Second, neocons, by definition, barely even pretend to care about the truth, whether they know it or not. The smarter ones do, the dumber ones don't. They are often followers of the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss, and his belief in the “noble lie”, falsehoods propagated by those who are superior in society to deceive and mislead the peasants into acting contrary to their own belief system, for their own good as elites to find that concept for them. It was no accident that the war in Iraq, along with every U.S. war that followed, began – and then was sustained – with propaganda so intense and deceitful that calling them lies is a woeful understatement. Neocons do believe in lies. They believe in lies – and appear to derive arousal from them – almost as much as they believe in and find purpose and excitement in wars.

Neocons were said to have reached the peak of their power during the Bush-Cheney administration when the trauma of the 9/11 attack and the fear and anger it inspired finally gave them the fuel to usher their demented agenda of endless permanent war. The utter failure of the Iraq War and the realization that it was based on lies told to the public through the corporate media, often led by neocons themselves, supposedly resulted in neocons finally being expelled from power and influence in Washington. They were discredited, we were told, finally unmasked as the deceitful sociopaths that they are.

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