Chris Hedges Describes our Self-Destructive Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine

Chris Hedges describes the dire situation. At the end of this passage he ties in the poison of Russiagate, as exposed by the Twitter Files and the recent reporting of Matt Taibbi:

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.

In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”

Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.

Continue ReadingChris Hedges Describes our Self-Destructive Proxy War with Russia in Ukraine

For 2023, How about Fewer Headlines Like These?

We must not forget that the New York Times cheer-leaded us into Iraq, thanks to a long stream of inaccurate WMD articles by Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman. The NYT is currently a big promoter or U.S. military involvement in Ukraine. It makes you wonder whether the NYT full-on uncritical embrace of Russiagate was the warm-up act for its Ukraine position.

At some point, we need to recognize that insanity is watching the NYT do the same thing over and over, yet assume that it will act otherwise.

My hope for 2023: That our journalists (especially the NYT) will become more thoughtful, more open to evidence, and there will be fewer articles like:

Greenwald's discussion below is well worth watching and carefully bolstered with evidence and topped off with comments by Noam Chomsky:

Continue ReadingFor 2023, How about Fewer Headlines Like These?

The Ease of Starting Wars

History proves how easy it is to convince the people of a country to go to war. This has always been true. Our leaders convince us that we are in danger and then they offer us a solution to our problems. In modern times, this means handing billions of dollars of taxpayer money to corporations like Raytheon. It works so well that every Democrat votes for doing it over and over in the case of Ukraine. Every member of the most liberal faction of the Democrats goes along with the scheme for the reason stated by Hermann Goering.

Julian Assange:

Populations don’t like wars. They have to be fooled into wars.. Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies

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Some of the Costs of the U.S. “Wars on Terror”

In the U.S., we tend to think mostly about our own losses, our own wounded and dead. The costs we inflict on other people with our war machine are estimated in Jacob Crosse's article: "Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million." An excerpt:

A staggering new report coauthored by Professor David Vine at the Watson Institute at Brown University conservatively estimates that 37 million people, equivalent to the entire population of Canada, have been forced to flee their home country, or have become internally displaced within it by nearly two decades of unending US imperialist war. The analysis, published by the Costs of War Project, sought to quantify for the first time the number of people displaced by the United States military operations since President George W. Bush declared a “global war on terror” in September 2001 following the still unexplained attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.

Professor Vine and his coauthors note that the 37 million estimated displaced is a “very conservative estimate,” with the real number of people displaced since September 2001, “closer to 48-59 million.” That is as much as, or more than, all of the displaced persons in World War II and therefore more than any other war in the last century. It is difficult to articulate the levels of misery, poverty, hardship, strife, pain and death visited upon entire societies and endured by millions of people.

The latest Costs of War report focused on eight countries that have been subjected to major US military operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

. . . The authors estimate that 9.2 million people in Iraq and 7.1 million in Syria have been displaced respectively, in both cases roughly 37 percent of the prewar population. . . .Somalia, where US forces have been operating since 2002, has the highest percentage of displaced persons with 46 percent of the country or nearly 4.2 million people displaced.

Throughout the “war on terror,” the authors estimate between 770,000 and 801,000 civilians and combatants on all sides have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen since US forces began military operations in those countries. The number of “indirect deaths,” that is, those who weren’t confirmed killed by military weaponry, but died due to lack of healthcare, infrastructure, or food as a result of US military operations, embargoes and blockades may exceed 3.1 million, although the authors noted that credible estimates range in excess of 12 million.

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The Risk of Nuclear War is Skyrocketing and Few Seem to Notice

The Ukraine war began Feb 24, 2020. Based on the above estimates, in only 8 months, the risk of nuclear war has increased somewhere between 400% and 2500%. Shouldn't this threat of annihilation be on the headline of every newspaper every day? Shouldn't the cost-benefit analysis of U.S. involvement have been discussed in open hearings in Congress before the U.S. jacked up the risk that we will all die for a territorial dispute involving a country most Americans couldn't have located on a map one year ago?

Is the problem that I'm in my 60s and I remember the terror we all felt during the Cuban Missile crisis? Is it that we are now a generation hooked on video games and violent movies, such that things always work out in the end (or if not, we hit the reboot button or wait for the next episode)?

Continue ReadingThe Risk of Nuclear War is Skyrocketing and Few Seem to Notice