Tag Archives: Cold War

Political Rants

The titanic struggle: A-holes vs. effers

Leave a comment

Another week of wall-to-wall reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That characterization of the operation is tantamount to a federal offense now in Russia. Whereas there they use force to make people think a certain way, over here we use the Edward Bernays method. That’s why polling shows a majority of Americans wanting the President to be “tougher” in his approach to the Ukraine crisis.

Majority support for policies that could easily result in total nuclear annihilation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Reporting on the atrocities Russia is committing in Ukraine flows in a constant stream from the corporate media. To be clear, it is 100% something that should be reported on heavily. But this is more than coverage. It is an influence campaign, and it may just get us all killed.

A game of absolutes

One of the sure signs that the networks are propagandizing us is the characterization of this war as part of a broader struggle between freedom and tyranny. Even Chris Hayes went on a tear about his last week, bizarrely extending this metaphor to the Cold War era. This claim doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Did we fight our near-genocidal war in Vietnam for “freedom”? I think not. Read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves. This is not good vs. evil, for we are not good.

Now, I expect this kind of thing out of the likes of Joe Scarborough, who is constantly laboring at the Reagan myth, desperately trying to keep it alive for another generation. Even on his show you will hear from people counseling caution, like Richard Haas. Those are the exceptions, though. It’s mostly a chorus of voices bearing witness to the suffering of Ukrainians in minute detail, showing frustration out of a lack of action on the part of the administration. The absolutism of good vs. evil is an essential component in their argument.

More like 1914 … or 2003

Frequent MSNBC guest Michael McFaul is back on the network, having suffered no real penalty for his endorsement of a comparison between Putin with Hitler, in which Hitler came out ahead. He was on Twitter telling people to stop talking about World War III, which was odd because he seems so wrapped up in World War II. McFaul is a fan of brinkmanship with respect to Ukraine – he thinks we can get a lot closer to open conflict without risk of nuclear war.

This is what happens when people take their own analogies too seriously. This is not World War II. We have nuclear weapons – thousands of them. We cannot do the kinds of things we did before those weapons existed. It’s simply not an option. There are many reasons why this period is nothing like 1939, but the nuclear question is probably the most salient difference. In all honesty, if you’re going to compare this with a world war, the closer analogy is 1914, when an accidental war prompted Europeans to slaughter each other by the millions for no good reason.

Don’t burn bridges

I’ve said it before. There’s only one way out of this horrendous conflict, and that’s through some kind of negotiated settlement. Cranking up the rhetoric makes this less likely, not more. For the Ukrainians’ sake, it’s better to make the deal now than later when their country is in even more of a shambles and many thousands more have lost their lives.

Ultimately Russia and Ukraine are going to have to reconcile themselves to being neighbors. That’s never going to change – it’s just geography. They need to find a path out of this mess, and we need to do everything in our power to help them get there.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Towards yet another new cold war

Leave a comment

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. As a society, we appear to be stuck in a holding pattern, circling our somewhat fractured collective memory of the Cold War. It seems we long for the illusion of a simple, good guys v. bad guys conflict, and we will stop at nothing to conjure one up again.

The echoes of the previous Cold War still reverberate, sometimes in odd and almost laughable ways. For instance, this week my Congressional Rep. Claudia Tenney called Pope Francis a communist. She is, of course, an unreconstructed Trumpist just visible under a faded coat of John Birch Society lacquer. But putting aside retrograde small-fry politicians mired in the failed policies of previous decades, we face a much larger problem.

Paging Howard Phillips!

Back in the days before the Internet, crazy people could only make their voices heard on radio and direct access cable television. One of those crazy people was the late Howard Phillips, co-founder of the American Constitution party or Taxpayers’ Party. Phillips had a regular show on direct access in the 1980s and 90s where he would rail against China, show scary videos, and look kind of grisly on his best days.

The reason I raise this is that even back then, this mentality was dated. We used to laugh about Phillips’s big map of “Red China” behind his desk, straight from the 1950s. Now he’s gone, but the anti-China rhetoric is still with us. Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty to criticize about China. But people in glass houses …. etc. The folks that angst over China’s policy towards Taiwan probably don’t give Puerto Rico’s status a moment’s thought.

Barry’s pivot, redux

True to form, Biden is resuscitating some of the worst parts of Obama’s foreign policy while preserving some of the worst elements of Trump’s. Both of his predecessors took aim at China, most notably Obama, whose “pivot to Asia” filled me with both dread and anger at the time. (What’s with the “pivot” language? Clearly meant to conjure up images of howitzers, or some gun fighter turning on his heel.)

This is obviously a priority for Biden, as indicated by the fact that he was willing to put the French government’s nose out of joint in service to their planned confrontation with China. They have continued training exercises, started under Trump, with the Taiwanese military, and extended arms sales. What’s more, their pullout from Afghanistan has freed up additional forces that they can devote to confronting China.

Slow-motion train wreck

Look, folks – this is not good. We are heading for a conflict with a nation of over a billion people The policies we are putting in place will eventually lead to military clashes between our two countries, whether intentional or accidental. That would have catastrophic consequences.

We need to stop this madness before it starts. Make clear to your congressional representatives that you do not want this coming war. Tell your friends and neighbors, even the Trump-ites. My guess is that no one wants this to happen, so the sooner we make our voices heard, the better.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Missed us by that much: nuclear brinkmanship

Leave a comment

This week was the 76th anniversary of our having dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? What an insane thing to do – though to be frank, at that point in the war our bombers were laying waste to Japanese cities with conventional bombs, including a 1000 plane raid on Tokyo. (The commander liked the number.)

When we pay homage to those whose lives were lost or permanently altered by this episode, we do so in the knowledge that things went from bad to worse over the years that followed. The system we set up over the arc of the Cold War was aptly described as a “Doomsday Machine”. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg reviews this system in great detail in his recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Planning for first strike/use

One thing that wasn’t particularly surprising about Ellsberg’s book was the fact that U.S. nuclear policy has always been based on the idea of first strike or first use. The reasoning is pretty simple – launch an overwhelming strike that eliminates the enemy’s ability to launch their own attack, partly by targeting their nuclear arsenal. The other component is that of blackmail, in essence – do as we say or we will blow up your cities.

What Ellsberg makes clear is that their actual plan in the 1950s and early 60s was, in the event of a general war, to bomb both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China to smithereens, even if the Chinese were not a party to the conflict. Of course, we know now (and they likely knew then) that any large exchange of H-bombs would result in virtual omnicide, but our war planners tried not to dwell on that notion.

Planes, trains, and autonomous vehicles

This insane “war” plan – really, an annihilation plan – was built on the flimsiest platform back in the 1950s. Supposedly only the president could give the order to use nuclear weapons. That authority, according to Ellsberg, was delegated to regional commanders, either explicitly or implicitly (there was supposedly a letter from Eisenhower to his commanders setting out the authority, though no one seemed to be able to produce a copy).

The plan relied on bombers back then and a very unreliable global communication system that could be disrupted by the weather. Later on, it was ICBMs with MIRV’ed warheads (multiple independent H-bomb warheads in a single missile), but the game was the same – use them or lose them.

It got to such a point of madness that during the Carter administration, planners seriously considered a massive construction project out west to support the MX missile program. It was like an enormous shell game, with thousands of miles of track, mobile launchers, bunkers, pools, fake missiles, all to throw the Soviets off.

Still crazy after all these years

Suffice to say that we still live with the remnants of this madness. After a number of close calls, when the entire ramshackle enterprise almost came crashing down on us all, we are still apparently willing to extend the life of these weapons yet another generation.

The longer these weapons exist, the greater the danger that they will be used. If our leaders really wanted to keep us safe, they would take the lead in ending the nuclear standoff once and for all. Their failure to do so speaks volumes.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Bad old days.

Leave a comment

I’m beginning to dread the next administration, whoever wins the upcoming election. It’s hard to dispel the notion that we are heading into a period of increasingly bellicose foreign policy, in response to circumstances that are the direct result of our previous decades of bellicose foreign policy. Ugly as these circumstances are, they do not justify the further application of American military power in places like Afghanistan, where we’ve been blowing things (and people) up for 14 years, and Syria, where we appear to be fighting on both sides of the ongoing conflict. And yet virtually every presidential candidate sounds ready to keep the imperial ball rolling, even though the policy is an obvious failure in every sense of the word.

What 40 years of bad policy looks like.The trouble with approaching these issues with an imperial mindset is that we are blind to our own failures while expressing righteous indignation over the failings of others. Russia’s military action in Syria is a good example. They are perhaps the fifth or sixth power to drop bombs in that unfortunate country. Their strategy, while militaristic and morally bankrupt, is not difficult to understand – they view Islamic radicalism as an extreme threat, and they make the not unrealistic assumption that the fall of Syria’s government would result in a failed state something like Libya or Somalia or Iraq (all of which are beneficiaries of our aforementioned bellicosity). So, like the U.S.’s support of Saudi’s murderous campaign in Yemen, they are applying force in support of Assad’s crumbling regime.

Of course, when we or our allies commit crimes (as we so often do), it’s presented as understandable, even noble. When official enemies commit crimes, it’s reprehensible. That’s vintage imperial statecraft. The offense taken at Russia’s actions fits this template, but also speaks to another dynamic – that of a kind of longing for the simplicity and drama of the Cold War. I’m not entirely referring to the administration here – they encourage this to some extent – but the corporate media, the pundits, the opinion-makers are all fully vested in this enterprise. The more elderly among them, those who lived through the actual Cold War, want to get the band back together again, so to speak. The younger pundits and journalists were brought up to revere the fairy tales told by their elders and want to join in the melodrama of facing off with an “evil empire”.

We are in such a cultural moment, I believe (just look at the current crop of blockbuster movies). At a time in human history when it is absolutely imperative that the nations of the world work together, we cannot afford this poisonous brand of nostalgia.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

New cold war on tap.

Leave a comment

The full-court press is on. The Obama team has been channeling Bush/Romney for the past couple of weeks, delivering on the promise of a more aggressive foreign policy on several fronts, most ominously (in my humble opinion) in far eastern Europe, on the indefensible frontiers of U.S./European capitalism and military hegemony. Obama has announce that we will be taking part in NATO exercises in western Ukraine; roughly the equivalent of Russia or China or Iran doing the same in western Cuba, except that Russia has been attacked ruinously by foreign alliances via their western frontier twice over the last century. (The same, of course, cannot be said of us and our southern frontier.)

This is the threat to world peace?At the close of the Cold War, it was understood that expansion of NATO would be seen as provocative by Russia, but because Russia was in a weak position, their economy destroyed by massive privatization, shock therapy structural adjustment, guided by some of our Chicago-school fanatics, we felt free to ignore their concerns. That worked so long as our drunken ally Yeltsin was in command. But now that the extremely powerful Russian presidency (which we supported under Yeltsin) has been inherited by a sober ex-KGB officer, and the Russian economy has been lifted somewhat by oil revenues, they have found the confidence to voice their objections. And, of course, we’re shocked, shocked!

I’ve never been a fan of Putin (even when our government was), but if this “Russian aggression” as I’ve heard on radio and television for several weeks now, it’s not very, well, aggressive. Sure, they’re helping their allies in eastern Ukraine, now under attack from Kiev, just as we massively intervene on the side of governments and movements all over the world. Putin, for all of his foibles, at least has a definable national interest to invoke in Ukraine. What’s our excuse in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, etc., etc.? Much more abstract, to say the least.

Why are we looking for this fight? And if we are, how can we accuse anyone else of being a threat to world peace?