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The parochial attitude of North Americans is quite disturbing, and unjustified. We have unparalleled access to information and news from across the globe and by this feature alone we should be attuned to the plight of others and the injustice in the world. Yet, most of us are not. As long as shit happens ‘over there’ whether it be across an ocean, or the local river the daily pattern of our lives does not change.
Only when our routines are disrupted and our comfort zones threatened do we awake from our slumber. In our defence, there really isn’t another way to go about one’s life as the amount of horror in the world is a completely paralyzing notion and can only be examined at arms length if one wishes to remain sane.
But.
I think the balance between our safe cocoons and concern for the situations others needs to be reordered. The slow-fast human catastrophe that is Syria highlights exactly what I’m talking about.
“A chemical attack in Douma, the last rebel-held stronghold near Syria’s capital, Damascus, has killed at least 70 people and affected hundreds, rescue workers have told Al Jazeera.
The White Helmets, a group of rescuers operating in opposition-held areas in Syria, said on Saturday that most of the fatalities were women and children.
“Seventy people suffocated to death and hundreds are still suffocating,” Raed al-Saleh, head of the White Helmets, told Al Jazeera, adding that the death toll was expected to rise as many people were in critical condition.
Al-Saleh said that chlorine gas and an unidentified but stronger gas were dropped on Douma.”
We sit complicit while the Assad regime gasses its own people in their efforts to ‘stabilize’ their country.
“We are currently dealing with more than 1,000 cases of people struggling to breathe after the chlorine barrel bomb was dropped on the city. The number of dead will probably rise even further.”
The Douma Media Centre, a pro-opposition group, posted images on social media of people being treated by medics, and of what appeared to be dead bodies, including many women and children.
Rescue workers also posted videos of people appearing to show symptoms consistent with a gas attack. Some appeared to have white foam around their mouths and noses.
Symptoms of a chlorine attack include coughing, dyspnea, intensive irritation of the mucous membrane and difficulty in breathing.”
Being a civilian is Syria isn’t such a welcoming proposition. Chemical warfare is an agreed upon ‘no-go’ for most of the nations of the world. There is a treaty and everything.
“The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is an arms control treaty that outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors. The full name of the treaty is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction and it is administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands. The treaty entered into force in 1997.”
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This image released early Sunday, April 8, 2018 by the Syrian Civil Defence White Helmets, shows a rescue worker carrying a child following an alleged chemical weapons attack in the rebel-held town of Douma, near Damascus, Syria. White Helmets via AP
Yet this happens. And most of NA placidly accepts this. Maybe some tsk-tisking and/or a lament on how horrible the gassing of civilians is. But then, most of us just scroll onward past this tragedy that has been disconnected from our consciousness.
What is missing, at least in part, is the feeling of responsibility (not to mention the empathy of what it must be like trying to survive during a civil war) of our part in their ordeal.
“Joseph Massad on Al Jazeera said the term was “part of a US strategy of controlling [the movement’s] aims and goals” and directing it towards western-style liberal democracy.[17] When Arab Spring protests in some countries were followed by electoral success for Islamist parties, some American pundits coined the terms “Islamist Spring”[20] and “Islamist Winter”.
Also this from The Atlantic:
“Egyptian military officials wagered, rightly, that they could get away with what became, according to Human Rights Watch, the worst mass killing in modern Egyptian history—as well as one of the worst single-day mass killings in recent decades anywhere in the world.
America’s relative silence was no accident. To offer a strong, coherent response to the killings would have required a strategy, which would have required more, not less, involvement. This, however, would have been at cross-purposes with the entire thrust of the administration’s policy. Obama was engaged in a concerted effort to reduce its footprint in the Middle East. The phrase “leading from behind” quickly became a pejorative for Obama’s foreign-policy doctrine, but it captured a very real shift in America’s posture. The foreign-policy analysts Nina Hachigian and David Shorr called it the “Responsibility Doctrine,” a strategy of “prodding other influential nations … to help shoulder the burdens of fostering a stable, peaceful world order.” In pursuing this strategy in the Middle East, the United States left a power vacuum—and a proxy struggle. During Morsi’s year-long tenure, Qatar became the single largest foreign donor to Egypt, at over $5 billion (with Turkey contributing another $2 billion). Just days after the military moved against Morsi, it was Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait that pledged a massive $12 billion to the new military-appointed government.
The United States, along with the conservative Gulf monarchies and many others, also viewed Islamist parties with considerable suspicion.”
Being a world power, only when convenient, isn’t being a world power. Behaving only to protect the national interest places us squarely in the realm of realpolitik and the (a)moral compass associated with that mode of thinking. Syria lies on the border of two spheres of influence. The Russian empire and the American Empire. Arguably, Russia has greater influence, not least of all because of geographical proximity, on Syria and the maintenance of the current regime is in their national self interest. Thus the frisson between the American tacit support for the revolution (toward a US friendly regime) and the Russian support for the status quo and continuation within their own sphere of self-interest are the only realpolitik concerns on the table. The humanitarian disaster resulting from this friction between empires is but a footnote and not really mainstream news worthy – at least not past the ratings ‘bump’ procured for showing disconnected images of human suffering.
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A non-corporate real media would be all over the context of the situation portraying the real cost in human misery of what happens when spheres of influence collide and how little the ‘national interest’ cares about people dying ‘over there’. Yet with all our glitzy internet power and googleplexes of information at our fingertips has this sort of contextual analysis even been hinted at in North American mainstream media?
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Not really.
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Compare how the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera frame the article (also the sources on which this piece is based). A telling difference, the focus on the ‘facts’ versus the human angle that the Al-Jazeera piece. I think we need more of the second variety as we need to inspire empathy and the common human nature that binds us all together, so we can work toward a more peaceable future.
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(Unlikely as it may be.)
We’re playing with nuclear fire. Hell, we’re doing a fire dance with twirling batons ablaze in a fireworks factory. This all started after the US nuked Japan in 1945. Since then, we’ve just been piling more fireworks around the fire dancers and giving the dancers bigger batons to twirl. There is no logic to this death dance we inflict on ourselves and the world.
Noam Chomsky takes a historical look at the post 1945 nuclear world.
“That conclusion [USSR could not compete with the US] was underscored repeatedly in the years that followed. When Nikita Khrushchev took control in Russia in 1953 after Stalin’s death, he recognized that the USSR could not compete militarily with the U.S., the richest and most powerful country in history, with incomparable advantages. If it ever hoped to escape its economic backwardness and the devastating effect of the last world war, it would need to reverse the arms race.
Accordingly, Khrushchev proposed sharp mutual reductions in offensive weapons. The incoming Kennedy administration considered the offer and rejected it, instead turning to rapid military expansion, even though it was already far in the lead. The late Kenneth Waltz, supported by other strategic analysts with close connections to U.S. intelligence, wrote then that the Kennedy administration “undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen… even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States.” Again, harming national security while enhancing state power.
U.S. intelligence verified that huge cuts had indeed been made in active Soviet military forces, both in terms of aircraft and manpower. In 1963, Khrushchev again called for new reductions. As a gesture, he withdrew troops from East Germany and called on Washington to reciprocate. That call, too, was rejected. William Kaufmann, a former top Pentagon aide and leading analyst of security issues, described the U.S. failure to respond to Khrushchev’s initiatives as, in career terms, “the one regret I have.”
The Soviet reaction to the U.S. build-up of those years was to place nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962 to try to redress the balance at least slightly. The move was also motivated in part by Kennedy’s terrorist campaign against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which was scheduled to lead to invasion that very month, as Russia and Cuba may have known. The ensuing “missile crisis” was “the most dangerous moment in history,” in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s adviser and confidant.
As the crisis peaked in late October, Kennedy received a secret letter from Khrushchev offering to end it by simultaneous public withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The latter were obsolete missiles, already ordered withdrawn by the Kennedy administration because they were being replaced by far more lethal Polaris submarines to be stationed in the Mediterranean.
Kennedy’s subjective estimate at that moment was that if he refused the Soviet premier’s offer, there was a 33% to 50% probability of nuclear war — a war that, as President Eisenhower had warned, would have destroyed the northern hemisphere. Kennedy nonetheless refused Khrushchev’s proposal for public withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba and Turkey; only the withdrawal from Cuba could be public, so as to protect the U.S. right to place missiles on Russia’s borders or anywhere else it chose.
It is hard to think of a more horrendous decision in history — and for this, he is still highly praised for his cool courage and statesmanship.”
I’d hate to see what incensed, insane leadership looks like…
I’m reassured with the knowledge that a small legion of smart people are actively planning the demise of civilization and the majority of human life here on Earth. I’m thinking that these people need to be called the Fermi Corps because they are actively trying to prove Fermi’s Paradox and associated theory theory to be correct. Rajan Menon writes on Tom’s Dispatch on how our governments are attempting to normalize and rationalize nuclear solutions that spell the end of our world.
What is scary (on top of the base amount of scary) is how insular this report (NPR) seems to be.
“Instead, [the Nuclear Posture Review] it makes an elaborate case for a massive expansion and “modernization” of what’s already the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal (6,800 warheads versus 7,000 for Russia) so that an American commander-in-chief has a “diverse set of nuclear capabilities that provide… flexibility to tailor the approach to deterring one or more potential adversaries in different circumstances.”
The NPR insists that future presidents must have advanced “low-yield” or “useable” nuclear weapons to wield for limited, selective strikes. The stated goal: to convince adversaries of the foolishness of threatening or, for that matter, launching their own limited strikes against the American nuclear arsenal in hopes of extracting “concessions” from us. This is where Strangelovian logic and nuclear absurdity take over. What state in its right mind would launch such an attack, leaving the bulk of the U.S. strategic nuclear force, some 1,550 deployed warheads, intact? On that, the NPR offers no enlightenment.
You don’t have to be an acolyte of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz or have heard about his concept of “friction” to know that even the best-laid plans in wartime are regularly shredded. Concepts like limited nuclear war and nuclear blackmail may be fun to kick around in war-college seminars. Trying them out in the real world, though, could produce disaster. This ought to be self-evident, but to the authors of the NPR it’s not. They portray Russia and China as wild-eyed gamblers with an unbounded affinity for risk-taking.
The document gets even loopier. It seeks to provide the commander-in-chief with nuclear options for repelling non-nuclear attacks against the United States, or even its allies. Presidents, insists the document, require “a range of flexible nuclear capabilities,” so that adversaries will never doubt that “we will defeat non-nuclear attacks.” Here’s the problem, though: were Washington to cross that nuclear Rubicon and launch a “limited” strike during a conventional war, it would enter a true terra incognita. The United States did, of course, drop two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945, but that country lacked the means to respond in kind.
However, Russia and China, the principal adversaries the NPR has in mind (though North Korea gets mentioned as well), do have just those means at hand to strike back. So when it comes to using nuclear weapons selectively, its authors quickly find themselves splashing about in a sea of bizarre speculation. They blithely assume that other countries will behave precisely as American military strategists (or an American president) might ideally expect them to and so will interpret the nuclear “message” of a limited strike (and its thousands of casualties) exactly as intended. Even with the aid of game theory, war games, and scenario building — tools beloved by war planners — there’s no way to know where the road marked “nuclear flexibility” actually leads. We’ve never been on it before. There isn’t a map. All that exists are untested assumptions that already look shaky.”
Our demise as a species is being laid out, piecemeal, by people who should know better. Realistically the only ‘nuclear button’ needed by the the ‘great powers’ is one that is labelled “The End of All Civilization” because there are no winners in a nuclear exchange.
It might even be better just to have a button that incinerates one’s own country and civilian population, as a quick (relatively quick-ish) nuclear conflagration seems to be a more humanitarian endpoint than the slow starvation and decent into chaos that is promised with nuclear winter.
Sounds a bit macabre, I realize, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t prefer the nuclear winter option, as my mad blogging skillz and boff0 teaching portfolio have no utility in any sort of post apocalyptic scenario.
The tortures that the Grecian people are being subjected to by the neo-liberal institutions of Europe (European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF) are unnecessarily brutal and threaten to unravel the fabric of their society. We can learn what is in store for other nations that dare to act against the ‘good prudence’ of the current economic elite. Robert Hunziker writes about the toxic economic prescription being forced onto Greece and some of the reasoning behind it.
“Mysteriously, but maybe not so mysterious, this particular Greek Tragedy does not pass the sniff test. Something is rotten, somewhere. In order to get to the bottom of it, according to Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, member Secretariat of Syriza: “The Greek Reform Program was no mistake but was and remains the premeditated assassination, by economic and political means, of a European nation and its state, for reasons of much wider significance than the significance of the country itself,” Ibid.
Which prompts: Why so brutally horribly dehumanizing?
According to one analysis, Greece is the scapegoat for all European ills, thus it represents a looming threat to all other abusers of neoliberal dicta. The rationale: Other delinquent southern European countries were spared the hatchet only because, if Troika brutalized them as well, it risks alliances of like-minded protagonists and revolt all across half of Europe. Which would exceed the wherewithal of the grand neoliberal crusade and possibly blow its covert operations wide open for all to see. As it happens, Greece was/is low hanging fruit and a perfect whipping boy that hopefully knocks some sense into spendthrift Mediterranean lefties, or so the Troika likely assumes. Otherwise, why destroy Greece?
As it happened, Troika misrepresented good intentions, and in fact lied by publicly claiming Greece was receiving enormous amounts of financial support from its European partners, whereas 95% of those funds zip-zip right back to Deutsche Bank, PNB Paribas, and other U.S. and European banks, bypassing Greece’s banks and citizens as quickly as a finger click. But wait; of course, Greece keeps five percent.
In order to receive Troika’s financial bailout, Greece has undergone a massive transfer of public assets, all the best stuff, to privatization interests, part of the hardcore hypothesis behind neoliberalism, e.g., (1) 14 major regional airports sold to Germany’s Fraport, (2) the Port of Piraeus, one of the largest ports in Europe sold to China’s Cosco, (3) the Port of Thessaloniki, which is Greece’s second largest city, sold to a German consortium, and (4) privatization funds created, under Germany’s direction, for water utility transfers to private hands, prompting the president of the Greece water company trade union to forewarn that the for-profit model often times raises prices for consumers and sometimes service degrades. But then it’s too late to do much about it.
And, come to think of it, why should water be a for-profit enterprise in the first instance? And, why should ports, as old as the city of Athens, be for-profit private enterprises? By longevity alone, it is an iconic attachment to Greece, dating back centuries upon centuries. Maybe some precious things in life should escape the dictates of profit for the few in favor of the common interests of the many.
Regardless, financial colonization is ripping Greece to shreds same as 19th-century European colonization of Africa, in harmony with the Industrial Revolution, shredded natural resources. But, nowadays Industrial Revolution is passé as the Internet revolutionizes everything, other than the onslaught of neoliberalism’s transnational elite special forces.”
I think we, as Canadians, should be aware of what is in the toolbox of the world’s financial instituions when it comes to deal with countries that are ‘in need of financial discipline’.
If democracy is to be a useful concept for our future generations one aspect that is necessarily going to have to change is the level of engagement people have toward their political system. What is in play now is a plutocratic distortion of what representative government is supposed to look like. When our political representatives (continuously) fail at their mandated role – representing the people that voted for them – it is easy to see how the apathy sets in. Consistently getting the short end of the stick from whichever party happens to be in control isn’t a very heartening situation.
The problem is that the current system works exquisitely well for a select few and thus, change to the political system would endanger their extravagant lifestyles an expectations.
And that, most certainly, will not do.
Therefore increasing voter apathy and furthering the disconnect between people and the political process is a necessity to maintain the current system. The demobilization of the American public is evinced by the dull eyed phlegmatic indifference to such alarming concepts like that of ‘generational war’. When people just shrug off the very real possibility of endless war (with Oceana) your society has a problem. Stephanie Savell writes about the deadening of the public interest in her essay that appears on Tom’s Dispatch titled “The Hidden Costs of America’s Wars“.
“Of course, it’s hardly surprising these days that our government is far from transparent about so many things, but doing original research on the war on terror has brought this into stark relief for me. I was stunned at how difficult it can be to find the most basic information, scattered at so many different websites, often hidden, sometimes impossible to locate. One obscure but key source for the map we did, for example, proved to be a Pentagon list labeled “Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medals Approved Areas of Eligibility.” From it, my team and I were able to learn of places like Ethiopia and Greece that the military deems part of that “War on Terrorism.” We were then able to crosscheck these with the State Department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism,” which officially document terrorist incidents, country by country, and what each country’s government is doing to counter terrorism.
This research process brought home to me that the detachment many Americans feel in relation to those post-9/11 wars is matched — even fed — by the opacity of government information about them. This no doubt stems, at least in part, from a cultural trend: the demobilization of the American people. The government demands nothing of the public, not even minimalist acts like buying war bonds (as in World War II), which would not only help offset the country’s growing debt from its war-making, but might also generate actual concern and interest in those wars. (Even if the government didn’t spend another dollar on its wars, our research shows that we will still have to pay a breathtaking $8 trillion extra in interest on past war borrowing by the 2050s.)
Our map of the war on terror did, in fact, get some media attention, but as is so often the case when we reach out to even theoretically sympathetic congressional representatives, we heard nothing back from our outreach. Not a peep. That’s hardly surprising, of course, since like the American people, Congress has largely been demobilized when it comes to America’s wars (though not when it comes to pouring ever more federal dollars into the U.S. military).
Last October, when news came out about four Green Berets killed by an Islamic State affiliate in the West African nation of Niger, congressional debates revealed that American lawmakers had little idea where in the world our troops were stationed, what they were doing there, or even the extent of counterterrorism activity among the Pentagon’s various commands. Yet the majority of those representatives remain all too quick to grant blank checks to President Trump’s requests for ever greater military spending (as was also true of requests from presidents Bush and Obama).
After visiting some congressional offices in November, my colleagues and I were struck that even the most progressive among them were talking only about allocating slightly — and I mean slightly — less money to the Pentagon budget, or supporting slightly fewer of the hundreds of military bases with which Washington garrisons the globe. The idea that it might be possible to work toward ending this country’s “forever wars” was essentially unmentionable.
Such a conversation could only come about if Americans — particularly young Americans — were to become passionate about stopping the spread of the war on terror, now considered little short of a “generational struggle” by the U.S. military. For any of this to change, President Trump’s enthusiastic support for expanding the military and its budget, and the fear-based inertia that leads lawmakers to unquestioningly support any American military campaign, would have to be met by a strong counterforce. Through the engagement of significant numbers of concerned citizens, the status quo of war making might be reversed, and the rising tide of the U.S. counterterror wars stemmed.”
The challenge here, in the beginning, is to raise awareness of the problems that face the American populace. People need the context in order to name the problems that affect them.
Our actions are causing the earth to warm. This is easy slam dunk science. Yet somehow the leader of the free world didn’t get the memo. Michael Klare writes:
“In energy terms, what does dominant mean in practice? For President Trump and his cohorts, it means above all the “unleashing” of the country’s energy abundance by eliminating every imaginable regulatory impediment to the exploitation of domestic reserves of fossil fuels. After all, America possesses some of the largest reservoirs of oil, coal, and natural gas on the planet and, by applying every technological marvel at its disposal, can maximally extract those reserves to enhance national power.
“The truth is that we have near-limitless supplies of energy in our country,” he declared last June. All that stood in the way of exploiting them when he entered the Oval Office, he insisted, were environmental regulations imposed by the Obama administration. “We cannot have obstruction. Since my very first day in office, I have been moving at record pace to cancel these regulations and to eliminate the barriers to domestic energy production.” He then cited his approval of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, the cancellation of a moratorium on the leasing of federal lands for coal mining, the reversal of an Obama administration rule aimed at preventing methane leakage from natural gas production on federal lands, and the rollback of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which (if implemented) would require sharp cuts in coal usage. And from the recent opening of the pristine Alaskan Arctic Refuge to that of those coastal waters to every kind of drilling, it’s never ended.
Closely related to such actions has been his repudiation of the Paris Agreement, because — as he saw it — that pact, too, stood in the way of his plan to “unleash” domestic energy in the pursuit of international power. By withdrawing from the agreement, he claimed to be preserving American “sovereignty,” while opening the path to a new kind of global energy dominance. “We have so much more [energy] than we ever thought possible,” he asserted. “We are really in the driving seat. And you know what? We don’t want to let other countries take away our sovereignty and tell us what to do and how to do it. That’s not going to happen.”
Never mind that the Paris agreement in no way intruded on American sovereignty. It only obligated its partners — at this point, every country on Earth except the United States — to enact its own greenhouse gas emissions reduction measures aimed at preventing global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial levels. (That is the biggest increase scientists believe the planet can absorb without experiencing truly catastrophic impacts like a 10-foot rise in global sea levels). In the Obama years, in its own self-designed blueprint for achieving this goal, the United States promised, among other things, to implement the Clean Power Plan to minimize the consumption of coal, itself already a dying industry. This, of course, represented an unacceptable impediment to Trump’s extract-everything policy.”
I’m glad the people in power will get a few more sweet sweet dollars. Perhaps they can purchase a large dam to keep the oceans at bay too..
*sigh*
I think, perhaps, the American public – so disassociated with what democracy actually is – has already begun the labourious task of wallpapering over the elephant in the room.
Is there a more obvious example of how undemocratic a supposedly democratic national is (hmm..18 years of being at war racking up trillions of dollars of war debt that will cripple their future *and* creating more terror and instability in the world)?
The current system will remain until change is forced on the powers that be.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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