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Fascinating reading about some of the circular nature of events that are playing out in the Middle East as of late. This excerpt from the Counterpunch article titled Once More, Into the Quagmire.
The Middle East Needs Our Military Might
One can hear, in the reverberating noise of mainstream justifications, a series of claims. Among them is the idea that the Middle East is united in opposition to ISIS. Indeed it is, if you confine your poll to the rotten monarchies of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Adding Jordan to the mix, this fulsome collection of anti-democratic and largely puritanical theocrats is by some stretch of the imagination supposed to provide Arab and Muslim legitimacy to America’s war.
Fancy that, legitimacy conferred by five of the most authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Thus we are ostensibly defending the cause of freedom by assembling a coalition of five treacherous freedom deniers. One human rights violator is leading a coalition of human rights violators against a new human rights violator whose actions deeply offend it. We are appalled at the sight of beheadings and intend to destroy those who practice it, supported by the leading beheader on the Arabian Peninsula. We bomb ISIS oil depots, claiming they have been criminally seized. This barely a decade after we criminally seized major Iraqi oil contracts, while our troops “guarded” the oil ministry (from ‘insurgents’).
Then there’s the dutifully ignored footnote, a poll conducted by the Arab America Institute, which found that:
“Strong majorities in every country favor U.S. policies that support a negotiated solution to the conflict, coupled with more support for Syrian refugees. Majorities in all countries oppose any form of U.S. military engagement (i.e., “no-fly zone,” air strikes, or supplying advanced weapons to the opposition).”
And most Arabs found President Obama most effective in ending the U.S. presence in Iraq. Perhaps the true patriot could efface all of this were it not for the additional fact that our partners in extermination are the leading financial backers of extremists across the Arab world. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are nothing if not open-air markets for arms merchants, money launderers, and angry mullah mosque builders. You could be forgiven for wondering if half our coalition is helping attack ISIS and then immediately re-arming it when it emerges from the rubble, as it invariably will. This is what’s known in arch capitalist circles as “creative destruction.”
Fifty seven years ago seems like a long time, but in term of changing cultural norms it was mere minutes, we still have such a long way to go. Three cheers for Ms.Counts and her steely determination, courage and perseverance in the face of such ugly human behaviour.
In 1956, forty black students applied for transfers at a white school. At 15 years of age, on 4 September 1957, Dorothy Counts was one of the four black students enrolled at various all-white schools in the district; She was at Harry Harding High School, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Three students were enrolled at other schools, including Central High School. The harassment started when the wife of John Z. Warlick, the leader of the White Citizens Council, urged the boys to “keep her out” and at the same time, implored the girls to spit on her, saying, “spit on her, girls, spit on her.” Dorothy walked by without reacting, but told the press that many people threw rocks at her—most of which landed in front of her feet—and that many spat on her back. Photographer Douglas Martin won the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year with an image of Counts being mocked by a crowd on her first day of school.
More abuse followed that day. She had trash thrown at her while eating her dinner and the teachers ignored her. The following day, she befriended two white girls, but they soon drew back because of harassment from other classmates. Her family received threatening phone calls and after four days of extensive harassment—which included a smashed car and having her locker ransacked, her father decided to take his daughter out of the school. At a press conference, he said:
It is with compassion for our native land and love for our daughter Dorothy that we withdraw her as a student at Harding High School. As long as we felt she could be protected from bodily injury and insults within the school’s walls and upon the school premises, we were willing to grant her desire to study at Harding.
The family moved to Pennsylvania, where Counts attended an integrated school in Philadelphia, and later earned a degree from Johnson C. Smith University. She has spent her professional career in child care resources.
In 2008, Harding High School awarded Counts an honorary diploma. In 2010, Counts received a public apology from a member of the crowd which harassed her in 1957. In 2010, Harding High School renamed its library in honor of Counts-Scoggins, an honour rarely bestowed upon living persons.
[Source:Wikipedia]
The anniversary of World War I has been in the news as of late. Solemn words have been said, and in Canada, the funny idea that somehow it forged our nation from a quaint backwater into a respected player on the world stage. Sending people to die horrible deaths should not be the price of entry into world politics. WWI laid the foundation for WWII and both featured the notion that somehow civilian casualties were OK and even necessary to the war effort. Here we are in the 21st century and have the ultimate ‘soft target’ weapons available to us and they are not in anyway guaranteeing our safety, but rather our destruction – ain’t progress grand?
One can trace the insanity from WWI all the way to the present – let’s let John Oliver comment on the present state of affairs and the nuclear deterrent that keeps us ‘safe’.
Winston Churchill about the Palestinians, in 1937:
“I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Source: Page 9, Samar Attar (2010) Debunking the Myths of Colonization: The Arabs and Europe, University Press of America. Page 156, Makovsky Michael (2007) Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft, Yale University Press.
We’re the good guys right? Right?? Just keep telling yourselves that.
If you have not picked up or borrowed Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder yet, I suggest you do so. It is a shockingly candid dissertation on what happened to the people on the Eastern Front between Stalin and Hitler. I quote from that text:
“Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike. When the Soviet partisans prevented peasant from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants. A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him. Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch the houses and the fields. If they could not reliably get grain, the could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested. When Soviet partisans sabotaged
trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated. When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet Citizens. The Germans swept mines by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields. In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership. The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen. German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return.
The Soviet leadership was not especially concerned with the plight of Jews. After November 1941 Stalin never singled out the Jews as victims of Hitler. Some partisan commanders did try to protect the Jews. But the Soviets, like the Americans or the British, seem not to have seriously contemplated direct military action to rescue Jews. The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value life very cheaply. Jews in ghettos were aiding the German war effort as forced laborers, so their death over pits was of little concern to the authorities in Moscow. Jews who were not aiding but hindering the Germans were showing signs of a dangerous capacity for initiative, and might later resist the reimposition of Soviet rule. By Stalinist logic, Jews were suspect either way: if they remained in the ghetto and worked for the Germans, of if they left the ghetto and showed a capacity for independent action. The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow. The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.”
-Timothy Snyder. Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. p 238-239.
That is a small sliver of what war is. The systematic destruction of empathetic thoughts in pursuit of ideology and conformity.
The first step – always the first step – is to identify another human being as the ‘other’. Once that othering has been established there is no evil, no heinous action, that is out of reach. (Funny how religious belief is all about othering, but I’m sure it’s a completely different situation.)
—–
This book is best read in small doses, as it is chock full of humanity doing horrible things to itself. Consider yourself warned.
I’m glad I’ll be dead when humanity’s collective shit hits the fan. I used to get all wrapped up in debates about Capitalism and the slow motion Seppuku we’re committing. I was genuinely flummoxed when my arguments were characterized as hopelessly naive and that my positions were unfounded vis-a-vis economic reality (a.k.a the dominant capitalist consumption paradigm).
Bollocks to that noise.
I’m out of fucks to give about important economic arguments and how super-fucking-awesome capitalism is. I will not be around when glitz comes off of our over-consumption and enough of humanity realizes how hard they’ve been screwed over by our benevolent job creating, all-boats-raising, [insert mendacious free-market dogmatic sentiment here], elite whose only goal is to keep their particular party going on the backs of every else. I, if consciousness exists after corporeal death, will be bathing in tears of the elite, relishing every savoury nanosecond of schadenfreude, as their hard “earned” lifestyle and material wealth crumbles to ash in a fiery pyre with the rest humanity.
Our human tendency to stratify our societies is our downfall. The inequalities that capitalism creates blinds those with power and privilege to the destruction of the very means of survival. Ronald Wright wrote this about the importance of the biosphere and the resources it supplies. To0 tree-huggy for you? Tough darts friend, the historical record is littered with the wrecks of societies that did not learn this fundamental lesson.
The lesson I read in the past is this: that the health of land and water – and of woods, which are the keepers of water – can be the only lasting basis for any civilization’s survival and success.
—A Short History of Progress, p 105
Don’t believe me? Well fuckmesideways bro, you don’t have too, it might be easier if you don’t see this one coming. The good scientists over at NASA have published a neat study on the merry death-spiral we happen to be inhabiting, The Guardian has an article summarizing said paper, thus we’ll peruse the highlights here.
This paragraph’s prescience is chilling:
“Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse – often lasting centuries – have been quite common.”
Useful thought experiment time. Imagine when you were a teenager. Remember how thoroughly self absorbed, shallow, and brain-dead you were? That same myopic narcissism is reflected in intellectual, political and social stands that typify the attitudes of the elite. This NASA study is a smackdown of all of what our cherished elites hold dear.
Will a peer reviewed article suddenly change minds and ingrained attitudes? Considerthe prevalence and persistence of religious belief despite the wealth of knowledge that contradicts said venerated mythology. The sheer number of people that haplessly cling to religious delusion is a testament to the doggerel stupidity our species is infected with. The peoples minds we need to change have the influence and the inclination not to listen to reason. So let’s not get all lathered up about the ramifications of this report, even if does purportedly deal in fact.
“It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:
“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.
Mmm. Sounds nothing at all like our society. But let’s not learn from the past because the ignoble fate suffered by those societies couldn’t possibly happen today.
Because hubris.
(I could have stopped the post here, but sadly, my sanguine nature runs both wide and deep, thus we continue, hoping a difference might be made)
But what are the causes of the downfall of human civilizations?
“[…]lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”
Wow. You mean the rich worry only about getting richer and fucking everyone else over is an actual historical(now supported with SCIENCE!!!)fact? Thank you brave scientists heads for nailing that conclusion that has been obvious to anyone who studies history and has more than two fucking neurons to rub together. So one could say that a system that creates stratification – CAPITALISM – isn’t a really a good system to blindly, balls-to-the-wall-style, endorse. Who would have figured that shit out (hint: rhymes with ‘parks’).
“Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:
“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.”
Are you enjoying your peon status? I know I certainly am. But hey, you could make it rich someday too and live just like the fat cats – not that the elites would propagate popular myths (thank you corporate media) to keep the drones in line. But why listen to bitter ole Arbourist? Ronald Wright has done the dirty work and comes to a similar (paraphrased)conclusion:
“Wright sees needed reforms being blocked by vested interests who reject multi-lateral organisations, and support laissez-faire economics and transfers of power to corporations as leading to the social and environmental degradations that led to the collapse of previous civilisations. Necessary reforms are, in Wright’s view, being blocked by vested interests who are hostile to change, including American market extremists. Wright concludes that “our present behaviour is typical of failed societies at the zenith of their greed and arrogance” and calls for a shift towards long-term thinking:”
Yep, and the Elites and their libertarian teenager mentality are going to resolutely deny this until they are standing in the warm rich glow of their freshly razed gated communities and mansions. Only then does this sort of message sink in.
“Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues conclude that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today… we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” In the first of these scenarios, civilisation:
“…. appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.”
So many options, how about option #2?
“Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that “with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites.”
Oh this sounds all gloomy and pretty shitty overall, do we have some sciency facts on this? Of course we do…
“In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most “detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners”, allowing them to “continue ‘business as usual’ despite the impending catastrophe.” The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how “historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases).”
Pretty good argument for a more egalitarian society no? Because the status quo means most of us die and the remainder to to live life Hobbsian style: “Nasty, Brutish 
and short.” Did statement that just send up a dog whistle for our dear friends of capitalism?? Sharing wealth, income redistribution.. the soon to be named spectre of unfuckingwashed Socialism?
Damn straight, son.
Oh were you contemplating bringing some apologia for capitalism to the comments section to set me straight on how fucking wonderful it is and how really if we just keep innovating it will be a panacea for all? (Tell that to third world parents whose kids(21 a minute if you have statistical fetish) are still dying of preventable diseases). Change this shitty system now or get used to the happy-funtime reality that Hobbes and Malthus intimately describe.
“Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:
“While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory ‘so far’ in support of doing nothing.”
It won’t change, not by our hand. I get that – keep the orgy going kids; I expect nothing less.
But as I said earlier I won’t be around to stew when things go sideways (well maybe as a wizened old soul on a rocking chair with a shotgun and cats), so enjoy your mess assholes. I’m frackking done with this.
Let’s close with a non swear word laden summary from Ronald Wright of many of my thoughts on humanities majestic progress and the challenges we face:
“Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we
do, and don’t do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.
The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees’ seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands.”
—A Short History of Progress, p 131–2
Short History of Progress Wikipedia.
Short History of Progress Review on Quill and Quire
Surviving Progress: Documentary Film featuring Ronald Wright.
The Massey Lecture Series: A Short History of Progress produced by the CBC on youtube-
Greetings gentle readers, should we not consider the first 9/11 and also mourn for its victims? The first 9/11 essentially ruined Chile as a country; Chile was thrown backward into dictatorial hell where thousand of its citizens were systematically abducted, tortured and murdered. Why we choose not to mourn Chile’s 9/11 is because we caused it and thus it must be erased from the historical record ASAP.
Let’s let Noam Chomsky get us up to speed on the sad state of our intellectual elites and their reaction to 9/11(s). (italics and bolding mine)
If the responsibility of intellectuals refers to their moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the cause of freedom, justice, mercy, and peace—and to speak out not simply about the abuses of our enemies, but, far more significantly, about the crimes in which we are implicated and can ameliorate or terminate if we choose—how should we think of 9/11?
The notion that 9/11 “changed the world” is widely held, understandably. The events of that day certainly had major consequences, domestic and international. One was to lead President Bush to re-declare Ronald Reagan’s war on terrorism—the first one has been effectively “disappeared,” to borrow the phrase of our favorite Latin American killers and torturers, presumably because the consequences do not fit well with preferred self images. Another consequence was the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and more recently military interventions in several other countries in the region and regular threats of an attack on Iran (“all options are open,” in the standard phrase). The costs, in every dimension, have been enormous. That suggests a rather obvious question, not asked for the first time: was there an alternative?
A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won major successes in his war against the United States. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” the journalist Eric Margolis writes.
The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap. . . . Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction . . . . may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States.
A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates that the final bill will be $3.2–4 trillion. Quite an impressive achievement by bin Laden.
That Washington was intent on rushing into bin Laden’s trap was evident at once. Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, writes, “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.” The al Qaeda leader, Scheuer continues, “is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world.”
And, as Scheuer explains, bin Laden largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.
There is good reason to believe that the jihadi movement could have been split and undermined after the 9/11 attack, which was criticized harshly within the movement. Furthermore, the “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but no such idea was even considered by decision-makers in government. It seems no thought was given to the Taliban’s tentative offer—how serious an offer, we cannot know—to present the al Qaeda leaders for a judicial proceeding.
At the time, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the horrendous crime of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”—an accurate judgment. The crimes could have been even worse. Suppose that Flight 93, downed by courageous passengers in Pennsylvania, had bombed the White House, killing the president. Suppose that the perpetrators of the crime planned to, and did, impose a military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Suppose the new dictatorship established, with the support of the criminals, an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere, and, as icing on the cake, brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
As we all should know, this is not a thought experiment. It happened. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the United States succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s ghastly regime in office. The dictatorship then installed the Chicago Boys—economists trained at the University of Chicago—to reshape Chile’s economy. Consider the economic destruction, the torture and kidnappings, and multiply the numbers killed by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, and you will see just how much more devastating the first 9/11 was.
Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities.
The goal of the overthrow, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us”—screw us by trying to take over their own resources and more generally to pursue a policy of independent development along lines disliked by Washington. In the background was the conclusion of Nixon’s National Security Council that if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.” Washington’s “credibility” would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.
The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently.
These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.”
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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