Well worth reading the full and well detailed article HERE:Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, most people in the world agree that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, without killing many thousands of civilians in the process. But unfortunately, the U.S. military has always accepted massive civilian deaths as part of the cost of war. The military is now poised to kill thousands of foreign civilians, in order to prove that killing U.S. civilians is wrong.
The media has told us repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the U.S. only because of our "freedom" and "prosperity." Missing from this explanation is the historical context of the U.S. role in the Middle East, and for that matter in the rest of the world. This basic primer is an attempt to brief readers who have not closely followed the history of U.S. foreign or military affairs, and are perhaps unaware of the background of U.S. military interventions abroad, but are concerned about the direction of our country toward a new war in the name of "freedom" and "protecting civilians."
The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to "protectorates" such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers. Many of the uses of U.S. combat forces are documented in A History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890: http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html
You wouldn’t know it if you were to turn on your television every day or simply skim the media’s headlines, but North Korea has continuously offered to freeze its nuclear program. The very threat we are continuously told to fear could be immediately neutralized but is instead repeatedly rejected by the United States.However, prominent media outlets such as the Washington Post continue to tell a different story, namely that:“[North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un] has shown no interest in talks — he won’t even set foot in China, his biggest patron. Even if negotiations took place, the current regime has made clear that ‘it will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table, as one envoy recently put it.”As the Intercept explains, this is a false assertion:“There’s, of course, a significant difference between North Korea saying it will never negotiate to halt or eliminate its nuclear weapons program, and that it will never negotiate as long as the U.S. continues to threaten it…The reality is that North Korea is saying that, under certain conditions, it will put its nuclear weapons on the table.” [emphasis added]Not only does the media continue to misinform the public on this issue, but as Noam Chomsky explained in an interview with Democracy! Now, the United States continues to categorically reject North Korea’s proposal:“There is one proposal that’s ignored. You see a mention of it now and then. It’s a pretty simple proposal. Remember the goal is to get North Korea to freeze its weapons systems – weapons and missile systems. One proposal is to accept their offer to do that. Sounds simple, they’ve made a proposal – China and North Korea – proposed to freeze the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons systems and the U.S. instantly rejected it. And you can’t blame that on Trump, Obama did the same thing, a couple of years ago. The Same offer was presented – I think it was 2015 – the Obama administration instantly rejected it.”Why would they do that? Why fear North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities but then reject a proposal to freeze their production? As Chomsky explains further:“The reason is that it calls for a quid pro quo. It says in return the United States should put an end to threatening military maneuvers on North Korea’s borders, which happen to include under Trump, sending of nuclear-capable B-52s flying right near the border. Maybe Americans don’t remember very well but North Koreans have a memory of not too long ago when North Korea was absolutely flattened – literally – by American bombing. There was literally no targets left.” [emphasis added]In the early 1950s, the U.S. relentlessly bombed North Korea, destroying over 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country’s population. As the Asia Pacific Journal has noted, the U.S. did, indeed, drop so many bombs that they eventually ran out of targets to hit and bombed the irrigation systems, instead:“By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.” [emphasis added]Despite the people and leadership of North Korea knowing this history and the history of other like-minded states who became easy targets for the U.S. military upon dismantling their weapons programs, North Korea is still to this day offering this proposal to freeze its program.As the Intercept explained at the end of August:“North Korea’s proclamations have been closely tracked by Robert Carlin, currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and formerly head of the Northeast Asia Division in the State Department’s intelligence arm. Carlin has visited North Korea over 30 times.“Via email, Carlin described how it is difficult but critical to accurately decode North Korean communications. ‘Observers dismiss as unimportant what the North Koreans say,’ Carlin writes, and ‘therefore don’t read it carefully, except of course if it is colorful, fiery language that makes for lovely headlines. Some of what the North says is simply propaganda and can be read with one eye closed. Other things are written and edited very carefully, and need to be read very carefully. And then, having been read, they need to be compared with past statements, and put in context.’”The media’s insistence that North Korea will never give up its weapons systems is completely disingenuous when one reads the entire context of the statements offered by Kim Jong-un’s government. On July 4, Kim’s statement read as follows:“[T]he DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.” [emphasis added]Quid pro quo.This is a deal-breaker for the U.S. even though it would undoubtedly diffuse the entire situation and provide the region with at least a brief period of stability.The U.S., together with South Korea, simulates an invasion of North Korea every year. In Donald Trump’s first six months in office, he dropped over 20,650 bombs in approximately seven countries, which killed thousands of civilians. By comparison, Kim Jong-un bombs the ocean.No matter how objectively you look at it, North Korea has a genuine reason to want to be prepared in the face of American aggression. But a military strike option to counter any potential North Korean threat is not the only option and, further, is almost certainly the worst option on the table.After the failures and crimes of U.S. politicians and the military in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Afghanistan — to name a few — we should be demanding that our world leaders try the diplomatic option advanced by the North Korean regime to the fullest extent in order to avoid a potential nuclear holocaust and the deaths of millions of innocent civilians.
It’s impossible to imagine what it’s like to be killed in a nuclear explosion, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I think it will probably involve being blasted over quite a large distance, and at a surprising height, while simultaneously having all your skin burnt off. I know we think of it as being an instant death, but there’s every chance that there will be a few seconds where you’ll be sailing out of your local school catchment area, at a height of about a hundred feet or so, as some sort of screaming skeleton. Maybe you will get to see your family melt before the blast picks you up, and your final memory will be of their faces devolving into cubism. Or maybe it’s more like being smashed to pieces by a wave of rubble. After all those years of driving into town to go to work, or go shopping, your city centre will finally be coming to you, moving at several thousand miles an hour, and hotter than Venus in July.
Donald Trump got himself into yet another war of words with North Korea after they test fired a missile that went over Japan. In a war of words you do not want to be on Trump’s side: a man who speaks like he’s on shuffle and has a smaller vocabulary than an upturned calculator. It’s incredible to see the US take the moral high ground about, of all things, nuking Japan. Bear in mind that Japan is a country that specialises in wooden buildings with paper walls. It’s odd to think that as millions of people hunkered down in their paper houses during a potential nuclear attack, they were still safer than the many thousands of people in the UK living in high rise social housing.
Trump is like a fat bee bashing around inside a greenhouse repeatedly failing to understand why the world doesn’t work as he thought it did. The chances of this unrepentant lunatic starting World War III are surely very high. Often, when I hear Trump talk even the most egregious garbage about wanting to strip people of their healthcare, or exile children, I’m actually just glad that he’s talking about the future, weighing his words like I would those of a possible suicide.
This is a man who obsesses over winning, and uses success as his single metric for evaluating humanity, who has become the key player in a game which it is impossible too win. Who would win in an all out conflict with North Korea? My best guess is a guy in Tokyo who knows how to catch and roast rats, who owns a shopping trolley and has the entrepreneurial flair to get out into the smoking rubble of his city and begin trading his rodents on sticks for essential items. A UN expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations told the media that Trumps latest intervention on sanctions was, ‘an exceedingly silly thing to say’. We can only assume he’s had that statement prepared for the last two years and since writing it has thought about pressing the send button a couple of hundred times a day.
Trump isn’t a military man, and salutes troops in a way that makes Benny Hill look like Stalin. I hate the way that “draft dodger’ is thrown at Trump as an insult. I mean, if you want to insult a guy who looks like God twisted some haemorrhoids into a balloon animal, why pick one of the few moments that he behaved rationally? Some take comfort in the fact that a triumvirate of US generals have essentially annexed military policy. In many ways, the concentration of power into the hands of Generals Mattis, Kelly and McMaster is the only thing worse than Trump.
It’s impossible to have been in an institution like the US army your whole life without having internalised a worldview that believes complex international relationships are best handled through the medium of high explosives. In their own way, their worldview will be as limited as those priests who live in the catacombs under the Vatican who can see in the dark and have five hundred words for a child’s bottom. The US military view is one that sees existence as a permanent war for resources. A huge reason for elite climate change denial is that it collapses the American worldview. If you allow that climate change is real, the war for resources is two dying men in a locked room fighting over a live hand-grenade. It’s also a worldview of permanent escalation. In the aftermath of a college shooting, we always laugh at the wing-nut who calls for more guns on campus. Yet that’s actually a pretty tight metaphor for US foreign policy, one where the US is both the wing-nut, and the shooter.
If I might make one suggestion to the North Koreans, please don’t drop bombs indiscriminately upon the USA. There are specific targets you should hit that would upset the President the most and, luckily for your bombing crews, they’ve all got his name written on them in fifty foot high letters.
For Siegfried Sassoon, the frontline was the one place he could get away from the war. For the UK government, the Brexit negotiations are the one place they can get away from Brexit, as this is where their strategy of ignorance is deployed, a strategy which has turned these negotiations into something resembling an out-of-control drinking game — with round after round of insults, half-truths, and accusations — rather than the most important political and economic event in a generation. The process has descended into rhetorical trench warfare.
So when UK leaders compare the process to a divorce they have a point, of sorts. There are important decisions to make, there are bills to settle, and worse still, lawyers to pay. Yet when a couple divorces, splitting the dog and car in half, divvying up the CDs and tallying up the tablecloths, they tend not to argue about what divorce means as a concept, as a phenomenon, and as a thing. Although there may be an emotional war, there’s no epistemological gulf to bridge. A divorce — messy, soft, hard or amicable — means a separation and a reckoning for both parties.
Divorce means divorce. And we know this because we have dictionaries and Google. Just imagine the confusion otherwise. Divorce loses its meaning in a sudden freak accident, and one person is taking out cardboard boxes to the car (‘I’m leaving you!’), while the other flicks through travel brochures (‘How about a European River Cruise this year?’) You’d have two people living in two different semantic spheres, each with a completely different understanding of reality and events. Sounds familiar?
This semantic dementia explains how the UK government, like a modern Miss Havisham, has morphed into a person avoiding the pressures of a real breakup; someone who prefers to wallow in the warm nectar of the past, the nostalgia of yesteryear — a nostalgia that can, in English minds ever susceptible to flickering daydreams of Empire, inflate to unmanageable proportions and like a balloon, just float away.
This is the misty, nostalgic dream-world of the jilted lover; stranger still, the jilted lover who campaigned for the separation, voted for the breakup, yet who is dumb-founded by the reckoning. This is magical thinking, denial thinking, and the stuff of dreams.
And in that other dream-world of Alice in Wonderland, at the end of a race in which everyone runs in circles, whichever way they like, for however long they like, the Dodo announces: ‘Everybody has won and all must have prizes.’
And so maybe the Dodo and the ardent Brexiteers are right. Maybe there will be prizes for all after Brexit. Control over immigration. Sovereignty. New trading relationships and new ties. New opportunities. New neighbours! (Who will become, inevitably, good friends.) Why can’t we have a ‘global Britain’ and a leaner, fitter EU?
Yet as this divorce of separate semantic spheres spins out; as the pound keeps sinking, prices keep rising, and the economy splutters, it’s unclear whether the prize is worth the risk.
And the questions to ask are these: Are you ready to be taken ‘over the top’ by the Brexit officer class of Boris Johnson and co? Are the blithe reassurances and Cheshire cat grin of David Davies, Michael Gove’s invitation to “take back the billions we give to the EU […] squandered on grand parliamentary buildings and bureaucratic follies”, and Liam Fox’s promise of the “glorious joy of free trade” really enough? Or is this officer class simply deluded?
Perhaps when thinking of the coming Brexit journey, we might heed the words of soldiers serving in the real trenches of Ypres, a hundred years ago: “This farce promises to be a great success and a long run is expected.”
So be warned. As we fight across a no man’s land of our own making, the distant goal of national strength regained may turn out, on closer inspection, to be mere post-imperial frailty in disguise. And somewhere between now and March 2019, the UK government will realise that the rhetorical trenches from which they fire, and in which they hide, offer no escape from a Brexit reality growing more dangerous and absurd by the day.
Can you please distribute this notice to women who may be interested?
Scottish branch of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom have linked up with Glasgow Women's Library to bring you an event focusing on the Peace Crusades in Glasgow & Manchester.
Not all women were in favour of war in 1914-1918. Many were participants in the Women's Peace Crusades.
The event will take place on Saturday afternoon, 1.30-3.30 on 30 September 2017, at Glasgow Women's Library.
All women are welcome to attend this free event.
Details: HERE:
Bill McKibben of 350 informs us that “5.6 million Floridians have been told to evacuate, making it by far the largest mass movement of people in American history. Hot new world.” Meanwhile Trumps environmental chief Scott Pruitt tells us that “now is not the time” for discussion about climate change, even amid record-breaking hurricanes Irma, Jose, and Katia.
The above photograph could be the defining image of our time.
When Florida gun owner Ryon Edwards Florida posted a Facebook event to encourage others to ‘shoot the storm’ and fire their guns at Hurricane Irma, 46,000 people responded.
In an outburst of irony he explained: “I never envisioned this event becoming some kind of crazy idea larger than myself. It has become something a little out of my control.”
It’s been well documented that whilst the medias attention has turned to the crisis in America far more deadly events are unfolding in Asia, but there’s a reason we are focused on America and the Caribbean.
As the Floridians golf through carnage, the storms are descending on the epicentre of ignorance, the dead centre of denialism, a Mar a Lago endgame.
What club would you choose for the end of the world?
But as a new study asserts that 50% of temperature increases and 32% of sea level rise was caused by just 90 companies. The New Republic suggests we start naming hurricanes “after Exxon, and Chevron, not Harvey and Irma”.
“Specifically, the study asserts that the 90 largest carbon producers—including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil—have cumulatively caused up to 50 percent of the increase in global mean surface temperature since 1880, and up to 32 percent of global sea level rise. Investor-owned companies like BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil have caused 16 percent of the global average temperature increases and 11 percent of the global sea level rise, the study says.
The study “demonstrates, strictly speaking, causal responsibility” for the worst impacts of sea level rise and temperature increases, Oxford University political science professor Henry Shue wrote in accompanying commentary for the study.”
So as the hurricanes descend it’s obvious that the problem isn’t just climate change, it’s Capitalism.
And that’s one of the reasons – other than Western-centric news filters – that the focus is on America.
It’s easy enough to defy reality as you bunker-down (pun intended) to the abstract notion of climate crisis. It’s rather more difficult as the storms are laying waste to your golf club.
If NOW is not the time – when is?
The denialism has layers.
The first, the outright lies of the deluded or the compromised: ‘This isn’t happening.’ The second the idea that ‘sustainability’ and a growth agenda can fix this. The third that capitalism is reformable.
The first and second have been widely debunked exposed and ridiculed, The third is now in play.
The delusional behaviour is stark in America – suffering under a (well armed) combination of Trumpism, turbo-capitalism and Christian fundamentalism, but it exists everywhere.
This from the Dark Mountain’s new collection of essays Walking on Lava:
The stakes are in the meadow … the fields are overgrown
The winds of change are blowin’ through the place I’ve called home
They’re digging at the edges to build the power line
Same old story … but now the story’s mine […]
It all began 300 years before
What story is beginning
If this one is no more?
– Railroad Earth, ‘Lone Croft Farewell’
“It has become something a little out of my control.”
Weather creates storms. It’s people who turn them into disasters, as this summer has made all too clear—from Texas and Louisiana, facing the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, to India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, where monsoon floods have killed more than 1,400 people in a single month.
In the United States, Harvey presents perhaps the starkest illustration since Hurricane Sandy of the kinds of disasters we are capable of concocting. And as with all such extreme weather events, the slow disaster most directly precipitating this immediate one is climate change, making storms and floods more frequent and fearsome than they otherwise would have been.
Unless you deny climate change exists outright—as several members of the Trump administration do—it’s hard to argue that there isn’t something at least a little unnatural about Harvey. Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann argues that the storm surge from Harvey was seven inches higher than it would have been just a few decades ago thanks to sea level rise. Harvey benefited from hotter-than-average temperatures in the waters where it brewed: average sea surface temperatures in the Gulf have risen about 0.5 degrees Celsius in recent decades, and as Harvey approached in August, stood at up to 4°C above average. “Not only are the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico unusually warm right now,” Mann wrote, “but there is a deep layer of warm water that Harvey was able to feed upon when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast.” As a result, Houston is now dealing with the aftermath of the third “500-year flood” the city has experienced in the last three years.
Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, meanwhile, called it “opportunistic” and “misplaced” to talk about climate change in the storm’s wake, telling Breitbart radio that, “to look at things like this and to talk about a cause and effect really isn’t helping the people of Texas right now.” Worth mentioning, too, is that Pruitt has spent the better part of his tenure as EPA director trying to peel back regulations that would cap greenhouse gas emissions. He’s currently gearing up for a government-funded Red Team-Blue Team debate on the reality of climate change—with help from the Heartland Institute, a climate-denying think tank copiously funded by the oil and gas industries.
Even if Pruitt is right and tides aren’t rising, Harvey still would have hit the Gulf harder than it should have. Storms happen all the time in nature, from solar flares to Martian dust storms. No one would care much if a hurricane of Harvey’s scale struck some unpopulated stretch of land or spun out to sea. The difference when they hit places like Houston—the nation’s fourth most populous city—is that people do live there, and that those people are organized in particular ways: by racism and capitalism and any number of other structuring forces in society, themselves sharing a web of connections to one another.
In the case of Houston itself: The Magnolia City has long been heralded by libertarians as a kind of case study for no-holds-barred development, un-zoned and untainted by regulations and—by extension—a playground for enterprising real estate moguls. As a ProPublica and Texas Tribune report last year found, there have been 7,000 residential buildings constructed in floodplains since hurricane Katrina. From 1996 to 2011, Harris County (containing the wider Houston area) has also seen a 25 percent increase in the amount of impermeable—that is, paved—surfaces, which displaced absorbent wetlands and prairie grass that help provide a buffer against runoff. That development not only puts more people and property in harm’s way, but drives up the cost of dealing with disasters.
While developers have been able to move about Houston at will, the same can’t be said for its residents. Houston alone is home to an estimated 575,000 undocumented immigrants, the third most of any metro area after New York and Los Angeles. As thousands began to evacuate, the Border Patrol announced that it would keep its checkpoints in the Rio Grande Valley open so long as the highways also remained open. This left undocumented Texans in Harvey’s path with an unbelievably cruel choice as the storm approached: try to ride it out, or risk deportation. Had it not been temporarily blocked via court order, this past Friday would also have seen the implementation of SB 4, one of the country’s most draconian anti-immigrant laws. Now, many of those attempting to rebuild their lives post-Harvey will also have to deal with the White House’s decision today to rescind DACA, which protects from deportation undocumented immigrants who arrived to the United States as children.
There’s nothing natural, either, about the fact that Harvey’s floods inundated thirteen of Texas’s forty-one Superfund sites that are still awaiting clean-up, sites whose toxic contents now threaten their neighbors. A group of AP journalists visited storm-impacted sites around Houston before EPA inspectors, whose spokespeople claimed the sites were inaccessible. Long-term, the administration seems posed to make a bad situation even worse. Trump proposed a 30 percent cut to the EPA’s Superfund cleanup fund in his March budget blueprint, extending the George W. Bush administration’s doctrine that the polluters responsible for creating such sites should no longer have to contribute to cleaning them up.
Some of those same polluters are at the root of yet another kind of disaster unfolding in Southeast Texas. Storm damage has resulted in an emissions spike from the area’s oil and chemical refineries, which spat out 2,700 extra tons of pollution because of storm damage, and still more from preventative shut-downs. Beginning Thursday, chemical fires at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas, about twenty-five miles from downtown Houston, sent a plume of noxious black smoke billowing over the area. The fires lasted through the weekend, as International Business Times reported that the company had successfully lobbied Republicans to block relevant safety regulations—despite being fully aware of the risks.
A broader analysis from the Center For Biological Diversity has found that Harvey has so far triggered the release of an estimated 1 million pounds of harmful substances from the area’s sixty petroleum plants. On top of storm damage, then, Texans—particularly the low-income communities of color clustered around oil and chemical operations—now face a mounting public health crisis. And that’s without mentioning the risk of infectious diseases carried by sewage and other waste contaminating floodwaters.
It’s not very many people who create these man-made disasters. That catastrophic weather events are growing more common and severe is owed—in large part—to the 100 companies that have spit 71 percent of carbon emissions into the atmosphere since 1988, including many of those with hubs in Texas. Then there are developers who’ve taken advantage of lax zoning laws, and the members of the GOP eager to gut the budgets of the programs and agencies tasked with helping both prevent and recover from some of the storms’ worst impacts.
So if the response on the ground to the crisis in Houston has been defined by a sense of collective solidarity—of neighbors helping neighbors—the precipitating causes of that crisis are undoubtedly a product of wealthy elites.
Like climate change itself, Harvey’s horrors can’t be broken down to any one cause, be it rising warm tides or greedy developers or austerity-addled politicians. Yet what’s most foreboding about the prospect of an increasingly climate-changed reality is that all of those things which are already making life unlivable for so many will get muddled with the new ecological normal of our hotter, wetter world: immigration authorities threatening to deport people as they try to get out of harm’s way; capital swooping in after waters subside for a fresh round of land speculation; a hollowed-out public sphere, growing less nimble with every passing budget negotiation.
Even a socialist America would have to deal with bad weather, and probably a lot more of it given the level of warming we’re already on track to experience. How we respond to that weather—and prevent more of it from happening than needs to—will mean the difference between a changed climate and an altogether meaner one.
Kate Aronoff is co-host of Dissent’s Hot & Bothered podcast on the politics of climate change and a writing fellow at In These Times.
Anti-war activists have begun a week of protests in east London in an effort to stop weapons and military equipment arriving at Britain’s biggest arms fair.Read the full article HERE:
The biennial Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), which bills itself as “the world leading event” for buyers and sellers of military equipment, begins next week at the ExCeL centre in Docklands.
More than 34,000 visitors are expected to attend the arms fair, including delegations from regimes accused of human rights abuses such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, as well as representatives of the world’s 10 biggest arms companies.
Keynote speakers include Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, as well as the chiefs of staff of the British armed forces.
Thousands of protesters are expected to take action outside the the ExCeL centre throughout the week, with blockades, actions and demonstrations outside all main entrances in an effort to hamper exhibitors from setting up their stands for the four-day event, which opens on 12 September.
Protests on each day will have a different focus, from nuclear weapons to arms to Israel to free movement for people rather than weapons. Opponents to the fair say that some of the world’s most oppressive regimes are represented among buyers.
On Monday, protesters were demonstrating against arms to Israel. By 3pm, police had already made six arrests, according to Kat Hobbs of Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
