A Powerpoint on US imperialism and how the peace movement might respond

 

RETHINKING THE PEACE MOVEMENT IN 2022 (009) (005).pptx

FACES OF THE ENEMY: To Pursue War Governments and Their Media Create Enemies

Harry Targ

 

 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fote

We live in a World of Cognitive Warfare

 A recent document prepared by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  suggested that “in cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield. The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviors to favor an aggressor's tactical or strategic objectives.”

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/countering-cognitive-warfare-awareness-and-resilience/index.html)

This NATO document, of course, is addressing the world of international relations but the concept of “cognitive warfare” seems to parallel efforts “to change not only what people think, but how they think and act.” This project animates the efforts of media conglomerates-print, electronic, social media platforms. Changing how people think and act has its historic roots in campaigns to convince citizens to support wars, consume cigarettes, forget climate disasters, and to find flaws in populations because of class, race, gender, sexual preference, and/or religion. Creating images of enemies is central to launching wars. The processes of “branding” are similar in all realms of human experience.

Perhaps challenging the process of “branding” should be on the agenda for all those who seek a more humane society. Break up “branding machines.” Democratize the ability to describe and express experiences. And, in the educational sphere, teach students to analyze brands and to evaluate their relative accuracy.

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In August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression.

Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted "no." Over the next three years the U.S. sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.

Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.

President Johnson's lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq- imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.

Now is the time for the American people to insist that their leaders tell the truth about the U.S. role in the world. The same goes for peoples everywhere.

UNESCO on War

“Since wars begin in the minds of men (and women), it is in the minds of men (and women) that the defenses of peace must be constructed'.” (The first sentence of the Preamble to UNESCO's Constitution is translated into nine languages and carved in stone on a monument erected at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris).

https://www.nonviolenceny.org/post/culture-of-peace-and-peacebuilding

 

 

Essays on the Ukraine War and the United States: 2022

 https://d.docs.live.net/9576d2290f69b52f/Documents/Ukraine%20latest.docx 

Imperial Decline and the Threat of a New Cold War With China

 Revisiting a Book Review in the Context of Rising Tensions

Harry Targ

Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power, Haymarket Books, 2017.

Researchers affiliated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who regularly assess the danger of nuclear war declared that the probability of nuclear war has increased over the last year. Using their “doomsday clock” as a metaphor the dial was recently moved to 100 seconds to midnight; midnight signifying the onset of nuclear war. The scientists believe that the danger of nuclear destruction and devastating climate disaster is greater now than at any time since the early 1980s.

The context for this grim prediction is well-reflected in a 2017 book  by University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century.  The author describes the twentieth century emergence of the US as the global hegemonic power based upon economic superiority and overwhelming military power. However, this economic and military dominance is being challenged today.

Perhaps the most critical challenge to the American empire, he suggests, is the rise of China, particularly as an economic successor to US control of the global political economy: Chinese domestic development, Chinese trade and investment with countries on every continent, and an Asian financial and trading system that challenges the historic US presence in the region. In economic terms the global system is changing from unipolarity to multipolarity.

In response to this decline McCoy suggests that the United States has embarked on a program to expand militarily programs around the globe and in outer space including preparing for cyber space war, occupying space, developing biometrics to identify potential enemies, increasing drone warfare capabilities, and the creation of a whole panoply of weapons that exceed the imagination of science fiction. In sum, therefore, the new militarism is designed to forestall and overcome declining empire.

This book is a must read for the peace movement because it indicates the dangerous world in which we live, the emergence of a New Cold War with China, and the increased probability of global destruction. It suggests that peace activists must continue to oppose militarism and develop a public discourse that celebrates the emergence of a multi-polar world, a world in which more countries can participate in global policy-making. The alternative could be, as the atomic scientists warn, a nuclear apocalypse.

As to an older narrative of challenges to United States hegemony during Cold War I see:

http://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2018/05/strategy-of-empire-in-decline-cold-war.html

A Radio Discussion of "the horrors of socialism" versus the reality of socialism: a one hour broadcast discussion

 https://soundcloud.com/user-240416425/2023-02-11-1500-grass-is-greener-targ-on-community-or-the-horrors-of-socialism?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Building a New Society

Harry Targ 

November 8, 2011, The Rag Blog, reposted.

(“Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America. Passed the House of Representatives February 2, 2023.” While not their intention, Congress did the American people a service by raising for conversation the meaning, purposes, and visions of “socialism” today. The essay below written a decade ago remembers visions of socialism that animated the thinking and actions of young people 50 years ago. And these visions of socialism go back years before that. They involve a passion for public purpose, real not corporate democracy, economic equality, an end to racism, sexism, and the exploitation of all workers, and perhaps most of all the creation of a society based on the best of US history that maximizes the potential of each and every human being. Let us have more conversations about socialism). 

                      Paul Goodman. Image from Zeitgeist Films / Sam Falk for The New York Times. 

A powerful concept animated the vision of young people in the 1960s, the idea of community. Many of us came to that decade with little interest in politics. We were not “red diaper” babies, but we became outraged by Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and war. Our education had communicated an early version of Margaret Thatcher’s admonition, “there is no alternative,” and our impulses told us then that “another world was possible.”

New and old ideas about a better world began to circulate from college campuses, the streets, some churches, and popular culture. A whole body of engaging literature caught the fancy of young people. 

For me Paul Goodman’s description of youth growing up in the sterile 1950s, Growing Up Absurd, resonated. He wrote about alternative possibilities in such books as Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. Perhaps most startling to a young reader was the earlier analysis Goodman published with his brother Percival, Communitas. In that book the Goodman brothers argued that societies, big and small, were products of values. Architecture and the organization of space, social, and political forms, and the ease with which people could communicate and interact with each other varied. And the variations created in space and social forms affected whether communities valued life and sociability or consumption and profit maximization. 

The Goodmans opened up new intellectual doors for me. I looked at earlier anarchists, such as Peter Kropotkin, who argued that humans -- if not separated by time, space, and power structures -- often lived in solidarity with their neighbors. A “mutual aid” principle was natural to human existence. And, as a result “the state" sought to stamp it out and replace it with top-down authority. 

Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, identified a “centralistic political principle” that emerged when groups and states sought control of markets and natural resources and “the most valuable of all goods,” the lives of people who lived with each other changed as “...the autonomous relationships become meaningless, personal relationships wither; and the very spirit of...” being human “...hires itself out as a functionary.” The alternative for Buber was what he called a decentralized social principle, or community which is “...never a mere attitude of mind” but of “...tribulation and only because of that community of spirit; community of toil and only because of that community of salvation...” 

In 1974, I wrote in summation about these theorists and many others that the architectural forms and social structures of the Goodmans can profitably be blended with the spiritualism and socialism of Buber to construct a synthesis of all that the utopians and anarchists set out to achieve. The Goodmans show how community can be created in the industrial age and Buber illustrates how the best features of the entire community tradition fit together. 

The ideas of community, empowerment, and social justice spread from these and other sources. They were articulated for the Sixties in the Port Huron Statement, written by founders of the Students for a Democratic Society. While written by and for a relatively privileged sector of disenchanted youth in a period of booming economic growth and military expansion, the document spoke to the passion for justice, participation, and community, and an “…unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.” It called for the creation of “human interdependence,” replacing “...power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance...” by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.” 

By the late Sixties many of us were identifying a new society that must be built on core principles. These included:

-local control and participatory democracy

-racial justice 

-gender equality 

-equitable distribution of resources and the collective product of human labor 

-commitments to the satisfaction of minimal basic needs for all of humankind 

-the development of an ethic that connects survival to human existence, not to specific jobs 

-human control over technology; and 

-a new “land ethic” that conceives of humankind as part of nature, not in conflict with it. 

Many of us began to explore the impediments to the construction of a society based on human scale that would celebrate both individual creativity and community. Growing familiarization with the critique of capitalism suggested that the capitalist mode of production, dominant over two-thirds of the world, was based upon the exploitation, oppression, dehumanization, and repression of the vast majority of humankind. Incorporating an understanding of the workings of capitalism did not contradict the vision that Buber called the decentralized social principle and the many eloquent calls by others for “community.” It did suggest that building a new society entailed class struggle which would manifest itself in factories and fields, in rich and poor countries, and in political venues from the ballot box to the streets. 

Bringing about positive change was a much more complicated affair than activists originally thought, but the sustained and sometimes brutal opposition to our visions validated the general correctness of them. Today, new generations of activists, along with older ones, are reflecting and participating in diverse social movements in our cities and towns. They observe with enthusiasm the mobilizations, the militancy, and the passion for justice still unfolding in the Middle East. The efforts of Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorians, and the Cubans who inspired us so much over the years are applauded. Important debates about social market economies, workers’ management of large enterprises, this or that candidate or political party, are occurring on the Internet and in the streets. 

Although the times are so different from the 1960s, perhaps the vision of community that animated our thinking then (which we in turn learned from those who preceded us) may still be relevant for today. Without creating new documents or dogmas perhaps it can be proclaimed that we remain committed to the sanctity of human life, to equality, to popular control of all our institutions, to a reverence for the environment, and to the idea that the best of society comes from our communal efforts to make living better for all.

BREAKING NEWS

BALLOONGATE: US MILITARY DEFENDS THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES FROM BIRTHDAY BALLOON

 

 

A thirteen-year-old boy in Bejing was celebrating his birthday Wednesday when a helium balloon filled with candy flew out the window of his house and took off over the skies of China. Because of high winds the balloon sailed across the Chinese mainland, traversed across the Pacific, and was spotted by the crack US radar system over the state of Montana.

Debate in the Biden Administration ensured about how to respond to this birthday balloon’s clear penetration of US air space. Hawks in the administration argued that the balloon had to be immediately destroyed before American children heard about the sweets in the balloon. More patient advisors from the State Department took the view that maybe the US should keep the lid on informing the media about the birthday balloon until it sailed across the Atlantic. Then the world’s greatest air force could shoot down the balloon and confiscate the evidence of the Chinese birthday party without Americans seeing what was in the balloon.

Finally, the balloon was shot down off the coast of North Carolina. Retrieved from the shootdown was much of the contents of the balloon: candy corn, milk duds, M and Ms, Baby Ruth candy bars, and popcorn and 42 packages of cherry Life Savers.

Biden spokespersons accused the Chinese of trying to embarrass the United States in the eyes of the world by showing off their typical birthday presents. The Chinese claimed, on the other hand, that if the window in the apartment where the party was held had been closed, the birthday balloon would never have flown into the sky and drifted toward the Western Hemisphere.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy charged that the Biden Administration knew of the birthday balloons, charging that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a CEO in a balloon manufacturing company. Others pointed out that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken did not write down his scheduled Chinese visit and just plain forgot about it.

Meanwhile two Senators, one from Indiana and another from Arkansas have called for an additional $100 billion increase in the 2023 military budget, called the Balloon Production and Distribution Act. The CEO of the Happy Balloon Company of Battle Ground, Indiana said that the BPD Act is vital to US national security. If US “kids”, he said, learn about Chinese birthday parties they will mobilize against their own government.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was quoted as saying on a “breaking news” special that this balloon attack is the biggest story since Pearl Harbor.

When asked about whether this crisis could lead to nuclear war between the US and China: Biden said: “Maybe Not.”