The End of Democratic Capitalism: Pity they Couldn't Resist the Nuclear War

Sabres are rattling again in Washington towatd Moscow and Beijing. Could nuclear war still happen? The US and Russia possess about 14,000 nuclear warheads, but other countries possess them too, like India, Pakistan, Israel.

According to simulations by Alan Robock of Rutgers University in New Jersey and Michael Mills at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado even a nuclear war between say India and Pakistan could devastate the world. The fires from bombed cities would send about 5 million tonnes of hot black smoke into the stratosphere, where it would spread round the world. This smog would cut solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface by 8 per cent – enough to drop average winter temperatures by a startling 2.5 to 6 °C across North America, Europe and much of Asia, and not just for a few days. It would take around five years for the impacts to peak, and the repercussions would still be felt strongly after a decade.

Near-ice-age temperatures would cause frosts capable of reducing the growing season in the world’s mid-latitude bread baskets by up to 40 days. This, combined with meagre rainfall and blistering UV, would cause crop yields to plummet. Nuclear winter would deliver global famine. The smoke would also heat the normally chilly stratosphere by around 30°C, unleashing nitrogen chemistry that would destroy much of the ozone layer.

Moreover, climate models predict that rainfall would be reduced as weather systems lost energy. The Asian monsoon would collapse... that’s two billion people with as much as 80 per cent less water. The Amazon basin and the already arid Southwestern US and western Australia would scarcely do better. All from a small regional but nuclear war.

Steven Starr of the University of Missouri has calculated that a nuclear exchange between the major nuclear powers, US and Russia (and perhaps China), could throw 150 million tonnes of smoke into the air. That would block 70 per cent of sunlight and cool much of the world by 20°C or more. Unable to grow food, most people would starve to death. Those who hope to hide from the starvation in deep bunkers or whatever will have a long wait for the radioactice fallout from such a massive nuclear exchange to reduce--thousands of years, and it is unlikely anyone could survive. One of the greatest geopolitical achievements of the past 60 years was to avoid a nuclear war. The next 60 look just as gloomy.

(Adapted from Fred Pearce, New Scientist)

The Social Psychology of Making Enemies, Propaganda and War

Short Summary

Contrary to common belief, war and the creation of enemies is not coded in our genes.

• The symbolic enemy of primitive-ritualistic warfare, where the enemy in is quite different from the modern notion of an enemy.
• The withholding enemy of the greedy-colonial warfare who is part of the imperialist, capital grabbing culture.
• The worthy enemy, a fighter of heroic wars is a fighter of heroic wars, what Bertolt Brecht calls "the beloved enemy”.
• The enemy of God in a holy war has to be destroyed to ensure the safety of the holy group.
• The threatening enemy in defensive wars that aim to protect one's country or homeland.
• The oppressive, dictatorial enemy opposing liberation or revolutionary wars.

A classic study in the US in the midst of the cold war revealed that young students viewed the Soviets as “the enemy”, not because they posed a physical threat to the US but due to their different ideology and competitive stand as a super power. Most adults over age fifty who have gone through some personal experience with war define “the enemy” in the traditional way, meaning the country with which we are at war.

An enemy image is a representation of the enemy. The double standard dynamic is the most powerful in distorting perceptions of enemy images. This is a process whereby people use a different yardstick to judge the enemy’s actions or to assess enemy motivations than they use for themselves or for allies.

The tendencies to judge the enemy’s actions negatively, to remember mainly negative information and to attribute peaceful acts to situational factors are frequently accompanied by hostile predictions of the enemy’s intentions far exceeding what can be determined by the facts. As most people are likely to perceive an enemy as more dangerous and more hostile than they really are, they are also more likely to expect the enemy to act more aggressively and violently than can be assumed from the available facts. The ability to present and perceive the enemy in such paradoxical ways enables people to justify their attitudes and behavior towards the enemy.

Four of the unwritten rules of enmity are:

1. The enemy of my friend is my enemy
2. The friend of my enemy is my enemy
3. The enemy of my enemy is my friend
4. My enemies are friends with each other

While during the cold war it was the split between the USSR and the US, more recently it has been between the Arab-Muslim world and the US This dynamic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is also responsible for the awkward situations where the US found itself simultaneously supporting two sides of a conflict with arms during the lengthy Iran-Iraqi war in the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1991 and 2002 wars in Iraq the US found itself again in the awkward position of supporting Syria, who was opposing Iraq (the enemy of my enemy is my friend) and at the same time labeling Syria as a terrorist nation due its hostile position towards Israel, the US’ ally (the enemy of my friend is my enemy). During the cold war research has shown that the US’s enemy, at that time, the USSR, was closely associated in people’s minds with terrorism and drug trafficking. As predicted by the statement, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as soon as he gained enough political and military power in Iran, the late Shah of Iran opposed the Kurdish minority who were fighting for their independence.

Accordingly, one of the primary goals of war propaganda is its creation of enemy images that strip the enemy of their human, domestic and individual characteristics. Analysis of enemy images and war propaganda reveals that there are nine levels to describing or perceiving the enemy. On the other hand in an era when television can show the enemy, their children and families right in our living rooms, it is no longer easy to dehumanize the enemy. To see the enemy as a full person, like us experiencing joy, pain, fear and hope, will change our relationships to our enemies. Far from justifying all of our enemy’s actions, understanding will give us an historical, political and emotional context for our enemy’s actions.

The Social Psychology of Making Enemies, Propaganda and War

Abridged Article

Contrary to common belief, war and the creation of enemies is not coded in our genes. The first humans who could organize and train an army, plan and conduct a war against an enemy, appeared in the Neolithic period, only about 11,000 to 13,000 years ago. Psychological elements predispose us towards propaganda and war. We can act in evil ways and make enemies. By understanding how prejudice and propaganda moves people, enemy making and war might be stopped. The US cartoon character, Pogo, wisely says, “We have met the enemy and it is us”.

Ofer Zur tells us that, since the Neolithic Period, people have fought seven types of warfare, each represented by a specific type of enemy:

1. The symbolic enemy of primitive-ritualistic warfare, where the enemy in is quite different from the modern notion of an enemy.
2. The withholding enemy of the greedy-colonial warfare who is part of the imperialist, capital grabbing culture. The greedy, dominating and colonial enemy in these wars was one who deprived the dominated people of their physical and psychological needs. From the view of the dominant party, the enemy was not to be destroyed but to be exploited, enslaved and used to fulfil the greedy needs of the elite group of people. The enemy in this war is to be exploited, nowadays not necessarily militarily or wholly militarily but economically exploited.
3. The worthy enemy, a fighter of heroic wars is a fighter of heroic wars, what Bertolt Brecht calls “the beloved enemy”.
4. The enemy of God in a holy war has to be destroyed to ensure the safety of the holy group. The Arabs, and many in the US, view the Middle Eastern wars as a holy war between Islam and Christianity. The Cold War too from the US viewpoint had the elements of a holy war against the “atheist communists”, and the recent war on terrorism has an underpinning of holy war on radical Muslim terrorists, both being depicted as the “good guys”, the US and its allies, versus the “bad guys”, anyone who contested the US view of the world.
5. The threatening enemy in defensive wars that aim to protect one’s country or homeland. The US fought in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam to defend an ally, allegedly to “defend the free world”, or to defend itself from Communist or other believed threats. Troops and civilians alike are conditioned to believe that their country’s cause is just, their leaders are blameless, and that God is on their side against the vile and evil enemy “over there”.
6. The oppressive, dictatorial enemy in opposing liberation or revolutionary wars.
7. The recently conceived notion of a war on terrorism, although, beyond agreement that terrorism aims at inducing terror, no one has yet found a commonly agreed definition. After all, warfare generally induces terror. Consequently, terrorism is ften simply “name calling” against any “enemy of the state”. It is the term used by powerful governments when their enemy threaten the dominance of those governments in war albeit with far more primitive weapons. In the war on terrorism there are desperate attempts to identify and destroy the enemy by traditional means of bombing, but traditional warfare tactics are not effective with non-traditional warfare. The Israelis and other military and police forces in Mediterranean countries, the US in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the British Army in Ireland, and others have all learned that you can’t use WMD to fight an enemy “out there” when the enemy is “right here”, within, all around or among us.

Enmity, Enemy Images And Paranoia

Recent dictionary definitions of “enemy” are on the lines of “a hostile force or power”, “a member or unit of such a force”, or “something having destructive effect”. US Federal law defines “enemy” as “the government of any nation with which the US is at war”. More personally, “enemy” can be defined as a person or a group of persons perceived to represent a threat to or hostile towards the perceiver. In the cold war, students we found to see the Soviets as “the enemy” not because they posed any actual threat to the US, but due to their different and competitive ideology as a super power. Most adults over age fifty who have gone through some personal experience with war define “the enemy” in the traditional way, meaning the country with which we are at war. However, most young people in Europe and the US, having not directly experienced war in their adult lives, consistently define “enemy” in terms involving different ideologies, religions, values or competition for world domination.

While enemy traditionally has been defined as some type of perceived or real threat, “enmity” puts more emphasis on mutuality. Hypothetically, nation [A] can be an enemy of nation [B], while nation [B] does not consider [A] its enemy. An enemy image is a representation of the enemy. So, an image of “the enemy” can be accurate or biased, imaginary or real. More often than not, it is both. The role of war propaganda is to propagate a stereotypical bad, evil or demonic image of the enemy. Riitta Wahlstrom defines “enemy image” as “the commonly-held, stereotyped, dehumanized image of the outgroup”:

The enemy image provides a focus for externalization of fears and threats… a lot of undesirable cognitions and emotions are projected on to the enemy.

There is an emphasis on the processes of dehumanization (which legitimizes violence against the enemy), externalization, projection and several cognitive biases.

The pathology of the normal person who is a member of a war-justifying society forms the template from which all the images of the enemy are created.

In publicing enemy images and war, propaganda exploits people’s sense of insecurity, their loyalty and clinks with the group, and their predisposition to paranoia. Seeing the world as divided into us and them, undesirable negative qualities are projected on to the enemy. Social psychologists have documented the importance of the outgroup and enmity in the formation of group identity and group cohesion. These social instincts, or their lack, and the relative strength of one’s sense of self contribute to the individual’s vulnerability to war propaganda and establish an individual’s inclination towards making enemies. Enemies are suitable targets for unacceptable negative feelings or guilt by individuals or groups, as they attempt to rid themselves of these emotions. In the US, some people made Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld, or the military-industrial complex, with some justification, into their enemies. Internal group cohesion and group identity was promoted to counter the aggressive war campaign against international enemies led by these leading politicians.

Young children adopt attitudes, including enemy images, without really understanding them. But, at adolescence, they can think more abstractly and can draw more accurate conclusions from their personal experiences. In this way, children learn about enmity from their surroundings and internalize prejudices and enemy images as part of the process of becoming members of their culture. Thereby, people may use a different yardstick to judge the enemy than they use for themselves or friends and allies. During a conflict this double standard allows each side to regard its own deeds as defensive while denouncing the enemy’s as offensive. The double standard bias leads not only to misconceptions about the enemy and to an exaggerated perception of danger, it may also force the escalation of conflict to a point where mistrust and bad feeling renders negotiation no longer viable, then war may be inevitable.

The enemy’s hostile actions are commonly attributed to natural characteristics, while conciliatory or peaceful actions are attributed to the circumstances. In other words, when the enemy is acting peacefully, the external circumstances force it to. It is not voluntary. Americans, in tests, chose negative motives when bad acts were fictitiously ascribed to the enemy, but positive ones when the same acts were ascribed to the US.

The tendency to judge the enemy’s actions as malign, to remember mainly negative information, and to attribute peaceful acts to the situation rather than free will are frequently accompanied by hostile predictions of the enemy’s intentions far exceeding what the facts support. As people mainly see an enemy as more dangerous and more hostile than they really are, they also mainly expect the enemy to act more aggressively and violently than objective evidence suggests. The enemy will be seen as unwarrantedly hostile when we misread its intentions. The projection of hostile intent onto the enemy, can be provocative, and cause an escalation of the conflict, thereby becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Mirror Image

A close analysis of the images of the enemy as perceived by opposing parties reveals that they often see each other in a similar light, as Uri Bronfenbrenner showed in the cold war, and which remains true. The mirror image has manifested clearly in the way both sides of the Iraq war of 2002 depicted themselves and the other. The United State’s narrative of the war has been:

Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple an evil dictator and establish democracy and human rights.

Psychology shows that people pay attention to, and recall more negative adjectives and stories about people they consider “the enemy”, than with people they consider friends. Terrorism and the external enemy have preoccupied the attention of Americans. Incredible statements about the USSR and then by Muslims are readily accepted in the US and the West generally because they describe “the enemy”. Evidence suggests this gullibility is shared with the other side. The bias in credibility assessment maintains a person’s inner mental consistency by ignoring, tuning-out, disregarding or denying any information that is inconsistent with their attitudes towards the enemy. It is a process which culminates with hostile and very often wrong predictions of the enemy’s intentions. It mobilizes people through fear and hate to feel justified in going to war and killing the enemy without guilt.

Someone seen as an evil enemy today can be an ally and a trusted friend tomorrow. War propaganda often focuses on historical differences between “us” and “them, the enemy”. Propaganda distorts truth and skews historical actuality with the goal of perpetuating present enmity towards a contemporary enemy. The fascists who effected the putsch in Kiev spread the lie that the Russians invaded the Ukraine when it was the German Nazi armies, The Ukraine being already within the Societ Union. Equally, after 9/11, the Taliban had to be depicted as the world’s most threatening enemy who were also hiding Bin Ladin to spread unreasonable terror worldwide but especially in western homes. There are modern nations, such as Finland, Costa Rica and Switzerland, without enemies and there have been peaceful societies throughout human evolution. But most groups, nations, tribes or countries have an enemy. Each in group often has an out group. Enmity with some other is important to maintain group cohesion and group identity, explaining the prevalence of the idea of the enemy. Even so, no one has shown that groups necessarily require enemies, or that there are no other ways to maintain group cohesion and identity.

The dynamic of enmity is complex and often has significant inconsistencies and paradoxes. Four of the unwritten rules of enmity state that:

1. The enemy of my friend is my enemy
2. The friend of my enemy is my enemy
3. The enemy of my enemy is my friend
4. My enemies are friends with each other.

While during the cold war it was the split between the Soviet Union and the US, more recently it has been that between the Arab-Muslim world and the US. The notion of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is responsible for the embarrassment of the US finding itself simultaneously on both sides of a conflict in its Middle eastern machinations since the 1970s. Thus the US is simultaneously bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria while supporting ISIS as a weapon against Syria, allegedly a terrorist nation (the enemy of my enemy is my friend--at least to some degree!). Syria is also hostile to Israel, the US’s ally (the enemy of my friend is my enemy). People assume that their enemies are friends with each other. During the cold war the US’s enemy, the USSR, was blamed by Americans for all kinds of terrorism and drug trafficking. Our enemies of the day are therefore typically regarded as allies of each other, and with other threats whether communism, terrorism, or human rights violations in general. Our side don’t do things like that, not because it is true, but because no one propagates the evidence for it that exists, and because no one likes to think that our side is ever beastly!

Ignorance and Dehumanization

The above biases and distorted perceptions are to do with ignorance of the world beyond national borders and the enemy in particular, often fostered deliberately. Twenty-eight percent of US citizens believe that the USSR fought against, and not with, the US in World War II. Ignorance also perpetuates personal attribution of barbaric actions to the enemy. To fight our own kind we have to dehumanize the enemy, to see other human beings as less than human. So, the main goal of war propaganda is to paint an enemy stripped of their human characteristics, to paint them as monstrous!

Broadly there are nine ways of characterising the enemy. Least likely is as being recognizably human, but is possible and even likely in primitive ritualistic and heroic, romanticised warfare. Otherwise, the enemy is depicted as increasingly less human, becoming merely a representation of death, destruction and evil. Caricatures and cartoons in the press, on the Internet and TV depict Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein or Muslim opponents as a “demonic enemy”. The war on terrorism depicts the enemy as an animal and the US soldier as a hunter. Pictures of American service men and women sexually humiliating prisoners held in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 mocked the pious aim of Muslims of “submitting” to God by putting them in subservient, dehumanizing positions that sub-feminized the enemy before their dominating female guards.

The west also depicts and dehumanizes the enemy on the computer or videogame screen, and through the selling of “shoot-em-up” videogames largely played by children and unsophisticated young men. On the other hand in an era when television can show the enemy, their children and families right in our living rooms, it is not as easy to dehumanize them as it once was. In the summer 2014 assault by the IDF on Gaza, it was the Israelis who came out on TV as the least human by their murdering thousands of largely helpless Gazans in their homes. More and more sophisticated techniques must be developed to continue denying the enemy’s humanity. Although the US has the largest store of war instruments on the planet, domestically they have to protect themselves at airports against the Pimpernel terrorists by checking soft drink bottles, tennis shoes and threatening weapons like nail clippers.

Today it is imperative to seek ways of reducing enmity among groups and discover if nations can exist without enemies. Every war runs the risk of escalating to a nuclear level, so by failing to settle disputes amicably we risk destroying ourselves. We must stop dehumanizing the enemy and view them as human beings whose grievances mau be legitimate. To see the enemy, like us, experiencing joy, pain, fear and hope, will help us to empathize with our enemies, giving us an historical, political and emotional context to understand our enemy’s actions, to recognize the enemies’ needs, hopes and fears, and the catalysts that motivate them. We will be less likely to make hostile predictions, to have selective negative attention, and we will apply fewer double standards in assessing the enemy’s actions.

The central need in doing this is to develop a healthy skepticism about what the media tell us about our supposed enemies, and why anyone should want us to believe the lies they propagate. The answer is the need of the ruling elite to capture absolute power and greed for wealth that anables them to do it. But while true, that is another story. Meanwhile, relatively few US citizens have a passport to travel abroad, and consequently they have a narrow view of the human race. Those who do travel broaden their awareness of the common humanity of all people. Grassroots citizen diplomacy, sister-cities, pen pals and other networking activities between the members of warring groups can drastically reduce enmity by rehumanizing the enemy.

Enmity might once have promoted group cohesion and enhanced group identity, we have moved far from the situation of small bands of wandering humans when this was so. Now there is ample evidence to show that groups can develop cohesion and identity without enemies. The danger in the current US war against terrorism is that it will descend to the level of the terrorist-enemy it fights and by that destroy the very values that the US is fighting to preserve. Fighting the enemy on its own terms can destroy the country itself.

Reference

The un-abridged article can be read at this address:

• http://www.zurinstitute.com/enmity.html

Psychology and Class in War and National Hatred

Social psychology has revealed that even tiny infants distinguish between people close to them with whom they feel comfortable and others, strangers whom they dislike. For two million years of human social evolution, we lived in small groups of about 150 people, and distrusted strange, even though neighbouring groups. So it is that people learn to separate those they like from those who make them feel ill at ease, to separate good people from bad. It is out of such primitive thinking that the structures of enmity grow and can be exploited by unscrupulous leaders whether political or religious. Hesse showed that, by age five, children have the idea of the enemy, someone whom they see as whatever in the culture seems most fearful and threatening—a wild beast, a demon or someone with evil intent. Interestingly, these Hesse’s subjects did not generally see their own nationality as having evil intent.

Now we live in a global village but still have our loyalty to clans and tribes, albeit much bigger and more dangerous ones. Disputes between them can still lead to violence and war but now they can end up as genocide. The nuclear threat has fed off Christian apocalyptic thinking to split the peoples of the world globally into good and evil. Worse, the singular delusion of US exceptionalism as America being God’s own country and Americans as God’s latter day Chosen People, forced their conviction that, they, being good, would be saved in the event of a nuclear holocaust and the evil enemy would perish. The danger of reinforcing infantile thought patterns is clear.

War begins in the mind, with the idea of the enemy.

Broyles W Jr, Why me?-why them? The New York Times, 1986

Yet analysis of the images of the enemy as perceived by opposing parties reveals that they often see each other in a similar light. Uri Bronfenbrenner has coined the term “mirror image” and documents how American and Russian views of each other during the cold war were essentially interchangeable:

Our enemy is a coarse, crooked megalomaniac who aims to kill us.

Tommy White, retired US Air Force Chief of Staff

Both sides felt that:

1. the other was the aggressor
2. the other’s government exploited and deluded its people
3. the majority of the people were essentially good and were not sympathetic to the government’s deceitful leadership
4. the other government should never be trusted—they have hidden, sneaky and secretive ways to go about their plots
5. their policy verges on madness, while ours is, of course, rational and humane.

Examples of the mirror image dynamic are numerous. In a testimony to Bronfenbrenner’s thorough research it is as relevant to the 2002 Iraq-United States war as it was during the cold war. Americans and Iraqis have accused each other’s governments of misleading their people for their own self-interests. The Americans and Arabs have repeatedly exchanged accusations of the other’s attempt to dominate the world, control its oil supply and insatiate greed. The mirror image has manifested clearly in the way both sides of the Iraq war of 2002 depicted themselves and the other: The United State’s narrative of the war has been: “Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple an evil dictator and establish democracy and human rights.” On the other side the Arab narrative was: “The same Yankees who pay for Israelis to blow up Palestinians are now seizing Iraqi oil fields and maiming Iraqi women and children.” Both, Iraqis and Americans accused each other of violation of human rights, ruthlessness and greed.

During the cold war the United States blamed the Soviet Union for expansionism when they invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union blamed the United States for expansionism when it sent troops to Vietnam, Grenada and to countries in South America. Americans blamed the Soviets for human rights violations of minorities and Jewish dissidents, and the Soviets reminded Americans of their systematic violation of the basic human rights of the poor and African Americans in the United States. Both sides blamed the other for violations of international treaties, for the support of terrorism and for the escalation of the nuclear arms race. The United States blames Iraq for being part of the Axis of Evil, along side Iran and North Korea, and Iraq, and many other countries, consider the United States, Britain and Israel as their own Axis of Evil.

This principle explains how people are more likely to assess the informer and information that represent their view as more credible than the informer who presents an opposing view. This bias in the judgment of sources of information explains the resistance of enemy images to change. Statements by the Iraqis and the United States, or statements by the Soviet Union and the United States against each other, have often been perceived as credible by their respective audiences only because they describe “the enemy”. This principle was also evident within American political culture between political parties, when in conflict over a course of action or the selection of a candidate for office. Research on the credibility of newscasters also confirms that the more consistent the newscaster’s report was with the research subject’s predispositions, the more credible the newscaster was perceived to be.

Americans with negative attitudes towards nations whom they saw as hostile to the United States (eg, North Korea and Iran or, a couple of decades ago, the Soviet Union and Iran) are likely to assume that the relationship between these countries was positive. In other words people are likely to assume that their enemies are friends with each other. During the cold war research has shown that the United States’ enemy, at that time the Soviet Union, was closely associated in people’s minds with terrorism and drug trafficking. Similarly, Saddam Hussein had been associated with Bin Ladin right after 9/11, even though there was no evidence of such relationship.

When the enemy is presenting a conciliatory or peaceful offer, it is met with paranoid suspicion and is suspect for its hidden “real goals”. When Saddam Hussein, for example, finally allowed the UN inspectors to survey the presidential palaces and other locations, it was demanded that he be met with as much suspicion as when he did not allow them to inspect any of the sites. The fact that the inspectors did not find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction did not change the United States’ or the British government’s opinion in regard to Hussein’s dangerousness. Partly as a result of this double standard in attribution, both governments were unfazed by the lack of evidence and went on with their war plans.

One of the most critical elements in fighting our own kind is the ability to dehumanize the enemy, that is, to perceive other human beings as less than human:

The image of the enemy is not only the soldier’s most powerful weapon, it is society’s most powerful weapon. It enables people en masse to participate in acts of violence they would never consider doing as individuals.

Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy

“Moral” or “civilized” human beings do not intentionally and rationally kill other human beings, but they do kill Gooks, Huns, Japs or Niggers. The substitution of labels from Soviet citizens to Reds, Jewish people to Hibbs or rats, American men to Yankees or Arab people to fanatic Muslims serves a simple but profound function: it allows people to kill with a minimal or no sense of guilt. Accordingly, one of the primary goals of war propaganda is its creation of enemy images that strip the enemy of their human, domestic and individual characteristics. In the words of Butler Shaffer:

War, by its very nature, is sociopathic… it dehumanizes people.

John E Mack tells that a school pupil after the war being taught by his teacher about Russians complained angrily, “You’re trying to get us to see them as people”. At this level of dehumanization the enemy is represented not only as inhuman, but also as a lifeless object. In the Iraq war of 1991 the United States depicted the enemy as a small dot-type target on the computer or videogame screen. Dehumanized enemies are often referred to by technical names or the code-numbers of their weaponry rather than by nationality or even real personal names. During the cold war this allowed the United States to fight not the Soviet army but the SS11 (Soviet long range nuclear missile) or the Frog (Soviet short range nuclear missile). An explosion on the TV or computer screen or the elimination of an SS11 by a Minuteman I (United States long range nuclear missile) are not likely to lead to feeling of regret regarding the loss of human lives. The technical names of weaponry as a representation of the enemy shield us from these feelings. George Orwell reflected well when he stated:

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Doublespeak is the most advanced level of dehumanization. Through Doublespeak, a term coined by George Orwell in his novel 1984, human lives are presented as abstractions. “Collateral damage” is doublespeak for civilian casualties, “servicing the target” is a euphemism for killing. Numerical terms, such as “megadeath”, stand for one million dead people. There is nothing in these terms that evoke any thoughts or feelings in regard to the human lives being destroyed; they elicit neither guilt nor shame. Therefore, killing and the destruction of life can go on. Additional examples of Doublespeak are: “coercive diplomacy” for bombing, “permanent pre-hostility” for peace and “engage the enemy on all sides” for ambushes. Consistent with the effort to mask the destructive power of weaponry, nuclear weapons have often been given pet names, such as “Poseidon” for the United States nuclear submarine, “Peacekeeper” or “Minuteman” for long-range nuclear missiles, and “Honest John” for the surface-to-surface missile. Acronyms are also abstractions. GLCM (pronounced as “glick-em”) stands for “ground launched cruise missile” and SLCM (pronounced “slick-em”) stands for “submarine launched cruise missile”. Possibilities for names of recent wars in Iraq have included euphemisms such as: “Desert Storm”, “Infinite Justice” and “Enduring Freedom”.

There is a substantial, politically influential, and aggressive body of American opinion for which the specter of a great and fearful external enemy, to be exorcised only by vast military preparations and much belligerent posturing, has become a political and psychological necessity.

George F Kennan, former US Ambassador to the USSR

One of the central shifts in the post 9/11 era is the emergent focus on militant Islam and the war on terrorism. The enemy appears to be rigidly defined and split tidily in two. On one side is the American technically superior empire and her supporters, on the other, terrorism, fueled by the energy of low tech, grass roots, religious, militant martyrs. Most terrifying to many is the sickening infectious enmity that is spreading across the planet, dividing nations—especially the United States, creating religious factions, pitting ethnic groups against one another as it demands a decision to line up behind one warring faction or the other. These two groups have become the modern “superpowers” with new war tactics that are truly terrifying. The old tools of war, and the antiquated posturing of the military, could appear almost comical if they were not so sad, if they did not bear such horrifying consequences. The war being waged is killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and there is no end in sight.

When the world was faced with two real superpowers, both seemingly equally powerful, Bronfenbrenner perhaps had no valid means to objectively testing whether one side or the other was making legitimate claims. Now there is only one superpower, the US, faced only by lesser powers, so the rationale for lying by its rulers who know their own absolute strength cannot be justified at all by psychological reasoning except perhaps by their utter insanity! Looking at the world since 1945, the US has had a hand in innumerable instances of wars and interventions, often against minnows. Each time the same fears were propagated, and now the fear of gangs of bandits in countries far off is again being wound up into a threat to the existence of the mightiest power in the world. Well, now it no longer washes. These gangs are not existential threats to anyone except perhaps their immediate neighbours, but certainly not the USA, so we can clearly see that the fears being generated are deliberately induced. Yes, based no doubt on deep psychological fears from the time when life was rather precarious, but not based on anything real today. And if the US is perpetuating these threats and fears unilaterally now, maybe we should ask who was driving the propaganda even in the cold war years. Maybe it was not quite as even as Bronfenbrenner thought.

Individuals may have little to do with the choice of national enemies. Most Americans, for example, know only what has been reported in the mass media about the Soviet Union. We are largely unaware of the forces that operate within our institutions, affecting the thinking of our leaders and ourselves, and which determine how the Soviet Union will be represented to us. Ill-will and a desire for revenge are transmitted from one generation to another, and we are not taught to think critically about how our assigned enemies are selected for us…But the attitude of one people towards another is usually determined by leaders who manipulate the minds of citizens for domestic political reasons which are generally unknown to the public.

1988 John E Mack, MD
The Lancet, 1988

National leaders have become adept at keeping their people focused on the supposed threat of an outside enemy. Yet the “cold war” taught that today we no longer could destroy the enemy on the other side of the wall, the river or the ocean without destroying ourselves. Destroying “the enemy” in the nuclear era inevitably means self-destruction. Even then people kid themselves that their protective myth will guarantee them safety, whether some sort of Star-Wars defensive system or the protection of God whisking away people still alive to heaven for a grandstand seat to watch the fireworks. As for terrorism, it is no different. We cannot eliminate terrorism, we cannot bomb it or any other belief or ideology out of existence. What we are left with is to attempt to increase our effectiveness in persuasion and proving what works in practice. For that we must stop dehumanizing the terrorist enemy and view them as full human beings with some legitimate grievances.

There is no self-awareness or self-responsibility at the highest political level which corresponds to the awareness of personal responsibility with which we are familiar as moral beings in society. So we have to create a new expectation of political self-responsibility—a political morality. Instead of constant blaming of the other side, we need to give new attention to adversaries’ culture and history, to their dreams and their values. We can no longer afford enemies, and nor is the notion of national security any longer useful. The security of each depends on everyone else. Regrettably the most powerful people in the world are the unbelievable rich who control it and therefore us all.

Conflict can become genocidal when powerful groups think that the most efficient means to get what they want is to eliminate those in the way.

Chirot, D and McCauley, C, Why Not Kill Them All?

Until they cease to want more by any means at all, as they have done so far, or they are forcibly removed from the equation, we can never have a world free of war. Greed at the top is the ultimate perpetuator of international enmity.

References:

• Mack, J E, The Enemy System (short version)
• Chirot, D and McCauley, C, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder
• Zur, O (1991), The love of hating: The psychology of enmity. History of European Ideas

A Century of False Pretexts for War

When Secretary of State John Kerry made his statement about Russia's actions in Ukraine, his hypocrisy was apparent to all but the most clueless of viewers and listeners. But Kerry expected the public to let the US administration get away with transparent hypocrisy. The public has always gone along with the pretexts for war their rulers have offered to them decade after decade in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

James Corbett reports on it in a 15 minute video from BoilingFrogs (www.boilingfrogspost.com).

Nationalism, War, Fascism, Class, the State

Class disguised as nationalism is the basic cause of wars in the modern period. There is no fully developed social psychology of nationalism, but there is of class… Marxism.

The essence of government is the use of force in accordance with law to secure certain ends which the holders of power consider desirable. The coercion of an individual or a group by force is always in itself more or less harmful. Those who are being coerced by the force of the state may not feel they are benefitting in any way, but those wielding the power always know that they are. They argue that if there were no government, it would not mean that force would stop being used between men. It would merely be the exercise of force by those who had strong predatory instincts, necessitating either slavery or an uncharacteristic willingness to repel force with force on the part of those whose instincts were less violent.

This is, of course, the state of affairs at present, the ruling class being the predator in the position of being able to use force against the subjugated class. And in international relations, the current super power or powers are in the position of being able to use their force against any other state they choose to.

So the ruling elite of the world’s super power(s) are the ones who hold the power of force over everyone else, and those elite people tell us they are using force to keep at bay the horrors of communism or anarchism or Islamists or whatever they find most appropriate to single out as the ones who are currently terrorising the world.

In fact, it is they, the world’s elite who are terrorising everyone else because they are the ones with the power to do it, but their propaganda is that they use their force to save everyone else from anarchy, and we are meant to be immediately persuaded by them, their media moguls and their academic gurus that they are entirely correct. Yet the behaviour of the USA in the 70 years since the second world war, is so manifestly clear—the USA is the propagator of terror everywhere—that it is amazing anyone falls for the ruling propaganda claptrap.

If communism or anarchism or Islam have no solution to offer for the evils of the world, why does the world under the guiding force of the US industrialised military class keep taking us all into hideous unavoidable wars? The student of the modern world has to see war and its excuses as political and economic myths produced to scare everyone into submission. Americans cannot abide Islam and a religion of submission, but the US religion of submission is enjoined by all of those wonderful US Zionist Christians, supposedly free to exercise their free will, but so completely mesmerised by ruling class smoke and mirrors that they require no supreme being to fall before. They do it anyway to any authoritative enough figure they meet.

These people, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, spoke of the experience of combat as an epiphany, as offering an opportunity for heroism, “brotherhood, community, dedication, selflessness, order, command, ritual, and aristocracy in an era when all these were being eroded by bourgeois liberal society” (L Bramson & G W Goethals, “War”). And, if this is at all true, it is because the people who had taken over the running of society were the capitalists whose raison d’etre was the new liberal economics which according to Adam Smith would exercise the invisible hand of the beneficial liberal society to make everything better for everyone.

It was true, though only if you were one of the controlling elite, and that is who they meant by “everyone”. The propagandists of the rulers presented war as glorious and so on, because it was helping to save the good society offered by capitalism from all and every conceivable alternative, and tempted by all that glory, heroism and national adulation, what young person with no discernable future other than poverty and drudgery could resist?

Nationalism and the nation-state emerge as the only focus for identity for millions of alienated workers and peasant/small holders whose conditions of life have been transformed by the speed of change brought on by the insane rush by the already rich to accumulate more capital. Poor soldiers, though getting only a small share of the national wealth, could claim a large share of the national glory, which was again just what the ruling elite want, but few infantrymen ever get to realise.

Led by a militarising civil society keen to identify the personal ambition of those with no ambition but that presented to them by the prevailing glorifying of nationalism and its associated last refuge of scoundrels many people find seemingly noble cause destiny and mutual social bonding in the founding of a community they can identify with in the nation and its citizens’ army to guard endangered freedoms. They founded fascism, and liked it! The liberal rhetoric of the defence of freedom, actually served to tighten the ruling class grip on it.

The power of capitalism was to commodify everything, and with the militarisation of society, weapons were also commodified and their manufacture and use became essential to the ruling elite. Capitalism developed a superstructure consisting of a military-industrial and financial complex, as President Eisenhower noticed even from the golf tee. Meanwhile, the prospect of modern aerial warfare could suitably terrorise the nervous population for whom militarism had become the norm. Shared danger albeit in a country safe enough from most conventional warfare kept the community of citizen soldiers anxious and a mystique of war and hero worship popular among people previously glad to take a girl to a drive-in or to see a baseball match. The experience of combat was created a new aristocracy—those who had seen action, killed the “terrorists” and returned home, but their own wounds and scars, notably those that were mental and not simply physical, and those whose physical scars were too horrific to show found themselves fighting new battles and, they now found, with little help or sympathy. The real heroes were not weak, and did not need counselling and psychiatry.

Then in militaristic society, the distinction between the violent criminal and the war hero is pretty narrow, and damaged heroes often metamorphosed into horrible criminals, but the state wants to employ the thug as the agent of its force to keep society from communism and anarchy or Islam, it wants the soldier citizen to be ready and willing to kill, at the command of some state authority… but not otherwise! Where does it leave morality? Where is Christian morality when the liberal state wants the elite to exploit those simple or naïve enough not to realise they are being robbed. The capitalist congratulates himself that he is helping the poor man get to heaven, no doubt. He is willing to sacrifice his own place there for the simple reason that he only pretends to believe it for the sake of the subjects. Neoliberalism does not punish the powerful and the wealthy. They get wealthy and powerful by their using force, and they have the force of the state to maintain their privileged position.

In a just society, the private use of force should be prohibited except in rare cases, but the state actually is the class of people that administer it and benefit from it. Those people are not going to administer a just state because it would mean removing their own power to do it!

As the ruling class cannot be expected to remove their own privilege, it remains to the subject and normally submissive class to do it, as Marx explained, but it requires the poor and oppressed to become conscious of their own role and power. The first step to doing it is to appreciate that the state is not neutral but serves a ruling class of rich and powerful people called capitalists, people who are not pleasant and are not democrats. Ordinary people can rally together and give the ruling elite a surprise, and get immense strength out of their feeling of brotherhood. Hemingway wrote, concerning the Spanish Civil War when people from all over the world went to help defend the Spanish Republic against the African soldiers under the command of the fascist general Franco:

It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.

Once the people, and particularly the fighting men realise what they ought to be fighting for, the revolution becomes possible.

Our Wars are Illegal: Accounting for War Press Conference

The Worst Crimes in UK History

by Jim McCluskey, reposted from Dissident Voice, May 20th, 2013

In a time of peace the West is permanently at war. Massive standing armies are continuously fed their natural fare. And, incredibly, the myth of the UK being a peace-loving country is sustained by a “liberal” media who endlessly regurgitate the spurious justifications of the political elite. There are currently only two states on the planet which routinely attack other sovereign states and yet the UK and the US persist in seeing themselves as on the side of righteousness and peace.

John McDonnell is an outstanding member of parliament who tells it as it is. Together with Annie Machon (former MI5 officer) and Chris Coverdale (of Make War history) they held a press conference on 23rd April, 2013, under the heading “Accounting for War”.

As John McDonnell pointed out the UK has been involved in 5 illegal wars since 2001. These have caused the deaths of at least 1 million adults in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya and Syria. An estimated 600,000 children have died.

We are all responsible for this. We let it happen. These children have parents who grieve as we would grieve at the death our own child. Our grief would be all the more bitter in the knowledge that the killing took place at the behest of pitiless fantasists who are not being brought to justice for their crimes. As John declared our government issued the orders for war with the consent of Parliament, the Queen, Law-enforcement authorities and taxpayers. These, he claimed, are the worst crimes in UK history.

Annie Machon resigned from MI5 in protest against the UK’s illegal activities in Libya which included efforts to destabilise the state and a plan to murder President Gadaffi. At the press conference she stated that UK’s secret agents are active in a number of Middle Eastern and other countries attempting to destabilise governments including Syria where covert action is widely understood to have been going on for decades. Moreover the lack of effective oversight of the UK secret service is such that even government ministers cannot discover the extent of their activities. Even as information emerges about the crimes of illegal kidnap, rendition (sending abroad), and torture of individuals the government has chosen not to have a root and branch examination of the relationship of government, elected representatives and the law but has passed further legislation to protect the secret services and to prevent evidence of illegality becoming public.

Annie Machon informed the UK media that the secret service had definitely ‘fixed’ the intelligence purporting to justify the invasion of Iraq and that Iran, too, was to have been invaded in 2008. It was not invaded because the US intelligence agencies advised that there was no evidence that Iran was making or was intending to make a nuclear bomb.

Chris Coverdale quoted from the 1970 UN Declaration on Principles of International Law, Point 6:

“No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic and cultural elements are in violation of international law.”

The UN Declaration makes it clear that the invasion of another state is an illegal act and those who authorise it can, under the law, be brought to account.

The UK’s mentor and ally in war crimes is the US. Here, by far the largest army the world has ever known, invades and destroys with impunity smaller states with no chance of effectively defending themselves. This is an army which has been granted militaristic nirvana – its political masters have declared the world a battlefield and instituted war without end (“perpetual war for perpetual peace^rdquo; in the words of the late Gore Vidal). The view that we can stop terrorism by invading the countries and slaughtering the families of those we suspect of being terrorists is one which mystifies the minds of sane people everywhere.

In addition to the illegal and gratuitous invading of sovereign states the US is also engaged in a covert war round the globe and the multiple crimes committed therein have been exposed in Jeremy Scahill’s book, Dirty Wars. The global operations of the foot-soldiers in this war include targeted assassinations (murder of prominent or suspect individuals) of those unfortunate enough to be named in President Obama’s hit list (hit lists, once considered the territory of organised crime, have gone mainstream). These “black ops” take place world-wide, we are told, with thousands of operatives working in 100 different countries, as cogs in the United States killing machine, hunting down, capturing or killing designated individuals, directing drones, AC-130 heavily armed ground-attack gunships and cruise missiles, and continuing the age-old work of destabilising governments and political movements which are deemed not to support the interests of the US.

And we, the citizens of the West, cosseted in our unheeding comfort zones, kept in ignorance by a colluding media, culpably unaware, drift towards disaster.

The abandonment of the rule of law by governments undermines the moral fibre of a nation. This is all of a piece with our commitment to incinerate millions of our fellow humans with thermonuclear weapons if “our vital interests” are threatened.

If the forces of destruction are to be brought under control it can only happen by sufficient numbers of citizens finding out the true story and then acting accordingly. We all owe a huge dept to individuals like John McDonnell MP, Annie Machon, Chris Coverdale and investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill who work tirelessly to this end.

Jim McCluskey is the author of The Nuclear Threat.

So this is Heroic, Is it? Fascist, More Like!

How can we agree to all this mayhem and still have a clear conscience?

Don't our leaders brag we live in Christian countries? Since when did the Jesus Christ of the gospels approve of killing and injuring people, in these cases people none of us even know. Fascists could hardly be worse. So, whose trying to stop it?

How Easily We Forget!

We read that within two months of the outbreak of World War I, as many as 640,000 young men had volunteered for service in the British army. They gathered outside recruiting offices in crowds so large that mounted police sometimes had to be called in to control them. 90 years on, Tony Blair had to lie to the nation trying to convince it of the moral and legal justification for invading Iraq. A century after “the war to end all wars” the British seemed convinced it should have been, and a million demonstrated against Blair’s fraud. But had popular opinion about warfare really been transformed from a stance of naïve patriotic fervour, to one of widespread aversion or abhorrence?

Cambridge visiting historian, J Winter, thought it was the consequence of a process of cultural evolution:

I do think that one reason Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction was because he couldn’t take the nation with him in support of war. That is a consequence of the contribution artists, poets, filmmakers and others have made to our understanding of the horrors of war. Only a fool would argue that cultural history only moves in one direction at any given time. Nevertheless, there is clearly something that has brought most people to the view that war is simply not a legitimate human activity any more. Time and again culture has shown us that the best defence we have against the ravages of war is the human imagination itself.

There is a certain absence of reality here. It is true that artists and poets were in the forefront of those objecting to the mass murder justified as war, but in the intervening decade, the establishment has pushed warfare down our throats continually, and now there seems to be no substantial body of people willing to object to us acting like fascists in invading other people’s countries and killing poor people, men, women and children in their own homes. The lauding of heavily armed soldiers as heroes is nothing less than obscene, yet the BBC TV does it ad nauseum. With Wootten Bassett no longer the featured town for public displays of sickening one-sided sentimentality, it has now found a new one in the appropriately named, Warminster.

Our utter failure to comprehend the scale of our crimes is that we soak up the propaganda of intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries, something that for decades after WWII was wrong because it was considered as openly fascist, the very thing that the fascist countries recently defeated, like Nazi Germany and Bushido Japan, had done in their attempts at power grabbing, but following the lead of Tony Blair—a Catholic Saint in the making when the miracle appears—in West Africa and Serbia, then Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of other people’s countries has become acceptable as the norm, and people now write to newspapers demanding it.

Yet, while condemning Assad in Syria for killing allegedly 8000 of his own people, the figures of how many people we are killing in Afghanistan are never published except as journalistic estimates, but they are not slight, and are certainly of the same order. The long term propaganda against Gaddafi ended up in another lie, a so-called no-fly zone, which even the Russians and Chinese were willing to accept, but which turned out to be a full scale air attack which destroyed the country’s main communications and fuelling centers, and killed 50,000 people, according to the government of the anti-Gaddafi victors. Everyone knows that at least a million people were killed in the Bush/Blair WMD attack on Iraq, and the Clinton/Blair sanctions on medicine and supplies that preceded it.

Do we seriously expect that we can treat people like rats and expect them not to bite back? Six British soldiers were killed in one explosion, to be accompanied by the usual BBC and Sky sentimentality, and mock shock.

“Ingrates! We try to help them and this is what we get.”

Just what would these people do if a foreign army landed in this “Sceptred Isle” and started to kill us in our homes, streets and fields? We certainly would not feel gratitude for the brave foreigners dying to “help” us.

Well, get real! Nor do the Afghans, and nor will the Syrians, if we try the same trick there, and nor will the Iranians, who are the real object of this continuous war build up, and propaganda.

Now we hear from politicians advocating the mayhem and their brain-dead supporters—including some parents of the dead, but not others—that we ought not to stop because, if we did, “our lads” will have died in vain. Does anyone seriously buy this? We have to keep sending in battalion after battalion to lose their lives until maybe we might win. It is the gambler’s insane way to recoup his gambling debts. Double up, each time. Eventually he must win. Yes indeed, if he has infinite resources to risk. In this case lives! These dolts are gambling with the lives of our own youth, and are murdering mostly innocent peasants abroad, assuming that we must win before our resources run out—before we run out of young men.

Well, at present we have plenty of young unemployed. They had better be ready to lose their lives as well as their incomes, if the present insane strategy is to work. Major economic crises, like the one between the world wars, ended up in mass brutality. The west is building up to a mass attack on Iran which could be nuclear, and will lead to many deaths and possibly a new World War with Russia and China.

It really is time for us all to begin objecting on a serious scale, to follow the lead of the sensitive souls who wrote moving verse, sang sad songs, made troubling images, and produced films exposing war for what it is—mass cull of human life—in the hopes that it really would end all war. Jay Winter thinks they succeeded, but we are fighting one long continuous war, and have lots of heroes, many dead and more horribly injured.

How can a mass cull of our own children be of value to us? We are not facing any serious external threat like Hitler. Our threat is right here at home. It is our warmongering rulers.

Republicans Attracted to Repulsive Sights, Liberals Avoid Them

It is said that conservatives and liberals do not see things in the same way. Recent findings make that clear—quite literally. In a series of experiments, researchers closely monitored physiological reactions and eye movements of participants shown combinations of pleasant and unpleasant images on a screen. To gauge subjects’ physiological responses, electrodes measured subtle skin conductance changes indicating an emotional response. The cognitive data were gathered by fitting subjects with eye tracking equipment that captured even the most subtle of eye movements while the images were on the screen.

1. Conservatives had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the unpleasant images like an open wound, a crashed car or a dirty toilet than liberals
2. Liberals had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the pleasant images like a beach ball or a bunny rabbit than conservatives.

Conservatives seem to focus on and respond more to negative stimuli while liberals focus on and respond more to positive stimuli. Conservatives responded physiologically more to images of Democratic politicians—presumed to be a unpleasant to them—than they did to presumably agreeable pictures of Republicans. Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger physiological response to Democratic figures—presumed to be an agreeable stimulus to them—than they did to images of the Republicans, presumed disagreeable to them.

Ultimately the research suggests Republicans are rubberneckers, attracted to unpleasant and gory sights, while liberals find even thoughts of such horrors unpleasant. Who then seems more likely to be a warmonger, a torturer or apologist for torture, and a believer that the pacific Jesus Christ of the gospels is really Rambo Jesus? No prizes for this one.

Are Americans Sick Of War?

A poll by “Pulse Opinion Research” shows that 72 percent of likely voters in the US think that the country is fighting too many wars abroad. Operations continue incessantly overseas and new ones always arrive when old ones seem to be getting settled, like Libya after Iraq. The US people increasingly want to know when the military will finally listen to the people and step back.

Americans see the country deep in hock, and millions unemployed and underemployed, while millions more, even middle class people, worry about the possibility of getting the bullet—fired! Or their compensation slashed in some economy drive. Yet administrations always have plenty of money to fight foreign wars. Something Americans can do without in these allegedly hard times is their tax dollars wasted on useless wars.

With Americans wanting out, this administration is doing little. Yet Obama campaigned under the banner of “Change”, of which ending war was one prominent constituent part, but like Clinton he has broken every promise and spinelessly has bent over to the militarists and the armamaments manufacturers, introducing the US into more wars on his watch. Even a Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul, thinks these wars “endless” and “unwinnable”.

Is Paul doing the same as Obama? Codding the voter? Elections in the USA are an utter fraud. It does not matter who wins, the same policies—aimed at keeping the military and industrial barons and their financiers in banking and insurance swimming in profits—are retained, and the professional lobbyists in Washington with their bucketloads of bribery dollars can always get their own way with grasping representatives. They all have their price, and it isn’t high for the filthy rich minority with enough megabucks to control the USA.

Yankees threw off the yoke of the English, but now they'll have to throw off the yoke of their home grown oppressors. The Brits had to do the same. They threw out the king in the seventeenth century, but kings returned. In the nineteenth century, they had to strike and riot to get the two reform acts passed that pulled the greedy rich into some order for a couple of centuries. Now the British will have to do it again, too!

A Civil War in the USA Today Would Mean Tens of Millions Dead

Which of the many wars the USA has been involved in since its inception has taken the greatest toll of US lives? The answer is the Civil War from 1861-65. It has always been said that 620,000 Americans died in that conflict, two percent of the US population at the time of 31 million. That would translate into well over 6 million deaths pro rata today, and that assumes nineteenth century weaponry.

It is impossible to catalogue the fate of each of the 3 million or more men who fought in the war, and neither the Union nor the Confederacy kept standardized personnel records, and the Confederate records, based on incomplete battle reports and deaths from non-combat causes like disease, were little better than guesswork. The figure was 258,000, a lot less than the more accurate Union figure.

Binghamton University historian J David Hacker now reveals the war’s dead numbered between 650,000 and 850,000, with 750,000 as the central figure, a central estimate 20 percent higher than old figure of 620,000. Hacker realized that civilian deaths were so low relative to soldiers’ deaths that he could compare the number of native-born men missing in the 1870 Census relative to the number of native-born women missing and produce an estimate of the number missing presumed dead from that. He looked at the ratio of male survival relative to female survival for each age group, found the normal peace time pattern in survival rates for men and women by looking at the numbers for 1850-1860 and 1870-1880. Then he compared the war decade, 1860-1870, relative to the pattern. Hacker says:

You can track the number of people of certain ages from one census to the next, and you can see how many are missing.

Pulitzer Prize-winner James McPherson, the greatest living historian of the war, says:

I have always been convinced that the consensus figure of 620,000 is too low, and especially that the figure of 260,000 Confederate dead is definitely too low. My guess is that most of the difference between the estimate of 620,000 and Hacker’s higher figure is the result of underreported Confederate deaths.

McPherson says the new figure should gain acceptance among historians of the era:

An accurate tally—or at least a reasonable estimate—is important in order to gauge the huge impact of the war on American society.

If the recent polarization in American society were to lead to a modern civil war of a similar ferocity, the portends are that, by comparison with the previous one, and allowing for the West's readiness to use WMD and automated killing machines like drone aircraft, deaths would be unimaginable. Yet the US ruling elite seem almost to be inviting it to happen. Maybe they should be less smug. Once US citizens realize the degree to which they have been robbed, it will happen. The kleptocrats will then have killed off the uncomplaining goose that has being laying them golden eggs for the last three decades.

Bin Laden Assassination—the Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories about the death of Osama bin Laden have been fueled by the US military’s rapid disposal of the body at sea, and the US announcement it would not release any images of bin Laden’s dead body. When the Americans killed Mullah Dadullah, Taliban’s chief military commander, they publicly showed the footage. Canadian deputy Leader of the Opposition and MP, Thomas Mulcair, stated in an interview with CBC Television:

I don’t think from what I’ve heard that those pictures [of bin Laden’s body] exist.

Fox News has challenged the DNA evidence confirming Bin Laden’s death. Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch said Bin Laden’s death could not be verified. To be 99.9 percent certain of the identity by DNA, as was claimed, the test had to have been compared against the DNA of a mother and father, or several natural brothers or sisters. DNA was available only from half brothers and half sisters, which makes that degree of certainty impossible, unless a busload of them had been tested.

Radio host, Alex Jones, among many others, thinks Bin Laden has been dead for years, and his body had been kept frozen on ice to be used as a propaganda tool at a future politically expedient time. In 2002, he claimed that an anonymous White House source had told him that bin Laden “is frozen, literally frozen and that he would be rolled out in the future at some date”. Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said in 2003, “Yes we have been told by intelligence that they’ve got him, Bush may roll him out but because they exposed that at the election they didn’t do it”.

Stephen Lendman, citing former Pakistani president, Benazir Bhutto, said that Bin Laden died of natural causes in mid December 2001. Obama’s announcement was an excuse to involve the United States in wars with Pakistan. Maybe that is why the Pakistanis are particularly skeptical of the alleged raid and assassination.

Abbottabad residents said the announcement of Osama’s death was a US conspiracy against Pakistan. Some residents doubted not only that Bin Laden was dead, but also that he ever lived among them. A local lawyer agreed with Thomas Mulcair:

They’re just making it up. Nobody has seen the body.

Pakistani officials said no firefight had ever taken place:

Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers.

Bin Laden was captured alive, and executed outside the compound in front of his 12-year old daughter. Then his body was taken away by helicopter. An article in the Urdu newspaper Ausaf quoted military sources as saying:

Arabic news network Al-Arabiya claimed senior Pakistani security officials said Osama Bin Laden was captured alive in his Pakistani hideout and then shot by US special forces. His 12 year old saw her father executed and his body dragged to a helicopter.

Another Pakistani official rejected US accounts of the bloody firefight, saying:

Bin Laden has been killed somewhere else. But since the US intends to extend the Afghan war into Pakistan, and accuse Pakistan, and obtain a permit for its military’s entry into the country, it has devised the [Seal operation] scenario.

Hamid Gul former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) said Bin laden had died many years ago and that the official death story given out by the American media was a hoax. He thinks the American government knew about Bin Laden’s death years ago:

They were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment, and it couldn’t be a better moment because President Obama had to fight off his first salvo in his next year’s election as he runs for president.

Contrary to that, others think Bin Laden was actually working with the US during the entire war on terror. Bin Laden was the main source of US help in the war on terror. He had been a US agent in Afghanistan when the Taliban were fighting the Soviets. A source was quoted as saying:

The West has been very pleased with Bin Laden’s operations in recent years. Now the West was forced to kill him in order to prevent a possible leak of information he had, information more precious than gold.

Pakistanis offer a unifying theory for the apparently discordant theories being bandied about. Bin Laden truly did die in 2001, but the US found a body double for them to pretend he was still alive, and to make the Bin Laden videos for “Al Qaida” to release after his death. US agencies and the Pakistan intelligence worked together to keep the double safe, eventually in the compound minutes away from the Pakistani military academy, a very safe place, and a place where videos could be made without fear of detection. Unbeknown to the poor dupe who was now Bin Laden, when the time was ripe, he was to be assassinated as Bin Laden! That is what happened on 2 May, but the release of photos meant the body might be recognized as not being Bin Laden. Diversionary fakes had to be released first, so that when the “real ones” come out, they too will be doubted!

Smug Gloating over the Murderous efficiency of the USA Bodes Ill

In the US, the killing of Osama Bin Laden seemed to have been everything that President Obama could have wished for with his battle for a second term on the immediate horizon. Raucous celebrations hit the US streets and Obama’s approval rating shot up by 9 per cent. A more reflective mood seems to be taking hold in the US at the cold blooded military execution of an unarmed and untried man.

Few people would want to defend Bin Laden, but anyone concerned with the application of proper democratic and civilized principles, especially in a violent cultural competition with those constantly accused of the opposite, his extrajudicial killing without trial by marines dropped illegally into a foreign country without permission are now starting to brood about the consequences of the operation. Slamming through anyone’s home shooting unarmed residents including women and children cannot advance the cause of law and justice. Even supposing the house had been under surveillance for some time, the marines could not have been sure whom they might have killed.

The initial infantile bogeyman propaganda soon began being revised into its opposite. Bin Laden did not use his wife as a human shield. She rushed spontaneously at a US gunman who shot her in the leg. The armed resistance of Bin Laden was false, he was unarmed and defenceless, as were everyone in the main building. The resistance came from a guard outside in the compound.

This execution has revived arguments about the illegality of the war on terror and has raised all the issues that made it such a controversial and unacceptable policy. Summary justice reflects the disregard for law that the US has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, at Guantanamo Bay, and continually with Iran, the Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. It is the conduct of a state that has no regard for the rights of others where its own interests are concerned.

The point of justice is that the evidence for and against someone can be heard, and people are judged by their peers, not their enemies. The USA nominally subscribes to that form of justice. Bin Laden was a human being and deserved the same right to justice as anyone else, a trial, establishment of identity, a plea, presentation of the evidence for and against, examination of it, and a fair judgement. Failure to follow the rules of law, the due process of law, is ultimately a danger to everyone. It damages our claims to be a superior civilisation to that of our enemies and detractors, the terrorists. The Nazis were surely far worse criminals than any modern terrorist but were accorded the right to defend themselves at Nuremburg. Besides sending illegal hit squads to assassinate people abroad, the rulers of the USA feel free to start wars of imperial conquest, to set up concentration camps, to torture people, and to murder of foreigners, most of whom are innocent, in distant countries by robot aircraft armed with missiles.

Eight missiles from a US Predator drone led to the destruction of a vehicle carrying “foreign militants” in Datta Khel in north Waziristan, Pakistan, killing 15 people as it approached a roadside restaurant, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. The restaurant and a nearby house were hit and at least one civilian was among the dead. Barack Obama’s administration has favored the use of CIA unmanned drones because no American can be killed or injured while feeding the dogs of war in the US. Nor does the US government publicly acknowledge its responsibility for these attacks though it is the only force able to deploy them. The US Brookings Institute estimates that the drones kill 10 civilians for every alleged terrorist killed. The Conflict Monitoring Centre says at least 900 Pakistanis were killed by drones in 2010, “the vast majority” of whom being civilians.

Another US drone fired a missile at a car in Yemen’s Shabwa province killing two brothers suspected of being Al Qaida militants, the first in Yemen since 2002. The Defence Ministry confirmed the deaths. Shabwa provincial officials identified the two as Abdullah and Mosaad Mubarak. The Yemeni foreign minister had already said the government would no longer allow missile strikes by pilotless aircraft because of the high rate of civilians killed and injured by them.

These were within days of the death of Bin Laden. The USA is beginning to sound worryingly Nazi itself! Where is the barrier to stop some administration from acting with equal arbitrariness at home. All they need is some suitable atrocity to blame on whoever they want to attack. The Nazis burnt the Reichstag building as an excuse to set up martial law. How long can the rule of law last in the USA when it is so easily abrogated elsewhere? The fact that there seems to be pretty general approval for the violation of law in the USA, and the added fact that few have the nerve to contest it, does not bode well. The USA is rushing like lemmings to their own destruction while gloating smugly over their power to destroy others.

Reporting, the UK Morning Star

Our Heroic Leaders Lead us into a Fruitless War Again! Why?

Well, here we go again. We are three days into another crusade against the Moslems. Western leaders inevitably deny it, but it has become essential for us to effect regime change over certain Moslem leaders, some of whom, like Gaddafi and the late Saddam Hussein, who used to be so much in favour that western arms dealers sold them billions worth of modern weapons. Only a few weeks ago, the latest grubby British leader to emulate the avaricious and unprincipled T Blair, “Dave” Cameron, was selling arms personally to Arab sheiks and kings. Now he is sending “our boys” to risk death flying over Libya to bomb the poor souls beneath, to save them from being bombed by Gaddafi! Could anything be more hypocritical?

The spokesman for the Arab League did not think so. He complained that the Arabs understood a “no fly zone” was to stop Gaddafi’s aeroplanes from flying, not to stop Libyans from living, whether supporters of Gaddafi or rebels. Plainly Cameron and his vile coalition, including Obama, intend to weight the civil war, which until last week looked favorable to Gaddafi, heavily towards the rebels. No one seems to know what proportion of the Libyans oppose Gaddafi. They quickly seemed to capture the north eastern corner of the country around Benghazi, then could make no more progress. The bulk of Libya seems to prefer their present leader to some western puppet.

“Dave” admits he wants to see regime change, admitting that his objectives are the same as Blair’s and Bush’s in Iraq, but pretends the terms of the UN resolution 1973 forbid it. Even so, almost the first blow struck was a cruise missile strike against an important administrative building in Tripoli where there was a chance that Gaddafi might be himself killed. While the direct objective cannot be Gaddafi, “Dave” explains, he can be legitimately targeted because the UN resolution said all means can be used to stop Libyan civilians from being killed, so killing one Libyan civilian can be legitimate on those grounds, and, naturally, many others might be killed colaterally—sad that!

Hypocrisy

Meanwhile the hypocrisy of taking precipitate action against some oil rich dictators while favoring other equally unpleasant or worse oil rich dictators passes by the half of our knowing electorate that happily soak up every lie the BBC, Murdoch and company sling at them. Simultaneously with the rebellion against Gaddafi the people of Bahrein rebelled against their king, who after being forced to say he was willing to concede some reforms, was obliged by an unyielding public, to bring in the Saudi Arabian army, an army that is the personal arm-twister of the Saud family who rule Arabia.

Arabia is the best friend of all opportunistic western leaders because of their oil, and their oil wealth, which again makes them prime customers for arms dealers. The arms they sold were used against a tiny island, just a causeway off Saudi Arabia, but where is the call for the king of Bahrein and the wicked Saud family to yield to the legitimate rebels? Why is there a no fly Zone over Arabia? For the same reason that Bush chose to bomb Iraq as punishment of the Moslems for the 9/11 attacks, even though the 9/11 bombers were almost entirely Saudi terrorists, not Iraqi terrorists—Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. But the Saudi’s are chums of the west, specifically of the Bush family, it was said at the time. There can be no one with a brain cell today who does not know this, but sadly our cynical rulers know full well that there is nothing easier than for the minority to rule the majority. Just use media manipulation.

In the UK, before the war in Iraq, a million people turned out against the war. It woke up the British ruling class and their media pals to the need for continuous propaganda, so a campaign began that is continuing still. Almost the only history taught in British schools these days is Hitler and WWII, the way our “brave boys” beat the Nazis. They were indeed brave boys… then… fighting against a right wing racist dictatorship that wanted to control the world from Europe to India, and most of them conscripted, not professional soldiers, but it gets our youth admiring warfare, and imagining that we only fight just wars—now a big lie.

Our “brave boys” today are more like the Nazis, fighting against poor foreigners thousands of miles away who just want to live their own lives. But the propaganda in the last decade has worked, and these—our own soldiers—though they are killing farmers and their families trying to wrest back the control of their own land from foreigners, are hailed as heroes! Well, they are called that when they return in a box, or with bits of themselves missing. In the UK a charity was set up for these heroes called, would you believe, “Help the Heroes”, when the people helping could have been more help marching in an angry mass to stop these boys, and girls, from wasting their lives for no good reason. Helping rich men grab someone else’s resources, mainly oil not carrots, is not heroic. They do not differ from heavies working for gangsters, except that the heavies know what they are doing, and do it for profit, while our soldiers are paid little more than KPs.

We can always afford a good war!

Now the Queen has given the little Wiltshire town of Wootton Basset the accolade of “Royal” because it hosted a regular mass line up of people grieving for the victims as each one, returned to Lineham air base, proceeded in a funeral procession through the town. Some will have grieved genuinely. But how much more valuable it would have been if they had instead been protesting against the war. Instead it became a neo Nazi showcase of tattooed bikers, war veterans who ought to have known better, various other rentacrowd types, and, of course, BBC and Murdoch’s TV camera men duly filming it several times a week, for its propaganda value. The town naturally loved it—business had never been better.

Now we learn that with the launch of the war against Libya, another propaganda charity has started, “Horses for Heroes”, in which disabled soldiers are riding from John o’Groats at the tip of Scotland to Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall, around 1000 miles, nominally to raise money, but, in fact, like “Help the Heroes”, to continue the war sympathy campaign on the British people. The UK is now like the US. It is on a permanent war economy, and even the media have to show some people, even veterans, saying so, and criticizing the hysteria for war sentiment. These wise people ask:

How can we afford these wars when we are bankrupt, and ordinary people are feeling the weight of government cuts through pay freezes and tax hikes. How can money be found, in these allegedly dire circumstances, for stupid overseas adventures which are of no concern for us.

The megarich financier class gets richer while ordinary people get poorer. The megarich, investment capitalists and bankers, get bailed out by poor people’s sacrifices, and arms dealers get rich by killing the poor, here allegedly being heroes, and abroad by being evil cowards blowing up our heroes to defend their land and homes. All is fair in war, as far as the rich are concerned, providing that the profits roll in. I wonder what they would do if we rebelled. Would they shoot rebels? It is what they have usually done. Does anyone seriously think they are different now?

Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.