An axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 election. We now have definitive proof.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer warns that emails and other documents reported on by The New York Post about Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China may be “Russian disinformation,” Oct. 16, 2020.
A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.
But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden’s son Hunter at a repair shop.
From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post‘s archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter’s own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden’s profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one’s career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.
Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
That is the argument Wisconsin prosecutors wants to make against Rittenhouse. If Rittenhouse sympathizes with the Proud Boys, if he is politically opposed to wanton looting, then he doesn’t have the right to defend his community or himself. If he wants to defend innocent people and their property from a rampaging mob, he is a “chaos tourist.”
More than a year has passed, but Kyle Rittenhouse still isn’t home free. The Illinois teenager is still in danger of spending the rest of his life in prison, if convicted on two homicide charges brought by the state of Wisconsin.
In a Friday court hearing, prosecutors revealed their strategy for putting Rittenhouse away forever: Tar him as a thought criminal.
Prosecutors in the Rittenhouse case asked the judge allow them to admit evidence of Rittenhouse’s meetings with members of the Proud Boys — including photos taken at a Mount Pleasant tavern showing him posing with members of the group, a right-wing organization that has been involved in violent protests and counter protests round the United States.
At the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger said that the state has since learned that the men Rittenhouse met for lunch at the Pudgy’s tavern just off Highway 20 were leaders of the Proud Boys in Wisconsin. Binger said Rittenhouse also met in Miami with the national leaders of the Proud Boys. [Kenosha News]
The government’s strategy to destroy Kyle Rittenhouse’s life doesn’t just matter for his own case. It matters because these same strategies will be used to systematically strip the right to a fair trial from any American targeted by the ruling regime.
A few core facts, to jog your memory: On August 23 of the Summer of Floyd, Kenosha police shot Jacob Blake as he resisted arrest and attempted to drive away with children the police believed he was kidnapping. Though Blake survived, Kenosha erupted into “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” that left the downtown scorched. 0:43 / 47:21
WATCH: Check out Darren Beattie’s latest interviews
On the third night of the riots, Rittenhouse, who turned out to protect local businesses and clean up vandalism, shot and killed two people amid the carnage.
Eyewitness accounts and video footage are clear about what happened. One of the rioters, an unstable man named Joseph Rosenbaum, began pursuing Rittenhouse. As Rittenhouse fled, he heard shots fired behind him (by whom remains unclear). Rittenhouse turned around and saw Rosenbaum lunging toward him (and toward his gun). Rittenhouse shot and killed Rosenbaum.
Then, as Rittenhouse continued attempting to flee the scene, several more people attacked him. After tripping to the ground, Rittenhouse shot and killed Anthony Huber after Huber hit him with a skateboard and tried to grab his rifle. He wounded Gaige Grosskreutz after Grosskreutz lunged for him holding a handgun.
The video footage in both shootings is crystal clear. The three people Rittenhouse shot were all attacking him. Revolver News was one of the first media outlets to unequivocally argue that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. Eventually, other media outlets came around and even the New York Times conceded that Revolver’s analysis was in essence correct.
It is simply indefensible to criminally charge Rittenhouse in light of the actual facts of his case. But charged he was, with two counts of first degree murder (and a bevy of lesser charges).
So what was the government’s plan? Simple — use a relentless character assassination campaign to make the clear fact of Rittenhouse’s self-defense irrelevant.
The government revealed its strategy in detail on Friday, during a preliminary hearing on the evidence that will be allowed during the November trial. Law and Crime reporter Colin Kalmbacher described the hearing at length on Twitter.
Phase 1 of the prosecution’s plan is to link Rittenhouse to the Proud Boys, and accuse him of racism for making the “okay” sign in a photo.
Binger says Rittenhouse’s ideology aligns with the Proud Boys–particularly the intent to use violent means to secure political outcomes. Says he was out in Kenosha that night because of his political beliefs. Repeatedly tying Rittenhouse to the Proud Boys’ violent beliefs.
Kyle Rittenhouse meeting with Proud Boys members [Kenosha County DA]“Most everyone there was there because of their beliefs, one way or the other, in regards to the shooting of Jacob Blake,” prosecutor Thomas Binger argued. “Chaos tourists like the defendant were drawn like a moth to the flame to our community. He was drawn to this incident because of his beliefs, which align with the Proud Boys. They take pride in using violence to achieve their means.”
Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech.
Notably, when George Washington University student and self-professed Antifa member Jason Charter was charged as the alleged “ringleader” of efforts to take down statues in Washington, D.C., Charter declared the “movement is winning.” He is right and this poll shows the success.
We have previously discussed the worrisome signs of a rising generation of censors in the country as leaders and writers embrace censorship and blacklisting. The latest chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech. Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.
Faculty and editors are now actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views.Others are supporting actual book burning. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right. So the dean of one of the premier journalism schools now supports censorship.Free speech advocates are facing a generational shift that is now being reflected in our law schools, where free speech principles were once a touchstone of the rule of law. As millions of students are taught that free speech is a threat and that “China is right” about censorship, these figures are shaping a new society in their own intolerant images.The most chilling aspect of this story is how many on left applaud such censorship. A prior poll shows roughly half of the public supporting not just corporate censorship but government censorship of anything deemed “misinformation.” Perhaps the same citizens and academics will embrace the Chinese model on social scoring and praise actions that the reported move by Chase bank.We discussed this issue recently with regard to a lawsuit against SUNY. It is also discussed in my forthcoming law review article, Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, 45 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (2021).This has been an issue of contention with some academics who believe that free speech includes the right to silence others. Berkeley has been the focus of much concern over the use of a heckler’s veto on our campuses as violent protesters have succeeded in silencing speakers, even including a few speakers like an ACLU official. Both students and some faculty have maintained the position that they have a right to silence those with whom they disagree and even student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech. At another University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display. In the meantime, academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned after she made a single analogy to acting like a “slaveholder” as a self-criticism for failing to achieve equity and reparations for black faculty and students).We previously discussed the case of Fresno State University Public Health Professor Dr. Gregory Thatcher recruited students to destroy pro-life messages written on the sidewalks and wrongly told the pro-life students that they had no free speech rights in the matter. A district court has now ordered Thatcher to pay $17,000 and undergo First Amendment training. However, Thatcher remained defiant and the university appeared complicit in his actions by the lack of disciplinary action.The pro-life students had written messages on the sidewalk like “You CAN be pregnant & successful” and “Unborn lives matter” to “Women need love, NOT abortion.” Thatcher got students from his 8 a.m. class to help remove the anti-abortion messages and that their chalk was taken away to write pro-choice slogans on the sidewalk. The students seem entirely unconcerned that they are censoring speech and engaging in a grossly intolerant act. Instead, they refer to their teacher as telling them that they should do so. Thatcher then walked up. Thatcher invoked the controversial restriction of free speech to “zones” and says that there is no free speech right for this type of writing outside of that zone. When the students explain that they have permission, he then proceed to rub out their messages and declared “you have permission to put it down — I have permission to get rid of it.”
Thatcher is arguing that same Orwellian “Stopping free speech is free speech” position.
A few years ago, I debated NYU Professor Jeremy Waldron who is a leading voice for speech codes. Waldron insisted that shutting down speakers through heckling is a form of free speech.
I disagree. It is the antithesis of free speech and the failure of schools to protect the exercise of free speech is the antithesis of higher education.
The added increase in embracing violence is particularly chilling. A quarter of those polled supported violence to prevent others from speaking. This is the core of the philosophy of the Antifa movement. It is at its base a movement at war with free speech, defining the right itself as a tool of oppression. That purpose is evident in what is called the “bible” of the Antifa movement: Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Bray emphasizes the struggle of the movement against free speech:
“At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase that says, ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’” Indeed, Bray admits that “most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists… From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”
It is an illusion designed to promote what Antifa is resisting “white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism, and genocide.” Thus, all of these opposing figures are deemed fascistic and thus unworthy of being heard.
Antifa has a long and well-documented history of such violence. Bray quotes one Antifa member as summing up their approach to free speech as a “nonargument . . . you have the right to speak but you also have the right to be shut up.”
Notably, when George Washington University student and self-professed Antifa member Jason Charter was charged as the alleged “ringleader” of efforts to take down statues in Washington, D.C., Charter declared the “movement is winning.” He is right and this poll shows the success.
This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that keep the populace in a state of high alert.
Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world—all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.
America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.
The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.
Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.
This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that keep the populace in a state of high alert.
Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.
We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of a virus, fear of the unmasked, fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.
The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.
Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.
Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology, endless wars, COVID-19 mandates, etc., hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.
All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police, marauding SWAT teams, and egregious assaults on the rights of the citizenry.
America has already entered a new phase, one in which communities are locked down, employees are forced to choose between keeping their jobs or exercising their freedoms, children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents, and law-abiding Americans are finding their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented and their communications monitored.
These threats are not to be underestimated.
Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.
Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.
So far, these tactics are working.
An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America.
Each successive crisis in recent years (a COVID-19 pandemic, terrorism, etc.)—manufactured or legitimate—has succeeded in reducing the American people to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”
“I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…
“I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…
“Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.”
As history makes clear, fear leads to fascistic, totalitarian regimes.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.
· The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
· The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
· The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
· The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
· The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
· The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
· The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
· The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
· The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
· The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.
The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.
“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized,” writes Jeffrey Tucker. “Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.
Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring.
It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences.
For example, neuroscientists have observed how quickly fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Postreports:
In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling.
Now consider the ramifications of inherited generations of fears and experiences on human beings. As the Postreports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”
Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world—all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.
In the words of psychologist Erich Fromm:
[C]an human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one?
The whole Global South, stunned by the accelerated collapse of the western Empire and its unilateral rules-based order, now seems to be ready to embrace the new groove, fully displayed in Dushanbe: a multipolar Greater Eurasia of sovereign equals.
The US better rethink it’s Iranian and Chinese war plans.
The two defining moments of the historic 20th anniversary Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan had to come from the keynote speeches of – who else – the leaders of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
Xi Jinping: “Today we will launch procedures to admit Iran as a full member of the SCO.”
Vladimir Putin: “I would like to highlight the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed today between the SCO Secretariat and the Eurasian Economic Commission. It is clearly designed to further Russia’s idea of establishing a Greater Eurasia Partnership covering the SCO, the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union), ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI).”
In short, over the weekend, Iran was enshrined in its rightful, prime Eurasian role, and all Eurasian integration paths converged toward a new global geopolitical – and geoeconomic – paradigm, with a sonic boom bound to echo for the rest of the century.
That was the killer one-two punch immediately following the Atlantic alliance’s ignominious imperial retreat from Afghanistan. Right as the Taliban took control of Kabul on 15 August, the redoubtable Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, told his Iranian colleague Admiral Ali Shamkhani that “the Islamic Republic will become a full member of the SCO.”
Dushanbe revealed itself as the ultimate diplomatic crossover. President Xi firmly rejected any “condescending lecturing” and emphasized development paths and governance models compatible with national conditions. Just like Putin, he stressed the complementary focus of BRI and the EAEU, and in fact summarized a true multilateralist Manifesto for the Global South.
Right on point, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan noted that the SCO should advance “the development of a regional macro-economy.” This is reflected in the SCO’s drive to start using local currencies for trade, bypassing the US dollar.
Watch that quadrilateral
Dushanbe was not just a bed of roses. Tajikistan’s Emomali Rahmon, a staunch, secular Muslim and former member of the Communist Party of the USSR – in power for no less than 29 years, re-elected for the 5th time in 2020 with 90 percent of the vote – right off the bat denounced the “medieval sharia” of Taliban 2.0 and said they had already “abandoned their previous promise to form an inclusive government.”
Rahmon, who has never been caught smiling on camera, was already in power when the Taliban conquered Kabul in 1996. He was bound to publicly support his Tajik cousins against the “expansion of extremist ideology” in Afghanistan – which in fact worries all SCO member-states when it comes to smashing dodgy jihadi outfits of the ISIS-K mold.
Four star generals and the process of their promotion, then and now, are worlds apart.
Four stars now automatically become part of a mutual general officer admiration society, that cheers even mediocre performance in general officers chosen for high command, because, like “made men” in the Mafia, senior leaders agree not to turn on their peers.
On September 1, 1939, Brigadier George C. Marshall took the oath of office as the 15th U.S. Army chief of staff, a post he held until November 1945. When the ceremony ended, General Marshall confided to his aide de camp, “There is enough dead wood in the Army’s officer corps to light several forest fires.”
Marshall was more right than he knew. If the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps fought shoulder to shoulder with the French Army in 1940, American arms would have suffered the same fate as the French and British Armies—total defeat at the hands of the German Wehrmacht. This fact was made painfully obvious 14 months after the Second World War broke out.
In February 1943, 11,000 German troops smashed through the 30,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army’s II Corps at Kasserine Pass. The U.S. commander, Major Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, a swaggering blowhard, was relieved and sent home. It was not the last time that a cigar-chewing imitation of a real general would fail in action against the German onslaught, but the experience strengthened Marshall’s intolerance of general officer failure in action.
Dwight D. Eisenhower thought Marshall had picked Fredendall—an officer with no combat experience despite serving in the First World War—but Fredendall was actually chosen for command by Lieutenant Gen. Lesley McNair for the energy he demonstrated in training. Though Fredendall had not gone ashore to join his troops until the fighting was over, Eisenhower decorated Fredendall for the II Corps’ successful landing in North Africa. Sadly, once Fredendall was selected for the wrong reasons, only disaster in combat with a capable opponent could reveal Fredendall’s deficiencies as a battlefield commander.
Unfortunately, the practice of tolerating mediocre officers with friends and sponsors in the four star ranks persists today.
Today, the task of finding senior military leaders with character, competence and intelligence is immeasurably harder than it was in Marshall’s day. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the American media’s adulation for four stars transformed general officers such as Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Allen, and Austin into instant celebrities.
Four stars now automatically become part of a mutual general officer admiration society, that cheers even mediocre performance in general officers chosen for high command, because, like “made men” in the Mafia, senior leaders agree not to turn on their peers. Eliminating failed general officers, even when failure is found out the hard way in action, is deemed dangerous to a promotion system based on nepotism that presents itself as infallible.
Political leaders are of no help. Almost no one in the Senate asked relevant questions of nominees for four stars after 9/11—questions like: Is this mission really achievable? Will the proposed operations have a decisive impact and accomplish the mission? What do Americans gain if this the proposed operation actually works? And what do the American People lose if the mission fails? Should Americans really expect the Army and Marine Corps to impose a Western system of government on Iraq or Afghanistan? Are cultures really congruent?
Consequently for aspiring four stars, advocating the commitment of more soldiers, more cash, and more time in Afghanistan and Iraq became customary. Carrying on the failed policies of the military and political leaders who nominated them for four stars ensured that the future four stars would have a chair when the music stopped. Senators and Congressmen either could not evaluate the nominees or they were reluctant to admit that the system had gotten things wrong from the beginning.
Rather than address the hard issues, political oversight of the armed forces focuses more on policies designed to please constituents or create jobs in their states and districts, policies that neuter the military’s ability to punish substandard performers or to link promotion to merit. The end result justifies the divisive practice of advancing individuals—frequently women and minorities—who are less qualified or not otherwise “selectable” by reducing the numbers of qualified individuals from selection to create spaces.
Clearly, officers who express concern about these policies do not go unnoticed in political circles. These officers are frequently viewed as politically unreliable and are eliminated from promotion to the senior ranks. However, those officers who strongly identify with these policies make themselves known not only to their superiors in uniform, but to members of the House and Senate with an interest in promoting their ideological fellow travelers in uniform to flag rank in the armed forces.
The point is that General Mark Milley is not an isolated example. He’s the product of an environment that has existed for nearly 30 years, if not longer. Behind Mark Milley stand another two dozen four stars ready to take his job that are indistinguishable from him in their attitudes and career patterns.
Is the situation hopeless? History answers with an emphatic “No.”
After the defeat of the U.S. Army’s II Corps, General Sir Harold Alexander, Eisenhower’s British deputy, commented on Fredendall to his American allies, “I’m sure you must have better men than that.” Eisenhower agreed. Major Gen. Patton, a man who but for the outbreak of WWII would have retired as an obscure cavalry colonel, replaced Fredendall.
Will the abysmal outcome in Afghanistan, or the revelations that four stars actively conspired with President Trump’s opponents to undermine his authority, make any difference to how we select the brass? Time will solve the mystery.
Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.
The official reactions to the announcement of the Australian-British-US pact (AUKUS) are only about the termination of the Australian-French arms contract. As terrible as this is for the shipyards, it is only a collateral consequence of a reversal of alliances aimed at preparing for a war against China.
The announcement of the Australian-British-US (A-UK-US) pact [1] was like an earthquake in the Indo-Pacific region.
There is no doubt that Washington is preparing for a long-term military confrontation with China.
Until now, the Western deployment to contain China politically and militarily has involved the United States and the United Kingdom as well as France and Germany. Today, the Europeans are left out. And tomorrow the area will be controlled by the Quad+ (US and UK, plus Australia, India and Japan). Washington is preparing a war in one or two decades.
While France and Germany have not been consulted on this strategy, nor even warned of its public announcement (but other countries had been warned, such as Indonesia), the new device should be staged next week in Washington.
While it is logical that London and Washington should rely on Camberra rather than Paris, since Australia is a member of the “Five Eyes” with which France is just associated, the entry into the game of Japan and especially India puts an end to a long period of uncertainty. More troubling is the role assigned to Germany, which could join the “Five Eyes” [2], but not the Quad, i.e. spying on telecommunications, but not military action.
Admiral John Aquilino, commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific.
Alliances shaken up
This new situation forces each alliance to reposition itself.
The A-NZ-US, which linked Australia, New Zealand and the United States, has not been in operation since 1985 and has been definitively buried. New Zealand had affirmed its policy of nuclear disarmament and consequently refused entry to its ports to nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ships. Since the Pentagon refuses to reveal these “details”, no US warship has entered the country. Future Australian submarines will also be banned.
For the moment, the European Union has not reacted. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who was giving a state of the Union address [3] on the same day the AUKUS pact was announced, is paralyzed. She was talking about her new strategy in the Indo-Pacific area, while the Brexit Brits were pulling the rug out from under her. Not only is the European Union not a military power, but those of its members who are, will no longer have a say.
NATO is silent. It had ambitions to expand in the Indo-Pacific and understands that it will not be part of the game.
Samuel Moyn is a distinguished intellectual historian who teaches both history and law at Yale. His earlier books were written for an academic audience, but in Humane he has an urgent message that he wishes to convey to the general public. There has in recent years been a movement to make war more humane, especially by minimizing death or injury to noncombatants. Moyn thinks this movement poses a danger:
At our stage in the coming of humane war, its advocates and audiences should reevaluate whether they have lost their way in helping to entrench continuing violence, which they could struggle to end instead. If the quest for more humane war could someday minimize not just collateral death and damage but even combatant killing and injury, the looming threat of something far more disquieting is also real. What if the elemental aim of endless war is not the death of enemy soldiers but rather the potentially nonviolent control of other peoples? Would that be tolerable? (p. 324)
If you are opposed to war, humane war, to the extent there can be such a thing, is not enough. That was fully evident to the foremost critic of war of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Count Leo Tolstoy. Just as opponents of slavery sought to abolish it rather than ameliorate the conditions of servitude, so should opponents of war seek to end it, not to humanize it. It was no accident that Tolstoy drew this analogy, as he had been influenced by the American pacifist and abolitionist Adin Ballou. “The Cornell University founder Andrew Dickson White, a long-distance visitor to Tolstoy’s estate, was shocked when Tolstoy insisted in conversation that Ballou was the ‘greatest of all American writers’” (p. 34. Many readers of mises.org will have read White’s great study Fiat Money Inflation inFrance.).
Tolstoy’s opinions on war mattered a great deal, as he was an international celebrity, widely regarded as the world’s foremost novelist. His followers included Mahatma Gandhi and William Jennings Bryan, who visited Tolstoy at his estate in Russia. Often, though, his opinions on various subjects struck many people as odd and extreme, such as his declaration that Shakespeare was an “insignificant, inartistic writer.”
The movement against war of course had other leaders besides Tolstoy. “One of the leading ideologues of eternal peace in the second half of the nineteenth century was the Englishman William [sic] Cobden, who insisted that free trade could someday unify humanity where Christianity had graphically failed to do so” (p. 21. Cobden’s first name was not William but Richard; perhaps Moyn slipped because he was thinking of William Cobbett.).
As I have already mentioned, the antiwar movement of that time wanted to end war, not make it more humane, and indeed Tolstoy was sometimes tempted to go further. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei suggests that soldiers in battle should act as ruthlessly as possible, for example killing enemy prisoners out of hand. Increasing the horror of war might make it more likely that people would end it. By no means was this view confined to fictional characters; Tolstoy himself was of this opinion, though he later withdrew it, and the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz spoke in similar terms. Moyn lists a number of examples, but one should be added as well: General William Sherman, who justified his tactics of wanton destruction with this same argument. Fortunately, the view did not prevail in the peace movement, and the movement in fact included efforts to improve conditions for wounded soldiers, of which the most notable were the activities of the Red Cross, founded in Geneva in the 1860s. But the main focus of the antiwar movement was elsewhere. Countess Bertha von Suttner, one of the leaders of the mainstream movement, who had persuaded Alfred Nobel to endow a prize for peace, was justifiably angry that the corecipient of the first peace prize was Henry Dunant, a founder of the Red Cross but not a campaigner for war’s abolition.
Schemes to end war abounded both before and after World War I. Moyn does not mention one of the most theoretically interesting of these, a plan by the philosopher Josiah Royce to end war through insurance agencies, a proposal that prefigured some later suggestions by libertarians for protection through such agencies. (As I fear is all too evident, I am prone to try to catch out authors in errors and omissions; but in doing so, I am especially unfair to Moyn, whose scholarship for this book is prodigious.)
Moyn views with much favor attempts to end war through international law, enforced by an international body able to use armed force to compel acceptance of its decisions. In this connection he devotes much attention to the work of Quincy Wright, a leading authority on international law who favored such an organization. (In his account of Wright’s youth, Moyn points out that Carl Sandburg was a family friend and that Quincy and his father printed editions of Sandburg’s poems on their family printing press. It should also be noted that they were joined in this activity by Quincy’s brother Sewall, who was to become of the twentieth century’s foremost theorists of evolutionary biology.)
I cannot think that this is an effective scheme to end war; the “police actions” of the international body do not cease to be wars by giving them another name. To his credit, Moyn cites a dissenting view by John Bassett Moore, the foremost American authority of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on international law. Moore “felt it was not a good idea for their country to renounce its birthright in exchange for the pottage of endless war to keep other countries from fighting one another (p. 77). Moyn also cites an article by Edwin Borchard, Moore’s greatest disciple, on the illegality of Franklin Roosevelt’s bases-for-destroyers deal with Britain (p. 347, note to p.122).
Moyn also views sympathetically the unsuccessful effort to try Kaiser Wilhelm II for criminal conduct in launching World War I. By making rulers personally responsible for their conduct, peace would be encouraged. Once more, I find myself in dissent from Moyn. Is a tribunal of judges from the victorious side in a war a fit body to decide the responsibilities for a war’s outbreak? Did Germany and its kaiser bear the primary guilt for World War I? I do not think so, and though I cannot argue the question here, the point is much disputed. Moyn also praises the post–World War II Nuremberg tribunal, pointing out that the primary indictment of the German leaders was for starting the war, not for crimes against humanity committed during the conflict. One must again ask whether “victor’s justice” is desirable, all the more so in that the Soviets, sitting in judgment on Germany, had like that country invaded Poland when the war began.
Moyn covers a vast number of issues, and I have space to cover only one more. Today critics of American foreign policy often point to the Vietnam War as the principal instance of horrendous conduct by America during wartime. Those of us alive at the time will never forget the “body counts,” the My Lai massacre, napalm and Agent Orange, and the saturation bombing of both Vietnam and Cambodia. Moyn says that bad as it was, the Korean War was worse. “Korea was the most brutal war of the twentieth century, measured by the intensity of violence and per capita civilian deaths. In three years, four million died, and half of them were civilians—a higher proportion of the population than in any modern war, including World War II and the Vietnam conflict” (p. 135).
Although a number of treaties sought to regulate military conduct during war, serious efforts to apply such measures is a quite recent development. The notorious program of killing by drone, in which civilian casualties are few, at least as compared with earlier military incursions, is a prime case of the effort to “humanize” war. It is precisely this that arouses Moyn’s suspicions. He fears that the expansion of such endeavors, along with programs of global surveillance, would subject the world to hegemonic control by one or a few dominant superpowers. In warning against this danger, Moyn has rendered a great service to peace. Author:
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison first formalized the principles of nullification in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. While Jefferson called it “the rightful remedy” to federal overreach, Madison put it a different way, saying a state is “duty bound” to interpose “to arrest the progress of the evil.” Jefferson and Madison were the first to propose nullification specifically, but they didn’t create the idea. In fact, the strategies and principles date back to before the American Revolution. Colonists used nullification strategies to force Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. And during the Virginia ratifying convention, George Nicholas said that if Congress were to exercise any power not expressly granted to it, the state of Virginia would be “exonerated from it,” implying that the state would have the authority to ignore or block unconstitutional acts. Nullification is a fundamental part of the American political system. But what exactly does it mean? There are two definitions. One is legal. When a court strikes down a law, it literally wipes it off the books. But there is also a practical definition – to make something of no value or consequence. When we talk about nullification happening today, we generally mean it in the practical sense – to end the practical effect of a federal act. Here is a succinct definition of nullification as we apply it: Any act or set of acts which has as its result a particular law being rendered legally null and void, or unenforceable in practice. Madison gave us a blueprint on how to do this in Federalist #46. He suggested four steps to take on counteract and stop federal programs – whether “warrantable” or “unwarrantable,” the most significant being a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union.” The federal government involves itself in almost every aspect of life, but depends on state assistance to do almost everything. If states refuse to help, it becomes nearly impossible for the feds to enforce their laws or implement their programs. We can use this strategy to undermine and nullify all kinds of federal acts in practice – from warrantless spying, to gun control, to plant prohibition and more.
by Tyler Durden
