Author: John Grant

Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within 30 years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the state.
                    - Bertrand Russell

An epidemic of unhappiness is spreading across the planet, while capital absolutism is asserting its right to unfettered control of our lives.
                    - Franco “Bifo” Berardi
 

First there was Paris. Then Colorado Springs. Then San Bernadino. A great discussion was raised in the land over which of the killers were terrorists and which were just lunatics. Police and FBI frantically went through apartments, hard-drives and cellphones to find out who had radicalized whom. Well paid corporate TV anchors salivated as police cordoned off crime scenes and politicos huddled in secret situation rooms to get their stories straight so they could release an official story to an eager and fearful public. They no doubt kept many important details to themselves.

Media covers focused on America's problem with murder/suicide

Beyond the radicalizing question, there isn’t much interest why these people — versus other people — did what they did. Motivation comes down to: Who made them do it? The words alienation and despair are rarely seen, except maybe in the marginalized columns of the left. The problems of alienation and despair disappeared from the national discussion about the time Jimmy Carter’s malaise was overwhelmed by Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill and the rigors of 21st century “neoliberal” financial capitalism took the driver’s seat in America.

The Right emphatically pointed at ISIS and the Muslim threat. Utilizing sophisticated social media skills, a monstrous, growing caliphate had declared war on America and was seducing people living among us to kill us. America needed to respond with unrestrained lethal force, so America could be great again. In cases like the Planned Parenthood killings and the Charleston killings, the Left pointed at rightwing media bullhorns like Bill O’Reilly for relentlessly demonizing Planned Parenthood and the Black Lives Matters movement. O’Reilly vociferously denied on-air that he had “radicalized” anyone; he was not responsible for armed lunatics. The National Rifle Association stood firm: Any controls on citizen access to military assault rifles was the work of the Devil.

[Al Qaeda’s] strategic objective has always been … the overthrow of the House of Saud. In pursuing that regional goal, however, it has been drawn into a worldwide conflict with American power.
             - John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern

Al Zarqawi … is an example of how the west has created bogeymen. Al Zarqawi is also an example of how the bogeymen have a habit of, eventually, fulfilling the role we give them.
             - Jason Burke on the founder of al Qaeda in Iraq and, by extension after his death, ISIS
 

I know it’s not patriotic, but every time I hear some politico talk of bombing Iraq and Syria in response to the gruesome massacre in Paris I think of The Battle Of Algiers and the scene where a leader of the guerrilla movement is captured by the French military. A French reporter asks the man how he can justify the gruesome carnage from explosions in cafes and bars. “We’ll be glad to exchange our satchel charges for your jet bombers,” he says.

“Bomb the shit out of ISIS!”, screw civilian casualties, save Christians and one of the refugees might be a bad guy
 

Always angling to be the farthest right of his fellow Republicans, candidate Ted Cruz honed in on the moral issue from Dick Cheney’s dark side. Cruz questioned whether a concern for civilian deaths was fitting when it came to the need to bomb ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Jeb! said we should only protect Christian refugees. Trump hollered to his fans, “We need to bomb the shit out of ISIS!” Rubio decried not having thorough dossiers on the refugees. The brilliant surgeon smiled beatifically. Pressed by the reactionary right of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, French President Hollande publicly declared war (whatever that meant in 2015) and increased the number of bombing raids on targets inside Syria provided by US intelligence. Reports suggested there were significant civilian casualties. Anti-Assad activists pleaded on Twitter for the French and other western forces to restrain their bombing, since, as Cruz understood, western bombs kill lots of people victimized by ISIS. Being caught in the crossfire between ISIS and the bomb-crazy West helps drive refugees to flee to Turkey and Europe. Sympathy for these refugees is evaporating rapidly, since fear-mongering demagogues are stigmatizing them as potential terrorists. Twenty US governors have said, “Not in my backyard. Send them back to where they came from.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got worked up into a lather and wanted all the able-bodied refugee males to return to Syria as a fighting force. Not a bully Teddy Roosevelt type, the Peace Corps veteran didn’t volunteer to lead it.

It’s not a pretty picture of western humanity in crisis. Narcissism is not a wholesome trait.

Dr. Ben Carson rocked the presidential campaign TV circus by suggesting the victims of the Roseburg, Oregon, shooting were too passive in responding to the lunatic gunman who shot and killed his writing professor and eight classmates. Carson received derision from the left and from liberals like Chris Matthews; on the right, he was defended by Bill O’Reilly and others.

This came in the midst of a growing national political struggle between a Black Lives Matter movement and a Blue Lives Matter movement. Given this struggle and the fact Carson is African American, his comments on passivity in the face of outrage and violence raises some interesting questions.

Does Carson have a point concerning citizen passivity in the Oregon shooting? Does our addiction to infotainment media and fantasy encourage passivity among American citizens in the real world? Have we as a people become too soft and too reliant on the police, their SWAT teams and all their military equipment and tactics? In Amsterdam, a port city where marijuana and prostitution are legal and where there’s a long history of dealing with exotic temptations, a Dutch psychiatrist once told me that the Dutch mother teaches her child that he or she has an interior locus of control to engage with all the temptation. In this light, do Americans more and more rely on the various exterior loci of control, like police, courts and prison? In the post-911 climate of demagogic fear we live in, have ordinary citizens handed over too much power and authority to what has become deceptively known as “first responders”?

What exactly does the term first responder mean? The men on United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who shared glances and signals and said “Let’s roll!” were not cops or military. They were the real first responders, citizens who chose to respond instead of sitting passively in their seats accepting their fates. The same for the three Americans on the French train; they chose to take a risk and to act. (Note: Michel Chossudovsky claims the United 93 incident never happened, since what we supposedly know of the “Let’s roll!” story hinged on cellphone contact with the plane in the air, and such connections were spotty in 2001. He argues it was a propaganda narrative to inspire the War On Terror.)

 
A political society endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.
                              - Pope Francis speaking to the US Congress
 
Pope Francis’ speech to the US Congress struck me as a message with strains long demanded in the corrupt halls of our government. It was a message that took me back 30 years to my travels in Central America during the Reagan years, which was a pivotal moment in modern US history for the rise of a money class and the problems of inequity we currently face.

Pope Francis arriving by Fiat and speaking in front of VP Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner

I was raised an atheist by a right-wing militarist. As a little boy, when my father worked in research for a pharmaceutical company in suburban New York, there came a time he aspired to enter the corporate end of the business. So I was sent to Sunday school for a brief period. There I learned that Jesus Christ was this cool guy in robes who loved people and was nice to them.

My father’s honeymoon with the corporate side of the company did not last long. I imagine it was a bitter affair, because soon enough he collected his wife and three sons and moved to a house in the truck farming area of south Dade County below Miami. I recall him saying he was going “bohemian.” He got a job lecturing in physiology at the University of Miami Medical School and he set up our rural property as an amateur nursery, where he worked a hobby of botany, treating seeds aimed at the creation of strange new versions of sub-tropical plants.

You might say dear old Dad was a bit eccentric. He had been a PT boat captain in the Solomon Islands, Peleliu and Okinawa for a couple years and, though it wasn’t an issue then, he must have had some variant of PTSD that contributed to his eccentricities. He and I fought most of our lives over politics, me taking a critical, leftist line, especially following my stint in Vietnam. Still, he was a complicated man and I recall him saying about me in public more than once, “Sometimes, at night, I wonder whether you might be right.” The one thing we saw absolutely eye-to-eye on was a disbelief in some kind of supernatural deity who knew or cared what we humans were thinking and doing. What he believed in was biology.

One of the things we regularly fought over was Ronald Reagan. “If I could I’d vote for him five more times,” he said at the end of Reagan’s second term. I once responded to him by saying, “When you were in your PT boat hiding in terror in the mangrove from the Japanese, some starlet was rubbing suntan oil on your hero Ronald Reagan’s ass beside a pool.” He grimaced and said, “You really know how to hurt a guy.”

The United States of America ain’t what it used to be. The expansive, frontier energy of our past is a lost dream. Good fortune is assumed, taken for granted, leading to laziness and arrogance. Imperialism on the down-slope is not pretty. The long, festering list of shortcomings symbolized by the nation’s neglected infrastructure has a cost. For someone like Donald Trump, it’s an opportunity.

The rocket-like advance of technology dazzles us as it gnaws away at the dignity and integrity of our lives. Fear of the other and outsiders rules from the NSA down to local police departments; it’s a favored flogging topic for pandering politicians. Power is never static. The world created out of the ashes of World War Two — when the US assumed the mantle of top dog — is shifting before our eyes. People dream of getting it all back in the box. Formerly colonized nations now compete directly in a globalized capitalist market against former colonizers. Resentment from abuses of the past strain relations. This is especially true in the Middle East. Citizens flee for their lives into the perceived safety of Europe from the confusing wreckage that was once Syria. And let’s not forget Iraq and Afghanistan as they both try to sort out the aftermath of US intervention and occupation.

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Russia, which exists not all that far away from Syria, has announced it’s sending troops and establishing a military base in Syria. President Barack Obama, whose nation is 12,000 miles away from Syria, is debating whether to talk with President Vladimir Putin about Syria when he comes to speak at the UN September 28th. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Putin views Mr. Obama as weak, and Mr. Obama views Mr. Putin as a thug.” Not a lot of rapport there. Donald Trump, on the other hand, said during the recent debate, “I would talk with (Putin) and I would get along with him.” He probably would.

Elton John, the gay British rock star, was recently scammed with a phony call from a putative Putin. Once it was clear the call was bogus, Putin said he’d be glad to chat with John, who said, “I’d love to sit down with him and talk to him. The world faces much bigger problems than gay people.”

We can only hope Mr. Obama shares Mr. John’s willingness and will schedule a long, no-nonsense and complicated conversation with Mr. Putin in New York. Talk is good. Mr. Obama doesn’t have to arm wrestle Mr. Putin — just talk with him directly and candidly about how to facilitate fixing the god-awful mess created in Syria, much of it the result of a vague but determined US policy of regime change ala Saddam and Gaddafi. The idea that our leaders cannot talk with leaders they disagree with and may even see as an “enemy” has become a major hurdle to sanity in the world. The Iran Deal is a rare exception. Likud Israel and Republican America would rather talk tough, posture in the mirror like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver and build more weapons — than actually enter a mature dialogue.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. … The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.
     - Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy, Princeton University, author of On Bullshit
 

In a recent news story, a New York Times reporter referred to “the siren call” of ISIS propaganda that motivated three teenage Muslim girls to fly from Britain to ISIS-controlled Syria. The girls were clearly frustrated, facing anti-Muslim prejudice and cultural pressures unique to Muslim girls. They clearly found no solace in “the siren call” of western, market-worshipping consumer society. The New York Times reporter did not characterize western culture this way, but it might be so characterized. The so-called Free Market is becoming a sort of religion.

The girls seemed caught in a delusional double bind, driven by hope for more satisfying lives. “[T]he girls spoke of leaving behind an immoral society to search for religious virtue and meaning,” the Times story reports. At least one of the girls is now married to an ISIS member. The question that interests me is how much of the competing pressures working on such vulnerable girls amounts to what Professor Frankfurt calls bullshit.

Bullshit is taking over the world. It’s certainly become a staple of our culture. ISIS and other religious entities employ it masterfully, via social media. When the Times reporter uses the phrase “siren call” she’s using an antiquated, poetic term that carries some judgmental or patronizing spin. Reduced to its essence, the ISIS siren call would seem to be a form of what Professor Frankfurt calls bullshit, calculating statements and claims that exhibit no concern for the truth; influence and power is the goal. And as Frankfurt told Jon Stewart, the stuff is piling up higher every day. Marketing, advertising and public relations reeks of it. Religion makes it sound holy. In the struggle for the bottom line, bullshit consumes more and more of the informational oxygen in the room. Polarization is the rule everywhere, leading to factional struggles that assure bullshit an honored space, as a devotion to the serious search for truth becomes more a quaint and naïve posture. Well, that is, unless the intellectual search is in the service of business efficiency, technological advancement or profit. The fact is, bullshit rules.

In a recent essay in Harper’s called “How College Sold Its Soul … and Surrendered to the Market,” William Deresiewicz writes that what we used to call a “liberal education” — a curriculum that emphasized accumulating a breadth of knowledge and the capacity for critical thinking in order to produce a responsible citizen — is being winnowed out of existence and replaced by institutions that emphasize training to be a winner in what is called “neo-liberalism” — that is, market-oriented capitalism.

“It is not the humanities per se that are under attack,” he writes. “It is learning: learning for its own sake, curiosity for its own sake, ideas for their own sake.” As an example, he cites how Florida Governor Rick Scott “has singled out anthropology majors as something that his state does not need more of.” Scott has proposed raising tuition costs at Florida state universities for liberal arts majors. This hits close to home, since I graduated in 1973 from Florida State University with a major in English and Creative Writing, and a minor in Philosophy.

Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
                                    - Franz Kafka, The Trial
 
A couple weeks ago, our military special operations command began an eight-week military exercise called Jade Helm 15 in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. As reported in The New York Times, some Texans worried it was “actually a ruse for a federal takeover of the state.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor movements of federal special ops elements. A group of volunteers planned to follow military vehicles they could detect and post their locations on a website.

This is not your traditional, old-school military. This is ARSOF Next. No, that’s not a movie title along the lines of Apocalypse Now. ARSOF Next: A Return to First Principles is the title of a propaganda magazine put out by the US Army Special Operations Command. ARSOF stands for Army Special Operations Forces, the doctrine specializing in surgical strike capabilities and special warfare now taking over our military.

A special ops soldier, a lecture on ARSOF Next, and a local police force having fun with a cool new tool

According to the magazine, the United States has reached a “strategic inflection point” characterized by an “uncertain strategic security environment framed by diminishing defense resources and an increasing number and variety of potential threats.” Huge invasions and occupations are totally yesterday, something the Bush debacle in Iraq made quite clear. “Social, political, informational and economic trends in international competition are converging between state and non-state actors and others for superiority over the physical, cognitive, moral security and adequate governance of populations.” Read this military gobble-de-gook about 10 times and you begin to realize we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The nation state idea begun with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia is breaking down and corporate and other “non-state actors” are filling the void. The New York Times has been running a series on the lawless nature of the world’s oceans, where seaborne slavery and unaccounted-for murder are common occurrences. The next step up in this brave new world is the geographical “failed state,” a term of world politics applied by still-intact nation states to those places where anarchy rules. The “free” market is now king and the still-civilized world is engaged in a world-wide capitalist free-for-all. The “real” world is becoming very mixed up with the cyber world. This all means powers like the US will rely more and more on sophisticated intelligence-gathering and secret, a-legal operational capacities to protect their realms. Hence ARSOF Next and PR about our military as a great empathetic institution.

 
Our ancestors were literally fighting to keep human beings as slaves and to continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will. I am not proud of this heritage.
      - S.C. State Senator Paul Thurmond, son of Strom Thurmond,
       explaining why he will vote to take down the Confederate flag

This is the beginning of communism.
      - Robert Lampley protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds
 
 
A young man gets hooked on a volatile political website, obtains a modern weapon, pumps up his sense of vengeful zealotry, latches onto a symbolic target and kills a handful of people. Why does this “radicalized” young man do this? To advance what he feels in his tumultuous, troubled inner life is an important goal, a greater conflagration — all to satisfy his youthful, lone-wolf feelings of dissatisfaction with the status-quo.

In America, if that young man is a Muslim and the website is focused on attacking the globalized, consumer culture of the National Security State — let’s say he sets off a bomb at a public marathon race — it’s terrorism. If the young man is a white American attacking African Americans … well, if you listen to Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, he’s an individual, Godless lunatic and the real problem is “far-left race-hustlers” who hate America and want to destroy it.

"You talkin' to me!" Dylann Roof posturing with his new Glock and the Council of Conservative Citizens website

Since the first moments following Dylann Storm Roof’s shooting of nine African American Christians in Charleston, I’ve been watching a lot of Fox News and MSNBC. Even before rigor mortis set in on the nine bodies, after expressing his condolences, O’Reilly began flogging the individual maniac line hard. Race problems in America, he insisted over and over, have been solved and any other explanation was far-left race-hustling. MSNBC conceded Roof was likely not mentally well, but it quickly assumed what might be called a social-dysfunction line focused on the persistence of racism in America.

Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer-prize winning, African American columnist at The Washington Post, was the spiritual center of MSNBC’s coverage, since he was raised as a black kid in Charleston; his grandfather had a blacksmith shop near the murder site, the famous AME church known affectionately as Mother Emanuel. Robinson is a moderate, easy-going man, and you felt in his heart he understood only too well what this was all about. He was not shy in calling it race-based, white nationalist terrorism.

 
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
                             - Quote attributed to George Orwell
 

Everybody loves a good killer. American pop culture is saturated with the love of killers. The more sexy and elite the killer, the more reverence he or she receives and the more the obvious moral questions are parried away. As the Orwell quote, above, suggests, all societies revere “rough men” with the capacity to ruthlessly kill members of threatening nations or outlaw bands.

Nowadays, official killing demands the nurturing of an elite esprit-de-corps among the killers. Their work must be done in strict secrecy so we, the public, can remain ignorant and “safe in our beds” while the killer elite remain aloof and unaccountable. Furthermore, it’s important to be able to easily marginalize those of us deemed by the killer elite and their promoters to be overly-delicate, moral scolds.

"Rough men" from Seal Team Six and a local police force. When do they become the problem?

This sense of embattled esprit-de-corps in conjunction with unaccountability is even seeping into our domestic police departments. In some cases, cops are too quick to shoot when things don’t go right for them or they are dis’ed; in other cases, the connection to elite special-ops killers seems aspirational. Since 9/11 we’ve witnessed many linkages (like regional Fusion Centers and the distribution of surplus war weaponry) between the military and local police departments. In analytic stories focused on the “black lives matter” movement and policing, we’re told our local police forces have moved from a Community Policing model to a Broken Windows model and now to something called an Intelligence-Based model. This sounds ominously close to the special-ops, manhunter formula.

Like the frog in a pot of slowly heating water who doesn’t realize he’s being boiled to death, whether it’s fear of attacks from outside or fear of violence and crime from inside, it seems time for the public to ask whether Orwell’s “rough men” idea is applicable in today’s confusing world or whether the sense of unaccountable, elite institutions focused on violence can become a threat in and of themselves.

Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a big front-page story that makes the case that lethal special-operations have become the military’s “new way of war,” what The Times calls a “global manhunting machine.” Seal Team Six is the unquestioned top-of-the-line elite unit. Think Chris Kyle and the hagiographic film bio American Sniper. Seal Team Six is expanding with The Omega Program, which undertakes what The Times calls “deniable operations … modeled after the Vietnam Phoenix Program.” Then there’s the team’s global intelligence gathering force called The Black Squadron. Both have been given hip, pop-culture-friendly names. All this is part and parcel of the rise of the Pentagon as an unaccountable intelligence and covert operating force of its own parallel to the CIA.

 
      Anthropologists have found that in traditional societies, memory becomes attached to places.
                  T.M. Luhrmann, New York Times Op-ed May 25, 2015
 
Members of Veterans For Peace came from as far away as San Diego to be part of the annual Memorial Day ceremonies at the Vietnam War Memorial on the mall in Washington DC. A wide range of Americans were in attendance on a beautiful, sunny day. Some rubbed names of loved ones with pencils onto pieces of paper; others left significant items at the base of the Wall. These are collected and warehoused.

Doug Rawlings, left, and the author leaving a wreath at the Wall on Memorial Day. Photo by Ellen Davidson

Vietnam veteran poet Doug Rawlings from Maine devised a program called Letters to the Wall. It’s an on-going project of Full Disclosure, which is connected to Veterans For Peace. Full Disclosure was created to counter the current US government and Pentagon propaganda campaign commemorating the Vietnam War. The project, operated with $15 million-a-year in tax-payer funds, was begun on the 50th anniversary of the Marine landing in DaNang in March 1965.

Full Disclosure members attempted unsuccessfully to meet with Pentagon managers of the program to discuss the limitations of its website, especially a timeline of events concerning the war. The timeline emphasizes things like Medals of Honor awarded to US soldiers, but it leaves out much of the complexity and the unpleasant realities of a war that began at the close of World War Two in 1945 when US leaders chose to support French re-colonization of Vietnam. Vietnamese guerrillas were US allies against the Japanese and admired their American comrades-in-arms. After the French capitulated, the war went on until 1975, when the US left Vietnam. Going through the website and reading the timeline, it’s easy to get confused and think that the Vietnamese somehow attacked us and that our soldiers were responding bravely to being attacked. Indisputable historic facts such as how the agreed-upon unification elections designated for 1956 were scotched by US leaders (who knew Ho Chi Minh would win by up to 80% of the vote) are altogether missing on the Commemoration website. The overwhelming reality that US soldiers were sent halfway around the world as an occupying army is lost in the interest of honoring the courage and sacrifice of Vietnam veterans.

Here’s how Rawlings described the letter project for those interested in writing a letter:

“Let those American soldiers who died know how you feel about the war that took their lives. If you have been seared by the experience of the American war in Vietnam, then tell them your story. Veterans, conscientious objectors, veterans’ family members, war resistors, anyone whose life was touched by the war — all of us need to speak. All of our experiences matter.”

One hundred and fifty letters were collected, and at 11 AM on Memorial Day, VFP members walked to the Wall and dropped them at the base of the panels, along with all the other items left there. On the envelope, written by hand, each letter said: “Please Read Me.” The letters are all collected on-line.