By Rowan Wolf
I am fed up and more than ticked off by most of the Congress and by the Democratic Presidential candidates. Remember the expansion of the Bush’s illegal wiretapping? Remember the temporary expansion of the FISA extension than Representative Harman was passed based on hyped security threats? WHY are the Democrats passing these attacks on civil liberties and Constitutional protections?
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Rowan Wolf of Uncommon Thought Journal and CJO’s Avenger
A lot has been written about the increasing role of “military contractors” in Iraq. Blackwater, CACI, and others have made headlines. So many contractors are being used by both the U.S. military and intelligence branches that Amnesty USA (5/23/06) claimed that the U.S. was “outsourcing the war on terror.”
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William Blum interviewed by Jason Miller
(including satirical commentary by Miller)
“We have morality on our side….”
—William Blum
Ironic words flowing from the pen of a man who has devoted forty years of his life to hard-core dissent against the United States, the most moral nation in the history of civilization.
We are a nation founded upon bedrock principles of Christianity.
Would Christ not have approved of chattel slavery, the Native American genocide, and the millions of “savages” we have slaughtered to expand our borders and to maintain “Pax Americana?” Those who have died to sustain our peace and prosperity were but martyrs for a cause greater than themselves. In a sense, each one of them was a little Jesus.
Jesus certainly would have approved of American Capitalism. He was a fisher of men. Our bourgeois are fishers of men’s wealth. Those who reach the apex of our system’s hierarchy enable Christianity to flourish. By clawing their way to the top (driven by the greed and selfishness which our cynical culture rewards), they provide a criminal ruling class for us to bestow our compassion upon. More importantly, by condemning a large percentage of the population to economic struggle or poverty, they present us with an endless supply of hungry, broken people to whom we can minister and tend.
The book of Genesis clearly states that God gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” So relax. Rapacious consumption resulting in severe environmental damage, the infliction of intense suffering upon animals, and species extinction is a divine right. Who are we to argue with God’s edict that humans rule?
Jehovah set the gold standard when he deployed fire and brimstone, but we have managed to approximate his divine wrath. Just ask the people of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, North Vietnam, or a host of other malefactors we punished with a well-deserved rain of fire.
Clearly we Americans are fulfilling our divine mission to maintain the moral order of the world each day. We continue to drive a stake through the heart of Godless Communism. We torture terrorists. We execute murderers. We topple dictators, spread liberty, and punish Islamofascist nations harshly.
Yet despite all we do for the world, there are still those who hate us. Worse still, there are Americans, like William Blum, who have the audacity to bad-mouth this great nation. It is a tribute to our patience and humanity that we put up with such ingratitude and calumny. Thankfully, he represents a tiny segment of our overwhelmingly patriotic populace.
While people like him slander our magnificent country with idiotic little T-shirt slogans like, “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity”, our men and women in uniform are fighting to keep the world safe for democracy.
How do such so-called progressives think? Let’s find out by eavesdropping on that incessant moralist, Jason Miller, as he questions Blum, a widely published author and scathing critic of the land of the free:
JM: You are quite a remarkable individual. False modesty aside, if you were introducing yourself to an individual who didn’t know you and giving them a summary of who William Blum is, how would that introduction go?
WB: It would of course depend largely on who the person was and what the circumstances were, but I might say that I spent the first half of my life in the “bourgeois” world, including IBM and the Department of State, and then was radicalized by Vietnam and became a drug-using, semi-hippie, underground-press writer, world traveler, book author, campus speaker, commie terrorist threat to all that is decent and holy.
JM: In early 2006, Osama bin Laden told US Americans that they needed to read your book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. What were the immediate effects and consequences for you?
WB: Instant celebrity, on many of the major news programs, including CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, etc., with a chance to say things to the great unwashed that I would never otherwise have had; 1000 emails, half hostile, a couple threatening.
JM: Obviously, the dust has had plenty of time to settle. How has bin Laden’s “endorsement” affected your book sales and impact as a political educator and social activist?
WB: About 15,000 extra copies of Rogue State sold. I use the experience in my talks on campus, explaining why I was not embarrassed by the endorsement, as I had mentioned on air, and which had bothered my interviewers, like Wolf Blitzer, who wanted me to disown the entire endorsement.
JM: In Rogue State, you write, “No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.” To what extent can you attribute this conclusion to first-hand knowledge derived from your years with the State Department, or otherwise?
WB: I was a computer systems analyst and programmer at the State Dept; not much privy to important secrets except for the lists they kept of baddies, foreign and domestic. Reading the news carefully, with a knowledge of the past, is enough to make one suspicious.
JM: I note that you spent some time in Chile observing Allende’s attempt to implement socialism. Had Allende survived, how successful do you think he would have been in fending off the relentless tide of neoliberalism?
WB: I think he would have done pretty well at that. He was a sincere man of the left, not a Democratic Party type liberal.
JM: How much affinity did Allende have for Castro?
WB: As far as I remember, a lot.
JM: Please briefly compare and contrast Allende and Hugo Chavez.
WB: Allende didn’t deliberately antagonize the US as Chavez does. I wish Chavez would cool it a bit. He’s antagonizing homicidal maniacs, literally. Yet, Allende’s moderation in language and policy didn’t save him from Washington’s wrath. Once you’re an ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) of Washington, your days are numbered, or at least your life and program will be made next to impossible.
JM: What chance do you believe the Bolivarian Revolution has of succeeding in becoming a viable alternative and genuine threat to the hegemony of the militaristic, rapacious imperialism which is inextricably linked to “American Capitalism?”
WB: Based on past experience, not much chance. But what’s new is the oil money. That changes the picture. But I can’t predict what’s going to happen.
JM: You left the State Department in 1967 because of your opposition to the Vietnam War. What do you think the opposition to the Iraqi Occupation, which obviously comprises many people, needs to do to increase its effectiveness?
WB: All I can ever suggest is education. Educate yourself and as many others as you can. I write my books and give public talks with that in mind, giving activists talking points to help them to convince others, giving newcomers new food for thought, planting seeds. Our numbers are indeed growing and I can only hope that at some point it will reach a critical mass and “explode”. I can’t offer more than that.
JM: During the Vietnam War, you founded and edited the Washington Free Press. Since there was no Internet, how did you distribute your underground publication?
WB: Mainly in street sales and at events, plus dozens of book stores and other venues; at our peak we sold maybe 20-25 thousand each issue.
JM: What contact, if any, did you have with radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, whose members were investigated, pursued, incarcerated, or in some cases, murdered, by our government?
WB: I knew individual members, some wrote for the Free Press, but I personally was never a member of any group. In later years, I was a member of Trotskyist groups in the US and the UK.
JM: While there are distinct parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq, there are also a number of differences. Would you kindly lend us your insight by briefly comparing and contrasting the two?
WB: The US had no intention of occupying Vietnam. But in Iraq and Afghanistan they have done so because of oil and oil pipelines.
JM: What did your work with Philip Agee, former CIA agent and author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary, entail?
WB: I didn’t work with him so much as with other people in London who had a relationship with him. We were engaged in exposing covert CIA officers in the US embassy.
JM: You publicly supported Ralph Nader’s bids for the presidency. I have been repeatedly lambasted for voting for Nader. How would you respond to critics who claim that voting outside the deeply corrupt duopoly is a “wasted vote”?
WB: It would be hard to imagine a more wasted vote than voting for someone you don’t like or support. I should add that I think that most people who voted for Nader would not have voted at all if he was not a candidate. So for all these people, Nader votes did not rob the Democrats of a vote.
JM: When can we expect another book from you?
WB: I don’t know. I’m sort of burnt out. I’m not an author who feels obliged to keep turning out book after book. I have to see a gap to fill.
JM: You words here: “I’m committed to fighting U.S. foreign policy, the greatest threat to peace and happiness in the world, and being in the United States is the best place for carrying out the battle. This is the belly of the beast, and I try to be an ulcer inside of it.” As a veteran of this struggle, you are a true inspiration to the rest of us aspiring ulcers. What words of advice and encouragement do you have for us?
WB: See my reply above about education. And when you’re in ideological conflict with one of the bad guys, and he’s mouthing the usual patriotic/conservative clichés, don’t be shy of challenging any of those clichés. He’s so unused to having them challenged that he’s often thrown for a loss. Like always, question the motivation of the US in their interventions from a MORAL point of view. We have morality on our side — look at Iraq, et al. The conservatives have a very difficult time dealing with this.
As we can plainly see, these two men—Blum and Miller– are representative of that nefarious counter-culture which began to rear its ugly head in the sixties, aborted our valiant efforts to save Vietnam, and persists to this very day. Their utopian, and let’s be candid here, utterly inane attempts to universally apply moral principles such as compassion, justice, and human dignity are roadblocks to American progress and success.
As we know, civilization would devolve into chaos if the United States collapsed. Ergo, regardless of the cost in human lives or damage to the environment, the truly moral thing to do is to pursue America’s interests.
Now who has morality on their side?
[Author’s Note: I extend my sincere thanks to William Blum for granting me a cyber-interview. It was truly an honor to engage in the Q&A and a joy to write the accompanying satirical analysis.]
William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire, and West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir. Visit his website: http://www.killinghope.org/. He can be reached at: bblum6@aol.com.
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. His essays have been widely published, he is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor ( http://www.bestcyrano.org/), and he volunteers at homeless shelters. He welcomes constructive correspondence at willpowerful@hotmail.com or via his blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/
Books by William Blum:
http://www.amazon.com/Freeing-World-Death-Essays-American/dp/1567513069
By Jason Miller
“I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler”.
—Paul Robeson
Virtually every day our mendacious corporate media publicizes the farcical “debate” between officials of the Bush Regime and Congress. While numerous polls have indicated that over 2/3 of US Americans want an end to the war in Iraq, and voters positioned the Democrats to exercise the will of the people, the war rages on.
Between the Gulf War, the subsequent US-driven draconian UN economic sanctions, and the seemingly endless US invasion and occupation of Iraq, well over a million Iraqis are dead. Infrastructure essential to vital human needs, including transportation, health, utilities, water, and sanitation has been decimated. Depleted uranium will continue to visit misery and death upon the Iraqi population long after the imperial invaders have been sent packing, as we were in Vietnam.
Machiavellian plutocrats, whose moral development has not progressed beyond that of an earthworm, scheme incessantly to convince the American public that we can “win” or “succeed” in Iraq. How much murder and mayhem must we inflict before we achieve the “victory” the cynical bourgeoisie covets?
Yet despite the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few individuals and corporate entities, each of us in the United States is complicit in the crimes of our nation to some degree. Obviously, some bear much more responsibility than others, but we have each had a hand in the obliteration of the Iraqi nation.
While a majority of US Americans now vehemently oppose the Bush administration and its abominable war, too many of us still believe that both are anomalies which will be “corrected” once we “elect” a new cast of characters to take the political reins in 2008. Sadly, little could be further from the truth. As with most putrescence, ours runs deep beneath the surface.
Fed a steady diet of carefully crafted agitprop from cradle to grave, many of us zealously pursue the American Dream of suburban utopias bordered by white picket fences. Utterly oblivious and indifferent to the staggering cost we impose upon the rest of the world, we ignore the stack of bloodied corpses on which we climb as we reach for the sacred brass ring. Ready-made delusions eagerly provided by our corporate masters assure us that we are entitled to all that we desire, convince us that we are morally superior to those we bleed dry to gratify ourselves, and shield us from the grim reality that we are the “monsters on Maple Street.”
Beneath the gilded façade of truth, justice, and the American Way lurks a corrosive and rapacious socioeconomic system which is inimical to democracy, a relative handful of opulent overlords ruling a “constitutional republic”, and hundreds of millions of poor and working class individuals who are all too willing to participate in crimes against humanity in exchange for “the good life”, which as Hurricane Katrina so clearly demonstrated, is not nearly as “good” as we have been programmed to believe.
Since it is unlikely that conscience will impel us to muster the collective will necessary to dismantle this abhorrence, let’s pray that resistance movements in Iraq and other nations that we oppress and occupy serve us a healthy portion of humility by sending us home with our tails between our legs.
In the event readers need a summary of the case for divine intervention on behalf of humanity against the detestable monstrosity we have become, here it is:
1. We are a gluttonous herd of swine devouring resources at a rate well beyond the Earth’s capacity to renew them. Metaphorically speaking, we are one of twenty people populating the globe. Yet we greedily gobble a quarter of the pie, leaving our nineteen neighbors to divvy up the remaining 75%.
2. Our socioeconomic system, in which our de facto aristocracy, myriad “think tanks”, textbook authors, and mainstream media whores have inculcated us to place an unwavering faith of cult-like proportions, is only several generations removed from feudalism, mercantilism, chattel slavery, and the early industrial capitalism which fostered the abject human misery about which Dickens wrote. Concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, exploitation of the working class and the poor, various forms of servitude, profits and property over people, unbridled consumption of resources, and an insatiable need for growth and expansion are inherent malignant aspects of our much vaunted “American Capitalism”. Encouraging and rewarding greed, narcissism, hyper-competitiveness, selfishness, and ruthlessness, the “best system there is” has propelled shamelessly decadent pigs to obscene opulence while leaving over half of the world’s population to wallow in extreme poverty.
3. Rather than dismantling the military leviathan we created to facilitate our involvement in World War II, we chose to embrace a perpetual Military Keynesianism under which a mere 5% of the world’s population spends more on war than the rest of the world combined. We have no problem “tainting” our capitalism with a little socialism as long as it enables the continued existence of the parasitic “defense” industry, allows us to maintain over 700 military bases in at least 130 different countries, and empowers us to wage the covert and overt imperialist wars necessary to advance the interests of capital.
4. We have a long history of spouting off about our devotion to “freedom and democracy,” decrying (and sometimes lynching) authoritarian rulers who refuse to surrender their nation’s sovereignty to our empire, and installing and supporting brutal tyrants who serve the needs of our beloved plutocrats. Iran, bad. Saudi Arabia, good. Venezuela, evil. Colombia, righteous. You get the picture.
5. In the course of our “infinitely benevolent” quest to democratize and free the world, we have left a bloody wake of annihilated human beings euphemistically labeled as “collateral damage.” Millions of Native Americans “sacrificed their lives” so that we could found and expand the United States. At least 600,000 Filipinos were felled as we toiled under the crushing responsibility of our “white man’s burden.” A half million Japanese died so we could display our power to Russia, a significant threat to capitalism’s hegemony. Factor in the 135,000 at Dresden, over two million Koreans, three million Vietnamese, the aforementioned million plus in Iraq, and millions more (counting those murdered via covert operations, smaller military interventions, and by proxies like the Shah, Pinochet, and Israel…not to mention the blacks who died as a result of the slave trade and Jim Crow lynchings), and the malevolence of the Third Reich pales in comparison to the criminal enterprise known as the United States of America.
6. Aside from having developed and deployed nuclear weapons (in spite of the rest of the world being years away from attaining them and Japan’s loss of will to continue the war), we possess and continue to develop the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet. Friendly regional hegemons, like India and Israel, receive our blessing and assistance in nurturing their nuclear capabilities, sans signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, we relentlessly beat the drums of war against Iran for exercising their right (as a signatory of the NNPT) to develop a program to produce nuclear energy. How much longer can the chicken-hawks in DC refrain from unleashing atomic hell, again? How much blatant hypocrisy can the world endure?
7. Given our love affair, no scratch that, our obsession, with shopping, acquiring, owning, and consuming, we keep the Once-ler’s fat, happy, and running at full throttle. As the Truffula trees, Humming-fish, Bar-ba-loots, and Swomee- Swans disappear at an alarming rate, we’re too busy “lovin’ it” at McDonald’s and cashing in on Wal-Mart’s “always low prices” to notice or care. Global temperatures rise, ice shelves plunge into the sea, glaciers recede at alarming rates, violent storms rage, species become extinct, and bees disappear en masse as we intrepidly continue filling our two lives per gallon Hummers with inane consumer goods that we don’t need. “Keeping the economy strong” is indeed a noble calling.
8. As crafty as we are, we are not solely reliant upon military means to impose our cultural imperialism. As Milton Friedman and “the Chicago Boys” demonstrated with their experiment in Chile, neoliberalism is a powerful economic tool with which we can integrate weaker nations into our empire. Astoundingly, nation after developing nation accepted our Trojan horse of “generous” loan packages which in turn forced them to crush organized labor, privatize, deregulate, and cut or eliminate humanitarian expenditures. For many years, Fidel Castro was one of the few hold-outs in the face of our economic tyranny. With the recent emergence of leaders like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, hope looms on the horizon. Yet predictably, we continue to rain misery upon the people of Cuba and are desperately attempting to sell the world on the idea of pouring our food supply into our gas tanks so we can eliminate our dependence on Chavez’s oil and give him the “Fidel treatment.”
To spare ourselves the guilt of our undeniable abetment in crimes against the Earth and nearly all its sentient inhabitants, we desperately cling to the Disneyesque illusion that the United States is a benevolent “policeman to the world” that preserves and advances noble ideals like human rights and freedom.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but the analyses of Hannah Arendt and Ward Churchill define our reality much more accurately. No matter how closely an individual US American might adhere to humane principles, we are all “Little Eichmanns.” We can minimize our roles, but there is no escaping participation in our nation’s virtuoso performance of “The Banality of Evil.”
God bless America?
How about God bless humanity by cursing the American Empire?
We desperately need the heavy doses of reality, constraint, and humility that the loss of our military and economic supremacy would bring….
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. His essays have been widely published, he is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor, and he volunteers at homeless shelters. He welcomes constructive correspondence at willpowerful@hotmail.com or via his blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/
By Rowan Wolf of Uncommon Thought Journal
Well, the cat is out of the bag. The U.S. blew it on North Korea’s uranium enrichment program. That’s right. North Korea did not have a uranium enrichment program, but because of U.S. accusations, they did jump into a plutonium program out of self defense. Think that Bush didn’t start another nuclear arms race? Well think again.
by Jason Miller
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world….
—Louis Armstrong
In an increasingly frightening and unstable world, there is one nation we know will stand firm and resolute in its commitment to freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Without the relentless, selfless efforts of the United States, humankind would plunge into a seething cauldron of tyranny, slavery, chaos and endless war. Besides Israel, severely weakened as it is by the constant strain of fending off the barbarian hordes seeking to “wipe it off the map” and Great Britain, incessantly pressured by its Leftist, pacifist neighbors to appease and negotiate, the home of the brave wages its courageous struggle virtually alone.
But fear not. The time draws nigh when an aspiring superpower will stand firmly alongside the United States in its defense of humankind. India, the world’s largest democracy and a haven for the free market economics of Capitalism, is forging a deep alliance with the United States.
What a wonderful world it will indeed be when two nations, each of which was forged in the crucible of revolution against the imperial tyranny of Great Britain, can ally themselves to fend off the twin evils of terrorism and Islamofascism as they unite to spread democracy and corporate benevolence.
As Robert Blackwill, ambassador to India from 2001 to 2003, deputy assistant to the president, deputy national security advisor for strategic planning, and presidential envoy to Iraq from 2003 to 2004, noted in The National Interest(1):
Bush Jumps the Shark
John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD
www.virtualcitizens.com
2006-10-22
On Wednesday, 18 October 2006, G. W. Bush granted an interview to Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. In light of delicious news about Republican party peccadilloes, homosexual aides and members outside the closet, Bush sought to reinvigorate the panic button base. However instead of being his sycophantic self, Mr. O’Reilly exposed some of the Bush lies, double-speak, and disassembling. As a result, what looked to be a standard re-run of some Bushevik telenovela, All My Iraqi Children or As the Jihad Turns, morphed into a sit-com where Bush was forced to Jump the Shark [?] - without a stand-in. And with his ratings in the low 30s, which is higher than the field for the Republican Congress, I imagine that soon Bush, Coach Hastert and Fonzie will be commiserating at the ranch.
The following is an annotated excerpt from the Life with O’Reilly’s Factor episode that ran on 17 October 2006 (redacted transcript posted on 20 October 2006).[1]
By Andrew Bosworth, PhD
www.virtualcitizens.com
2006-10-17
Oliver North, host of “War Stories” on Fox News, devoted an entire hour to “jihad.” Presented as a “special investigation,” it replaced the normal format of the show: a blood-and-soil adoration of military power; a “my-country-right-or-wrong” mentality; and the insistence that war fits into some kind of larger purpose or design. North really does love the smell of napalm in the morning…
In the latest “War Stories” episode, some of the major distortions, omissions and lies deserve mention. For example, Oliver North linked Yasser Arafat to Radical Islam. While Arafat certainly employed terror tactics – and practically invented the concept of “skyjacking’ – Arafat was a secular leader of a nationalist movement. His most famous declarations and programs made absolutely NO mention of Islam. So why is North eager to depict all Middle Eastern anti-western movements as Islamic? The simplicity harkens back to the glory days of the Cold War, when communists all emanated from the same monolithic bloc.
Oliver North then turned his attention to Iran. There was no mention that under the Reagan administration North helped sell weapons to the Ayatollah Khomeini and then used the ill-gotten gains to sponsor death squads in Central America. That was the reason for North’s mug-shot. North was separated from terrorism by zero degrees.
By Rowan Wolf of Uncommon Thought Journal
Who gets nuclear power and who does not? Who decides? The first is the million dollar question. The second seems to be the United States. However the decision making on who can and can not have nuclear power seems almost whimsical.
Of War Criminals, Enablers, and the Decreasing Significance of We the People
by Jason Miller
Remember the archaic notion that freedom of speech and peaceable assembly are guaranteed by a document the Bush Regime is rendering as “quaint” as the Geneva Conventions?
Here is a reminder:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Since the “leader of the free world” has established a consistent pattern of over-riding, circumventing, or simply ignoring both the Constitution and judicial rulings, the hallowed basis for our Constitutional Republic has nearly been reduced to a “God-damn piece of paper”.
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