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Marking 16 Years of the US Global War Of Terror
Guy Debord:
In 1967, in a book entitled
The Society of the Spectacle,
I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the
autocratic reign of the market economy, which had acceded to an
irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of
government that accompanied this reign....
Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical
knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information
and commentary on the most recent past....
With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat
into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable
statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning....
All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve
their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for
independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode
of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie.
With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools.
Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the
expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance....
Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism.
Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story
of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive.
The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but
they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with
terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational
and democratic.
— Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988
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“It is a sobering thought that better evidence is required to prosecute a
shoplifter than is needed to commence a world war.”
— Anthony Scrivener QC, The Times, 5 Oct 2001
“It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it
may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.”
— Dick Cheney, 21 Oct 2001
Legend has it the Cold War was closed out in 1991. 10 years later, its Next
Generation spawn was inaugurated. 16+ years into this war that will not end
“in our lifetime”, it is our moral responsibility to reveal
its covert and overt roots and, in doing so, end it given that
it is being done in our name every single day.
“Your loyalty belongs to the human race and not to a flag, not to
a country that’s supposedly under attack from some mystical force
that’s out there that you can’t even identify—I mean,
these terrorists, the way they’re presented to us,
it’s as if they dropped in from outer space. All you know
about them is that they hate you and they want to kill you. You
can’t negotiate with them. You can’t talk to them.
You can’t understand them. All you can do is
kill them. And you got to kill every last one except, you
never know.... It’s like the pod people, you know, maybe
it’s spread to somebody else and then you’ve got to start
killing them.” — John Judge, 21 Feb 2005
Ed Curtin:
Graeme MacQueen:
John Judge:
Antidote to September 11 – Exercising Our Imagination:
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John Judge was an unparalleled historian of the US National Security State.
An exemplar earthling, his loyalty was to the human race, not to a
flag or a country.
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by David T. Ratcliffe
Dr. William Francis Pepper, Esq:
Martin Luther King was much more than a civil rights leader and that’s
what no one in official capacity wants you to know. He had become effectively
a world-figure in terms of human rights people and particularly the poor of
this earth. That’s where he was going. That’s the area you
don’t really get into safely when you start talking about redistributing
wealth. Diverting huge sums of money into social welfare programs and health
programs and educational programs at the grass roots.
When you start going into that you begin to tread on toes
in this country, in the United Kingdom, and in most of the
western world. When you start associating with the poor of
this planet and the exploitation of what’s happened to whole
cultures and tribal cultures in Africa in particular, and
you see the results of the exploitation of western colonial
powers and when you want to see a movement to not only
arrest that process which still goes forward today under
different guises but to actually reverse it and to give an
opportunity for people to control their destinies and their
own natural wealth, that’s dangerous ground to get on.
King was committed, increasingly, to that kind of political view. He
wept in India as early as ’60, ’61 when he was there. He
had never seen such poverty in such a massive scale. ‘How
can people live like this?’
There’s a lot of people live that like this. Why do people
live like this? Most of America doesn’t see that. We are
a residentially segregated society forever. King saw that,
wanted to bridge it and the solutions were too radical,
too potentially dangerous. Jefferson was an idol of his.
With all of Jefferson’s foibles, remember he said, ‘You
need a revolution every 20 years. You need to sweep the
room clean every 20 years,’ said Mr. Jefferson. You need
that revolution. King believed that as well.
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Needed: A Martin Luther King Day of Truth
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[T]he assassination of Martin King, and all of the other assassinations
in the sixties...have to be seen in a historical context. You have to
go back effectively, to the compelled death of Socrates, work through
Caesar, all the way down and you will see whenever a ruling structure
cannot control an errant leader, if they can’t control him in
one way or another, ultimately they assassinate him. That has happened
throughout history. Americans don’t understand that, so they look
upon, as a kind of anomaly...the assassinations in the United States in the sixties, and they’re not. They are a part of a historical process
and must be viewed that way. Martin King had to be stopped. The only
way to stop him ultimately was to assassinate him and that’s
what they did.
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In his “Little Essays of Love and Virtue”
Havelock Ellis, writing in 1922,
during another period of heralded American prosperity,
and perhaps sensing what lay ahead as there would be only seven years
before economic disaster struck, said: “all civilisation has from
time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution”.
This was, of course, the fear in 1967 and 1968. Martin Luther King Jr
was, for the transnational corporations, public enemy number one. He
stood in the way of their inexorable consolidation of power. If he had
played along as have many of his peers before and after, he would likely
be with us today, a wealthy and honored man, a pillar of the state. But
he did not choose to play that game and as we have seen the might of the
steward state was brought to bear upon him, and to this day the pillars
of the American Republic continue to be supported by the same foundation
stones of lies and greed which he was determined to crumble to dust and
replace.
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August 2015: 70 years ago, nuclear weapons made extinction of all Life on Earth possible.
That prospective reality never went away and its chances keep increasing.
If we do not abolish nuclear weapons they will surely abolish us.
It is the non-nuclear-weapon states on whom we must depend to drive a
process to ban nuclear weapons, to stigmatize them, to make them
socially and politically unacceptable, to make it harder for nations
to get away with possessing and upgrading them, and to help the
nuclear-weapon states overcome this awful, debilitating addiction.
This flips the traditional arms-control approach on its head. The
humanitarian initiative is about empowering and mobilizing the
rest of the world to say “enough.” It is about
shifting the debate from “acceptable,”
“safe” numbers of nuclear warheads to their
fundamental inhumanity and incompatibility with basic standards
of civilized behaviour. It is about taking away from the
nuclear-armed states the power to dictate the terms of the debate
and to set the agenda—and refusing to perpetuate their
exceptionalism.
—Tim
Wright, “ A New Movement to Ban Nuclear Weapons”
From:
Chris Jordan photographic
arts: “Edge-walking the lines between beauty
and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far,
the visible and the invisible, Jordan’s images confront the
enormous power of humanity’s collective will.”
E Pluribus Unum
depicts the names of one million organizations around the world
that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social
justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture.
The actual number of such organizations is unknown, but estimates
range between one and two million, and growing.
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While there are a wealth of disturbing facts visualized by Jordan,
still, as with all the eternal opposites, forever joined like
two sides of a coin, there is also the “enormous
power of humanity’s collective will” to understand and
be informed by. This power is what we must
ALL engage, direct, and
focus, to close the book on the possibility of nuclear annihilation for
the sake of the children, all we share Earth with, and all yet to be
born and live out their lives here long, long, long after we are gone.
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E
Pluribus Unum, 2010 24x24 feet, laser etched onto aluminum panels
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Accountability? We don't need no steenkeen accountability!
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Satirists of the brilliance expressed by
Mike Luckovich ( Atlanta
Journal-Constitution “cartoonist”) tower above the
pedestrian level of puerile infotainment pundit-commentators, providing incisive
critical analysis of actual reality transpiring on the world scene. It
was refreshing to see Mike’s March 27 “Forebears” printed
as the daily cartoon in Friday’s Boston Globe Opinion Section.
John Judge
( rest in peace)
liked to point out how, ‘You don’t need to read the news
– you can get a much more accurate depiction of world events by
simply reading the cartoons!’
“In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two
elements – unlimited war and irregular war – into their first
way of war which is still their way of war. I make throughout the book,
connections between the U.S. military today and its foundation in these
unrelenting wars that actually went up through 1890 and then moved overseas
to the Philippines and the Caribbean with the same generals in the
Philippines who had been fighting the Sioux and the Cheyenne in the Northern
Plains.”
From the Author’s Note (page xiii):
“I’ve come to realize that a new periodization of US history is
needed that traces the Indigenous experience as opposed to the following
standard division: Colonial, Revolutionary, Jacksonian, Civil War and
Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age, Overseas Imperialism,
Progressivism, World War I, Depression, New Deal, World War II, Cold War,
and Vietnam War, followed by contemporary decades. I altered this
periodization to better reflect Indigenous experience but not as radically
as needs to be done. This is an issue much discussed in current Native
American scholarship.
“I also wanted to set aside the rhetoric of race, not because race and
racism are unimportant but to emphasize that Native peoples were colonized
and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples - hundreds of nations
- not as a racial or ethnic group. "Colonization," "dispossession,"
"settler colonialism," "genocide" - these are the terms that drill to the
core of US history, to the very source of the country’s existence.
“The charge of genocide, once unacceptable by establishment academic and
political classes when applied to the United States, has gained currency as
evidence of it has mounted, but it is too often accompanied by an
assumption of disappearance. So I realized it was crucial to make the
reality and significance of Indigenous peoples’ survival clear throughout
the book. Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance
and storytelling passed through the generations, and I sought to
demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide,
by whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this in order to
more accurately understand the history of the United States.
“My hope is that this book will be a springboard to dialogue about
history, the present reality of Indigenous peoples’ experience, and
the meaning and future of the United States itself.”
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p r e s e n t s
How the West Caused the Crisis in Ukraine
Summary: On January 10, 2015 Evanston Neighbors for Peace
organized an event with two eminent speakers,
John Mearsheimer,
Professor at the University of Chicago and Rick Rozoff the foremost
investigator of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In part one Prof. Mearsheimer spoke about the origins of the crisis
and how to avert the ever heightening risk of war between the United States
and Russia. He gave an update of his acclaimed article in the
magazine Foreign Affairs:
“ Why
the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.”
It is widely acknowledged that the expansion eastward of NATO is
a major provocation of Russia and a
huge and under-reported factor in the origins and the conduct of the war
in Ukraine.
Few investigative journalists follow the day to day politics of NATO
- that are directed largely by the US - as closely as Rick Rozoff.
He is the manager of
Stop NATO International
and has been an active opponent of war, militarism and intervention for over
40 years. He writes on the threat of international militarization and
the globalization of NATO.
This is an urgent appeal to pay attention to the crisis in Ukraine
where the two largest nuclear powers, the US and Russia are in
direct and escalating confrontation.
Mearsheimer states emphatically that in the prevailing wisdom in the
West, the Ukraine crisis is blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression.
But this account is wrong says Mearsheimer: The United States and its
European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis.
Questions in this Q & A period range from who engineered the
February 2014 Coup in Ukraine, to what role the Neo-Nazis play.
Credits: Thanks to Dale Lehman, WZRD Chicago, for the recording
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Imagine running out of imagine
Mistaking authority for power
Weaving lifes free spirit
Into patterns of control
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Dan Cohen,
founder of the nonprofit organization
Music & Memory,
confronts a broken healthcare system to demonstrate music’s
ability to combat memory loss and restore a deep sense of self to
those suffering from it.
The political system we find ourselves navigating our lives within
cannot make life healthier because all such agendas as so-called
health care are based on profit, not human needs.
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8 December 2014
Fifteenth Anniversary of Verdict in the Martin Luther King Murder Trial
THE Trial of the 20th Century
Fifteen
years
ago
today
the jury reached its verdict in the only trial
ever held for the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The trial was
conducted in the Circuit Court of Shelby County, Memphis, Tennessee.
It began on November 15 and lasted fourteen days. The Plaintiffs were Coretta
Scott King, Martin Luther King, III, Bernice King, Dexter Scott King and
Yolanda King. The Defendants were Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Conspirators.
This is the most important trial of the 20th century, and yet most people
have never heard of it.
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John Judge (1947-2014)
alternate historian, renowned researcher, educator, investigator, advocate for real democracy
Remarks delivered at the Celebration of the Life of John Patrick Judge
National Press Club, Washington DC, 31 May 2014
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back online:
Worldwatchers Archive
A Tribute To Mae Brussell
an exemplar and the most prolific anti-fascist political researcher of the latter half of the 20th Century.
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“Our weapons dictate what we are to do.
They force us into awful corners.
They give us our living, they sustain our economy,
they bolster up our politicians,
they sell our mass media, in short we live by them.
But if they continue to rule us we will also most
surely die by them.”
Thomas Merton,
Cold
War Letters (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 65.
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10 June 2013:
Fifty years ago President Kennedy gave the commencement
address to the graduating class at American University. In his book,
The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita
Khrushchev, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins summed
up the significance of that remarkable speech: “At American
University on June 10, 1963, President Kennedy proposed an end to the
Cold War.” Khrushchev called the American University Address
“the greatest speech by any American President since
Roosevelt.” This is the real jubilee of 2013, not 22 November.
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“We are truly human when we act responsibly to restore
harmony and act with love and compassion
to restore truth,
transparency and the equitable distribution of
the resources endowed by our common Creator.”
—Sister Megan Rice
“We were fulfilling our right and duty according to the US-signed
Nuremberg Charter that if one knows of one’s government committing a
war crime, one has a right and a duty to take steps to try to stop that
crime.”
—Greg Boertje-Obed
“In heaven Jesus has no arsenal of nuclear weapons. And as we pray
in the Our Father prayer:
‘Here on Earth as it is in
heaven.’ ... Nuclear weapons are a product of hell and we need to
send them back there.”
—Michael Walli
“Letters from a Georgia Jail: Anti-Nuclear Activists Await Sentencing,”
by David Cook, Religion & Politics, January 22, 2014
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Intelligence & Surveillance
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“By leaking
a
handful of NSA documents,
Edward Snowden has
given us a glimpse of future U.S. global policy and the changing
architecture of power on this planet.”
AND must listen:
35 min. 7/24/13
McCoy I-view on Jeff Blankfort’s
Takes
on the World prog
+
Maria Gilardin’s
29 min.
broadcast quality production of same
from TUCradio.org.
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But then it must be asked if we can remove cultural value from one
part of our lives without destroying it also in the other parts. Can
we justify secrecy, lying, and burglary in our so-called intelligence
organizations and yet preserve openness, honesty, and devotion to
principle in the rest of our government? Can we subsidize mayhem in
the military establishment and yet have peace, order, and respect
for human life in the streets? Can we degrade all forms of essential
work and yet expect arts and graces to flourish on weekends? And can
we ignore all questions of value on the farm and yet have them
answered affirmatively in the grocery store and the household?
The
answer is that, though such distinctions can be made theoretically,
they cannot be preserved in practice. Values may be corrupted or
abolished in only one discipline at the start, but the damage must
sooner or later spread to all; it can no more be confined than air
pollution. If we corrupt agriculture we corrupt culture, for in
nature and within certain invariable social necessities we are one
body, and what afflicts the hand will afflict the brain.
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6
June
2013—Edward Snowden[1][2][3][4]:
I’m just another guy who sits there, day to day, in the office, watches
what’s happening, and goes, “This is something that’s not
our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether
these [surveillance]
programs and policies are right or wrong.” And I’m willing to go
on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, “I didn’t
change these. I didn’t modify the story. This is the truth. This is
what’s happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing
this.”
Yeah, I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after
me or any of their third-party partners.... And that’s a fear I’ll
live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be. You
can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence
agencies and be completely free from risk, because they’re such powerful
adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you,
they’ll get you, in time.
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We forget ... that violence is so securely founded among us—in war,
in forms of land use, in various methods of economic “growth” and
“development”—because it is immensely profitable. People
do not become wealthy by treating one another or the world kindly and with
respect. Do we not need to remember this? Do we have a single eminent
leader who would dare to remind us?
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William F. Pepper, 21 June 2016
William F. Pepper with Martin Luther King, 1967
