The Time Has Come to Be Militantly Anti-Military-Industrial-Complex

Like Eduardo Galeano. Here is an excerpt from his recent interview on Democracy Now!, one of only a handful of news outlets worth paying attention to...

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about President Obama, a little more about him. We recently had on the Pan-Africanist scholar Ali Mazrui, who’s a Kenyan scholar, a chancellor at a Kenyan school and also at Binghamton University in New York. He said Barack Obama has become “the most powerful single black individual in the history of civilization.” What about the significance of Barack Obama becoming president?

EDUARDO GALEANO: Well, it’s a very important—a very important victory in a long, long and difficult and painful fight against racism, especially in this country, in the United States.

Here in the book, I tell some stories, unknown or almost unknown, happened fifteen minutes ago in historical terms. For instance, in 1942, 1942, the Pentagon, when the United States was entered in the Second World War, the Pentagon forbade, prohibited the transfusions of black blood. And at that time, the director of the plasma bank in the Red Cross was a scientific called Charles Drew, and he denied the order. He denied to obey it, saying it’s stupid. Such a thing, such a thing, black blood, does not exist. Blood is red; it’s not black. Blood is red. And he knew what it was he was speaking about. He was almost the inventor of the plasma, or at least the scientific who made it possible. He saved million of lives in the Second World War. But besides being a scientific of very high reputation, he was black. And he was black. And so, he was not—he knew perfectly well what he was speaking about, and that’s why he resigned or was resigned. And this happened just a while ago, it’s yesterday.

So it’s very important, the fact that Obama is now president of the United States, being, as he is, black or half-black, no? The problem is that nobody is better or worse for being black or white, like—this book also, Mirrors, contains a lot of stories about women, this half of humanity. I don’t know why called a minority. I’m not strong in mathematics, but how half of humanity may be a minority? And I tell a lot of stories that are badly known or unknown. Then, my friends—I have some terribly perverse friends, saying, “Well, now the system gave you as a gift that wonderful woman called Condoleezza Rice.” And I say, “Well, yes, it’s true, because a woman is not better than a man or a man better than a woman. We are all made, you know, half-garbage and half-marble, half-beauty and half-[expletive].” But we should have the same opportunities. And that’s a problem. The discrimination have condemned so many people to be invisible. And this book tries to recover their memories and to recover their presence.

The fact that Obama is black is very important in the fight against racism, but it’s also a challenge. I mean, he should prove that blacks can do it better than whites, like women in power, which is unfortunately not the case of Margaret Thatcher, for instance. But they are at least—at least Margaret Thatcher had the opportunity to show it. And sometimes I think Obama is doing it well, and sometimes not. But it must be very difficult for him.

Yesterday I said perhaps he’s lost in the bush, and meaning that there is all this war machine, for instance. He improved the war budget. He improved it. In the campaign, he was promising a quite different attitude. But he ended raising the war budget, which is mysteriously named in the United States “defense budget.” I don’t know defense against who, because the last time this country was invaded was in 1812. Well, later there was a short invasion by Pancho Villa, but this was almost nothing, I mean. And I believe we should—we should propose a new model of world, not consecrated to this human passion of killing each other. We are the only animal specialized in mutual extermination.

By the way, advertising, I’m a member of a vast movement working for a big giant march for peace and against violence on October 2 in all countries, in all countries. And I hope we may have millions and millions of feet walking in the whole planet, in all cities, in all parts of the world, against the war, against this crazy mad world living against itself, this big factory of death that the world is nowadays. Each minute, each minute, the last official figures say, each minute, the world gives, each minute, $3 million to military expenses, $3 million per minute for military expenses, for the industry of death. And each minute, fifteen children die from hunger or curable diseases. So we’ll march against it, because we believe another world is possible.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Eduardo Galeano, and we’re going to be back with him in a minute.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE!

The Real Enemy Among Us

Since President Obama took office and set up his big tent (having learned nothing from the Gingrich-led debacle of the Clinton years), the bottom-feeders from the Reagan-Bush neo-fascist revanchement have returned in force: and they are taking to the airwaves in defense of torture and the various other projects that putrify in the fetid bigotries of their fear-and-thing-ridden imaginations.

I, for one, have had enough. We've been more than polite and gracious to these thugs. It is time to show them the way back under the rocks from whence they have crawled.

Let's see now: we have the military-industrial-evangelical-complex (check); then we have the CIA engaged in para-military operations (check); and then we have private corporations who contract out the services of mercenaries to the government (check); then there's the FBI, National Guard units, state and local police (check, check, check, check). I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody...

I can hardly wait for the return of the East India Company, with its private army and navy to open "free markets" wherever the locals don't seem to understand the importance of buying what we have to sell them.

And still we fear the turbaned bogeyman in the night; armed to the teeth and hyper-vigilant and we just don't feel safe. Maybe it's all that under-the-table arms trading we've been doing for decades that has some people in government legitmately worried...

Blow-back is a bitch.

Centrism in a time of neo-fascist revanchement is just pissing in the flames. To put out the fire, the Left (if we have a viable one in this country, which is doubtful at this point) had better start organizing bucket brigades.

Obama is not ready to take on the real enemy among us: ourselves.

I Am A Chomskian Left Libertarian; Get Over It.

Noam Chomsky’s recent book “Failed States” is about the many ways in which the U.S. falls into that category—while reserving for itself the authority to name other states as “failed” and to intervene in their domestic affairs in order to keep their “failures” from spreading.

Noam points out that we have moved beyond the mere hypocrisy of a “double-standard” to the hyper-hypocrisy of a single standard: “our way” as defined by powerful elites, or “the highway.” The highway is the ever-present military option.

The militarism that pervades our society is no longer regarded as problematic (recall Eisenhower’s coining of the term “military-industrial-complex”); in fact, it isn’t even regarded at all. And that’s exactly the way the boys in the Pentagon like it. They would prefer that we stay tuned to professional sporting extravaganzas and “American Idol” and let them quietly massacre the Afghan women and children that we claim to be liberating. Whenever anyone questions the outcomes of their nefarious activities, they chant “Al-Qaeda”—allegedly a global shadow-network of religion-mad evil-doers and freedom-haters bent upon our destruction (when, in fact, it is largely the brand-name that the CIA concocted to apply to the DISORGANIZED perpetrators of occasional crimes against the United States’ self-proclaimed “interests” around the world).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, both the CIA and Pentagon felt compelled to justify their outrageously disproportionate claim upon U.S. tax revenues. Remember the so-called “peace-dividend” that was bandied about during the Clinton Administration? If the American people had ever gotten a taste of that, the military-industrial-complex would have hit hard times.

These days, I don’t just read Chomsky. The "Annals" of Tacitus are never far from my hands. In Book 2, Tacitus recounts the wiles of a certain slave by the name of Clemons who, after the murder of his master, Postumus Agrippa, attempted to pass himself off as the latter. “In age and figure he was not unlike his master,” Tacitus explains. So he spread the rumor that Agrippa was alive and then went about in disguise, keeping a low profile, for “he knew that truth gains strength by notoriety and time, falsehood by precipitancy and vagueness.”

This is the genius of the so-called “war on terror”: by definition, there can be no enemy who can be exposed by notoriety and time. Precipitancy and vagueness are therefore the order of the day. No democratic process is permitted to penetrate the veil of secrecy with which the “war on terror” is conducted. National security is at stake. We wouldn’t want another 9/11, now would we?

Because the American people have been cowed by the rumored threat of the "Green Menace" (the new color-code for the now outdated "Red Menace" that paved the way for the present dominance of the military-industrial complex), Clemons rules our country; his former master, the democratic prerogatives of the American people, lies murdered by his slave.

Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

An American Athenaeum

Break out the bubbly: a new siblogling has emerged!

Planned Obsolescence in the Warfare Economy

This is a story about the public-private partnerships that manage the U. S. economy on behalf of the Plutocratic War Party (aka the Democan-Republicrats).

For years prior to the revelations of the current economic crisis, the media in this country ran story after story on the shortage of U.S. troops and the hardships that this was causing those currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This story was run repeatedly, long after it was "news."

The reason for this repetition was that these stories were not "news," they were attempts by the Pentagon to use the (predictably supine) news media for further recruitment. That is to say, these "news stories" were attempts to appeal to Americans' sense of patriotism. "Uncle Sam Wants You!"

Fortunately, the Plutocratic War Party does not have to depend entirely upon appeals to patriotism for military recruitment. When such appeals fail to produce the necessary numbers, other options are resorted to.

This simple fact was recognized in the early years of the 20th century by Emma Goldman. In her insightful essay "Patriotism," Ms. Goldman wrote:

“… the greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism. The very moment the latter is undermined, capitalism will totter. True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force—necessity. Is it not a fact that during industrial depressions there is a tremendous increase in the number of enlistments? The trade of militarism may not be either lucrative or honorable, but it is better than tramping the country in search of work, standing in the bread line, or sleeping in municipal lodging houses…” Emma Goldman, “Patriotism,” Anarchism and Other Essays, New York: Dover Publications (1969/original pub. 1917), pp. 141-142.

The cycles of boom and bust in a warfare economy such as our own are not random. Neither was the Federal Government's rapid aid for Wall Street when the crisis was first announced. Nor is the fact that the jobs being lost due to this crisis are largely in construction and manufacturing: for job losses in those sectors assuredly produce the able-bodied young men (mostly) and women with which the military fills its lower ranks.

If you have asked yourself how it is that this economic crisis could have happened, given the extremely business-friendly environment of the past eight years, not to mention the impressive brain-trust that Wall Street cultivates and maintains on its own behalf, consider the type of economy we have (guns over butter) and the basic needs of the U.S. military for perpetuating its present projects around the world.

Then ask yourself a more difficult question: what is the Obama Administration doing to address the fundamental issues involved with this country's maintenance of a warfare economy?

Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

Killers for Christ

As if the entire enterprise of the War on Terror weren't illegitimate enough...