"you can't handle the truth"

Susan A. Brewer. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. x + 342 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-538135-1.

Reviewed by H. Matthew Loayza (Minnesota State University, Mankato)

The concluding chapter of Susan A. Brewer’s Why America Fights begins with a quotation from the climactic scene of the 1992 film A Few Good Men, where Marine Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) contemptuously dismisses the right of prosecuting attorney Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) to weigh in on national security matters.  When the furious Jessep roars “You can’t handle the truth!” to Kaffee, he echoes the verdict that U.S. policymakers have customarily rendered upon the American public for over a century.  In Why America Fights, Brewer explores the U.S. government’s use of overt propaganda to handle, manipulate, and advance specific versions of the truth to convince the public that the wars that they are asked to fight are worthwhile and virtuous.
...
The Second World War, according to Brewer, temporarily diverged from the general pattern when the Roosevelt administration originally defined the target audience for wartime propaganda as an educated, informed citizen who needed to be persuaded of the viability and righteousness of Uncle Sam’s plans.  However, this idea neither survived the war, nor was it resurrected in subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.  These limited conflicts, unlike the total mobilization of 1941-45, required relatively fewer contributions or sacrifices, and as Brewer observes, less civic participation.  Indeed, the author advances a compelling, if disturbing argument that since 1945, civic participation in wartime has declined to the point where citizens are asked to serve only as spectators and cheerleaders.  The mass media, she contends, has usually failed to challenge the official line in any meaningful way until discrepancies between the official narrative and reality became so evident (as occurred in both Vietnam and Iraq) that sticking to script would be to indulge in fantasy.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29336  

What's 9/11? Afghans never heard of NYC terror

Derrick Jensen on Pacifism

The Colbert Report: Nassir Ghaemi

Nassir Ghaemi

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi believes that mental illness can foster great leadership, but the Republican presidential candidates are too "normal."

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/394151/august-08-2011/nassir-ghaemi

"Democracy Now?"

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

by JOHN WALSH

 

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk.  But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion.  One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar.  It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention.  Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam.  But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort.  Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate?  That is a strange choice indeed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/30/meet-professor-juan-cole-consultant-to-the-cia/

Urban Rebellions Can Trigger Social Change

Saturday, 13 August 2011 09:05 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 
 

The riots, in effect, were the "forcible entry" of the Black masses into political discussions that usually treated them and their communities as invisible or irrelevant. Black poverty, deprivation and racism in urban areas went from being political non-issues to one of the most important issues of the decade.

http://www.international.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1961%3Aurban-rebellions-can-trigger-social-change&catid=97%3Abreaking-news&Itemid=119

The Bad Deal

 by James K. Galbraith

The President is not a progressive – he is not what Americans still call a “liberal.” He is a willful player in an epic drama of faux-politics, an operative for the money power, whose job is to neutralize the left with fear and distraction and then to pivot rightward and deliver a conservative result.

What Barack Obama got from the debt deal was exactly what his sponsors have wanted: a long-term lock-in of domestic spending cuts, and a path toward severe cuts in the core New Deal and Great Society insurance programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And, of course, no tax increases at all.

To see the arc of political strategy, recall that from the beginning Obama handed economic policy to retainers recruited from the stables of Robert Rubin. From the beginning, he touted “fiscal responsibility” and played up the (economically non-existent) “problem” of the budget deficit. From the beginning his team sabotaged economic recovery with optimistic forecasts and inadequate programs – in the clear interest of protecting the banking system from reform.

Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite

Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite

"Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive's private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans."

The S&P Downgrade: Still the Best Poliitcal System Money Can Buy?

America in Decline

Friday 5 August 2011

by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed 

 

‎'What remains of political democracy has been undermined further as both parties Composehave turned to auctioning congressional leadership positions, as political economist Thomas Ferguson outlines in the Financial Times.

“The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.'

 

http://www.truth-out.org/america-decline/1312567242

Obama: Cutting Social Welfare to Save the Pentagon

The administration's stated budget priorities

By Glenn Greenwald

'Just think about that for a minute. We have a Democratic administration installed in power after millions of liberals donated large amounts of their time and money to help elect them. Yet here we have a top official in the President's cabinet demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to protect the military budget from further reductions. That's the position of the Democratic administration.'

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/05/military

Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima

Gar Alperovitz: The Decision to Bomb Hiroshima

Here is how General Dwight D. Eisenhower reports he reacted when he was told by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that the atomic bomb would be used:

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."

In another public statement the man who later became President of the United States was blunt: "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

Prashad: California Dreamin'

Obama and the 2012 Elections

Primary Lessons

By VIJAY PRASHAD

"The California Progressives have taken a strong stand for the immediate period. I hope that others in the Democratic Party will take a similar position and push their colleagues into a public political discussion on the future of progressivism in America. Come the day when progressives in the Party such as Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison, Bernie Sanders and Donna Edwards, Emanuel Cleaver and John Conyers, Barney Frank and Bobby Rush, Maxine Waters and Jose Serrano consider how best to fight against the lunatic Right and the neo-liberal Right, to articulate a clear path to a progressive future that is not hampered by the Democratic Party's progressive mirage."

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad08022011.html

Obama: The Master of Winning by "Losing"

August 2, 2011

Gratuitous Capitulations

Obama Surrendered (But Got What He Wanted Too)

By ANDREW LEVINE

"[Obama] did not exactly stumble into this latest, spectacular defeat; rather he took advantage of the situation the Republicans presented, and made the most of it.
...
That is what Obama is about. And so, in the preposterous episode of political theater our political class staged in the past few weeks, he gave his all. He did negotiate badly enough that Business Schools could make a case study of his machinations, but he was more disingenuous than inept. Obama surrendered for one overwhelming reason --because he wanted to; because he is not just in the game to win, but to win for Wall Street. The time is long past due for liberals to face that reality, and to deal with it not, not as Obama and his advisors expect, by acquiescing out of fear that the alternative is even worse, but in a constructive way. If a Dump Obama cannot get going now, then when?"

http://www.counterpunch.org/levine08022011.html

Twain: I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.

AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade. 

http://www.alternet.org/vision/151850/8_reasons_young_americans_don%27t_fight_back%3A_how_the_us_crushed_youth_resistance/?page=entire

Obama's Austerity: We should have seen this coming, No?

Obama's Big Payback to Wall Street

The Worst Deal in American History?

By MIKE WHITNEY

Here's a clip from a speech Obama gave in November 2008, before he even took office, and long before the budget deficits had become a problem:

"Our economy is trapped in a vicious cycle: the turmoil on Wall Street means a new round of belt-tightening for families and businesses on Main Street ....we'll have to scour our federal budget, line-by-line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices as well."

Huh? You mean Obama was prattling the right-wing mantra before he ever set foot in the Oval Office?

Uh huh; which explains why he picked the two losers most responsible for the Crash of '08 to lead his economics team; Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama devotees shrugged off the appointments as a rookie error unwilling to breach any criticism of the Dear Leader. Even now, they cry "Foul", claiming Obama was either hoodwinked or --get this--a "poor negotiator".

Get real. Obama is as far right as you can get without donning a Tricorn hat and joining a militia. Don't believe it?

Here's an excerpt from his book Audacity of Hope where he gushingly praises his boyhood hero, Ronald Reagan:

"Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, person responsibility, optimism, and faith.

That Reagan's message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he'd written for them--a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites (Audacity of Hope, 31-32). (Excerpt from, Christopher Caldwell, What Obama Owes to Reagan, Daily Kos)

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney08012011.html

Aijaz Ahmad and Sabah Alnasseri on Imerialism and Neoliberalism

Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism

November 16, 2007
Toronto

ISLAM, ISLAMISMS AND THE WEST by Aijaz Ahmad
Aijaz Ahmad, visiting Professor of Political Science at York University.

Sabah Alnasseri, Sabah is refugee from Iraq now teaching Middle East Studies at York University.
http://www.socialistproject.ca/theory/sr2008.html

Prashad on the Costs of War

An Economic Draft

The Costs of War

By VIJAY PRASHAD

"The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop a part of its capital into the ocean"
-- Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1857-58.

Acknowledging this obscenity, Ralph Nader wrote in the Chicago Tribune (July 20) that big firms should be judged based on their "corporate patriotism." They like to take tax breaks and be rescued by marines when it suits them, but they are unwilling to invest their untaxed profits to build up the productive capacity in the United States. Corporations, Nader wrote, "receive all the benefits of American corporate personhood and avoid all the expectations of patriotic behavior and the responsibilities that go along with those privileges and immunities." Hand-over-fist they make money in the financial casinos and by defrauding workers across the world. Meanwhile, they are party to the view that the U. S. needs to balance its budget and cut "entitlements" so that the debt can be managed – but without their own positive contribution to that $14.46 trillion hole.

...

The message from this corner of America is simple: no more bombing houses in Droneland, no more foreclosing houses in America.

http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad07292011.html

Zizek on European Antisemitism

Zizek: “Antisemitism is alive and kicking in Europe”

"On Friday evening, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek gave a lecture in a bookstore in Central Tel Aviv teeming with familiar faces of leftwing activists. It was hosted by Udi Aloni, an Israeli-American artist and BDS activist, who just completed a book entitled What Does a Jew Want, which is edited by Zizek.

...

Sitting in a room full of Israeli activists, some of whom consider themselves on the forefront of the fight against Israeli occupation and apartheid; who devote much of their time going out to the West Bank in solidarity with Palestinians, in confrontation with Israeli military and who favor a total boycott of the country, I could feel the disappointment in the room from certain people that Zizek was not speaking more critically and disapprovingly of Israel. He barely said the word occupation, did not mention the word apartheid even once.  He did not directly speak that much about Israel itself or what should be done.

This was a bold move with such an audience – and I’m not sure if people got it or not, but in many ways, I think that Zizek was actually levying criticism against the very activists sitting in that room. They are so caught up with the “evils” of Israel that they have lost perspective on what is going on in the rest of the world, and may have lost sight of the very real dangers of continued antisemism, which has all sorts of consequences.

As someone familiar with Zizek’s ideas and who is well acquainted with his poignant criticism of Israel, I was quite pleased, because I didn’t need to hear over again from him how Israel is occupying the Palestinians. And really, as a philosopher who spends his time in Europe, what could he renew for us on that? But of course, an activist in the audience was not happy that he did not devote enough time to criticizing Zionism, so she asked him why that is.

He proceeded to say that Zionism is not the worst evil in the world. He mentioned the strangling of the West Bank by Israel as a colonization project and said that there should be maps everywhere hanging of what belongs to whom in the West Bank so people who  can really see Israel’s domination.

But he also stated that someone from the Democratic Republic of Congo would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat for the chance to move to the West Bank."

http://contested-terrain.net/zizek-%E2%80%9Cantisemitism-is-alive-and-kicking-in-europe%E2%80%9D/

Obama and the War on Drugs

Obama Administration: Pot has No Accepted Medical Use

Advocates for medical marijuana plan to appeal ruling in federal court

by John Hoeffel

"Marijuana has been approved by many states and the nation's capital to treat a range of illnesses, but the federal government has ruled that it has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous drug like heroin.

The decision, announced Friday, comes almost nine years after medical marijuana supporters asked the government to reclassify cannabis to take into account a growing body of worldwide research that shows its effectiveness in treating certain diseases, such as glaucoma and multiple sclerosis."

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart:  "marijuana 'has a high potential for abuse,' 'has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States' and 'lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision.'

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/10-2

David Harvey: The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

Chapter 5: “Capital Evolves” from David Harvey’s recent book The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is now available as a free PDF download:
Chapter 5: Capital Evolves from The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (258k PDF)