As Western Media Again Becomes A Cheerleader For War, Bias in the Press Mirrors Imperial Ideology
Ukrainians murdered by the Russians are worthy victims to be defended at all costs, but the people being murdered by America's wars in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan are unworthy victims.
Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.
On Saturday, March 5th, a Women’s March rally was held at a local park just down the street from where I live. This was just the second Women’s March I’ve attended, the first being in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump galvanized so many people across the country who had previously been politically disengaged and moved them out into the streets. The theme of the local Women’s March rally this year was “Engage For Equity,” and a portion of the proceeds raised were going to help the people of Ukraine since Putin had ordered Russian troops to invade their country. The blue and yellow bars of the Ukrainian flag were ubiquitous that sunny day, held aloft in solidarity for the worthy victims of a terrible war of Russian aggression.
The people who held those Ukrainian flags that day were reading a script that had been written for them. It is remarkable, and deeply troubling, the degree to which public opinion follows the dictates and undergirding ideologies of the United States empire. There is no propaganda as effective, stifling, or incensing as war propaganda.
It is uncontestable that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war crime. The United Nations Charter definition of a war of aggression, for which there is no serious claim to self defense from imminent threat, plainly applies in this case. And the Nuremberg Trials, which described preemptive, aggressive war-making as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole,” sentenced Nazis to death by hanging for committing this supreme crime.
I stand in agreement with those who view war itself as an inherent evil that must be decried no matter who is doing the war-making. War must be resisted on principle. I agree with the statements made by those on the left such as the socialist publication Tempest Magazine that writes:
We must oppose all forms of capitalist oppression against the working class. War will only serve the interests of the ruling class and will have devastating consequences for working people. As we enter a new historical epoch marked by great power rivalry between the U.S. and Russia and China, we must be clear on our position: Neither Washington, nor Moscow, nor Beijing, but International Socialism!
But these statements of solidarity with the people of Ukraine only go so far, particularly when they are absent of any crucial context that explains how we got here, who benefits from the conflict, or examines the staggering hypocrisy of the United States claiming outrage over Putin’s act of war.
How we got here is a long and complicated story which I will go into later. Who is ultimately benefiting from the conflict is cloudy, except for the fact that U.S. weapons manufacturer’s stock prices have risen precipitously, starting their rise just before the invasion commenced. The CEOs of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics had been boasting about their increased earnings in January due to tensions in Eastern Europe:
An article from In These Times lays out the immoral dynamic of private weapons manufacturers encouraging war and dictating official government policy:
[The arms industry] exerts tremendous influence in Washington, employing an average of 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years, or more than one lobbyist per member of Congress…
Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are also funders of the influential think tank, Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has been encouraging the United States to take immediate action, including militarily, in the event of a Russian invasion.
“Everyone in D.C. knows that weapons manufacturers are helping skew U.S. policy towards militarism, but they usually try to be less obvious,” Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, an anti-war organization, told In These Times. “They are cashing in on tensions over Ukraine as the U.S. pours weapons into the region.”
The results of this tail wagging the dog are not just private profits for weapons manufacturers. The results are death and destruction. When an organization has a vested interest in fanning the flames of war, that organization ought to be abolished, or at the very least broken up, nationalized, minimized, and kept from influencing policy. But the support for military spending remains overwhelmingly bipartisan in Washington.
In regards to Western hypocrisy in the coverage of Ukraine, it follows a well-worn pattern. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the media and political class have fallen into their usual, predictable wartime roles, reflecting imperial doctrine, parroting Pentagon pronouncements, ratcheting up tensions, and adhering to ugly notions of Western cultural supremacy. This has shown itself through: the media applying double standards in its coverage of refugees; the dichotomous treatment of Russian crimes versus the crimes of the U.S. and the European Union; the legitimating of voices calling for armed warfare between nuclear powers; and the war against any dissenting voices who do not spout the official line from Washington. These phenomena have taken hold with such prevalence and haste, defying any lessons that we should have learned from history by now, that it would be quite satirical if its effects weren’t so deadly serious.
The Double Standard
No serious, meaningful discussion can be had on this issue without acknowledging the fact that the U.S. has zero authority to posture, lecture, and scold other people and countries for flaunting international law, something that the U.S. itself has a long history of doing and continues to do on a daily basis and for which it is exempt from the kind of consequences that are currently being levied against the people of Russia. Our claims of defending “freedom and democracy” are lies unless we can satisfy the minimal notion of, as Noam Chomsky puts it, “If we think something is wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.”
Any time there is a clear double standard in the application of law, whether it be internationally, domestically, or even within family dynamics, those who benefit from the double standard will generally view the law as righteous and fair, while those who are the victims of the double standard will view the law as a source of inequality to which they have no say over and will thus determine the lawmakers and enforcers to be illegitimate. When such double standards are systemic, any earnest appeals to the “rule of law” or to the “rules-based international order,” particularly when those appeals come from people in power who benefit from the enforced inequality, can be rationally regarded as a joke.
And so it is that many politicians and media commentators in the U.S. and Europe, swept up as they are into the irrational maelstrom of war mongering and bloodlust, are weeping for the Ukrainian victims of Russian imperialism while simultaneously downplaying and ignoring the plight of Palestinians, Syrians, Yemenis, Somalians, Iraqis, and Afghanis suffering from U.S. imperialism. The examples of this are already litany, but here are a few revealing instances:
CBS News:
Al-Jazeera:
From ITV (UK):
NBC News:
The Daily Telegraph
The New York Times
Perhaps we should be thanking these reporters for articulating so clearly the double standards of media coverage. Perhaps it is also worth noting that these “civilized” European countries, where it is so shocking to see refugees coming from, went through the hell of some of the most destructive wars of the 20th century that included international genocide, the dissolution of democracies, and tens of millions dead or wounded. I say that not to diminish the very real plight of the current refugee crisis involving millions of Ukrainians, but because people seem to forget that the European wars of the 20th century are still within living memory and continue to have lasting effects on international relations - not to mention personal relationships - including on the current war in Ukraine, which I will explain more later.
The above media commentaries do not just reveal how refugees are treated differently based on their race. It also reveals the degree to which the mainstream media so closely adhere to U.S. foreign policy interests. This phenomena is not new. It is both described and predicted extraordinarily accurately by Herman’s and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model as they explain in their seminal work, Manufacturing Consent.
Any victims of crimes perpetrated by states that are enemies of the U.S., Herman and Chomsky explain, will predictably be considered “worthy” victims by the media, and their plight will be treated as a great affront to humanity, demonstrating the inherent evil of our enemies. But victims of crimes perpetrated by the U.S. or its client-states will predictably be considered “unworthy” victims, meriting far less attention and moral offense. Herman and Chomsky write:
This bias is politically advantageous to U.S. policy-makers, for focusing on victims of enemy states shows those states to be wicked and deserving of U.S. hostility; while ignoring U.S. and client-state victims allows ongoing U.S. policies to proceed more easily, unburdened by the interference of concern over the politically inconvenient victims.1
They go on:
A constant focus on victims of communism helps convince the public of enemy evil and sets the stage for intervention, subversion, support for terrorist states, an endless arms race, and military conflict - all in a noble cause. At the same time, the devotion of our leaders and media to this narrow set of victims raises public self-esteem and patriotism, as it demonstrates the essential humanity of country and people. The public does not notice the silence on victims in client states, which is as important in supporting state policy as the concentrated focus on enemy victims.2
To the United States, Ukrainians are the “worthy” victims. But the ten-thousand or so Ukrainians who have been killed by Ukrainian government forces in the eastern Donbas region since the U.S.-backed 2014 coup (or Maidan revolution, whichever way you care to characterize it), a region which has since seen its separatist portions officially recognized by Putin, do not fit the official U.S. narrative of unified, good-natured Ukrainians heroically battling the forces of an atavistic Russia hell-bent on violating their right to sovereignty, and are therefore considered “unworthy” victims and given much less time on the airwaves. To Russia, Ukrainian separatists battling against the U.S.-supported neo-Nazi Azov Battalion are the worthy victims for whom Russia is conducting this war to protect their right to sovereignty. Putin’s claims of “de-Nazifying” Ukraine are just as overly simplistic as U.S. claims of “defending democracy and freedom.”
The breathless indignation with which the Western press is reporting on the crimes of the Russian invasion stands in stark contrast to the over 20 years of reporting on the War on Terror. Those fleeing America’s wars in the Middle East have been met with hostility in Europe and the U.S., with Westerners fearing a breakdown of their cultural values due to too many refugees coming to their countries.
Again, this follows the predictable script of the kind of jingoist sentiment that creates “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. Russia has been hit hard with economic sanctions. Visa and Mastercard have cancelled their services in the country. The U.S. has banned Russian oil imports. McDonald’s has shut down its operations in Russia. Sanctions have been targeted against Russian oligarchs (read: billionaires). Anti-Russian sentiment has gone beyond the line of rationality and proportionality. Congressmembers are calling for Russian students to be kicked out of the country. Russian opera singers are being fired. Russian businesses are being boycotted. Russian community centers are being vandalized. Russian cats are being barred from whatever kind of competitions cats participate in. The blue and yellow Ukrainian flags are everywhere.
Where are the Palestinian flags? Amnesty International just recently took a long overdue stance that the Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes an apartheid regime. Gaza is a prison. Israel just passed a law that denies naturalization “to Palestinians from the occupied West Bank or Gaza married to Israeli citizens,” Reuters reports, “forcing thousands of Palestinian families to either emigrate or live apart.” Palestinians are deprived of their land, their resources, their homes, and their lives by an Israeli military that receives billions of dollars every single year from the United States and EU countries. Where is the backlash?
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel for its crimes against the Palestinian people is regarded cynically in high places as anti-Semitic. Teachers in the U.S. have lost their jobs because they refused to sign a loyalty oath to a foreign nation: Israel. Reporters have been silenced for supporting the BDS movement or for merely expressing support of Palestinians. Students and professors supporting BDS have been spied on and demonized. The Israel lobby, AIPAC, gives millions of dollars to congress to keep the arms, money, and propaganda flowing. And when congressmember Ilhan Omar called out the foreign interest lobby for unfairly influencing U.S. policy, she was labeled an anti-Semitic extremist.
Imagine if this same kind of collective hysteria had been brought to bear against America for the criminal invasion of Iraq; for the U.S. funding of death squads in Central America; for the criminal invasion of Vietnam; for the U.S.-backed genocide in Indonesia. The current level of hypocrisy regarding Russia and Ukraine is astounding and morally offensive to anyone who views human rights as a universal principle to be adhered to, not a cynical justification for invasions, occupations, and weapons sales.
Ukrainians are worthy victims. Palestinians are unworthy victims. The media plays its proper role. In 2002, Israel attacked Palestine and destroyed the old city of Nablus, the Ramallah cultural center, and the Jenin refugee camp. In his book, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New, Chomsky writes about the Israeli attack on the refugee camp where a crippled Palestinian, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road:
British reporters found “the flattened remains of a wheelchair…The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when [a friend] found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.” This apparently did not even merit report in the U.S., and if it were reported, it would be denied along with a flood of accusations of anti-Semitism that would probably lead to apology and retraction. If acknowledged, the crime would be dismissed as an inadvertent error in the course of justified retaliation…3
We don’t see the Palestinian flag held aloft by earnest liberals these days because Palestinians are unworthy. We don’t see the Afghani, Iraqi, Syrian, or Libyan flags held aloft because they are unworthy. We don’t see those flags because the U.S. empire does not want us to see those flags. The word “genocide” should never be used to describe what is happening to the Palestinians, the empire would have you believe. A disturbing and enraging documentary, Killing Gaza, free to watch online, proves otherwise.
Thankfully, there are some leaders in the West who do see through the hypocrisy and call it out accordingly. But, tellingly, the most vociferous voices are not in the U.S., they are instead found amongst the Irish, themselves the victims of centuries of imperialism:
Clare Daly, an Irish socialist and member of the European Parliament:
Imagine a U.S. lawmaker having the same courage to accurately describe Joe Biden as a despot for unilaterally stealing billions of dollars of Afghan money.
The Irish Parliament:
Continued remarks by Irish lawmaker Richard Boyd Barrett:
“You’re happy to correctly use the most strong and robust language to describe the crimes against humanity of Vladimir Putin,” he says to his colleagues, “but you will not use the same strength of language when it comes to describing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians when it is now being documented and detailed by two of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.”
Any US politician who would dare try to apply the same standards to Palestinians as to Ukrainians, or who would venture to remind people that the U.S. plays a key role in perpetuating the apartheid state of Israel and helped spark the war in Ukraine, will get called a Putin apologist and an anti-Semite. That is the level of our popular discourse.
It is the same as what happened after the 9/11 attacks. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Nationalist rhetoric replaces critical thinking and consistent principles in the face of war. All who dissent are labeled as treasonous. Only one member of congress, out of 519, voted against the authorization to use military force against Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks. That congressmember, Barbara Lee, who urged caution and restraint and had the wherewithal to understand that meeting violence with violence only begets more violence, was vilified as a treasonous communist for her vote. She has since been vindicated by the resulting criminality and quagmire of the war in Afghanistan, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Afghan deaths.
The propaganda device of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims has many exemplifications worth exploring here to better understand the current dynamic in Ukraine. As Herman and Chomsky wrote in Manufacturing Consent regarding the double standards applied by media and government officials to Turkey (a U.S. ally) and Iraq (a U.S. enemy, at one time) both killing their Kurdish populations:
“Genocide” is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes. Thus, with Saddam Hussein and Iraq having been U.S. targets in the 1990s, whereas Turkey has been an ally and client and the United States its major arms supplier as it engaged in its severe ethnic cleansing of Kurds during those years, we find former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith stating that “while Turkey represses its own Kurds, its cooperation is essential to an American-led mission to protect Iraq’s Kurds from renewed genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein.” Turkey’s treatment of its Kurds was in no way less murderous than Iraq’s treatment of Iraqi Kurds, but for Galbraith, Turkey only “represses,” while Iraq engages in “genocide.”4
Turkey, a member of NATO, has long robbed the Kurdish population of its rights, thus feeding armed extremist elements such as the leftist Kurdistan Workers’ Party. In Pirates and Emperors, Old and New, Chomsky writes:
[T]here was a sharp increase [of U.S. military aid and training for Turkey] in the mid-1980s as Turkey launched a counterinsurgency campaign targeting its miserably repressed Kurdish population. State terror operations escalated in the 1990s, becoming some of the worst crimes of that gory decade. The operations, conducted with rampant torture and unspeakable barbarism, drove millions of people from the devastated countryside while killing tens of thousands. The remaining population is confined to a virtual dungeon, deprived of even the most elementary rights. As state terror escalated, so did U.S. support for the crimes.5
It is now understood that not only did the U.S. give arms and funding to Turkey while it was murdering the Kurdish population, we also gave material support to Iraq while it was murdering its own Kurdish population with chemical weapons. In an article in Foreign Policy, the author refers to declassified CIA documents that show “that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.” The author goes on: “By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein’s military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.”
Not only do we apply a double standard to the crimes of our enemies versus our allies, but who our allies even are has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not their leaders are despots or human rights violators or war criminals; it has everything to do with whether or not they follow U.S. dictates and have something that we may want. Saudi Arabia, a monarchy, is perhaps the most despotic regime with some of the worst human rights abuses. And yet, we consider them an ally, sell them millions of dollars of military hardware, and advise and materially support their bombing of Yemeni civilians, all because they have lots of oil. Our leaders will feign offense at the Saudi Arabian crown prince butchering Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, but nothing substantive will actually be done. U.S. commitments to human rights are a joke.
Media bias in favor of the U.S. line is woefully transparent. In a recent NPR article on the U.S. and Russian proxy war in Syria and how it relates to the current war in Ukraine, the author, Jason Breslow, spends much of the article focusing on various war crimes committed by Russia in its attempt to help stop the U.S.-backed overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Breslow makes no mention of the fact that the U.S. has been conducting a dirty war in Syria against Russian and Iranian forces by funding anti-government jihadists (Al-Qaeda) to overthrow the Assad regime. Breslow particularly highlights the use of cluster bombs by Russia in Syria. He writes, “Cluster munitions are considered so indiscriminate in the harm they cause for civilians that in 2008 more than 100 nations signed a global treaty banning their use. Neither Ukraine nor Russia signed on.” Breslow fails to mention that not only did the United States also not sign that treaty, but we have also used cluster bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan and we sell cluster bombs to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Civilians are being killed years later by unexploded ordinance from these cluster bombs that were dropped by the U.S. and its allies. This, apparently, warrants no mention by NPR (National Pentagon Radio).
I see your Russian use of cluster bombs in Syria and I raise you one U.S. bombing of critical infrastructure in Syria, a dam that if ruptured could have caused tens of thousands of deaths. The U.S. was fully aware of this possibility, and yet we bombed the dam anyway.
This rank hypocrisy, laundered by the likes of NPR, is par for the course. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, recently addressed the U.N., saying: “We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.” Later, the official transcript of her remarks was edited to add the words, "if they are directed against civilians.” This Orwellian editing of the past, “he who controls the past controls the present,” serves to cover up U.S. hypocrisy, thus perpetuating the innocence with which we view ourselves and the endless evil that results from such manufactured innocence.
The U.S. has repeatedly used cluster bombs throughout its history, dropping them over Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere. Under President Barack Obama in 2009, a U.S. cluster bomb attack in Yemen killed 55 people, the majority of them women and children.
Simplified, state-supporting propaganda, disseminated by the media, fans the flames of war. It makes us feel like the unerring defenders of virtue who must stop at nothing to defend our allies from our demonic enemies. But, as the journalist Chris Hedges writes, war itself is demonic. It destroys everything that sustains life. In order for people to unquestioningly support such barbarity, they must be propagandized into it. “We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians,” Hedges writes, “Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar, artillery and tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns.”
This magical thinking - us vs. them, the good guys trying to beat the bad guys - is made all the more worrisome with this conflict now in Ukraine that involves two nuclear superpowers owning the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons which are more than enough to wipe out most living species on earth.
A Dangerous Game
Indeed, the U.S. has given billions of dollars of military aid to Ukraine just since the start of the Russian invasion, with the House having just passed a spending package with close to $14 billion set aside for Ukraine. And we are continuing to funnel lethal arms to the populace, thus ensuring a bloodbath for both sides and continued slaughter of Ukrainian civilians as they engage in an insurgency. This cynical use of human beings as pawns in geopolitical games is not new. It follows the same script that the U.S. used against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. The U.S. funneled money and arms to the Mujahedeen, thus ensuring a protracted conflict for Soviet invaders, while also leading to the rise of al-Qaeda. This similar strategy being used in Ukraine was recently made explicit by the world’s most highly qualified presidential candidate:
Clinton refers with a smirk to “unintended consequences,” meaning that arming and funding the most extreme elements of a population in order to create an insurgency in a proxy war against the Soviet Union ended up creating al-Qaeda, a group which, “as we know,” has done terrible things.
And yet, never learning a single lesson from history, the U.S. is materially supporting a Ukrainian resistance that, whatever you think about their glorious fight for sovereignty, has deep problems with neo-Nazism.
Attendant to this ongoing material support for Ukrainian resistance are increasing calls at the highest levels for escalating the war by having the U.S. enforce a no-fly zone against Russia. Lawmakers, former military commanders, and media pundits are embracing this notion of a no-fly zone with seemingly no indication they understand what that means or that they simply just do not care.
Enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine would require U.S. forces to both shoot down Russian aircraft and destroy any ground-based antiaircraft installations so that U.S. aircraft themselves would be less vulnerable to attack. What that means is the two largest nuclear superpowers with the longest history of confrontation (the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, the arms race, the space race, I could go on, etc.) engaging in a shooting war. The possibilities for irrevocable disaster should be all to obvious. But these people calling for such an extreme escalation do not seem to be using their rational faculties, if they even possess such a thing.
Here is an interview with Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar conducted by The Grayzone reporter Max Blumenthal:
Stunningly, she admits that she does not know what a no-fly zone would entail, but when Blumenthal explains that it would require the downing of Russian planes she says that “freedom is not free.” Presumably, freedom requires nuclear holocaust.
In an interview with NPR, Former NATO commander and retired U.S. Air Force general Philip Breedlove defended the use of what he called a “humanitarian” no-fly zone. “How is a humanitarian no-fly zone different than a traditional no-fly zone,” he was asked by NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer. “Maybe the humanitarian no-fly zone would only be over the western part of Ukraine,” he explains, “such that we could get relief trains in and wounded and dying out to try to bring medical care to them.” Why Putin would accept such an arrangement at face value and not suspect that this western no-fly zone would be used to funnel lethal arms, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, into Ukraine is not discussed.
Then comes this exchange which could have been lifted directly from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove:
PFEIFFER: Would you still support the idea of a no-fly zone over Ukraine if you knew it would provoke Russia to use nuclear weapons?
BREEDLOVE: No. Nobody wants a nuclear war.
PFEIFFER: So then it's a gamble to put a no-fly zone into effect.
BREEDLOVE: Yeah, that's your word. That's not the word I would use.
PFEIFFER: What word would you use?
BREEDLOVE: It's a calculated military decision.
Listening to this dangerous Orwellian nonsense over the radio while driving had me yelling at my steering wheel and made me afraid for the other drivers around me.
These increasing calls for a no-fly zone, claiming that it is a necessary act to stop Russian forces from continuing to kill innocent Ukrainian civilians and that Putin would not be so rash as to start a nuclear war in response to such an escalation, flies in the face of the dominant mainstream view that Putin is an irrational actor, an authoritarian madman who will stop at nothing to restore the glory of the former Soviet Union and Mother Russia. If he really is that crazy, as everyone in the Western media says he is, then a no-fly zone should be regarded as an insane proposition that does nothing but bring us closer to nuclear annihilation. Putin has already put Russian nuclear armaments on high alert since the U.S. and NATO have continued arming Ukraine.
For those who don’t know or who need a refresher, nuclear war means the end of humanity. It is that simple. Don’t just take it from me. The Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who formerly worked at the RAND corporation where throughout the 1950s and 60s he assessed the nuclear capabilities and response systems of the U.S. military, photocopied immense amounts of classified materials that detailed nuclear war planning. He writes extensively about this in his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. “The fact is that from the fall of 1969 to leaving the RAND corporation in August 1970,” Ellsberg writes, “I copied everything in the Top Secret safe in my office - of which the seven thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers were only a fraction - and a good deal more from my several safes for files classified Secret or Confidential, perhaps fifteen thousand pages in all.”
Most of those documents, hidden for years at Ellsberg’s brother’s home and then later temporarily inside a bag at a landfill after the FBI raided his brother’s place, were lost when a severe storm ripped through the landfill. Continuous scouring by Ellsberg and his family yielded no results. Ellsberg reconstructed much of the salient points through recently declassified documents and his own memory. In regards to the unimaginable destruction of nuclear war, Ellsberg writes:
The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred holocausts. I remember what I thought when I first held the single sheet with the graph [of projected casualties] on it. I thought, This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to.
He goes on:
In 1961 I had learned as an insider that our secret nuclear decision-making, policy, plans, and practices for general nuclear war endangered, by the [Joint Chiefs of Staff] estimate, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps a third of the earth’s population. What none of us knew at that time - not the Joint Chiefs, not the president or his science advisors, not anyone else for the next two decades, until 1983 - were the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then or later would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most other large species)…
smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight, lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age, and killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two…
even a fraction of the existing smaller arsenals would be more than enough to cause nuclear winter today…First-strike nuclear attacks by either side very much smaller than were planned in the sixties and seventies - and which are still prepared for instant execution in both Russia and America - would still kill by loss of sunlight and resulting starvation nearly all the humans on earth, now over seven billion.
Thankfully, the Biden administration has thus far resisted calls to institute a no-fly zone and it has ruled out putting ground troops in Ukraine. The administration has also put a stop to Poland sending fighter jets to Ukraine.
But now, some prominent figures are calling for a Russian coup, with some banking on the destabilizing sanctions to push Russian civilians into toppling their own government.
Avoiding World War III does not mean instigating a coup that would put the world’s largest or second largest nuclear arsenal into uncertain hands. Avoiding escalation through diplomacy and seeking détente is far more sensible than engaging in a direct hot war or dirty proxy war amongst two nuclear powers. The arms funneling needs to stop. The calls for increasing military confrontations are very dangerous.
The supposed realities described by Ellsberg must be heeded and kept in mind as the drums for war continue to get louder.
What Got Us Here
The war in Ukraine must be deescalated. It is true that Putin bears the bulk of the blame for the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent deaths. But this did not come out of nowhere. While it is obvious that the preponderance of the current violence is being waged by Russian forces against outmatched Ukrainians, it is necessary to understand why this conflict happened in the first place and what role the U.S. has played in stirring the conflict. Without that understanding, these wars of conquest will continue apace and the respective populaces will dutifully fall in line behind imperial ideology.
The history that brought us to this point is far reaching and complicated. This convolution is all the more reason why simplistic narratives of “good guys” versus “bad guys” must be resisted. Such narratives are not only unhelpful in determining the reality of the situation, they also serve to demonize anyone who does not adhere to their strictures.
I won’t explicate every single detail of what led to the conflict here. I can recommend several recent articles that go to great lengths examining the roles that NATO and the U.S. have played in exacerbating the understandable fears of the Kremlin. But to understand legitimate concerns of Putin and Russia is not to condone the war that has followed. That should go without saying, but sadly so much of our discourse is degraded, simplistic, and predictable.
Here are a few key points.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a group of allied states that share military infrastructure and which have pledged to defend one another from attack. That’s the nicest definition I can muster. A more realistic formulation is that NATO was originally formed to combat the Soviet Union, and since the fall of the USSR it has been used as a mighty, violent arm to enforce U.S. hegemony, foreign policy interests, and adventurism.
Given this history, Russia views NATO primarily as a hostile military alliance. It did not, and does not, have to be this way. After the dissolution of the USSR, many in the West, and Russia itself, advocated for either Russia joining NATO, or for the dissolution of NATO altogether. But the Clinton administration, breaking promises that had been made to Russia in 1990 during the negotiations over reunifying Germany that NATO would not expand eastward, chose instead to bring in Warsaw Pact nations into NATO while keeping Russia out of the alliance.
The justifications for this aggressive posture against Russia are threadbare, but it sure is helpful to the empire and its private interests for there to be a perpetual enemy to point to.
In 2008, George W. Bush declared that Ukraine would eventually join NATO. This ruffled the feathers of Russia and went against the explicit statements made by Putin that Russia would never allow a hostile military alliance to exist on its direct border.
Those who claim that emphasizing NATO expansion as a legitimate Russian grievance is a “Putin talking point” should pay heed to the wealth of voices who have been warning against NATO expansion for decades; from such wide-ranging figures as imperialist war criminals like Henry Kissinger, right-wing realists such as John Mearsheimer, establishment intelligence officials such as Biden’s own CIA director, and left-wing anarchist Noam Chomsky, they have all been vociferous in their warnings that NATO expansion is a threat to peace in the region. It is difficult to find areas of agreement from people with such wildly differing politics, but Ukraine is one such area. But now that war has started, such widespread ideas are considered treasonous.
Shifting to the internal politics of Ukraine, the U.S. claims of defending democracy in Ukraine are especially dubious given the fact that we have meddled with Ukrainian politics for decades through the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization that Washington Post reporter David Ignatius described as “doing in public what the CIA used to do in private.” Since the fall of the Soviet Union, billions of dollars have been funneled to Ukrainian politicians and business interests that are amenable to U.S. dictates.
In 2014, a U.S.-backed coup - or what some would characterize as a revolution - ousted Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych which led to civil war in the east of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine’s army. This civil war has killed approximately 14,000 people. It is understandable that Russia sees this conflict on its border as being instigated and fueled by Western powers.
In a leaked call, it was revealed that Victoria Nuland, a senior State Department official, prior to the coup discussed with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who should be in power in Ukraine. Her choice, “Yats,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was anointed by U.S. officials as the future Prime Minister of Ukraine.
After a sniper attack in Ukraine killed dozens of people, which was later revealed to be the doing of far-right Maidan revolutionaries, opposition to President Viktor Yanukovych grew and he was eventually ousted. Aaron Maté notes that:
A new government was quickly formed, despite lacking the sufficient parliamentary majority. This violation of Ukrainian law was of little consequence: with the Nuland-anointed Yatsenyuk named Ukraine's new Prime Minister, the United States got their "guy."
The 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine followed attempts by the International Monetary Fund [IMF] to transform the Ukrainian economy to be more friendly to multinational corporations. As history has shown, any attempt by a nation to rebuff Western interests exploiting that nation’s workers is met with harsh consequences. An article from the Black Agenda Report explains what happened in Ukraine prior to the coup:
In Ukraine, the IMF had long planned to implement a series of economic reforms to make the country more attractive to investors. These included cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), “reform[ing] and reduc[ing]” health and education sectors (which made up the bulk of employment in Ukraine), and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. Coup plotters like US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland repeatedly stressed the need for the Ukrainian government to enact the “necessary” reforms.
In 2013, after early steps to integrate with the West, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych turned against these changes and ended trade integration talks with the European Union. Months before his overthrow, he restarted economic negotiations with Russia, in a major snub to the Western economic sphere. By then, the nationalist protests were heating up that would go on to topple his government.
When the U.S. says it is defending freedom and democracy, it means that it is defending the right of Western corporations to do business inside a country as they see fit without any pesky interference from the local populace.
Additionally, the borders of Ukraine encompass populations in the west who are ethnically and culturally Ukrainian, and those in the east who identify much more strongly with Russia along those same lines. This helps to explain the continuation of the civil war and why Putin would make claims that he is defending the sovereignty of those in the eastern regions. The U.S. has been steadily funding and training Ukrainian militias and the military against the separatists since the 2014 coup.
And even though the U.S. could see the escalation that was happening prior to the Russian invasion, they made no meaningful attempts at diplomacy. As an article in Canadian Dimension puts it:
Even when the US began to warn that Russia was concentrating troops around Ukraine and preparing for a military invasion, Washington failed to build direct dialogue with Putin and was banking on sanctions, loud warnings, and the further militarization of Kyiv as necessary deterrents against potential Russian aggression. What today looks like a correct prediction by US intelligence services was likely a lucky guess and a self-fulfilled prophecy. Putin was concentrating troops as a bargaining tool and was expecting an offer from the West he could consider. That offer never came. Thus, Putin’s initial idea of a controlled escalation failed. [emphasis mine]
In short, for the official U.S. line on Ukraine to have any merit, we must completely disregard the facts that NATO has been expanding beyond what was promised to Russia, that since the 2014 coup Ukraine has been expressing interest in joining NATO, that there are Western economic imperatives for opening foreign markets in Ukraine, that the U.S. supported the 2014 coup and had a direct hand in picking the new government, and that the U.S. has been training the Ukrainian military and far-right paramilitary forces against separatist forces.
The War on Dissent
Seeing the violent immiseration of the Ukrainian people is an enraging site. If you are a decent human being, the realities of war should make you emotional. But the passions incited by war must not erase rationality or blind us to facts. The current state of affairs, characterized by jingoistic rage, blind adherence to state policy, and deeply worrying censorship and blacklisting, suggests that Americans have learned nothing from the War on Terror.
The attacks on 9/11 were a world-changing traumatic event. Americans cast themselves as moral crusaders defending our freedoms from wicked terrorists and murderous despots. But it was precisely this emotional, short-sighted bloodlust that paved the way for the 20 years of horror and stupidity ahead. To correctly describe al-Qaeda as perpetrators of atrocities did not prevent Americans from committing even greater atrocities. In fact, taking such a moral stance against terrorism made one more ready to support and participate in human rights abuses. As the journalist Glenn Greenwald writes:
correctly apprehending key moral dimensions to the conflict provided no immunity against being propagandized and misled. If anything, the contrary was true: it was precisely that moral zeal that enabled so many people to get so carried away, to be so vulnerable to having their (often-valid) emotions of rage and moral revulsion misdirected into believing falsehoods and cheering for moral atrocities in the name of vengeance or righteous justice. That moral righteousness crowded out the capacity to reason and think critically and unified huge numbers of Americans into herd behavior and group-think that led them to many conclusions which, two decades later, they recognize as wrong.
This bloodlust makes people all the more vulnerable to the propaganda device of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. It gets people cheerleading for war without even understanding the consequences of their actions. Any attempt to explain that the U.S. violated promises made to Moscow that NATO would not expand one inch beyond unified Germany is labeled as Russian talking points.
Any mention that the U.S. was involved in the 2014 coup of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych which led to Russian-backed separatists in the eastern regions of Ukraine engaging in fighting with the U.S.-backed government that has killed 14,000 people will be labeled not as fact but as Russian disinformation. To try to provide clarity to the U.S. role in this conflict is, as the journalist Chris Hedges writes:
to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims, and by extension ourselves. We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred, a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts, used to fuel the conflict.
And so it is that the United States and its allies have predictably gripped ever tightly to their narratives by shutting out any dissenting voices.
RT America - a Russian funded English-speaking media outlet that aired shows hosted by and featuring guest appearances from anti-establishment figures who are not allowed to appear on mainstream corporate media outlets such as CNN, Fox, and MSNBC - was recently shuttered after it had been taken off the air by cable companies and after the EU had banned broadcasts of its parent company Russia Today as well as Radio Sputnik.
Australian cable companies have also banned RT and the Australian government says it is working with tech companies to suppress Russian-sponsored media. (No mention of any attempts to suppress British-sponsored media such as the BBC or U.S.-sponsored media such as Voice of America).
The EU is currently trying to get Google to censor and suppress search results for RT and Radio Sputnik on the web and on social media. Radio Sputnik broadcasts the show By Any Means Necessary, hosted by Sean Blackmon and Jaquie Luqman, which examines worker-led movements through a black liberation lens and is highly critical of corporate media. This is the kind of media that is censored when you de-platform and sanction entire outlets.
RT America featured a variety of shows, from Chris Hedges’ On Contact where he mostly interviewed authors of books, to comedian Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight, to more typical news segments and analysis.
As you can see from the player above, all of Chris Hedges’ shows are now unavailable on Youtube. On Contact, going back years, which was a glorified book review show, has been completely memory holed. We do not live in a free society.
The great crime of RT America, as Chris Hedges points out, was made explicit by the 2017 Director of National Intelligence report. The report, which was used to justify the labeling of RT America as a foreign agent, shows that U.S. officials are deathly afraid of such things as:
“The channel portrayed the US electoral process as undemocratic and featured calls by US protesters for the public to rise up and ‘take this government back.’”
“In an effort to highlight the alleged ‘lack of democracy’ in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’”
“RT aired a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement… RT framed the movement as a fight against ‘the ruling class’ and described the current US political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations.”
“RT's reports often characterize the United States as a ‘surveillance state’ and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use”
“RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt.”
“RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health.”
“RT is a leading media voice opposing Western intervention in the Syrian conflict and blaming the West for waging ‘information wars’ against the Syrian Government”
Those are the kind of ideas that U.S. national security agencies consider to be verboten in American society, things such as “third-party candidates.” We can’t be giving good Americans any bad ideas like Republicans and Democrats both suck really hard and are leading us all to extinction.
Alternative media outlets, exemplified by courageous organizations such as Wikileaks, or by Ramparts Magazine during the Vietnam War, do what corporate media outlets refuse to do. They shame the mainstream press. And instead of the corporate media behaving rationally and stepping up their game, they instead choose to vilify and talk down to dissenting voices. This expresses itself most troublingly when the mainstream outlets refuse to say a mumbling word about the U.S. prosecution of journalist Julian Assange for the crime of exposing U.S. war crimes.
Lee Camp has since seen his shows and podcasts scrubbed from Youtube and Spotify:
Youtube, which is owned by Google, just announced that it will be instituting worldwide censorship of anything they deem to be Russian propaganda.
Google’s announcement reads:
[W]e are also now blocking access to YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media globally, expanding from across Europe. This change is effective immediately, and we expect our systems to take time to ramp up. Since our last update, our teams have now removed more than 1,000 channels and over 15,000 videos for violating not only our hate speech policy, but also our policies around misinformation, graphic content and more…In addition, we recently paused all YouTube ads in Russia. We’ve now extended this to all of the ways to monetize on our platform in Russia.
Google is bestowing upon itself the ultimate authority to determine what information is worthy of being memory holed. Supposedly, they will be 100 percent objective in their assessments. And more than that, they are blocking all monetization on their platform in Russia. Meaning, every single human being residing in Russia is now barred from making a living on Youtube. Nobody is innocent, all are guilty for the crime of of their nationality.
The CEO of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that brands itself as a more ethical alternative to Google, recently announced that they will be suppressing “Russian disinformation.”
Again, who is in charge of determining what is considered “Russian disinformation” and by what criteria those determinations are made is unclear. Presumably it will be done by a completely 100 percent objective entity that does not in any way whatsoever merely reflect Western neoliberal values and bias such as “third-parties are bad.”
To make it even more clear, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are choosing not to ban certain speech, such as those calling for violence against Russians.
Reuters is reporting that Facebook and Instagram are now allowing calls for the death of Russians and Russian leaders in exemption from the platforms' hate speech terms of service. The article reads:
Meta Platforms will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, in a temporary change to its hate speech policy.
Facebook is also allowing users to praise the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion because of the Russian invasion.
Ben Norton, of Multipolarista, has also reported that Twitter has altered its rules against incitement and death threats in the case of Russian leaders and military personnel.
But of course, these tech companies have no bias whatsoever. It is absolutely not a bad idea to give them unfettered control over online speech. They ought to choose where the violence is directed, that is only logical.
If the U.S. narrative about the war in Ukraine was unerringly true, then what purpose is there to silencing outside media voices? Shouldn’t differing perspectives be held up as something to be effectively argued against, thereby showcasing your position’s credibility? Isn’t it much more authoritarian and suspicious to silence dissenting voices than it is to allow them to sink or swim based on their own merits? It looks all the more authoritarian and troubling when the dissenting voices being suppressed are claiming that the U.S. is acting out its imperial interests in Ukraine.
This war on dissenting thought has deeply troubling consequences. These forces shape public opinion. The media always plays a key role in war. Glenn Greenwald lays out the worrying trends we are seeing right now:
Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon's messaging. And U.S. public opinion has consequently undergone a radical and rapid change; while recent polling had shown large majorities of Americans opposed to any major U.S. role in Ukraine, a new Gallup poll released on Friday found that “52% of Americans see the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a critical threat to U.S. vital interests” with almost no partisan division (56% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats), while “85% of Americans now view [Russia] unfavorably while 15% have a positive opinion of it.”
War really does bring all of us together. Forget all of these divisive culture war issues. Nothing is really all that bad once we realize that we can all sit down at the dinner table and say “Fuck you!” to our inhuman enemies.
This is not new. It is history repeating itself. Greenwald goes on:
Polls at the start of the Iraq War showed large majorities in favor of and believing outright falsehoods (such as that Saddam helped personally plan the 9/11 attack), while polls years later revealed a “huge majority” which now views the invasion as a mistake. Similarly, it is now commonplace to hear once-unquestioned policies — from mass NSA spying, to lawless detention, to empowering the CIA to torture, to placing blind faith in claims from intelligence agencies — be declared major mistakes by those who most vocally cheerlead those positions in the early years of the War on Terror.
This is what the media does. It gets excited over war, drumming up support, cheerleading the military industrial complex, and then the populace finds itself in a feeding frenzy. No act of criminality is too far when it comes to righteously punishing our enemies.
The kind of censorship madness we are seeing now is not unique to the war in Ukraine. It’s not even the first time that journalist Chris Hedges has lost a job over disagreements about whether or not war is a bad thing. In 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement speech at Rockford College that was an impassioned plea against the Iraq War. The speech was cut short by hecklers booing him off the stage and singing God Bless America.
“At a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric,” Hedges said, “war is a fine diversion.” And it remains so today.
Hedges, who was the Middle-East Bureau Chief for The New York Times at the time he gave the speech, was given a formal reprimand by the paper for speaking out against the war. Colleagues of his who spoke publicly in favor of the war received no such reprimand. The paper told him to refrain from making any further statements against the war in order to protect the paper’s image. Hedges refused, and instead resigned from the Times.
Even a supposed “left-wing” outlet such as MSNBC, which is really just a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, fired Phil Donahue and cancelled his show in 2003 because he allowed anti-war voices to spout their dangerous ideas on air.
The current script that has people, many of them in the liberal class, levying accusations of treason and spycraft against anyone questioning the official U.S. position on Ukraine was also used by some of the most retrograde neocons during the War on Terror. David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush who penned the “Axis of Evil Speech,” wrote an article in 2003 calling anti-war conservatives “unpatriotic.” Whether you are liberal or conservative in the United States, it does not matter, we all must stand in lockstep beside the endless war machine.
This is the tired and predictable script. Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists. Either you stand with Ukraine, or you are in Putin’s pocket. No nuance is permitted. No lessons from history are allowed. The United States is a benevolent country that never lies its people into wars and we are certainly not responsible for millions of deaths around the globe just in the past 30 years.
Just as saying that NATO expansion has helped to fuel the conflict in Ukraine is met with derision and accusations of disloyalty (University of Chicago students drafted a letter calling for professor John Mearsheimer to change his views on this issue), it was also considered beyond the pale for anyone to try to understand why al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden attacked the U.S. on 9/11.
Any attempts to explain the motives of the attack through decades of U.S. intervention, warfare, political meddling, and murderous sanctions in the region were met with scorn and revulsion in the West. Sanctions against Iraq, which overwhelmingly affected women and children and which the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (our first woman Secretary of State, yaas queen!) said were “worth the price,” were specifically cited by bin Laden as one of his primary grievances with the West.
The viewpoints of the enemy are not to be discussed or shared except as a means by which to further vilify them. The enemy is not human. The enemy is always a monster. It is only our motives that matter. Everything else is “whataboutism.” In regards to the criticism that bringing up American crimes at a time like this is just whataboutism, I refer you to this easy to understand formulation by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs:
[T]he point is not to deflect attention away from Putin’s crimes. It is to make sure that we have the moral standing to condemn those crimes, by holding our country to the same set of standards we wish to hold others to, and ensuring that our moral principles are not just hollow cover for the pursuit of our self-interest—in other words, international law for thee but not for me. If the U.S. commits a crime with impunity, it makes it harder to condemn other countries committing the same crime. Calling this “whataboutism” is just evading the question of why there is one moral standard for the U.S. and another standard for others.
If we can’t come correct in situations like this, then any scolding we do is mere hypocritical preening and worthy of derision. If we can’t submit our own war criminals to international justice, how can we expect to reasonably hold others to account? The United States’ refusal to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and its refusal to prosecute domestic war criminals, as the U.S. is obligated to do under its agreements with the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture, and the legal precedents set forth under the Nuremberg Trials, are just some of the many examples of how the U.S. flaunts the rule of law, scoffs at international treaties, and protects its powerful elite citizens from legal accountability. And yet the U.S. hypocritically insists on strict adherence to the rule of law for its own powerless and impoverished citizens and for its official foreign enemies. The U.S. makes a mockery of the rule of law. Its blatant hypocrisy is a mortal danger for democracy and for civil liberties. When the powerful aren’t expected to follow the law or be punished for their transgressions, let alone for their lack of basic morality, why should the rest of us have to fall in line?
An adherence to universal, consistent principles is not what some would call “moral equivalency.” To again borrow Chomsky’s analysis, there is no moral equivalence between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The latter was far worse by every measure. While Putin’s justifications for war are indefensible, though understandable, they do not come anywhere close to the levels of mendacity that the Bush administration exemplified when it lied about WMDs, or when it suggested that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, or when it intimated that the anthrax used in the mail attacks of 2001 came from Iraq when it was actually a strain that was developed and came from U.S. bio labs. Russia has not instituted an extralegal, worldwide regime of kidnapping and torture of innocent civilians in the name of combating terror.
We have not learned the lesson that when the media plays the role of cheerleader for the state, our discourse is blighted, and people die as a result.
It is incredibly easy, cheap, and effective to smear your opponents by claiming their earnest views actually come from a dastardly relationship with an outside enemy and by subscribing to them ulterior motives. Such tactics exemplify McCarthyism, you know, that thing, also referred to as the Red Scare, that destroyed people’s lives, divided friends and families, and deradicalized the most effective labor movements the United States has ever seen.
Sadly, it seems that people need to be reminded of the evils of McCarthyism and the degree to which lawmakers and the security apparatus were full partners in its implementation. It behooves no one on the left or in the artistic community to engage in those same kind of tactics.
McCarthyism was one of the darkest moments for civil liberties in this country. People were vilified, hauled before congress, blacklisted, and criminalized if there was even a whiff that they were sympathetic to leftist politics, let alone an actual member of the Communist Party. The communist boogeyman continued throughout the 20th century, particularly in the 1960s when it was convenient for undermining antiwar and civil rights protesters. The CIA and FBI aggressively disseminated disinformation and infiltrated and subverted anti-establishment organizations. Effective Marxist radicals were assassinated by the FBI. Corporate media outlets were and remain subservient to those security state agencies.
Unfortunately, the United States is full of amnesiacs, and thus history repeats itself.
Perhaps it is also worth noting that Russia is not currently a communist state. It has devolved into a crony-ist, capitalist, kleptocracy run by oligarchs and an authoritarian head of state, which, by the way, is not far from what the United States is.
Where We Are Headed
Crimes must be decried on principle, not based on who has power. If that is the way power is used, to rule the world by right and to terrorize those who interfere with the global order of things, then that power itself is criminal and illegitimate and ought to be overthrown. If our belief in human rights and the inherent value of human beings has any meaning whatsoever, we must be subject to the same consequences for criminality as other nations are. If we are not subject to an equal metric, then any nation that violates human rights, freedom of the press, or national sovereignty can logically point to the U.S. and say, they get away with it all the time, so can we.
This same dynamic is responsible for the decaying societies we see in Western culture. We live in a culture of rule-lessness. Wall Street and oligarchs are rewarded for their fraud, venality, and exploitation of workers, while ordinary working people see their quality of life get worse and are locked in cages for decades over minor offenses that have been deliberately crafted by lawmakers and enforced by courts and police departments to ensure a cowed, compliant, surveilled, and fearful population. This can only go on for so long.
By what legitimate authority can you tell a person in the street who has given up all hope completely or who is organizing for the overthrow of the corporate state of the U.S. government that they are wrong for doing so when all of the evidence around them leads them to the conclusion that the social contract has been broken, the rules only apply to them but not to the people in power, they have no meaningful say in the affairs of their state, every branch of their government is corrupted by moneyed interests, and that the only options left to them are revolution, nihilistic violence, or compliance, itself a form of death? What clean, unbroken principle can you point to which could convince that person that what they are seeing with their own eyes and hearing with their own ears is not actually happening?
You cannot understand these endless, seemingly irrational military incursions - conflicts that are illegal under international law, destabilizing of entire regions of the globe, unpopular in the long term, and, in Ukraine’s case, present the possibility of world-ending nuclear war - without understanding that they benefit, not nations or even individual corporations, they benefit individuals in power.
This is articulated well by journalist Andrew Cockburn in his book The Spoils of War, where he writes:
This entire process, whereby [military] spending growth slows and is then seemingly automatically regenerated, raises an intriguing possibility: that our military-industrial complex has become, in [ex-Pentagon official Franklin] Spinney’s words, a “living organic system” with a built-in self-defense reflex that reacts forcefully whenever a threat to its food supply - our money - hits a particular trigger point. The implications are profound, suggesting that the [military-industrial complex] is embedded in our society to such a degree that it cannot be dislodged, and also that it could be said to be concerned, exclusively, with self-preservation and expansion, like a giant, malignant virus. This, of course, is contrary to the notion that our armed forces exist to protect us against foreign enemies and impose our will around the globe - and that corruption, mismanagement and costly foreign wars are anomalies that can be corrected with suitable reforms and changes in policy.6
By any measure of social responsibility, these wars are insane, madness, the supreme act of criminality. But social responsibility does not factor into the calculus of those who have the power to start these wars and who profit from them.
There is a deep and longstanding distrust that people in power have for democracy and the power of the common people. In this system, we are treated as either obstacles to or objects of profit, not as human beings.
When the people in power make and break the rules on a whim, they do so at their own peril. They will one day find themselves menaced by a power that they themselves brought into existence and nurtured from the very moment they took that first step away from the rule of law and toward a rule of lawlessness. They have no one to blame but themselves for the coming catastrophe.
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Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002), xix-xx.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Preface to Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002), lxiii.
Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015), 13.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002), xx.
Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015), 8-9.
Andrew Cockburn, “The Military-Industrial Virus,” in The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2021), 48-49.