Tag Archives: Vietnam

Political Rants

The titanic struggle: A-holes vs. effers

Another week of wall-to-wall reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That characterization of the operation is tantamount to a federal offense now in Russia. Whereas there they use force to make people think a certain way, over here we use the Edward Bernays method. That’s why polling shows a majority of Americans wanting the President to be “tougher” in his approach to the Ukraine crisis.

Majority support for policies that could easily result in total nuclear annihilation doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Reporting on the atrocities Russia is committing in Ukraine flows in a constant stream from the corporate media. To be clear, it is 100% something that should be reported on heavily. But this is more than coverage. It is an influence campaign, and it may just get us all killed.

A game of absolutes

One of the sure signs that the networks are propagandizing us is the characterization of this war as part of a broader struggle between freedom and tyranny. Even Chris Hayes went on a tear about his last week, bizarrely extending this metaphor to the Cold War era. This claim doesn’t stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Did we fight our near-genocidal war in Vietnam for “freedom”? I think not. Read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves. This is not good vs. evil, for we are not good.

Now, I expect this kind of thing out of the likes of Joe Scarborough, who is constantly laboring at the Reagan myth, desperately trying to keep it alive for another generation. Even on his show you will hear from people counseling caution, like Richard Haas. Those are the exceptions, though. It’s mostly a chorus of voices bearing witness to the suffering of Ukrainians in minute detail, showing frustration out of a lack of action on the part of the administration. The absolutism of good vs. evil is an essential component in their argument.

More like 1914 … or 2003

Frequent MSNBC guest Michael McFaul is back on the network, having suffered no real penalty for his endorsement of a comparison between Putin with Hitler, in which Hitler came out ahead. He was on Twitter telling people to stop talking about World War III, which was odd because he seems so wrapped up in World War II. McFaul is a fan of brinkmanship with respect to Ukraine – he thinks we can get a lot closer to open conflict without risk of nuclear war.

This is what happens when people take their own analogies too seriously. This is not World War II. We have nuclear weapons – thousands of them. We cannot do the kinds of things we did before those weapons existed. It’s simply not an option. There are many reasons why this period is nothing like 1939, but the nuclear question is probably the most salient difference. In all honesty, if you’re going to compare this with a world war, the closer analogy is 1914, when an accidental war prompted Europeans to slaughter each other by the millions for no good reason.

Don’t burn bridges

I’ve said it before. There’s only one way out of this horrendous conflict, and that’s through some kind of negotiated settlement. Cranking up the rhetoric makes this less likely, not more. For the Ukrainians’ sake, it’s better to make the deal now than later when their country is in even more of a shambles and many thousands more have lost their lives.

Ultimately Russia and Ukraine are going to have to reconcile themselves to being neighbors. That’s never going to change – it’s just geography. They need to find a path out of this mess, and we need to do everything in our power to help them get there.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

With friends like us, who needs enemies?

Anyone who thinks what we’re doing to Afghanistan is uniquely cruel has not been paying attention over the last few decades. We did something very similar to Vietnam after that endless war ended. We sanctioned the government, denied them aid, blocked others from trading with them, and so on. That lasted decades, and I have no doubt that, given the prevailing political mood, the Afghan strangulation might last years, at least.

What the hell is the point of this policy? We bled rural Afghanistan for twenty years. Every family lost someone to our bombing runs, drone strikes, or night raids. Sniveling hacks like Lindsey Graham seem satisfied that all this killing has accomplished something, but he’s wrong, as usual, unless the point was to make some people a lot of money. As we sit around grousing incoherently about retail terrorism, a million people are on the brink of starvation, and we won’t even let them have their own damn money.

Keeping the creep-asses happy

I don’t imagine that our leaders actually care that much about people in other countries. They often pretend to care one way or the other to please some domestic constituency. For instance, it’s hard to find a politician willing to say something good about Cuba, or Venezuela, or some other official enemy. It’s not because they’re official enemies – on the contrary, they’re official enemies because our politicians don’t want to say anything good about them.

If I were to assume the best about Biden, I would guess that he won’t agree to free up Afghan reserves held in this country because he doesn’t want to be criticized for appearing to support the Taliban. I’m sure he can hear the attack ads in the back of his mind – Biden gave money to the Taliban! He supports terrorists! Not unlikely, though the right wing is going to say that anyway, regardless of what he does. So maybe a million kids need to die so that he can avoid some amount of criticism. That’s the best case.

For reasons of state

What’s the worst case? That they’re cravenly putting people’s lives at risk for some perceived gain. It’s kind of the same thing, except maybe more actively evil. Our leaders are well-practiced at standing by and folding their arms while thousands die. Look at the global COVID pandemic – we could have taken steps to tamp down the virus all around the world, thereby saving maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. But we didn’t because, well, we value free markets and private property over all other things. Even people.

The Lindsey Grahams of the world affect to be afraid that, if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll find some way to kill us over here. From what I’ve heard of the rural experience in Afghanistan over the last twenty years, I would guess that we are now in more danger from angry Afghans than we ever would have been had we decided not to invade. So, either the Senator is an imbecile or maybe he just doesn’t care that we’re making people bitter enough that they’ll want to get back at us one day. (My guess is that, by then, Graham will be long gone.)

Self-licking ice cream bomb

There is, of course, a financial incentive. The Pentagon budget is a tremendous bonanza for defense contractors. Untold fortunes have been made off of these massive, multi trillion-dollar budgets. Because institutions have a tendency to perpetuate themselves, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our global war on terror is likely to keep rolling and rolling, regardless of success or failure.

The machine is doing exactly what it’s built to do. No, it’s not keeping us safe – that’s not what it’s built for. It is making people rich, though, and so by that standard, our foreign policy is a screaming success.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

It ain’t deja vu until it’s over again.

Quite a week in the history of American empire. I listened to the commentary unfold this week as the 40-year war in Afghanistan drew to a close and I was reminded of, well, 40 years ago. Around that time I read a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky unwrapping the reams of commentary that followed the end of another seemingly endless American war, the one in Vietnam. A lot of what he was writing about is just as true today as it was in the mid to late 1970s.

The collection was called Towards a New Cold War and I should probably re-read it. I suspect it would prove a useful guide to the dreck I am hearing on a daily basis from the mainstream media – specifically, in my case, from the panel on Morning Joe. That show is as close to the center of the imperial enterprise as any media property. They should rename it “The Blob Speaks” or something along those lines.

Bungling efforts to do good

One of the narratives that emerged from the disaster that was the Vietnam War was the myth of good intentions. It went something like this: we entered the conflict intending to save the Vietnamese, then things went wrong. Articulate opinion was making this case back in the mid to late seventies, and we are hearing their modern counterparts doing the same today with regard to Afghanistan.

I have seen minor variations on this theme. The most popular one, as far as I can tell, is the argument that we shouldn’t have tried to remake Afghanistan in our own image. In other words, the Afghans are too corrupt, ignorant, backward, etc., to appreciate our way of life, our mode of governance, etc. Our efforts to impose our innate goodness on them amounted to hubris, albeit a very benign variety of that vice. Ungrateful wretches!

Assessing the costs

Another subject of post-Vietnam reflection was the notion that the destruction was mutual. President Carter even framed Vietnam in those terms. As someone who lived through the war years, I must admit that I don’t recall the non-existent Vietnamese air force dropping napalm on my neighborhood or flattening my town with high explosives. Maybe I slept through it.

While I don’t want to minimize the suffering of our Afghanistan War vets – far from it – there’s no question but that Afghans bore the overwhelming brunt of the suffering through this conflict. They died in the hundreds of thousands, their country torn to pieces. We lost a lot of people, spent a lot of money, but have not felt the impacts of this war as much as Afghan families.

We care, damn it!

Then, of course, there’s the virtue signalling. Once the United States was out of Vietnam, we became obsessed with the fate of the people of Indochina. As people fled the destroyed remains of Vietnamese society, our opinion-makers used that as a cudgel against the newly unified government of Vietnam.

While the Morning Joe couch and other commentators now express concern for Afghan refugees, they said very little about Afghans over the past twenty years. The fact is, millions of Afghans have been displaced by this war, both internally and in neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan and Iran, since 2001. Want to help Afghan refugees? Look there first. And while you’re at it, consider helping refugees from our other wars in Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, for instance.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Suffice to say that I am glad we are ending this useless war. No more posts like the ten-year anniversary piece I did a decade ago, right? Let’s hope not.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.