Op-Ed

I’m going to praise the heck out of yet another terrific book I’ve just read while yet again exclaiming (into a deep empty echoing canyon?) my bewilderment and outrage at the glaring omission it makes — the same one as all the other books.

George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis is part familiar; part original, creative, and inspiring; and pretty much all right-on and necessary. Its first chapter should be required reading everywhere — with the hope that whoever needs or wants the details will finish the book.

What’s a black female police officer to do when her fellow white male police officer talks about blowing up Black Lives Matter protestors? Any words of caution may be interpreted as anti-police rhetoric. This is the case of Police Lieutenant Melissa McFadden.

Racial discrimination

Police Lieutenant Melissa McFadden filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Columbus June 4. McFadden charges, among other things, that she was “retaliated and discriminated against” for “assisting a fellow officer in drafting and filing a claim of race based discrimination….” McFadden and one other female lieutenant are the highest-ranking minority women on the Columbus police force.

The charges in McFadden’s complaint are explosive. She alleges that after accompanying an “African-American female officer” to the city’s Human Resources department to file a complaint she was targeted by the white officers at the highest level of the department.

Institutionalized racism

Make no mistake: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions’ assault on immigrant families and their “tactic” of separating parents from their children are right out of the Nazi playbook.

It’s no accident US immigrations officials are telling parents they’re taking kids to “bathe,” then making them disappear … and then telling their parents they will never see them again.

This ghoulish reminder of Auschwitz shames us all. It should also terrify us. And make us ACT!

However removed we may think we are, WE are next, and so are our children.

This regime loves torture and dictatorship, and aspires to both.

Thugs like these have nothing of value to offer, so they rule with hate, fear, and scapegoating.

Many of these families are coming to our borders legally seeking asylum. Some families under assault are not even immigrants, they are merely of Hispanic origin or appearance.

There’s no immigrant “crisis” in the United States any more than there was a “Jewish Question” in Hitler’s Germany.

Hitler needed an object of hate to become absolute ruler. Jews comprised 1% of the German population. They were handy. 

World BEYOND War

Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent.

The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again).

They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again).

General Braddock and Colonel Washington tried again in 1755 (and still failed, except in the ethnic cleansing perpetrated and the driving out of the Acadians and the Native Americans).

The British and U.S. attacked in 1758 and took away a Canadian fort, renamed it Pittsburgh, and eventually built a giant stadium across the river dedicated to the glorification of ketchup.

George Washington sent troops led by Benedict Arnold to attack Canada yet again in 1775.

An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided for the inclusion of Canada, despite Canada’s lack of interest in being included.

By David Swanson

We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, and yet they overwhelmingly believe that the United States is “fundamentally better than other countries.” Why?

Duina didn’t try to puzzle this one out for himself. He went out and surveyed patriotic poor people in Alabama and Montana. He found variations between those two places, such as people loving the government for helping them a little bit and people loving the government for not helping them at all. He found variations between men and women and racial groups, but mostly he found intense patriotism built around identical myths and phrases.

amantha Bee is a smart, talented, funny, incisive, edgy, 48-year-old Canadian/American mother of three. She is also the star of the TBS show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” now in its third year. In 2017, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. On May 31, 2018, the Television Academy’s annual awards for “outstanding programs that have leveraged the dynamic power of television to inspire social change” included Samantha Bee’s “Full Frontal.” The awards ceremony was closed to the media because, in the taped broadcast of “Full Frontal” the night before, in the context of castigating the Trump administration immigration practices, Samantha Bee had called Ivanka Trump a “feckless [taboo word for vagina],” setting off a cultural foofaraw over vulgarity, but without concern for children taken from their parents by government force.

By David Swanson
Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, Reporter: A Memoir, occasionally notes the failure of the exposure of wrong-doing to result in accountability or policy reforms. That’s the closest the book generally comes to touching on any motivation behind Hersh’s work related to ending war or torture or any other evil. The exception is the bit about Hersh’s time working for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. In 1960, in Chapter 3, Hersh joins the U.S. Army without one word as to why. In Chapter 14 he self-censors the story of President Richard Nixon seriously assaulting the First Lady because Hersh thought it was a story unrelated to public policy. Wasn’t allowing Nixon to remain in office and unindicted related to public policy?

David Swanson

In Seymour Hersh’s new account of his career, Reporter: A Memoir, he recalls that Martin Luther King Jr. told him upon the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that he planned to register 900,000 Negroes to vote. King would go on to oppose war and organize poor people across racial lines before being killed.

By David Swanson

“Memorial Day is a time to remember, appreciate, and honor the selfless patriots who gave the ultimate sacrifice in service to freedom. At a time when our country seems so divided, we must not forget that it is because of their service and sacrifice that we live in the most free and prosperous nation on Earth.” —Congressman Tom Garrett

It would be difficult to count all of the lies in the above statement. Let’s just highlight a few.

Let’s start with “most free.”

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out that existing conflict theory pays little attention to the extinction-causing conflict being ongoingly generated by human over-consumption in the finite planetary biosphere (and, among other outcomes, currently resulting in 200 species extinctions daily). I also mentioned that this conflict is sometimes inadequately identified as a conflict caused by capitalism’s drive for unending economic growth in a finite environment.

I would like to explain the psychological origin of this biosphere-annihilating conflict and how this origin has nurtured the incredibly destructive aspects of capitalism (and socialism, for that matter) from the beginning. I would also like to explain what we can do about it.