Tag: war

ideological culture national politics & policies

An Opportunity to Forgo

national unity, war, peace, nationalism,

“We just marked the anniversary of 9/11.”

That’s what Democratic presidential aspirant and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg reminded last night’s debate audience. “All day today, I’ve been thinking about September 12th, the way it felt when for a moment we came together as a country.”

The terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon, and the attempt foiled by brave citizens who were killed in the crash of their airliner in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, did indeed result in a wonderful bond of unity throughout our country.

Having lost more than 3,000 citizens, we came together.

“Imagine,” instructs Buttigieg, “if we had been able to sustain that unity.”

Before we all sing along with John Lennon, though, consider: (1) It is not so easy for government to re-create the sort of public horror, fear, grief, etc., necessary to ensure maximum national unity, and (2) please don’t try.

The purpose of government is not to produce a pressure-cooker society where we forever exist on a wartime footing.

Do you miss the good old days of World War II? Totalitarianism threatened much of the globe; 70 million people died in the war. But it unified our country, which defeated Nazism, fascism, and a murderous empire.

We must memorialize the victory, not repeat it … just for unity’s sake.

Yet the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocosio-Cortez (D‑NY) states that “the House of Representatives recognizes that a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal is a historic opportunity.…”

Opportunity?

Our motto should be ‘Liberty’ — not ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags national unity, nationalism, peace, propaganda, war

ideological culture international affairs

War Minus One Warmonger

At long last, John Bolton’s 17 month tenure in the Trump Administration is over.

I won’t pretend not to be pleased. Yet I also do not pretend this national security advisor was always and completely on the wrong side. He has consistently claimed to have an ulterior motive for his favored never-ending war footing: “Individual liberty is the whole purpose of political life, and I thought it was threatened then” — when he was a teenager and exposed to the ideas of Barry Goldwater — “and I think it’s threatened now.”

Unfortunately, he rejected the lesson that our Founders knew all too well: constant war-making doesn’t yield freedom. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” James Madison wrote, it is war that “comprises and develops the germ of every other.” Madison’s list of reasons for war’s dangers include

Debts and taxes;
Rule of the many by the few;
Discretionary executive power;
Special favors greed economy;
Propaganda; etc.

Nevertheless, folks like John Bolton continue to think that we can be free while our military micromanages the “resolution” of every conflict across the globe.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who often comes off like a war skeptic, continues to side with the interventionists.

“We’re going to keep a presence” in Afghanistan, Trump said the other day. “We’re reducing that presence very substantially. We’re not fighting a war over there. We’re just policemen.”

… policemen who do not arrest anybody …

Not a recipe for freedom. Here or in Afghanistan.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Gage Skidmore on flickr

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Tags defense, John Bolton, peace, war

national politics & policies political challengers

And Then There Were 20-Something

Post author By Redactor
Post date August 13, 2019
No Comments on And Then There Were 20-Something

MIke Gravel, president, candidate, war, draft,

The media won’t have my favorite Democratic presidential candidate to kick around anymore.

“Mike Gravel drops out of 2020 race,” Vox headlined Catherine Kim’s report. “He never wanted to be president anyway.” A subhead continued: “The former Alaska senator simply ran to get other candidates to talk about American imperialism.”

It was largely a Twitter campaign, which, as The New York Times featured months ago, was run by two teenagers, David Oks and Henry Williams. “It wasn’t exactly a bid for the presidency,” the paper cautioned, “but neither was it really a prank.”

The goal? Launch Gravel — and, moreover, his issues — onto the debate stage. Though the campaign garnered enough individual donors to qualify, his lackluster polling results kept the former U.S. Senator out of prime time.

During the Vietnam War, Sen. Gravel worked to end the military draft and had the courage to read the Pentagon Papers into the Senate record in order to inform the public about the war. After leaving the Senate, Gravel continued his battle against U.S. military intervention, as well as advocating for initiative and referendum.

Back in 2008, in another quixotic presidential bid, he succeeded getting into the debates, lobbing in a few much-needed zingers. He was 77-years-old then; today he is 89.

Oks’ and Williams’ “real goal was to inject Gravel’s far-left views,” informed FiveThirtyEight.com, “into the primary.”

Though I disagree with Mike Gravel on a number of his “far-left” issues — and for endorsing Bernie Sanders for president — he has my utmost respect.

And if “ending ‘imperialist’ wars, legalizing drugs and enacting dramatic political reforms” be “far left,” make the most of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags candidate, draft, MIke Gravel, president, war

international affairs national politics & policies Popular

Who’ll Stop the Wars?

Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Debate, war, peace, foreign policy,

“Why were you the lone voice out there going after the neo-cons, going after the people who took us into these wars?” Chris Mathews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, asked presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D‑Hawaii) after Wednesday night’s debate.

Pro-peace candidates do well with voters, but still most politicians and the media remain hawkish. The only time “the mainstream media fawned” over President Trump was after airstrikes against Syria.

“I deployed to Iraq in 2005 during the height of that war,” she told Mathews. “I served in a medical unit where every single day I saw that terribly high human cost.”

Contrasted with former Vice-President Joe Biden, who voted for the Iraq War as senator, Gabbard pledged not to “bend to the whims of the military-industrial complex or the foreign policy establishment.”

“Today the Taliban claimed responsibility for killing two American service members in Afghanistan,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had posed during the debate. Noting that “leaders as disparate as President Obama and President Trump” have wanted “to end US involvement,” Maddow inquired of Rep. Tim Ryan (D‑Ohio), how he might get us out?

Instead, he argued: “We must be engaged in this.” That led Gabbard to cut in, calling Ryan’s answer “unacceptable.”

“We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan,” she declared. “We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began [nearly 18 years ago].”

Offered the opportunity, not one of the other eight candidates on the stage addressed the country’s longest war.

This is a problem, since, as I’ve repeatedly posited in this space, there is no plan to defeat the Taliban, only to negotiate power-sharing with them.

Ceaseless intervention.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Democratic Presidential Debate, foreign policy, peace, Tulsi Gabbard, war

folly international affairs national politics & policies Popular

Remember … the Maine?

“President Trump warned Thursday that America ‘will not stand’ for Iran shooting down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz,” a Fox News report summarizes, “while at the same time leaving open the possibility that the attack was unintentional.”

This incident immediately follows the previous week’s apparent provocation, attacks on Japanese oil tankers in the same vicinity — also said by our government to have been caused by the Iranian military. Nearly everyone now regards these events as portending war,* which some see as a long time coming, since American relations with Iran have been antagonistic since the late 1970s, when Shia clerics raised a popular revolt to oust the American-installed thug, er, Shah.

While Mr. Trump was incredulous that the strike on the drone (opposite of a drone strike) could have been intentional, the rest of us can dare doubt even more: Can we really trust the “intelligence” that blames Iran’s military or paramilitary Revolutionary Guard for these puzzlingly dangerous provocations?

Not based on past performance.

The “intelligence” used to justify America’s several wars with Iran’s neighbor, Iraq, seems more disinformation than mere misinformation. And we now know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident enabling U.S. escalation into Vietnam was a lie.

We should even “remember the Maine!” — the questionable rationale for the Spanish-American War.

Lying to start wars is obviously not unheard-of in our history. Indeed, some insiders have itched for war so badly that they have plotted false flag ops against the American people.

The truth of what is happening now may not be known for years … by us … or even by President Trump.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* According to the New York Times, late yesterday President Trump authorized and then de-authorized a strike against Iran.

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general freedom international affairs Popular

Bellicose Exclusions

Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, war, MSM, mainstream media,

“Jones and his Infowars nutritional supplement sales empire are having a bit of a rough moment,” wrote Justin Peters last year at Slate, “since the bellicose conspiracist has recently been banned from several social media and podcast platforms due to his hostile and hateful behavior.”

Like much of the commentary on Alex Jones, as well as on his colleague Paul Joseph Watson, there is something … off … about the characterization.

Bellicose?

Sure, he pushes bizarre accounts of conspiracies,* and on a personal level Alex Jones shouts and yells and blusters and worse.

But there is one way he is not bellicose. Alex Jones is almost consistently against war in general and America’s world-policing in particular.

And so, too, has been Paul Joseph Watson — who along with Jones was kicked off Facebook last week.**

If you are generally against war, being called “bellicose” and “hostile” must be galling, especially when personalities at CNN and MSNBC stand hand-in-hand with most at Fox in their obvious onscreen lust for actual warfare, drone bombings, and “tough choices.”

Yes, I know: Watson has been a withering critic of First World immigration policies and of the illiberalism he sees in Islamic cultures, and he relentlessly mocks Third Wave Feminism. That must be his “hateful” — and “hostile”? — element.

Yet, this seems less about hate and more about ideological disagreement.

More importantly, just whose interests are being served by social media’s current deliberate policy of marginalization?

The biggest cheers for ousting Jones and Watson — outside major media — echo from the left. But how is cheering on the consolidation of the military-industrial complex in leftists’ interest?

The current “war against Internet freedom” looks very bad for … dissent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* One of which he has even confessed to be “psychotic.”

** Others ousted include racial nationalists such as Paul Nehlen and Louis Farrakhan, gay conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and Laura Loomer. Their stances on military interventionism are less clearly anti-.

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