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Earthquakes do monumental local damage, sometimes defacing entire cities. A powerful tsunami can be far more destructive. It can spread damage across the full expanse of an ocean and flood faraway shores. Who doesn’t remember the drama in 2004 when a powerful located near Sumatra in Indonesia ended up wreaking havoc on the coast of Africa?

An ancient proverb informs us: “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.” This sums up what every stock market wizard knows: Clever traders profit most by buying after the market has crashed. For many, at least in the media, Trump 1.0 was the ill wind that would make their day.

Although the dominantly Democratic corporate media in the United States saw Trump’s 2016 presidential election as an unparalleled catastrophe for the nation, its pundits and late-night comedians realized that for them it was a windfall. The public was aching to hear the worst about their newly elected leader. Hating, deriding, mocking and deconstructing Trump became a source of income and notoriety for a lot of people.

Heather Cox Richardson, a popular Substack , stands out as an interesting example. Building on her reputation as a historian specialized in the 19th century and the American Civil War, she seized the opportunity to instruct devastated Democrats and moderates about the true meaning of the Trump tsunami. After some success with Facebook, when she moved to Substack she discovered a platform capable of turning her into an authentic influencer.

She quickly learned the trick of drawing on her historical knowledge to cite parallels across time. Trump had offered the nation the perspective of a new civil war, the perfect occasion for Richardson to offer her services as an indispensable illuminator of the Trump phenomenon. Her claim to gravitas as a published author led her followers to see in her a fountain of historical truth and accurate contemporary analysis.

But when she isn’t dealing with history but ongoing events, how subtle are her observations, how refined her analysis? Not quite up to academic standards, it appears.

In Richardson’s February 16 of “Letters from an American,” she attempts to review the events surrounding US Vice President JD Vance’s controversial speech at the Munich Security Conference. In guise of a conclusion, rather than producing any original insight, she approvingly quotes political scientist Stathis Kalyvas. “The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy
. The arrogance on display is staggering.”

A bit further on, in an attempt to clarify the question of war and peace that the Trump administration has dared to raise as a question deserving diplomatic attention, she cites Republican Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker, with whom she clearly agrees.

“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys. They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated.”

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Bad guys:

People who have caused serious problems, often involving death and serious destruction, to the exclusion of ourselves.

Contextual note

Can a serious historian like Richardson really believe any conflict is reducible to a contest between “good guys” and “bad guys?” In her books, she blames the South for its commitment to the obviously immoral and anti-democratic institution of slavery, which allows her to frame the Confederates as the party whose actions justified a war initiated by US President Abraham Lincoln’s government. In that sense, the Americans wearing gray uniforms were the bad guys.

But not all wars can be justified by such a stark contradiction with the purported values of a democratic nation. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government provided an even more clear-cut case to justify going to battle against bad guys. For most citizens of the contemporary liberal democratic order the US Civil War and World War II, despite the obscene levels of destruction in both, stand as two feel-good conflicts in the minds. Both contain obvious examples of fighting to defeat political intentions easily recognizable not just as bad but as morally evil.

But does that mean that all the “guys” involved on one side and the other were respectively good or bad? Should all their actions and beliefs fall into one of those two categories? Propaganda tends to promote that idea. When a conflict is raging, it’s reassuring to think of oneself and one’s countrymen as the good guys. Ordinary citizens and even media pundits are likely to think that way. But historians?

Many critics of the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy have painstakingly pointed out that the US may have been guilty of a significant amount of “bad guy” behavior that has been playing out over decades. The most egregious piece of concrete evidence is the intercepted in 2014 between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev. Scott Horton’s recent book, , recounts the entire concatenation of missteps over decades that led to the events of February 2022. Any honest observer who has examined the evidence will probably conclude that no group of either pristine good guys or committed bad guys emerges. If anything, and this might be the most embarrassing realization for someone like Richardson, both Ukraine and Russia emerge as victims, and therefore “good guys.” In such a scenario, it isn’t difficult to imagine who the bad guys might be.

After seemingly applauding Representative Wicker’s assessment of who’s good and who’s bad, Richardson seems to approve uncritically the congressman’s complementary observation asserting that “Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.” Has she considered the meaning of such a claim? Can a historian seriously believe that any country is “entitled to promises?” Does the idea make sense, linguistically, politically or morally?

And what does Wicker or Richardson assume is the “world” that made those promises? An examination of the declarations and behavior of nations across the globe demonstrates that, at best, “the world” Wicker refers to is essentially the US and its European allies. Does Richardson equate NATO with the world? It would seem so.

Historical note

Most moral systems acknowledge that good and evil are two competing forces in the world that play out in actual human behavior. Which means that bad guys do exist, and not only as a pretext allowing the US to mount a new military adventure. If you followed the State Department’s operating manual, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad were “bad guys.” In their own time, so were Mohammad Mosaddegh, Jacobo Árbenz, Patrice Lumumba, Vietnamese NgĂŽ ĐÏnh Diệm, Ho Chi Minh, Salvador Allende, Manuel Noriega, Manuel Zelaya and Evo Morales. Some paradoxically had been trusted friends of the good guys before seeing their identity changed to that of confirmed enemy or “bad guy.”

Hitler and the Nazis had the merit of giving the distinction between good guys and bad guys some discernible meaning. The Fuhrer’s unbridled territorial expansionism and overt racism provided a template for the image of an unequivocal bad guy. But think about this: Does it make sense to consider the forces that fire-bombed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Dresden and Tokyo before nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “good guys?” A Civil War general about whom Richardson has written , “War is hell.” This presumably acknowledges that good guys may sometimes become bad guys in the process.

Historians are trained to look beyond jingoistic justifications nations put forward in times of war or preparation for war. Instead, they grapple with the context from which conflicts emerge. Such exploration rarely leads to a verdict permitting to separate the good guys from the bad guys. If Richardson truly wishes to maintain her standing as a respected historian, with her eye on the facts, she would seek to avoid appealing to such simplistic binary representations of reality. Apparently, she finds it more rewarding to hone her image as a newsletter blogger.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51łÔčÏ Devil’s Dictionary.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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A moral groundwork

From its inception, America has framed its defining conflicts as to restore human and divine justice. For example, the Revolutionary War was not just a fight for independence; it was a battle against tyranny and a defense of individuals’ “unalienable rights endowed by a Creator” — a concept deeply influenced by Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. The Revolutionary War established of individualism, egalitarianism and activism, values rooted in both Enlightenment ideals and Judeo-Christian principles that celebrate individual liberty and human dignity.ÌęThese secular and spiritual ideals are embedded in foundational American documents such as the and the .

Similarly, the Civil War, while centering on economy and sovereignty, transformed into a moral crusade with President Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to slavery. By linking the war to the liberation of slaves, Lincoln set the groundwork for a United States based on equality and human dignity.

This moral foundation has defined America’s involvement in global conflicts throughout the 20th century. In both world wars, America intervened not merely out of self-interest but out of a sense of duty to preserve democracy, national interests with moral responsibility. President Franklin D. Roosevelt America’s fight against Nazism and fascism as a battle between good and evil, reinforcing the nation’s belief that democracy must prevail globally. Through its wartime efforts, America created a world order in which liberal values could thrive. The United Nations and its are the fruits of that moral American vision whose legacy has defined international order to this day.

The Cold War further emphasized America’s commitment to spreading liberal democracy. In contrast to the communist ideology that elevated the above the individual, America championed the right of every human being to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Democratic and Republican presidents, from to , equally emphasized the importance of this moral vision in the free world’s fight against communism. That philosophical commitment, more than mere technological or economic might, helped America win the Cold War and led to the spread of democratic governance across the world.

The loss of morality

Today, however, US foreign policy is increasingly abandoning its moral vision. This decline stems from a significant in bipartisan support for promoting democracy worldwide. Domestic challenges, along with perceived failures in recent nation-building efforts abroad, have dampened the American public’s and policymakers’ interest in democracy overseas. This shift has triggered an isolationist trend in US foreign policy arguably unseen since .

Because America’s global influence is built on not just military might or economic power, but a , the recent reluctance to follow that path risks undermining a legacy carefully built following WWII. By stepping back from the world stage, America risks creating a power vacuum that authoritarian regimes are eager to fill, leaving a more isolated US vulnerable to new threats in the long term.

When President Barack Obama from supporting democratic uprisings in and , he left in the lurch populations striving for freedom against brutal dictatorships, undermining American credibility. Similarly, President Joe Biden’s from Afghanistan ceded control back to the Taliban, reversing years of progress in women’s rights and civil liberties. Now, President-Elect Donald Trump may for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression when he goes back to the White House in January 2025. US foreign policy risks yet another retreat — one thatÌęcould determine the fate of Ukraine’s sovereignty and, by extension, the resilience of democracy in Europe.

If Ukraine falls to Russian aggression, it could much of Eastern and Northern Europe and set a dangerous precedent for the unchecked expansion of the Kremlin’s authoritarianism westward. This scenario would ripple across the region, threatening the democratic security of the Baltic states, the Caucasus and potentially Central Europe, posing the gravest challenge to democracy in Western Europe since World War II.

A collapse of democratic resistance in Ukraine could also to expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific. If America and its allies hesitate in Europe, Beijing might seize the opportunity to assert dominance over Taiwan and pressure Japan, while North Korea could feel encouraged to take aggressive steps toward South Korea. The effects could reach as far as India and Australia. Such outcomes would jeopardize decades of democratic progress in the Indo-Pacific and destabilize an entire region critical to global economy and security.

In addition to these risks, a potential US withdrawal from NATO would not only embolden external adversaries but could also fracture Europe internally. This move could empower pro-Russian factions within the European Union to pursue closer ties with Moscow, sidelining pro-democracy and pro-American parties. An eastward European shift would strain Washington and lay the groundwork for a strategic encirclement of the United States.

Given the rise of authoritarianism worldwide, the US must renew its commitment to human rights and democracy. While both Democrats and Republicans may hesitate to champion liberal values abroad, now more than ever, the US needs to reset its moral compass, recommit to its moral foundations in foreign policy, and prioritize the promotion of democratic ideals in the world. This renewed commitment to democracy in foreign policy is essential for preserving America’s global leadership but also critical for keeping the world a freer and safer place.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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The US emerged as the global superpower thanks to World War II. In 1945, Europe was in ruins. The war caused widespread destruction in Europe because of the bombing of cities and factories. European powers lost millions of people in the war. Being far from Europe and Japan, the incurred a very low rate of civilian casualties. There was almost no destruction of US infrastructure, with the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, as a notable exception. Naturally, the US emerged as the leader of the West. Although the Soviet Union was a US ally during the war, it competed with the US for global hegemony following the Allied victory, a period referred to as the Cold War.

During the Cold War, the US and its Western allies engaged in a brutal global competition with the Soviets and other communist states. Notable confrontations between these two power centers included the Korean War (1950–1953), the Vietnam War (1955–1975) and the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989). Using Soviet influence as an excuse, the US intervened in many countries, including Iran. At the behest of the UK, the US overthrew the first democratically elected government of Iran. Only 26 years after the infamous 1953 coup, the Iranian Revolution deposed the Shah and established Iran’s independence from both the US and the UK.

The US tacitly supported European imperial and colonial powers when they committed some of the worst genocides in human history. The most notable include the horrendous atrocities committed in Congo, Kenya and Algeria.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the world looked forward to years of peace and prosperity. Although the US proclaimed that this new era was one of peace, it began with the Rwandan Genocide (1994), the Bosnian Genocide (1995), to the present day with the US-backed genocide against Palestinians and the takeover of Syria by al-Qaeda’s affiliates.

The of the Soviet Union did not make the world more peaceful; it worsened it under unilateral US leadership. The fall produced a power vacuum that has yet to be filled. In particular, it released nationalistic, ethical, cultural and self-determination movements in the former Soviet states. It led to social unrest, organized crime, terrorism and corruption. The ripple effects of the fall will “continue to be felt for some time yet.”

After the Soviets were gone, the US no longer faced any serious challenges to its global hegemony. However, the US considered Iran’s independence from US influence a challenge to its global domination and has supported efforts to undermine the Islamic Republic of Iran. Presently, the US efforts that have unseated Assad of Syria were meant to undermine Iran’s dominance in the region. 

Recently, reporters saw US President Joe Biden leaving a bookstore with a copy of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi in his hand. The book describes the Palestinian struggle for their homeland. “Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland,” Khalidi writes. 

Hopefully, Biden will read this book and realize that instigating the war in Ukraine, enabling Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and aiding al-Qaeda affiliates are immoral.

The US’s prestige is falling worldwide, all it can do is slow the fall

The world is waking up thanks to Iran. The US’s decision to back Ukraine in the war and enable Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians has placed global attention on Iran. In particular, Iran’s support of the oppressed Palestinians has been a popular move. In the US, like around the world, young people with the oppressed Palestinians.

Iran has become so notable for its global standing as a supporter of the oppressed that its archenemy, Israel, admits it. On July 25, Israeli Prime Minister , against whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, addressed the US Congress.

Hearing the loud protest outside, he felt frustrated with the protesters, crying in his speech that “Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now outside this building.”

Led by Iran, worldwide, people realize the US is not what it claims to be. The US is not a promoter of democracy or peace but a brutal warmonger with no regard for human rights and international law. Internationally, it has used its veto power since 1970 against UN resolutions concerning Israel, with four in the last year. In November, it vetoed the latest UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in . Recently, it blundered by the rise to power in Syria of HayÊŒat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) formerly part of al-Qaeda.

To stop the US’ destructive behaviors globally, China, Russia, Iran and some other countries have moved away from the US and formed the alliance. More countries are planning to do the same. Within the new alliance, China pushes for more collaboration between countries rather than subjugating them, as the US does.

No supporter of democracy, not even much of a democracy

Globally, people are becoming more aware that the US does not support democracy. Its ventures into other countries in the name of democracy are a ploy to access their resources and wealth. In pursuit of power and wealth, the US has destroyed lives. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are just a few known examples where millions of innocent people were killed and billions of dollars of infrastructure were destroyed by US-led aggression.

The US is also a very flawed democracy itself. According to a poll from the Harris Poll and the Quincy Institute, around of Americans want the US to pursue peace with Russia. Yet, the US continues arming Ukraine against Russia. Likewise, of Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the “Israel–Palestine conflict,” but Biden continues arming Israel. Biden is acting as a dictator, ignoring the will of the people. This is not unique to Biden. US presidents have been getting the US in wars since its inception. Despite its global proclamation as a beacon of democracy, the US has never been a true democracy.

The US presidential system is flawed. The winner of the majority of Electoral College votes wins. In 2000 and 2016, George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote but still became presidents because they commanded a majority of Electoral College votes. Furthermore, the US is dominated by two main parties. Third parties are not even on the ballot in many states. Big money in politics also strengthens the hand of the two main political parties.

This means that American politics makes for the strangest of bedfellows. Christian evangelicals voted for Trump despite his chauvinism, infidelity, nepotism, racism and corruption. So did many working-class Americans as well as a majority of white women and Latino men voted for this celebrity billionaire who has given and plans to give tax cuts to the rich. On the other hand, Ivy League elites largely voted for Democrats even if they had misgivings about Kamala Harris.

Giving the rich tax breaks and spending too much on the military-industrial complex has led to the US suffering the highest rate among industrial countries. The US ranks last in outcomes among the ten major developed countries despite spending nearly twice as much — about 18% of gross domestic product — on healthcare than the others. The crisis is also worse than in other Western countries and the country has the highest rate among high-income countries.

As is well known, American interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and other countries led to the expansion of the military-industrial complex. Today, the US sends its poor to war who come back with post-traumatic stress disorder if not wounds or in body bags.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 killed thousands of innocents. Its intervention in Libya caused a civil war that continues to this day. Today, the US is inflicting similar misery on Syria. Together with Turkey and Israel, the US is supporting HTS. Note that HTS is an affiliate of al-Qaeda. The HTS fighters are nothing but terrorists who have innocents, including 12-year-olds and Americans. That is the reason why the US put a $10 million bounty on HTS leader . Yet today the US has supported HTS to get rid of the Assad family, legitimizing the very fighters it has designated as terrorists.

Instead of continuing to support death and destruction, the US should support peace and harmony. First, Washington must stop threatening, invading and harming other countries. This includes stopping support for terrorists like al-Golani as well as dropping sanctions that hurt millions of innocents. Second, the US must stop its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. A peace deal is in the interest of the entire world. Third, the US must support a free Palestine where Christians, Jews and Muslims can live together in peace.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Singh’s rise to military success

Singh was born in Kusumdesar Village in the Churu region of the Bikaner Kingdom on July 14, 1919, to Brijlal Singh Rathore, a soldier, and his wife Jadao Kanwar. In 1938, after his intermediate exam, Singh was enrolled as a Naik, or corporal, in the Bikaner State Forces. When World War II broke out, he received a commission as a Second Lieutenant from the King. In 1949, he was absorbed into the Indian Army with the Third Gorkha Rifles .Ìę

In 1961, Singh was promoted to the rank of brigadier and was given the command ofIndia’s paratroopers, the . “Operation Vijay,” the plan for the liberation of Goa from the Portuguese, commenced on December 17, 1961. Although the 50th Parachute Brigade was given a secondary role in the original operational plan, their rapid advance and initiative under Singh’s dynamic leadership made them the first to reach Panjim, the capital of Goa. On the morning of December 19,Panjim to the brigade. Portuguese Governor General and Commander-in-Chief Major General Vassalo De’ Silva fled to Marmagao but later surrendered. At 11 AM, Singh’s forces hoisted the Indian tricolor on the Secretariat Building at Panjim.

Refusal to retreat led to one of India’s greatest victories

Singh’s success did not stop there. In 1965,China issued an to India to vacate the border outposts of Nathu La and Jelep La in Sikkim. Above him in the military hierarchy was Lieutenant General Sam Manekshaw, the Eastern Army Commander, and Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, commander of the XXXIII corps, who were responsible for Sikkim. Singh, now a major general, was the General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the 17th Mountain Division, which controlled Nathu La. Orders given to the 17th and 27th Divisions required that they vacate the outposts and fall back to the main defenses in the case of hostilities.

The GOC of the 27th (deployed to the east of the 17th) from Jelep La. Thus, Jelep La fell to the Chinese. To this day, the vital pass leading to the is still with China. Singh, however, refused to pull back. From August to September 1967, the Chinese tried their best to make Indians withdraw from Nathu La, but Singh made his forces hold on even though he could have vacated this outpost. During this engagement, both sides suffered casualties, but Nathu La gave a bloody nose to the Chinese under Singh’s audacious leadership. The victory helped the nation and the army overcome some regrets of the military defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Perhaps Singh’s insistence on defending Nathu La led to him being given a non-operational command, the 101st Communications Zone in Shillong. However, this general with “a talent for war” had the uncanny quality of winding up in military operations. By this time, the Mizo separatist , orchestrated by the Mizo National Front, had begun. Since the area was under his responsibility, Singh set counter-insurgency operations into motion in Mizoram. His quick thinking quelled the rebellion for some time. Mizoram became an Indian state much later, in 1986. Mizoram is the rare example of a successful counter-insurgency operation, allthanks to the initial sagacious set by Singh.

The liberation of Bangladesh is Singh’s crowning glory

In December 1970, Singh was promoted to lieutenant general and assigned the command of the IV Corps. The hierarchy above Sagat was the same as it was in Nathu La in 1967: Aurora was now the Eastern Army commander and Manekshaw the army chief. 

Initially, the plans for the liberation of Bangladesh did not involve the capture of Dacca (now Dhaka), the capital of Bangladesh. The plan was to liberate areas up to the major rivers surrounding Dacca and thereafter to declare Bangladesh liberated. The army headquarters’ directive to Eastern Command did not envision Dacca as the final objective of the campaign in the east.

Singh was ordered to advance up to River Meghna from Tripura in the East and up to the river line. He was ordered not to cross the Meghna. However, military genius that he was, Singh clearly identified the two centers of gravity of the campaign: the fall of Dacca and the capitulation of all Pakistani forces in East Pakistan. Undaunted by the massive Meghna, Singh launched the first-ever Indian heliborne operation across the river. His IV Corps raced to Dacca in a blitzkrieg. This led to the fall of the city and the capture of 93,000 Pakistani soldiers. It would perhaps have been appropriate for Singh, seeing as it was he who captured Dacca, rather than Aurora to have accepted the of Pakistani forces from Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi.

Singh’s legacy lives on

The Param Vishisht Seva Medal and the Padma Bhushan, awarded to Singh for his services in war, fall short of the magnitude of his contribution to the Indian nation. According to an unverifiable rumor, his victory ride through Dacca and his “son-of-the-soil” image may have ruffled his superiors’ feathers, causing them to deny him the awards he deserved. Whatever the case, it would now be appropriate to award him the , even posthumously.

Singh eventually settled down in Jaipur after retiring from the army in 1979. His house in Jaipur is called “Meghna,” as is his younger granddaughter. He breathed his last on September 26, 2001, at the age of 82.

On July 14, 2019, and the week after that, I had the unique privilege of organizing celebrations for the of the birth of this illustrious general. A prominent road in Jaipur has been adorned with a bust of Singh and named after him. The Jaipur Literary Festival in January 2019 witnessed readings from his biography. A seminar was organized in Jaipur, where generals who fought the war with him, as well as his son Lieutenant Colonel Ran Vijay Singh and his relatives, paid tribute in a very publicized event.

Truly, Singh was a general who never lost a battle.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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As physicists explain, a closed system invariably tends towards disorder. In more common political terms: Since the public agenda of viable issues is limited, if the government removes foreign policy from the main focus of attention, it opens space for the emergence of all the domestic issues that have never been resolved.

Trump’s priority was isolationism: closing the country to immigrants, imposing tariffs on imports, disengaging from NATO, and telling Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and other satraps that they could do whatever they wanted.

The consequence of global withdrawal was the emergence of internal conflicts over immigration, race and police brutality, climate, sex and gender, religion, family and education, public health, gun control, voting rights, and so on. Of course, the unrest was aggravated by Trump’s racism and incompetence, as well as by the imbalances of the institutional system, but the strategic error is obvious.

For a great power like the United States, the most successful example of good government is the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus. Historian Michael Rostovtzeff that “the real diarchy” was not between the Emperor and the Senate (since the Emperor prevailed), but between the central government and the provinces and cities. The government should have two focuses: The central government should focus on public finances, defense and foreign policy (the opposite of what Trump did) while many smaller-scale matters should be widely decentralized to territorial units: the provinces or, in the case of the US, the states and cities.

In some ways, this was the model of government used by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. They focused on World War II and the Cold War while declining to interfere much in the internal affairs of states and giving ample space to the private economy. One of the costs was the territorial fragmentation of social policies, including the survival of racial segregation in some southern states. 

Again, this was the model for the second Cold War against the Soviet Union launched by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The US victory in this contest created a relatively short period of world hegemony, the last victory of which was the 1990 Persian Gulf War. President Bill Clinton continued an internal policy of decentralization until the end of the century, again at the expense of social policies on welfare and family issues.

The main risk of this approach is that, in the long term, it can produce imperial overload. Eisenhower already warned about this in 1961 when he denounced the excessive power of the military-industrial complex in his . His successor, John F. Kennedy, initiated a major turnaround: He began a troop withdrawal from Vietnam, tried to stop secret CIA operations in Cuba and other countries, and reached several agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear bombs — but he was not allowed to go any further. Immediately, protest movements began to emerge over civil rights and the forced recruitment of young people to go to wars of aggression in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Military defeats abroad generated political defeats at home: neither Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter completed two terms.Ìę

The cycle began again after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. The government of President George W. Bush embarked on a series of “preventive” wars, including a phantasmagorical “Global War on Terrorism,” which could have excited patriotic emotions capable of calming internal tensions. However, even though the army was now made up of volunteers and professional soldiers rather than conscripts, the US suffered a series of humiliating military defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

The War on Terror: 22 Years On

Trump’s challenge was a reaction to all these costly failures. But his entropic isolationism opened space for the expression of a wide internal discontent and a diversity of demands and protests, a high political polarization between the two parties and a blockage between the presidency and Congress. 

These repeated cycles in American politics show a permanent dilemma: If the empire develops an aggressive foreign policy, it can gain a certain international dominance but also an overload of military defeats and financial deterioration. If, on the contrary, isolationism prevails, it can provide savings in defense but also internal disorder and chaos. 

The way out of the dilemma could be a corrected diarchy. A great power has to prioritize foreign policy and defense, yes, but not multiple aggressive wars. It needs to maintain and expand the number of its allies, which can help reduce deficits and defeats and promote international cooperation, open trade and peace. At the same time, an internal decentralization on controversial issues, such as some “woke” issues right now, could decrease national polarization. 

Trump has learned nothing from his experience. Should she become president instead, Vice President Harris will have to reflect and plan carefully before acting.

[The author’s first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s Imperial Dilemma appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

The idea of electing a new “commander in chief” who will be the “leader of the free world” lifts people out of their boring routine. The actual political effect of the choice between a Democrat and Republican has never been clearly established. But because the emotional stakes are so high, the media have come to characterize every presidential election as existential. If the wrong candidate wins, democracy will disappear.

Along with the fabricated drama of existential stakes, every presidential campaign brings with it a great leap forward in the art of fiction. We used to wonder who might write “the great American novel,” a term so that it even merits an acronym: GAN. But of course, not many people have time to read novels these days, especially not “great” ones.

Who needs well-crafted literary masterpieces when the most compelling, thunderously suspenseful fiction appears regularly every four years in the drama of a presidential election? Whether its Haitian immigrants purloining pets and serving them for dinner or proclaiming a decade of unmitigated joy, election campaigns extend the range of the substitute for reality we call hyperreality.

Among the plethora of examples, let us consider a US presidential candidate’s foray into historical fiction. Here is how The New York Times summed up the of Harris’s historical novel:

“The most important moments in our history have come when we stood up to aggressors like Putin,” Ms. Harris said, warning that the Russian leader would not stop with Ukraine, and would possibly even look into encroaching on NATO territory, if he succeeds in his campaign.”

“History is so clear in reminding us, the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Isolation:

In contemporary American English, the undesirable result of any policy that  shows a preference for diplomacy over aggressive intervention, peace over the fostering of foreign conflicts conducted by allies with the objective of reinforcing an obsolete notion of hegemony associated with nostalgia for an illusory unipolar world.

Contextual note

The emergence of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016 confirmed what should already have been obvious: that politics in the US no longer needed a direct connection with reality. At least since Ronald Reagan and the triumph of electoral marketing that turned policy debate into an anecdotal sideshow, presidential campaigns have become a pure exercise in manufacturing something even more fundamental than Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s: hyperreality. On every level — practically for every word in the political vocabulary — the relationship between historical reality and a newly crafted version of it had become artificial if not totally disconnected.

Examples of political hyperreality abound. Trump provided the ultimate demonstration of how pervasive hyperreality could be. Only days after his inauguration, his administration was “alternative facts.” This was hardly new, but it was the first time it would become an object of public debate.

Kamala Harris’s use of “isolation” in the above quote provides a typical example of how the shift towards hyperreality produces its effects. Without being explicit, she appeals to a decontextualized historical meme drawn from a political culture that dates from the decades between the 20th century’s two world wars. The terms “isolationism” and “isolationist” were applied to an attitude spawned by the will to distance the US from any implication in the disputes between the waning and endemically belligerent European colonial powers. The US had very recently itself emerged as an active and rising colonial power thanks to its acquisitions that followed the 1898 Spanish–American war.

The people later vilified as “isolationists” have been blamed for impeding the US from challenging Adolf Hitler and other despots. They had developed an understandable distaste for getting involved in Europe’s internal quarrels. That, of course, after the “day of infamy” in which the Japanese attacked not only Hawaii but also the Philippines, Guam and British-controlled Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaya. The US was about to take its first steps as the future policeman of a world order that would emerge after the defeat of Germany and Japan.

One possible reading of the three major dramas of this month’s headlines — whether it’s next month’s election, the nearly three-year-old war in Ukraine or the genocidal campaign that Israel has extended beyond Gaza to the West Bank and now Lebanon — is that the battles we see emerging on all of these three fronts have one thing in common: They pitch an ill-defined cohort of defenders of the post-World War II 20th century order against an equally ill-defined group of seekers of a new world order that has manifestly become multipolar.

Trump finds himself comically, paradoxically and incomprehensibly sitting among the second camp, even though he has based his appeal on the idea of returning to the past by making “America great again.” Harris has become the empty, substance-deprived symbol of complacent immobility, whose mission is to perpetuate the existing hyperreality. Trump lives in the eternal present. That allows him to constantly invent his own hyperreality. Harris’s, in its continuity with the past, is already on public display.

Historical note

Most people should recognize that the world that preceded and the one that immediately followed World War II had very little in common. Harris displays lazy rhetoric when she applies terms inherited from a century ago to today’s reality. She’s in denial about the shift in meaning that took place over the course of a century. Language evolves. Apparently, politicians’ minds and worldviews don’t.

Harris’s use of the term “isolation” is clearly abusive and disrespectful of history. But it stands as only one among a multitude of examples in the hyperreal framework we now call “democratic politics.” The word “democracy” itself has never been so shamelessly abused. We find ourselves in yet another election year in which politicians and pundits are making the alarming that “democracy is on the ballot.” Practically equal numbers of voters on the two sides claim that electing the candidate they oppose will constitute a “threat to democracy.”

But do they have any idea of what the democracy is they’re referring to? Do they believe the notion inherited from the Greeks, which was less than wholeheartedly promoted by their nation’s founders, has any precise meaning concerning the reality of governance? Is democracy no more than observing the ritual of repetitive elections? James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought of democracy as mob rule, whereas Thomas Jefferson maintained that “the will of the people should prevail.” Who won that debate? Apparently, the word “democracy” won, but there is little indication that any discernible concept prevailed.

And, by the way, is there anyone willing to debate it today? Does democracy even have an accepted meaning today? If so, how does it square with the findings of a Princeton from 2014, which demonstrated with solid statistics that almost all significant policies are determined not by the people, but by an ill-defined, unelected but clearly powerful elite?

The NYT’s article contains another significant quote, this time from Morgan Finkelstein, the Harris campaign’s national security spokeswoman: “Vice President Harris understands that the American people stand on the side of freedom, democracy and rule of law. She knows that if America walks away from Ukraine, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe and our NATO allies.”

Can anyone honestly make the case that Ukraine provides an example of “freedom, democracy and rule of law?” The classic characterization of Putin as a new Russian Napoleon would be laughable to anyone observing events, mainly because of an utter lack of evidence in favor of it. But it is clearly established as a dogma of the reigning credo of hyperreality.

All this tends to demonstrate one thing: that a truly descriptive definition of democracy as it’s practiced today should be:

A political regime in which ambitious individuals can rise to a position of political power thanks to their “freedom” to distort the truth.

Harris and Trump are coming from different places but are playing the same game, though each has a different set of hyperreal rules. Trump invented his own. Harris sticks to house rules.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51łÔčÏ Devil’s Dictionary.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Must Kamala’s Rhetoric Be Isolated from Truth? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

However, we now find ourselves at a critical juncture, facing what can only be described as a near-death experience for international law. Political expediency has eclipsed the very ideals that once united nations, creating a landscape where some states are evidently “more equal than others.”

The crisis of multipolarity

The geopolitical arena has undergone a seismic shift since the conclusion of the unipolar moment, a time when the United States reigned as the undisputed superpower. Today, we navigate a tripolar world characterised by the competing influences of three dominant powers: the United States, Russia and China. Each of these nations pursues its own interests, often at the expense of the established international legal framework, leading to a complex web of contradictions and conflicts that jeopardise the stability of global governance.

In this tripolar moment, the relationships among these power centres are far from straightforward. Russia and China, while pursuing divergent geopolitical ambitions, have found a common adversary in the US. This alliance of convenience complicates international relations significantly. China, increasingly recognized as a formidable global player, has tacitly supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, demonstrating a strategic partnership that serves both nations’ interests against what they perceive as Western hegemony.

Russia, still nursing the wounds of its Soviet past, is determined to reclaim its status as a great power. Its invasion of Ukraine, framed as a “special military operation,” seeks to reinstate a sphere of influence reminiscent of the days when it could challenge US authority on the global stage.

Meanwhile, the US persists as an entrenched power center, leading a coalition of Western nations that largely oppose Russia’s aggression, advocating for Ukraine’s sovereignty and providing substantial military and intelligence support.

Hypocrisy from the West

The West’s contrasting approaches to Ukraine and Palestine, however, illustrate a stark hypocrisy. While the US and its allies have rallied against Russia, they have simultaneously turned a blind eye to the plight of Palestinians. The ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, marked by accusations of genocide against Israel, has not elicited a similar fervour from the West. Instead, the US continues to support Israel, often providing it with carte blanche to act with impunity in the face of international law.

This duality raises troubling questions about the foundations of international law itself. When the arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin was swiftly issued, the world observed a clear commitment to holding powerful leaders accountable for their actions. Conversely, efforts to hold Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for potential war crimes have met with staunch resistance from the US and other Western allies, revealing a stark inconsistency in the application of international norms.

Moreover, countries like Germany, Italy and the UK, which play a pivotal role in the European theatre, have been significant to Israel, further complicating the moral landscape of international law. Such actions not only undermine the credibility of these states but also diminish the sanctity of international legal frameworks designed to protect human rights.

At the heart of this crisis lies a profound erosion of legitimacy. The assertion that “my international law is better/more legitimate than yours” has become a dangerous mantra among the great powers, leading to an environment where legal principles are manipulated to serve national interests rather than uphold justice. This manipulation has created a dangerous precedent: When powerful nations selectively enforce international law, they undermine the very framework that holds the global community together.

How will the world move forward?

As conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine escalate, the prospects for resolution appear increasingly bleak. Both situations are emblematic of a broader trend in which the rights and voices of less powerful states and populations are consistently sidelined. The legitimate concerns of these states, often characterised by military and economic fragility, have been relegated to the periphery, exacerbating feelings of disenfranchisement and despair.

Compounding this precarious situation is the fact that all three power centres — Russia, China, and the US — are nuclear powers. This reality introduces an element of existential risk into the geopolitical calculus. The spectre of mutual assured destruction looms large, deterring overt military confrontation but simultaneously advancing a climate of instability. The fear of escalation creates a paradox: While the potential for nuclear conflict acts as a deterrent, it also perpetuates a precarious status quo that could fall at any moment.

In this context, the erosion of international law is not merely a legal concern; it poses a tangible threat to global peace. The moral compass that once underpinned the post-World War II order has been fragmented, leaving a void filled by militaristic posturing and geopolitical machinations. As nations increasingly resort to power politics and the barrel of a gun, the ideals of diplomacy and mutual respect risk being relegated to mere afterthoughts.

As we stand at this precipice, the urgency for a reinvigoration of international law and the principles that govern it has never been more pronounced. The global community must reassert its commitment to a rules-based order that prioritises justice, equality and accountability. This requires not only a re-evaluation of the existing power dynamics but also a concerted effort to elevate the voices of states and populations that have long been silenced.

Moreover, there is a pressing need for mechanisms that ensure the equitable application of international law, devoid of the selective enforcement that has characterised recent decades. Only through such reforms can we hope to restore faith in the international legal system and ensure that it serves as a genuine arbiter of justice rather than a tool for the powerful.

The near-death experience of international law invites reflection on our shared future. As we navigate the treacherous waters of a tripolar world, the stakes are undeniably high. The survival of the post-World War II order hangs in the balance, dependent on our ability to confront the complexities of contemporary geopolitics with integrity and resolve. We must strive to heal the fractures within our global governance structures, lest we find ourselves careening towards a regression that could lead us back to the Stone Age. In these dangerous times, the moral choices we make will shape not only our present but the legacy we leave for generations to come.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post The International System Is in Peril and Needs Urgent Reform appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

Lavender assigns every man in Gaza a numerical score from one to a hundred, based mainly on cell phone and social media data. It automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system known as “Where’s Daddy?” to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

Collateral damage

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place a man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched when he comes home.

The officers believe the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families is of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip. 

The officers who spoke to +972 explained that, in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses. So, these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.

The AI is new. The kill lists are not.

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in US wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala — to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.

Just as US weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and US military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German officers captured at the end of World War II. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front.

Gehlen and the Fremde Heere Ost had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet prisoners of war from all over the USSR and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns. All this to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA, welcomed them. He sent them back to Pullach, in occupied Germany, to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. After the formation of West Germany, the Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, or Federal Intelligence Service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

The CIA soon recruited other allies around the world. After a removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by US Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as , in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International that Iran had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief,” and that of the number of political prisoners ranged from 25,000 up to 100,000.

In Guatemala, a 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz with a brutal dictatorship. As in the 1960s, US special forces aided the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the US embassy a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the US role in the massacre in Indonesia. She spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad — there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

The CIA enlisted computers in its assassination schemes

Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the US role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.  

The program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at.Ìę

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione author Douglas Valentine how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the ‘hunter-killer’ teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc.,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom — that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the US defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.Ìę

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex systemÌę and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor.

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the US provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.Ìę

The US School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them — and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.

When the US the same methods to its hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek it “The Salvador Option.” A US officer explained to Newsweek that US and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel led the US Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the US-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.Ìę

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed interior minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was , the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.Ìę

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with corpses per month, while Casteel fed the Western media absurd cover stories such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in police uniforms.

Automated targeting

Meanwhile, US special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cell phone numbers mined from captured to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cell phones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior US told The Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Barack Obama put McChrystal in charge of US and NATO forces in 2009, and his cell phone-based “social network analysis” an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.Ìę

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cell phone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the US and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.Ìę

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cell phones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Davies has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead. 

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Old Strategy, New Technology: How Israel Uses AI-Generated Kill Lists appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

In the air war against the Nazi regime, the British Royal Air Force (RAF)’s Bomber Command initially sought to attack specific German military and industrial targets. This effort proved too costly and relatively ineffective. Then under its new leader, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, Bomber Command turned to a new tactic: “area bombing.” In effect, area bombing meant largely indiscriminate on German cities in an attempt to “de-house” the civilian population and break its morale. In 1943, an estimated 40,000 civilians were killed in the two-day Bombing of Hamburg, known by the code name “.”

Initially, US decision-makers had other ideas. Equipped with new, more accurate bombsights, the Eighth Air Force’s commanders were determined to Germany’s industrial infrastructure. These attacks were more successful, especially those that targeted the country’s oil refineries and synthetic rubber facilities. Yet by the war’s final years (1944–1945), the Eighth Air Force was carrying out almost daily raids on Berlin, a target with limited economic value. By the time of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Berlin and other German looked like the surface of the moon.

There is also the case of Dresden. A city with very limited economic value, both the RAF’s Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force targeted it. Between February 13 and 15, 1945, they a series of ruinous attacks that killed approximately 35,000 civilians. Winston Churchill supposedly decided he wanted Dresden bombed to Joseph Stalin the power of his arsenal.

Historical devastation unleashed on Japan

The strategic bombing campaign launched against Japan during the war was almost exclusively a US operation. It began in April 1942 with the famous on Tokyo. Physically, it did little overall damage. Psychologically, however, it was a spectacular for the US. They saw it as payback for the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. It also showed the Japanese public how vulnerable their home islands were to aerial assaults.

Serious air operations against Japan only began in the middle of June 1944, following the US of the Mariana Islands, notably Guam, Tinian and Saipan. The Marianas were close enough to Japan to permit the US Air Force to launch strategic bombing raids on Japanese cities. These attacks were also made possible by the deployment of the new Boeing B-29 bomber.

After some experimentation with its use, this craft was employed by General Curtis LeMay’s 509th Composite Group to stage firebombing raids on Japanese cities. The most lethal of these was the bombing of Tokyo, otherwise known by the code name “,” from March 9–10, 1945. One estimate is that approximately 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed during this one offensive. From March–August 1945, the US Air Force was also employed in mine-laying operations, under the code name “Operation Starvation,” with the goal to prevent fishing in the seas surrounding Japan.

The weapons used against Tokyo and the other cities were conventional weapons: incendiaries. The on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945, respectively) were something different. They were the first and so far only use of atomic weaponry in wartime. Not only this, but against a helpless civilian population.

These nuclear attacks and the radiation they left behind an estimated 214,000 people. They contributed to the Japanese government’s decision to surrender unconditionally to the Allies, bringing an end to the war.

Allies approved civilian slaughter

Seen in retrospect, one of the most striking things about indiscriminate British and US air attacks on civilian populations was the virtual absence of public criticism. It is true a handful of US nuclear scientists, led by Leo Szilard, circulated a to some of their peers objecting to the impending use of the atomic bomb. In Britain, the question was retrospectively about the need for the attack on Dresden. But at the time, there were no widespread public demonstrations about the Allied air attacks on civilians, nor any US or British radio commentators objecting to the carnage. If anything, Allied journalists tended to the bombing operations as significant achievements.

Why was there no public opposition or objections from Anglo-American newspaper or radio journalists and their attentive publics? Certainly, part of the answer was the widespread desire to retaliate. British civilians wanted revenge for the Nazi firebombing of major cities, especially London, during the Blitz. The US demanded payback for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, followed by the “fight to the death” response of the Japanese military as it struggled to prevent the Allied conquest of its occupied islands.

German and Japanese propaganda efforts to weaken British and US morale were unsuccessful. In Nazi Germany and Italy, British Fascist William Joyce and US turncoats Mildred Gillars and Rita Zucca — using the nicknames, “” and “,” respectively — made regular radio broadcasts stating the invincibility of the Axis Powers. In the Pacific, Iva Toguri D’Aquino, using the nickname, “,” made similar and equally unsuccessful attempts to undermine US morale — especially that of GIs fighting there.

To a significant extent, British and US journalists tended to define themselves as part of the war effort. There were exceptions here and there, however: In 1943, the isolationist Chicago Tribune the fact that US codebreakers had deciphered Japan’s Naval Code. That same year, journalist Drew Pearson made headlines when he a story that General George S Patton had slapped a soldier convalescing at a Sicilian hospital.

Substantial opposition to the Allied bombing of civilian targets developed well after World War II. The 1957 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marked a shift among Western intellectuals against strategic bombing. This retrospective opposition appeared in the context of the Cold War conflict between NATO and the Soviet Bloc countries.

The Israel–Hamas war: How does history compare?

To what degree does the current Israel–Hamas war resemble the exponentially larger struggle of World War II? At first glance, the answer would be little. The battle between the two sides is restricted to a small corner of the Middle East, while the scope of World War II was practically global. The same applies to the number of soldiers directly involved in the fighting: thousands, not millions.

The drones, missiles and other weapons being used by the Israelis and Hamas fighters are far more sophisticated than those available to either side in World War II. And the Israeli Iron Dome air defense would have been the envy of the soldiers of yesteryear. And, althought the Israelis do not advertise this fact, they possess nuclear weapons and the means to launch them.

There are no Hamas equivalents of “Lord Haw-Haw,” “Axis Sally” or “Tokyo Rose” employed to weaken Israeli morale. This is not because Hamas lacks the means, such as social media, to convey such messages. Rather, it is because the organization leaders regard their members as engaged in a holy war not only with Israelis, but with altogether. So, there is no point in surrendering. Hamas does not recognize any distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Israeli civilians, following the October 7, 2023 attacks, are not susceptible to such an appeal.

Aside from the scale and scope of the conflict, a crucial distinction between the two wars is the reactions of their audiences. With the possible exceptions of pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, his Indian followers and a few Axis wartime collaborators, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan enjoyed little popular support around the world.

The opposite is true for Hamas. Almost the entire ummah — the worldwide community of Muslim believers — and their religious and political leaders have for Hamas and its holy war with Israel. Strengthening their support is the fact that Israel controls Jerusalem, the location of many Muslim holy sites.

During World War II, most print journalists and radio reporters behaved as cheerleaders for the Allies’ cause. In the current conflict, with the technologies of mass communication being more varied and vastly superior, many journalists and influential people active in the West are now cheerleaders for Hamas. After briefly expressing sympathy for the Israelis murdered or kidnapped by Hamas fighters on October 7, major news outlets in Britain, the US and elsewhere reacted with thinly disguised hostility once the Israeli Air Force began bombarding Gaza. This malice was not confined to the civilian casualties involved, but to the existence of Israel itself. Antisemitism loomed large in both conflicts.

Antisemitism persists

One similarity between then and now, sadly, is antisemitism.

Hatred of Jews had no meaning in the war on Japan, but in the European conflict, it certainly did. In addition to the destruction of around two-thirds of the European Jewish community by the Nazis and their collaborators across Europe, the Western Allies were hardly immune to Jew-hatred. In Britain, foreign office officials repeatedly how tired they were of listening to the “wailing Jews” that sought their assistance.

Throughout World War II, the Royal Navy His Majesty’s Government’s White Paper of 1939. This seriously restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine. In other words, just as many European Jews were fleeing the Nazis, the British blocked the ports and sealed the exits.

The situation in the US was different. Figures in the Roosevelt Administration voiced sympathy for the ordeal of European Jews. But for the most part, their hands were tied. Surveys of US public opinion reflected widespread antisemitism. In view of this outlook, Congress was to modify immigration laws to permit more European refugees to enter the country. State Department officers controlling entry also did their best to deny visas to European Jews.

In the current Israel–Hamas war, the Jewish state has few friends aside from political leaders in the US and Britain. Even in these two countries, the present conflict has unleashed a wave of widespread antisemitism among professors, university students and Internet users that has not been seen in decades.

Animosity towards Jews appears to be a latent phenomenon throughout the Western world , needing only a stimulus to set it off, e.g.,Ìę the Israeli response to October 7. Among Muslims, on the other hand, antisemitism appears to be something visible and constant, reflected by the fact that Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to be throughout the Middle East.

What lessons should Israeli Jews and Westerners learn from these two wars? The obvious answers that come to mind are these: When the chips are down, you are on your own. And if you wish to survive, you had better learn to fight.

[ edited this piece.]

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Yet, to date, these fascist movements in the Arab world have not been compared to fascist movements in Europe. Some were heavily influenced by Europe’s fascism. In the case of the Lebanese and Spanish Phalangism, for instance, they both strongly emphasized religious identity to push their fascist agendas.

Addressing this gap in the literature, this article explores the Lebanese “Phalanges,” known as Čč±ô-°­ČčłÙÄć’iČú in Arabic, a paramilitary group which presented itself as but actually concerned itself with the national interests of Lebanon.

How the Phalanges drew inspiration from European Fascism

While some researchers have focused on the Lebanese Phalangesin the , no research has compared them to fascism in Europe. This is striking because they were inspired by the German Nazi regime, the in Czechoslovakia and, as the name implies, the Spanish Falange. Modeling them after these movements, Pierre Gemayel created the Lebanese Phalanges in 1936.Ìę

The Lebanese Phalanges shared several characteristics with European fascist movements at the time, such as upholding the importance of family and home and identifying an “other” to blame while picturing a glorious imaginary past.

Gemayel visited Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games. He was greatly attracted to Nazism and envisaged a Lebanon that would take after the :

I was the captain of the Lebanese football team and the president of the Lebanese Football Federation. We went to the Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin. And I saw then this discipline and order. And I said to myself: “Why can’t we do the same thing in Lebanon?” So when we came back to Lebanon, we created this youth movement. When I was in Berlin then, Nazism did not have the reputation which it has now. Nazism? In every system in the world, you can find something good. But Nazism was not Nazism at all. The word came afterwards. In their system, I saw discipline. And we in the Middle East, we need discipline more than anythingelse.

During his trip, Gemayel also visited several other European countries. In each of these countries, he made connections with their radical youth movements, studying their structure and observing them closely.

The Lebanese Phalanges

The Lebanese “Phalanges” were founded as a Christian “democratic” political organization in the 1930s that aimed to create a Westernized. The organization’s leaders were young, middle-class Christians with connections to France, which at the time ran the League of Nations Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon. In spite of the movement being officially secular, it was supported mainly by the Maronite Catholics, who often saw the Phalanges as the political expression of their Christian faith. The Maronites trace their origins to St. Maron (Arabic: MārĆ«n), a Syrian hermit of the late 4th and early 5th.

In line with fascist ideology, the movement upholds the importance of family and home with the “God, country, and family.” Their flag, which is also their logo, shows the cedar tree, which is often a trademark of Lebanon and “Lebaneseness.”Ìę

It is important to point out here that the Maronites, unlike some European fascists, did not see the Phalanges as a for their religion. The Phalanges connected fascist aspirations with religion.

The Lebanese Phalanges were also founded as a reaction to Muslim irredentist demands and to the growing strength of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which advocated for the absorption of Lebanon into a Greater Syria. The latter was a secret society that from a few students to about 1,000 members by 1935. In the 1930s the party into Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine.

For Lebanon, this era, 1936–1946, falls within the French mandate of the country. Lebanon gained its independence in 1943, and the French left the country in 1946. Also, 1945 was the end of WWII; in that same year, the Lebanese Phalanges put members but failed to win any seats until 1958.Ìę

The Spanish connection

The founders of the Phalanges chose the name, meaning “phalanx,” because they wanted it to be a semi-military group to instill discipline and organization in the Lebanese. Spanish political leader JosĂ© Antonio Primo de Rivera had named his party the Falange Española for similar reasons. This kind of concentration on youth was common in European fascism, particularly Nazism and Italian Fascism. Thus, most Lebanese Phalanges supporters at the time were the youth, particularly students and recent graduates. They stormed the streets of Beirut, chanting for Lebanese independence while asserting the country’s unique non-Arab identity.Ìę

Similar to their Spanish Falange, the Lebanese Phalanges adopted a nostalgic about “the return to empire.” For these Lebanese, this meant a future where the Phoenician legacy in Lebanon would once again take its place among the world’s nations while placing Christianity at its center.

In Spain, Falangism also placed a strong emphasis on Catholic religious identity, though it held some secular views on the Church’s direct influence in society, such as believing that the state should have supreme over the nation.Ìę

The Spanish movement gained importance from 1936 onwards, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War between right-wing nationalist rebels and supporters of the left-wing Second Spanish Republic. The Falange enjoyed an enormous influx of membership from frightened and disillusioned middle-class people to anti-republican militants. 

By the beginning of, it had several hundred thousand affiliates. General Francisco Franco, leader of the nationalist cause, weakened the movement’s original national-syndicalist ideology and made the Falange the official state party with a nominal membership of 900,000 in a country of. They provided the largest organized political following fully committed to the regime, and Franco found them indispensable. Franco was a Spanish military general who led the nationalist forces in overthrowing the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and thereafter ruled over Spain from 1939 to 1975 as a dictator.

Spanish Falangism promoted the revival and development of the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Falange and its affiliates in Hispanic states across the world promoted a form of pan-Hispanism which they described with the term Hispanidad. This advocated both a cultural and economic union of Hispanic societies around the world.

In fact, the Falange even produced maps that included Portugal as a province of Spain, especially during its early years of existence. After the Spanish Civil War, some radical members of the Spanish Falange called for reunification with Portugal and the annexation of former Spanish territories in the French Pyrenees. It has sought to unite ethnically Hispanic peoples, with proposals to create a commonwealth or federation of Spanish-speaking states headed by Spain.

Similarly, the Lebanese Phalanges believe the Phoenicians were the original residents of the Mediterranean coast. The Lebanese Phalanges imagined a glorious past, combining stories of a mythical golden age with ancestral legends and nationalÌę

The Phalanges’ leaders often used Phoenician phraseology to express the non-Arab identity of Lebanon, for instance, “Lebanon is not Phoenician [
] it is Phoenician, however, in culture and ethos, bequeathed to the modern Lebanese by their forefathers.” In this way, the Phalanges saw themselves as protectors of the Lebanese nation and carriers of Western influence against Arabs.Ìę

Although more work is needed on both movements’ ideological placement, this preliminary treatment should make clear how the Phalanges of Lebanon drew from the nationalist ideologies of their European counterparts.

[ edited this piece.]

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Every year, these exemplars of earthly success produce for our consumption some great, resounding idea or set of ideas meant to clarify the terms of the quotidian struggle we common mortals are engaged in. We should feel reassured. The new global aristocracy, whose PR is handled by these masters of social, political and economic insight, generously shares their conclusions with the rest of the world. This year their spiritual leader, Klaus Schwab, set the tone, informing us that this is a “unique juncture in human history facing challenges that are as diverse as they are profound.”

So what must we do to meet those challenges? The message was simple: “Rebuild trust.” This, of course, could be taken as an admission that a deficit of trust exists with regard to all the institutions that matter. These include governments, media, think tanks and
 influencers? I add the last merely because they have become an institution in their own right.

If you truly believe there is a failure of trust, rather than exhorting people to show more trust, you should be spending your time and energy inquiring why trust has evaporated. To its credit, the WEF team appeared to accept that something was rotten in the state of the former unipolar order. They even hinted a new world order could be in the offing.

One key moment occurred when the WEF’s president, Norwegian Conservative politician Bþrge Brende, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Confronting Sullivan with one of the memes of this year’s conference — the idea that the global order was undergoing a major transition — Joe Biden’s strategic thinker suddenly appeared to feel deeply uncomfortable. Was Brende intimating that the famous “world order” — sometimes referred to as the unipolar moment, in which the US has played a central role since World War II — was near its end and might soon be buried under the alluvia of history?

Sullivan’s quick thinking allowed him to dodge the issue by a shift of vocabulary. Instead of a change of order, he saw it as a change of “era.”

“I think of this a little bit more about a transition of eras rather than a transition to orders, but the two are kind of cousins of one another. The reason I draw the distinction is because I don’t think the international order built after 1945 is getting replaced wholesale with some new order; it will obviously evolve as it has evolved multiple times over the decades since 1945.”

Sullivan clearly believes in the persistence of the Pax Americana, even if it has consistently provided more bellum (war) than pax (peace). He sees no reason for calling into question the existing system of authority. On the contrary, he affirmed its power to act. “We have the capacity to shape what that looks like. And at the heart of it will be many of the core principles and core institutions of the existing order adapted for the challenges that we face today.”

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Core principles:

The implicit, unwritten and deliberately unarticulated rules that permit the exercise of power by those who control the status quo and can promote it as the accepted norm.

Contextual note

Sullivan gave away his game when he called the forces he invoked “the core principles and core institutions of the existing order,” which should be taken to be “the accepted norm.” An “existing order” stands as a power structure, a system of authoritative control that cannot be called into question. The “accepted norm” implies an admission of powerlessness by all those who do not hold the reins of power or simply can’t afford the trip to Davos.

When Sullivan claimed that “we have the capacity to shape what that looks like,” he played an interesting trick with regard to the subject of his proposition. Who is the “we” he invokes? This demonstrates the skill of someone who has mastered the art of what Shakespeare in Macbeth called “equivocation.” “We” is an inclusive pronoun. But whom does it typically include?Ìę

Sullivan wanted to have it four different ways. The “we” may refer to the government he represents, the Biden administration. Alternatively, it may designate the two people involved in the conversation, though Sullivan was probably not counting on Brende to lend a hand personally. “We” could refer to the entire elite assembly in Davos, the people whose accumulated power permits them to rule the world. The fourth and final possibility is humanity itself, the entire global population.

Most likely, what Sullivan had in mind were both the first and third references: his government and an undefined ruling global elite, the committed defenders of the status quo.

Historical note

Sullivan continued his reflection. He even appeared to see at least an abstract basis for acknowledging a potential modification of the sacred status quo. “But, yes,” he told the audience, “I believe we’ve entered a new era. I think that era is marked by a simple thing to say but a very complex reality, which is strategic competition in an age of interdependence. The major powers are deeply interdependent; they are also competitive. And that creates the world we’re operating in.”

This is the expected binary thinking endemic in US strategic reflection. On one side, interdependence; on the other, competition. Unlike the yin and yang, in which each term contains the other, they are opposed rather than dynamically related. But Sullivan’s level of abstraction makes the entire proposition meaningless. Yes, contrary trends always exist. So what? In his view, it’s the existing elite’s role to balance them.

Although Sullivan avoids it, the formerly unfashionable idea of a “ world” has achieved the level of a Davos meme. It’s a concept that very directly challenges the notion that the historical period commonly referred to as the “unipolar moment” may persist. This was the period that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the US as the world’s unique superpower. Joe Biden apparently sees that moment as the start of what has been “the American century.” In December 2020, the president-elect asserted, “I, honest to God, believe the 21st century’s going to be an American century.”

More and more lucid commentators today — such as historian Alfred McCoy in these columns — are prone to concluding that the American century is about to end. It may have escaped Biden’s aging brain when the influential publisher, Henry Luce, coined the phrase in 1941, he was presciently invoking a century of American domination that would begin once the war was over.Ìę

McCoy has been asserting for some time that it was the foreign policy of George W Bush, the mad promoter of his Global War on Terror, that set in motion the inexorable decline that would cut short the American century. The “core institutions” of that system of domination — including the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization — are still in place, though they reveal themselves increasingly powerless to maintain an order that was seriously shaken for the first time in 1971 when President Richard Nixon dismantled its key institution, the framework of the Bretton Woods agreement, by decoupling the dollar from gold. That event marked the disappearance of one of the essential “core principles” Sullivan refers to.

One is left wondering what other principles now remain. Fundamental ideas like democracy and the rule of law have never appeared more fragile. A series of chaotic elections in the US has coupled with systemic media prevarication have destroyed the kind of “trust” in the institutions the WEF seeks to restore.

Will, this time around, the WEF’s annual exercise of equivocation conducted high in the Swiss Alps reassure anyone?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of51łÔčÏ Devil’s Dictionary.]

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The book describes the trial of Marshal Philippe PĂ©tain, which took place only a few weeks after the war ended, and uses it to do two things: look back at the events that led to France’s humiliating defeat in 1940, and look forward to the present day to see how France remembers, and commemorates, its behavior between 1940 and 1945, especially ±čŸ±Čő-Ă -±čŸ±Čő Jewish people.

PĂ©tain was the great French war hero of World War I, especially due to his leadership in the crucial Battle of Verdun in 1916. Through this, he had acquired a godlike status. By the 1930s, PĂ©tain had long been retired from the army, and thus he had no responsibility for the strategic error of the French High Command that led to the defeat of May 1940. This error was sending the French Army deep into Belgium when Germany attacked that country, which created a gap in French defenses that allowed the Germans to encircle a large portion of the Allied armies from the rear in the vicinity of Dunkirk.

The consequences of this mistake discredited those who held office in France in the period immediately before the war. This included former prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud. Both of these ex-prime ministers gave evidence in PĂ©tain’s trial.

So did another ex-prime minister, Pierre Laval, who was later to be tried and executed for treason in 1945.

The author says that, for Laval, “no cause, however noble, could justify a war.” He had been prime minister in the 1930s and wanted reconciliation with Italy. During World War II, he said that he favored German victory, a matter on which PĂ©tain wisely offered no opinion.

When the Germans surrendered in 1945, Laval escaped to Spain, but Franco did not want him. According to the author, Laval was then offered asylum by the Irish government, presumably on the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera’s instructions.

I have never read any exploration of this issue in books about de Valera. Laval could have proved an embarrassing guest for Ireland. In the event, Laval opted to return to France and face a trial which he must have known would sentence him to death rather than live peacefully in Ireland.

PĂ©tain’s emergency leadership

Coming back to the dilemma faced by the French government in 1940, after the shock of the encirclement had worn off, the French army resisted the Germans bravely and effectively in central France. But the damage to public morale, caused by the initial defeat, was too deep. 

Could the French Army have resisted long enough to retreat with their government to Algeria (technically part of France)?

Some of PĂ©tain’s accusers argued that he should have taken this option and ordered the army to fight on rather than seek an armistice from the Germans. Others criticized him for not joining the Americans when they landed in North Africa in 1942. Instead, he authorized the French Army in North Africa to resist the Americans. Many interpreted this as treason.

How did PĂ©tain come to be in charge in late 1940 and thus be in a position to make these choices?

The previous French government, headed by Reynaud, had retreated from Paris to Bordeaux after the initial defeat in May 1940. But it needed a new leader. It turned to PĂ©tain, as an untainted national leader, to head a new government.

It was almost as if the politicians gathered in Bordeaux felt they needed the “PĂ©tain magic” to restore France. This was the hope on the basis of which the National Assembly made PĂ©tain head of state, soon with unlimited powers. It was never a viable project.

If PĂ©tain had thought things through, he would never have lent himself to such a dubious and hopeless endeavor. His vanity got the better of him. 

Even if Germany had won the war, and had come to terms with Britain, the prestige of PĂ©tain would not have sufficed to wipe France’s humiliation away.

Trial of a once-hero

How informative were the proceedings at the trial?

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that some issues were explored too much in the trial and that others deserved more attention.

A big part of the prosecution’s case was that PĂ©tain had long been preparing himself for a French military defeat and plotting how to exploit defeat to grasp supreme power. There was no evidence to back this.

The issue that got too little attention in the trial, in light of what we now know, was the active involvement of the French police, and of the Vichy government, in the transportation of the Jews to the gas chambers.

PĂ©tain’s defense team argued that the regime had spared many French people, including French Jews, from the horrors of direct German occupation by taking over the administration of a large portion of the interior of the country from 1940 to 1943 and that this saved lives.

There is statistical evidence to back this up. The survival rate of Jews in France, at the end of the war, was much higher than that of Jews in Poland and the Netherlands, which were directly occupied by the Germans and where virtually every Jew was wiped out.

Another issue that could have gotten more attention was the Munich Agreement with Hitler which sapped French morale.

Many of the themes evoked in this book are current today.

Grappling with the past

What is treason?

Is it treasonable to make the mistake of backing the loser?

Where is the line to be drawn between bad political judgment and treason? Where is the boundary between making a legitimate political judgment, and betraying a cause that is, or appears, lost?

What constitutes a war crime? That had not been defined at the time.

Who should be the jury in a trial like this? PĂ©tain’s jury consisted of two halves: sitting National Assembly deputies and recently active members of the Resistance. This politicized the judicial system in a way that would not be allowed today.

Jackson’s book also explores the emotions of the French people in the aftermath of an acute crisis. France has emerged as a strong democracy despite the trauma.

For the record, PĂ©tain was condemned to death at the end of the trial. But the jury anticipated, correctly, that Charles de Gaulle would commute the sentence. PĂ©tain died peacefully some years later.

The great merit of the book is the human stories it tells so well, prompting the reader to ask how he or she would have reacted if faced with the same dilemmas.

[ edited this piece.]

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It’s a tricky question since the Third Reich is probably the highest expression of hard power in human history. Hard power consists in financial or social coercion and, above all, military power. Soft power, on the other hand, is usually felt through diplomacy, science, sports and, most effectively, arts and entertainment. 

Hollywood turned the Nazi regime into a soft power asset for the United States throughout movie history, showing the moral, intellectual and martial superiority of the Allies in films like Casablanca (1942), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), From Here to Eternity (1953), Patton (1970), Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). All of these got took the most important Academy Awards; the Oscars, indeed, are the final coronation of Hollywood’s soft power.

The UK also used the victory against the Nazis as a soft power asset in films like in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The English Patient (1996). Russia, likewise, has its World War II films, such as Only “Old Men” Are Going Into Battle (1973), They Fought for Their Country (1975) and Stalingrad (2013). Coincidently or not, since Russia became the West’s political enemy during the Cold War, none of them got any significant awards in major festivals.

Turning other nation’s hard power into our own soft power is an old strategy of Hollywood, sometimes with direct help from the seat of hard power, Washington itself—like when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered movies to be made to engage citizens in the American cause, like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942) and Walt Disney’s of characters like ZĂ© Carioca for movies like Saludos Amigos (1942) as a conscious effort to keep Latin America close to the US during the war and supplying foods and commodities for the allied soldiers.

All Quiet on the Western Front

This year, however, a German movie made Oscar history and , including Best Picture, by showing World War I from Germany’s point of view. All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Edward Berger’s adaptation of the 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, is a war spectacle that trails Paul BĂ€umer, played by Felix Kammerer.

BĂ€umer is a frightened soldier during most of its 150 minutes, as Germany and France negotiate a ceasefire. Ceaseless scenes of brutality, shot in a widened scope, and powerful images closely follow BĂ€umer, deepening his human character, an essential cinematic tool to keep the viewers intimate and close to the protagonist, even if not because of his cause. The adaptation’s greatest quality lies exactly here: its ability to avoid stereotyping, something that Hollywood done has many times with Nazi Germans, Viet Cong, Soviets and so on. In contrast, Paul BĂ€umer is shown with his fears, desires, human mercy and naivety, through which we instantly connect with him. 

World War I, however, is not a big “cinematic taboo” for Germans like World War II—the greatest human tragedy of modern times or maybe of all times, responsible for the deaths of 35 to 60 million people or . With the help of Hollywood’s soft power, the Third Reich became solidly portrayed as the greatest enemy of human history. So, again, the question: can World War II, the Nazi regime, become a soft power asset through cinema for Germany?

Are we ready for a new look at WWII?

It’s probably impossible to imagine modern democratic societies accepting any German movies that simply show a sympathetic German point of view about World War II, no matter how good the movie is. It is hard to believe that any film could repeat the feat of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), which is considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made, studied in all film schools around the world because of the director’s use of techniques such as aerial photography, long-focus lenses, moving cameras, distorted perspective and music. Even despite its fame, none of the several awards the film won in Germany, France and Italy are today listed by major websites like IMDb, except for “Best Foreign Documentary” in the Venice Film Festival held during Mussolini’s dictatorship. 

German filmmakers and production companies have long circumvented this taboo with the same strategy Berger used in All Quiet on the Western Front: a script that relies on character density and preferably puts the conflict as a half-distant background. The Tin Drum (1979), directed by Volker Schlöndorff, accompanies Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent), who falls down the stairs at the age of three and stops growing up. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film by leaving the horror of the war distant and caricatural. Two years later, the German director Wolfgang Petersen got six Academy Awards nominations for his Das Boot (1981), an achievement only made possible because the movie portrays the horrors of the Nazi regime inside the claustrophobic submarine in the same way Hollywood had portrayed it for decades.

Recently, though, German movies that portray the Nazi regime with a closer and less stereotypical look from Germans themselves are getting recognition from relevant festivals around the world. Before the Fall (2004) directed by Dennis Gansel, takes a close look at the war while showing the boxing abilities of Friedrich Weimer (Max Riemelt), whose athletic skills take him to an elite Nazi high school in 1942. He applies, against his father’s wishes, to pursue a better future. 

More recently, Robert Schwentke’s The Captain (2017) follows the last days of World War II with a young German soldier, fighting for survival, who finds a Nazi captain uniform and assumes his identity. To escape the Nazis’ monstrousness, he becomes, himself, a monster. The movie won 23 international awards in festivals like the European Film Awards and the San SebastiĂĄn International Film Festival. 

The Academy Awards, considered the most important film festival in the world, still have not shared their soft power with German filmmakers who portray the Nazi regime with a less stereotypical look. But the success of All Quiet on the Western Front in the last iteration of the Academy Awards shows that even the most horrifying episodes of the human race may become a soft power asset to a nation that carried it out if filmmakers manage to depict human goodness, mercy and hope among evil and chaos.

[ edited this piece.]

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So, why did I choose to make Britain home?

Firstly, because it is a very pleasant place to live. Britain has parks, libraries, museums, theatres and a very high level of culture. Secondly, it has been an intellectually stimulating place to live. Britain has world-class universities, excellent media and lively public discourse. In the sciences, it may not be able to match the US, but the land of Isaac Newton still punches far above its weight. Finally, Britain has been a good place for business. British pluck is well known. This is the nation that stood up to Nazi Germany when the rest of Europe crumbled and saved democracy on the continent.

Yet this place that I have made my home is no longer marching to the broad sunlit uplands. Sadly, the sun has indeed set on the British Empire. 

The British can thank Brexit for this sunset. This vote to leave Europe will go down the annals of history as the biggest political hara-kiri in the country’s recent history.

Core systemic challenges 

After World War II, Britain lost its empire but retained its seat at the top table. After the 1956 Suez Crisis, the UK has been a loyal ally of the US. The Brits have followed the American lead on Afghanistan, Iraq and now the Russia-Ukraine War.

Yet this “special relationship” is not keeping the British economy afloat anymore. High inflation, high tax, low growth, low wages and, alarmingly, now define the economy. According to The Economist, Britain’s economic record since 2007 near the bottom among peer countries.

After World War II, Britain introduced the cradle-to-grave welfare economy. Clement Attlee’s Labour government introduced the National Health Service (NHS) that the British have come to treasure. Yet this national treasure is in . Waiting times for patients have been going up. Junior doctors have that they will be going on strike. No less than “819,000 operations, procedures and appointments in England have been , adding to the 7.5 million people waiting to start routine hospital treatment.”

The welfare system is simply not working anymore. The UK does not have the economic growth to pay for it anymore. Even the NHS is collapsing. The truth is that generations who have not worked and lived off the welfare system are draining the economy. The UK simply cannot afford to keep subsidizing those who do not work. Sir Humphrey Appleby’s suggestion to cut off all social security to those who turn down two job offers might not be such a bad idea.

Flawed tax structure

With an aging population and increasingly fewer people paying taxes, the government is under pressure to balance the books by increasing tax rates on those who do pay. If you earn ÂŁ50,271 ($64,620) to ÂŁ125,140, then you pay 40% of that income to (HMRC) department. If you earn over ÂŁ125,140 ($160,910), then the government takes 45% of every extra pound you make.

Add value-added tax (VAT), national insurance and other taxes and you find that the tax figure climbs to well above 60% of your income. With such high taxes, why should anyone work?

The UK has not only decreased the incentive to work but it has also made it less attractive for capital to remain in the country. is 40% on the value of an estate above ÂŁ325,000 ($417,760). This tax has to be paid immediately, even before probate is granted. (“Probate is the legal right to deal with someone’s property, money and possessions (their ‘estate’) when they die,” according to the .) Such a high inheritance that has to be paid immediately ensures that many inheritors sell off properties just to pay the HMRC. 

The UK’s English-speaking cousin across the Atlantic is far less punitive when it comes to what the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) calls the estate tax. This tax only kicks in when you cross $12,920,000. It is not just the US that is liberal on inheritance taxes. In 2004, the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, abolished the inheritance tax and the gift tax through a unanimous vote.

The UK has even hobbled the City of London, once a rival to Wall Street but now reeling under a law that treats the gains of fund managers as income. In contrast, the US treats these gains as carried interest. This is the term used to describe a share of profits earned by general partners of private equity, venture capital and hedge funds. In the US, fund managers pay a top 20% federal tax rate on carried interest, rather than regular federal income tax rates of up to 37%. Naturally, fund managers no longer want to incorporate funds in the UK.

As if these taxation measures were not foolish enough, the government has delivered a coup de grñce. A Conservative government, which is supposedly pro-free market, abolished the VAT refund for foreign tourists. For decades, rich travelers—Arab, Russian, Chinese, Indian et al.—have shopped till they dropped in London and other parts of the UK. From January 1, 2021, these foreign tourists have had to pay taxes on their purchases. This makes London a less attractive destination as compared to Paris or Milan. Harrods, Selfridges and Bicester Village once teemed with foreign tourists but now attract sparse crowds even in the middle of the summer.

The British economy is in a deep crisis. Once the Industrial Revolution and British Empire made the UK rich, powerful and prestigious. Only the memories of Raj Britannica remain now. The economy is in the gutter, the middle class is in pain and the country’s leaders have no vision for the future. This blessed green island nation I call home is not so blessed anymore.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post The Sun Has Now Set on the British Empire appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

The new defense alliance reflected the logic of the region, which included the majority of the world’s industrially developed nations, all in close proximity to the Atlantic Ocean and north of the Tropic of Cancer. Collins dictionary defines the term “North Atlantic” as: “the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean, esp the waters separating North America and Europe.”

By focusing on “defense” and its character as an “alliance,” NATO sought to create the perception that it existed as pure potency, rather than as an active force that would intervene militarily in geopolitics. At NATO’s core reigned the idea that peace and non-aggression were the norm. Security was the watchword. It was about potentially defending or protecting the peace within Europe. Because the contest turned into a race—the nuclear arms race—rather than a war, a peaceful consumer society could prosper and grow on both sides of the North Atlantic.

NATO became a logical necessity once the Cold War was officially announced, opposing capitalism and communism. Both sides had nuclear bombs. In Robert Oppenheimer’s borrowed words, both had “become death, a destroyer of worlds.” The entire drama was confined to the northern hemisphere, with the Soviet and American empires engaged in a permanent showdown, with Europe in the middle.  

Since those early days, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the very idea of NATO has undergone radical changes. Technically, there was no further reason for NATO to exist. The communist military menace had ended up in the dustbin of history. But not only did it continue to exist, it began expanding, much like La Fontaine’s frog that wished to be as big as an ox.

At this month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, the media noted that Japan and NATO appeared to agree on a new partnership program. To make it more concrete, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg proposed creating a NATO liaison office in Tokyo. Alas, France’s President Emmanuel Macron –  profiting from the rule that NATO decisions must be decided unanimously –  prevented that resolution from being passed.

Stoltenberg had the Tokyo liaison office proposal in an interview with CNN in May. On that occasion, he insisted that “Japan is a very close and important partner for NATO.” On NATO’s own, we can read today the assertion: “No partner is closer than Japan.”

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Close:

1. Near, in geographical terms
2. Emotionally connected
3. Ideologically formatted thanks to an asymmetric relationship in which a dominant power can dictate to subservient powers the policy orientation that undergirds its own value system and ensure the subordinates will serve its interests.

Contextual note

NATO’s Orwellian “Newspeak” retains only the third definition. After all, the distance between Tokyo and Brussels is exactly 9,442 km. The distance between Tokyo and Washington is 10,900 km, which is almost exactly halfway around the world at that latitude. So, the first definition has no meaning.

The second definition is about personal feelings. It could have meaning, but only if it were legitimate to draw conclusions about entire populations on the basis of what military and political strategists feel on both sides. Members of the political warrior class quite naturally sense some kind of universal bond when assuming there is a common enemy. But clearly neither Europeans, Japanese nor even the American people feel emotionally connected to Japan. 99.99% of the global population outside of Japan, even among those who admire Japanese culture, literally feels no emotional connection with the Japanese. The fact that the Japanese themselves have notoriously cultivated a “Gaijin complex” (distrust of foreigners) attests to this reality. 

Even while asserting a concordance of “values” between Tokyo and Brussels, Stoltenberg personally shows no evident capacity to identify with Japan’s hyper-collectivist culture, the contrary of Western individualism. In the NATO context, the dictionary’s second meaning of “close” makes no more sense than the first. In the annals of lexicography, our Devil’s Dictionary, therefore, stands as unique in providing an accurate description of Stoltenberg’s use of language. Close describes what is distant.

NATO expansion, the central fact that provoked the war in Ukraine, is one thing. But this kind of linguistic expansion— or rather inflation—is outdoing even La Fontaine’s frog. Should the world accept with a shrug that the North Atlantic now encompasses the South Pacific? We might rather be tempted to ask ourselves this question: Which nations in the world have direct access to both oceans? There are two: Canada and the US. In terms of power politics, Canada is a featherweight. But fragmented Europe, so distant from the Pacific, isn’t even part of the discussion. It should be clear by now that NATO is quite simply a tool of US foreign policy.

NATO’s obsession with the Pacific clearly means that the treaty organization is no longer about maintaining peace in Europe at all. Instead, it is about Washington’s plans for war with China. Beltway politicians, diplomats and media increasingly evoke this as the inevitable next step in geopolitical action. Macron alone seems to have that the motivating factor is not peace, but global conquest. Sensitive to the meaning of words, the French president argued: “Whatever people say, geography is stubborn.” He then added this truism: “The Indo-Pacific is not the North Atlantic, so we must not give the impression that NATO is somehow building legitimacy and a geographically established presence in other areas.”

Undaunted, Stoltenberg on July 12: “Security is not regional, it is global—so we are determined to continue deepening our cooperation.”

Put more bluntly, NATO has evolved from a tool designed to provide a soft landing after World War II into a willing initiator of World War III. Speaking with reporters at Vilnius, Stoltenberg called China a NATO “adversary,” and said, “China is increasingly challenging the rules-based international order, refusing to condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine, threatening Taiwan and carrying out a substantial military build-up.”

What Stolteberg failed to mention is that the Global South in its entirety is also challenging the rules-based international order, refusing to condemn Russia and demonstrating a studied indifference to the question of who owns and controls Taiwan. Moreover, most of the Global South recognizes that China has a long way to go to match the military build-up of NATO (i.e. the US military-industrial complex and its client states). Does that also make the Global South NATO’s enemy? Stoltenberg didn’t say.

Historical note

At this point in history, we can have some idea – however equivocal – of where NATO has been and what it still represents. After all, as an expanding alliance, at its base it still groups together in its core all the nations that, over the past 500 years, have practiced the most outrageous forms of colonialism on every continent. Their current wealth reflects that history. But things are rapidly changing. What gave some the impression of being a stabilizing factor in the past may prove to be the opposite in an evolving context.

After 1991, Cold War architect was not alone in observing that NATO had outlived its usefulness as defined by its initial mission. Created to respond to an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia focused on a rival economic system that could legitimately be suspected of seeking to spread its ideology across Europe and elsewhere in the world, the paranoia should have faded away. The rational leaders of the victorious capitalist West needed simply to redirect their attention towards constructing a new world order in conformity with Francis Fukyama’s blueprint for the “end of history.”

They chose a different path. In an article on The Tricontinental, Vijay Prashad traces the complex evolution of NATO since its beginnings. He highlights its permanent, though never publicly avowed ambition to stretch its influence well beyond the North Atlantic. He concludes by speculating that NATO’s ambition now has less and less to do with military prowess and security concerns than with the ambition of establishing its moral bullying power and incarnating its own rules-based order. “Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the U.N., suggesting that it—and not the actual international community—is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security and values.’”

Amazingly, there are commentators among the former colonial powers who are still wondering why the nations of the Global South have not simply fallen into line. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51łÔčÏ Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Macron Wants to Break Up Stoltenberg’s New Love Affair appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

First, the crazy idea, once expressed and shared publicly, begins to influence the thinking of those who have the power of decision-making or at least those with power over the implementation of real outcomes.

Who are these people? They tend to be either diplomats or military strategists. In some cases they are academics or even media celebrities. When some in either of these groups begin toying with one or even multiple crazy ideas, those ideas stop seeming crazy and can provide the groundwork for reaching some form of resolution. They may literally open an Overton window.

The second way a crazy idea may play out is more subtle. Its very craziness can set the stage for imagining other crazy ideas, one of which may point towards an unforeseen resolution. In this age of increasingly standardized discourse—not to say propaganda—this could prove to have a salutary effect.

Most people agree there is no lack of conflict in today’s world, the most egregious being the war in Ukraine. But there is a growing litany of others worth considering: trade wars, supply chain conflict, cultural conflict, generational clashes, class war, ethnic and religious confrontations, ideological standoffs, currency competition (dollar hegemony, crypto vs. fiat currency), competing economic priorities surrounding the climate crisis. The list expands exponentially as one moves from the global towards the local.

The context of today’s Crazy Idea

Topic: the war in Ukraine.

This week in Vilnius, Lithuania the leaders of NATO will meet to deliberate presumably on two topics:

1. The state of the war, which, despite official denials, no one can legitimately deny is a proxy war between NATO, led by the US, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia,
2. Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO.

From NATO’s point of view, the real stakes are Russia’s influence in the world; from Russia’s, they are its regional security. NATO claims the conflict is about Ukraine’s sovereignty and nothing else. Russia claims it’s about the denazification of Ukraine and the security of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Those official formulations on both sides reflect only one small aspect of the real issue, which is geopolitically complex.

 No one can predict at the beginning of this week how NATO will assess the state of a war that appears to be increasingly unfavorable on the ground to the NATO-Ukrainian cause. Will this provoke a timid move towards conciliation of a doubling down of NATO’s commitment with the risk of edging ever closer to nuclear confrontation?

It appears that the conference will seek to arrive at a definitive consensus on the principle of admitting Ukraine into NATO, but only after a formal peace is achieved. Because for the moment there is no prospect for negotiation of a peace deal, the idea of Ukraine joining NATO, even if unanimously approved, remains something of a pipe dream. What will Ukraine look like after a peace deal? Will it even exist as a viable political entity? So long as no serious discussions about discussions of peace are underway, that question has no meaning.

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Crazy Idea

A crazy idea is one that no one in politics or the media dares for the moment to enunciate, even if the thought may have crossed some people’s minds. Crazy ideas tend to be simple in their basic formulation. If taken seriously and ultimately implemented they acquire several degrees of complexity, but the basic idea becomes the driving force behind whatever solution emerges.

The basic form of today’s crazy idea is that NATO decides not just to admit Ukraine to NATO but also Russia.

That sounds preposterous, and it is preposterous, given the attitudes of the major actors. But as I pointed out last week, there are two historical precedents, in 1954 and 1999. On both of those occasions the Moscow government – the USSR in the first case, Russia in the second – expressed a desire to be part of NATO.

Why it may not be so crazy

The two historical precedents, both categorically refused by the US, demonstrate that the status of such an idea can be described as objectionable but not unthinkable. That’s an important distinction. If the right people are allowed to think freely about it, it can potentially become viable.

If both Russia and Ukraine were invited to join NATO, it would have an effect similar to what happened after the initial creation of NATO in 1949. It would eliminate the risk of armed conflict between any two nations in the organization and would thus guarantee Ukraine’s security and eliminate Russia’s perception of NATO as an existential threat. Borders could be redefined, as required, in a spirit of mutual respect and.

Though the US has never looked kindly upon Russian integration into Europe because it would threaten the balance of economic power that since World War II has been massively skewed in favor of the US, Russia’s association with European security could pull it away from China, serving to isolate the Beijing and break up the growing alliance between the two historical superpowers.

Why it’s just crazy enough not to be taken seriously

Foreign policy experts in the US have studied the theory elaborated more than a century ago by the British geographer and politician, Halford Mackinder. As an original geopolitical thinker at the height of the British empire’s extension across the globe, Mackinder described the Eurasian landmass as “the world island” and resoundingly announced his heartland principle: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.

In his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard, President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was deeply familiar with Mackinder’s theory, designated Ukraine as an “important space on the Eurasian chessboard.” In other words, foreign policy wonks in Washington have long understood that, even as an ally, a greater Europe that could include Russia would constitute Mackinder’s Heartland. It would be far too powerful in relation to the US, militarily and economically, and thus constitute a far greater threat to US hegemony than a rising China, or even—as we’re seeing now—a close alliance between China and Russia.

In other words, the US has a holy fear of the very idea of Russia’s integration into Europe. It has consistently seen Ukraine, rather, as the key to preventing Russia from coupling with Europe.

In contrast, Europeans have been aware of the economic advantages of having a strong relationship with Russia. Germany in particular is now discovering the crippling effects of the US putting in place an new iron curtain cutting it off not only from trade with the East, including restrictions on trade with China, but especially the cheap energy that was a key to the efficiency of German industry.

If they were free to speak their minds, Europeans might well be in favor of the crazy and verboten idea of integrating Russia into a vastly expanded NATO. They may even think that the US would see this as ultimately advantageous. But whatever they think, if indeed they do think after being trained for seven decades to keep their thoughts to themselves, they are not about to express it.

It would not be crazy to suppose that some Europeans, especially those of Old Europe led by Germany and France, are thinking that the more European nations there are in NATO, the easier it will be in a not-too-distant future for Europe to take the reins of NATO, define its own security framework and thereby weaken the influence—which is currently more like domination—of the US.

I’ll repeat what I’ve just said: it would not be crazy to suppose Europeans are thinking along these lines. But it would be absolutely bonkers to suppose that the US is not intent on stopping any move in that direction.

Europe currently has no margin of maneuver, but in a multipolar world intent upon limiting the power of US hegemony, that margin of maneuver could increase and allow for a new configuration of the geopolitical order in which Europe could play a balancing role between the US and China. In today’s world that seems utterly unthinkable, to the point that no sane person other than someone writing a column about crazy ideas would dare to evoke it. But an Afghanistan-style end to the Ukraine war, whether it occurs later this year or 19 years down the line, might end up providing the conditions that could allow that kind of configuration to fall into place.

An appeal to our readers

We at 51łÔčÏ believe that it is incumbent on all of humanity, including our authors and readers, to think about and eventually propose unorthodox and even manifestly illogical approaches to apparently insoluble conflicts. For that reason, we invite you to submit well-reasoned Crazy Ideas that we will regularly publish.

We only ask that your submissions respect the format of this one, with the following four-part structure:

1. The context of today’s Crazy Idea
   Background on the who, what, when and why that justifies imagining a crazy idea.
2. °ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Crazy Idea
   A concise formulation of the idea with eventually a paragraph clarifying its meaning.
3. Why it may not be crazy
   An explanation of the factors that make it worth considering, even if it appears utterly unlikely to be applied.
4. Why it’s just crazy enough not to be taken seriously
   Here is where you help readers to understand the redoubtable obstacles to achieving it and the utter unlikelihood of its ever being implemented.

With a bit of luck, the great decision-makers of our crazy world will discover your suggestions and begin to mull them over, eventually integrating them into the sort of modes of thought that could change the world we live in for the better.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post A Crazy Idea Aimed at Achieving Peace in the World appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

As he reiterated his request for post-Soviet Russia to join NATO, President Vladimir Putin, who had been in office little more than a year, pointed out that there was an even earlier precedent. “He revealed that the 1954 response from the West to a request by the Soviet Union to join NATO was that ‘the unrealistic nature of the proposal does not warrant discussion.’”

 â€œA mischievous Putin,” the article continues, “pointed out that he suggested Russian membership of Nato a year ago but was rebuffed by Madeleine Albright, then the US Secretary of State.”

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Unrealistic:

Not in conformity with Washington’s post-World War II policy of global hegemony, which became the orthodoxy of the Truman and Eisenhower administration.

Contextual note

The idea that something does not “warrant discussion” is in itself interesting. Diplomacy has always been about discussion. Discussion means dialogue or exchange. It ultimately implies seeking acceptable compromises once all the facts and intentions are on the table.

In the real world of diplomacy literally everything “warrants discussion.” One of the secrets of successful diplomacy is that until a public statement can be made, intentions remain secret. Diplomats are free to speak the unprintable. Even positions that fly in the face of stated principles may be discussed before they are rejected. That is how diplomacy worked during its golden age in Europe in the 19^th century. It had the singular merit of producing a century of evident tension, serious disputes and even acts of aggression. But it resolved most of them, not through war, but  thanks to shifting alliances.

The new style of diplomacy the US practices today was inaugurated in the aftermath of World War II. In the interest of assuming exclusive control of the vast post-colonial world left in the wake of crumbling European empires, it dispensed with nuance. It had to find an efficient way of governing the diversity of its pieces. Principles trumped interests.

The Western leaders forged what was called the Washington Consensus, initially a theory of development for the remnants of the European empires. It established a set of rules by which a new world order could achieve some semblance of economic order. Some of the rules were explicit and contained in documents such as the UN Charter and the foundational documents of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Others were not so much rules as ideological beliefs about how prosperity can be produced and maintained according to liberal economic ideology.

Though the Washington Consensus encountered considerable success, it ultimately proved costly to maintain. At one point it imperiled the dollar itself. In essence, it stood as an innovative variation on old ideas of empire. It created, formalized and enforced a relationship of what it deemed productive dependence. As a global phenomenon, it inevitably ran into the classic problems of empires whose tensions at some point become unmanageable.

Given the complexity of the whole, only a simplistic ideology could create the necessary impression of continuity and coherence. But any ideology imposed on a complex, diverse environment inevitably produces incoherence. The Guardian’s account of what happened in 1954 demonstrates the contradiction. By requesting membership in NATO, the Soviet Union appeared ready to adhere to a philosophy that allowed both for ideological diversity and a framework for mutual security. Capitalists and communists might, after all, agree on the principles of coexistence without having to align their ideologies.

But the newly constituted US hegemon realized that something else was at stake. The wartime economy that he propelled the US to leadership in the global economy had become the model for a new era of economic expansion. A wartime mentality was clearly required to make it work. Guaranteed security and stability suddenly appeared as obstacles to prosperity. The US economy needed an enemy. As a matter of principle, once the Cold War had begun, it could not – just as it cannot today – accept that designated adversaries play a role in defining the conditions for living in peace. Peace has no value. The health of the US economy depends on maintaining a war mentality.

Historical note

When reminded of those two historical facts – that Nikita Khruschev in 1954 and Vladimir Putin in 2000 deemed logical and desirable their nation’s inclusion in a broad defensive alliance – we should have the humility to rethink our understanding of history.

On the basis of this information, one possible revisionist reading of history could be summed up in these observations:

1. The Cold War was perceived not as a problem the US was faced with, but an opportunity to exploit. It became a sacred mission as the pretext for structuring the US economy around the military-industrial complex (MIC). The economy required a powerful nemesis. Washington cast its ally in World War II, the Soviet Union, in that role. When the murderous dictator Stalin died, it was unthinkable that his replacement by the amicable Khruschev could become a  pretext to establish peace and harmony between the USSR and the US.
2. The Eisenhower administration — which included John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State and his brother, Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA — invested heavily in the effort to establish the MIC at the core of the US economy. This required a permanent adversarial attitude not just towards the USSR. It could even extend to nations that insisted on being non-aligned. George W Bush formulated it with the greatest clarity: “if you are not with us you are with the terrorists.”
3. President Eisenhower himself dissented from the majority view inside his administration. He dared to manifest it three days before leaving office, when he crafted a televised speech denouncing, in its first draft, the “military-industrial-Congressional complex.” In the formal speech, he reduced it to the first three terms. Ike was the last president ever to use this expression in public, even as in the succeeding decades the MIC kept growing.
4. Ike’s successor, John F Kennedy, appeared keen on following Eisenhower’s parting prompt. Months after taking office, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he dismissed Allen Dulles. This may have been a contributing factor to his assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, not only shared none of Kennedy’s taste for reducing the influence of the MIC. By escalating the engagement in Vietnam and turning it into a hot war, Johnson created the ideal conditions for the MIC’s rapid development.
5. The definitive collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 should logically have led to the dismantling of NATO. Russia was clearly no longer an enemy. But Washington understood that NATO was its key to controlling Europe. NATO not only survived but expanded, though the lack of a designated enemy produced a certain degree of discomfort.
6. In the new millennium, if Russia couldn’t stop NATO’s expansion, Putin preferred to be part of it. But Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright knew that, like certain character actors in Hollywood, Russia’s role could only be that of a villain, even if it no longer had the ideological earmarks of a villain. Rocky vs Drago was a proven recipe for good box office.
7. The events of 9/11 inaugurated the Global War on Terror, which finally provided an identifiable enemy other than Russia. But this marginal group of extremists with a fanatical religious identity lacked political and especially national identity. Washington tried, but Al Qaeda wasn’t credible in the role.
8. China’s rise provided some hope for a new villain, especially as it remained officially communist. But instead of exercising military bravado, it exercised its influence through economic cooperation. Washington, and especially the Democrats, returned to the established value of Russia as the reliable enemy.

Whether it’s the Soviet Union joining NATO in 1954 or the European security framework Putin proposed in December 2021, before invading Ukraine, Washington deems that such proposals suffer from their “unrealistic nature.” The US has always preferred the hyperreal nature of a Drago challenging Rocky or Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” in a real-life remake of Star Wars. These are things Americans can identify with as they munch on their popcorn.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of 51łÔčÏ Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Why Does Washington Cast All its Villains in Moscow? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

Oppenheimer’s quote is a loose translation of a from chapter 11, verse 32 of the ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. This particular section is often referred to as the Vishwarupa, or “Universal Form,” chapter. Here, Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna, showing himself as the supreme being who encompasses all creation and destruction.

Just as Krishna’s universal form represents a cosmic power capable of immense destruction, nuclear weapons represented to Oppenheimer the potential for unparalleled devastation on a global scale. It is likely he viewed himself and his colleagues as modern incarnations of Arjuna, grappling with their involvement in creating a weapon capable of immense destruction.

Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project

The was a highly secretive research and development endeavour conducted by the United States during World War II. It aimed to create the world’s first atomic bomb, utilizing the power of nuclear fission. Prompted by concerns of Nazi Germany’s potential atomic weapon development, the project began in 1939. With the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the project gained momentum, and a team led by Oppenheimer was assigned to develop and test the atomic bomb.

Their efforts culminated in a pivotal moment on July 16, 1945—the Trinity Test. In the vast desert, controlled nuclear energy was realized, marking a significant scientific achievement. Subsequently, these achievements led to the devastating use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction caused by these bombings brought Japan to surrender, leading to the end of the war.

The Manhattan Project had far-reaching consequences. It marked a significant scientific, engineering, and logistical achievement that brought together a diverse team of experts from many disciplines. Moreover, it triggered the nuclear arms race and raised profound moral and ethical concerns surrounding the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons. 

In the aftermath of the war, Oppenheimer faced scrutiny due to his affiliations with communist organizations and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. This eventually led to the revocation of his security clearance, ending his involvement in governmental work. Yet Oppenheimer’s legacy endured. His unwavering belief in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy and his vision of a world where atomic power serves humanity’s progress continues to resonate.

The Quest to Stop Climate Change

In the present day, the quest for clean and dependable energy sources has never been more crucial. From out of this search, nuclear power has emerged as a potential savior, despite its contentious past. With its ability to provide abundant and environmentally friendly energy, nuclear power holds immense promise in the fight against climate change.

At the heart of nuclear power lies the process of nuclear fission, the awe-inspiring splitting of atomic nuclei that unleashes an extraordinary amount of energy. It is fuelled primarily by uranium-235 and plutonium-239, elements that pack a punch in energy density. When these nuclei split, they release an incredible amount of heat, which is then harnessed to generate steam. This steam, in turn, powers turbines that drive generators, transforming the unleashed energy into electricity.

Clean Energy Not So Clean, Time to Restrict Consumption Too

One of the most compelling aspects of nuclear energy is its remarkable cleanliness. Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear power generation virtually eliminates greenhouse gas emissions, which would shield us against rising carbon dioxide levels. By providing a reliable and low-carbon energy source, nuclear power plants reduce the need for polluting coal-fired plants. This would reduce harmful emissions and the associated health risks they pose to our communities.

Additionally, If other renewable energy sources experience fluctuations, nuclear power would provide consistent and reliable energy. This would ensure the smooth integration of renewable energy into our power grids, maximizing their potential without compromising the stability of our energy infrastructure.

Fear Mongering Slows Progress 

Nuclear power has come a long way since the devastating incidents at . These tragic events were a wake up call for the industry, exposing flaws in design, human error, and safety protocols. These disasters were a catalyst for tremendous progress in enhancing reactor safety.

Even with the remarkable strides in safety, nuclear energy continues to suffer from fear mongering and misinformation. Activists and well-intentioned individuals have inadvertently contributed to unwarranted fears. While their aspirations for a greener future are commendable, their rhetoric tends to overshadow the numerous benefits of nuclear power. Sensational claims about radiation leaks, nuclear waste, and the potential for accidents have stoked panic and undermined the perception of nuclear energy.

The truth, however, is quite different from the narrative of doom and gloom. Modern nuclear power plants are equipped with multiple layers of safety measures that are above and beyond what was previously imaginable. Enhanced reactor designs, ingenious passive cooling systems, and stringent regulatory frameworks minimize the risk of accidents. In fact, when compared to other energy sources such as coal or oil, nuclear power boasts an impressive safety record.

It is vital to separate fact from fiction when discussing nuclear energy. The advancements in safety technology and the rigorous oversight by regulatory bodies have significantly reduced the likelihood of a major accident. Furthermore, the stringent protocols for handling and disposing of nuclear waste ensure that it poses minimal risk to the environment and public health.

The Next-Generation of Nuclear Reactors

As we continue to prioritize safety, the future of nuclear energy is brimming with even greater potential—a realm where safe, limitless clean energy becomes a reality.

For example, Generation IV reactors are a new breed of advanced nuclear systems at the forefront of innovation. These reactors embrace cutting-edge technologies such as molten salt, high-temperature gas, and fast-neutron designs. By operating at higher temperatures, they unlock a whole new level of efficiency and offer exciting possibilities like hydrogen production—an essential element for a sustainable energy future.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are also a promising new technology.  These ingenious reactors are designed to be manufactured in a factory and transported to their intended site for installation. Their smaller size brings a host of advantages by simplifying the complexities of design, construction, and maintenance. Their modular nature also grants them unparalleled scalability and flexibility. With enhanced safety features, SMRs have the potential to illuminate remote areas, where access to electricity is difficult or non-existent. They can also seamlessly integrate with renewable energy sources, bolstering the stability and reliability of our power grids.

Unleashing the Power of Nuclear Energy

In the quest for a sustainable energy future, nuclear power offers unique advantages that set it apart from other alternatives, like solar and green hydrogen. 

One of nuclear power’s most impressive attributes is its incredible energy density. Meaning it can generate a staggering amount of energy from a relatively small amount of fuel. Nuclear power is a space-efficient marvel, outshining renewable sources like sprawling solar or wind farms that require vast areas to match the same energy output.

Unlike solar power, which hinges on daylight hours and weather patterns, nuclear power plants can provide continuous and reliable baseload power. And while green hydrogen production via electrolysis demands a constant supply of electricity, nuclear power can deliver an unwavering stream of energy.

Nuclear power is a low-carbon energy source, emitting virtually no greenhouse gases during operation. It holds immense potential in curbing carbon dioxide emissions, playing a vital role in our fight against climate change. When compared to power plants reliant on fossil fuels, nuclear power proves itself as a greener alternative that can pave the way to a cleaner, more sustainable future.

By reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports, nuclear power enhances energy security. It grants countries the ability to become more self-reliant in meeting their energy needs. This not only bolsters stability but also minimizes vulnerabilities arising from geopolitical tensions or volatile fuel prices. With nuclear power in their arsenal, nations can forge their own path towards energy independence.

When it comes to large-scale power generation, nuclear plants reign supreme. Their capacity to generate vast amounts of electricity makes them a perfect match for densely populated areas and energy-intensive industries. While renewable sources like solar and wind have made remarkable strides, they may require extensive land areas and infrastructure to match the sheer scale of nuclear power’s potential.

Nuclear power becomes an invaluable ally in the pursuit of a hydrogen-powered future. With its steadfast and continuous supply of electricity, it can serve as the bedrock for hydrogen production through high-temperature electrolysis or thermochemical cycles. This paves the way for a vibrant green hydrogen economy.

Political Solutions for a Sustainable Nuclear-Powered Future

Embarking on a global journey towards clean and boundless nuclear energy demands political solutions that can tackle the nuanced issues facing this power source. The adoption of nuclear energy is no simple feat, requiring political will, international collaboration and a delicate understanding of each nation’s unique circumstances and aspirations.

The path to embracing nuclear energy begins with robust international cooperation. Governments must unite to foster the development and deployment of nuclear technologies. By sharing knowledge, research, and best practices, nations can collectively propel the advancement of safer and more efficient nuclear power plants. In this pursuit, organizations like the play a pivotal role in facilitating cooperation among nations.

To ensure the safe and responsible use of nuclear power, governments must establish rigorous regulatory frameworks and safety standards. Independent regulatory bodies armed with authority and resources should oversee the nuclear industry, upholding transparency, accountability, and public confidence in this powerful energy source.

To encourage the widespread deployment of nuclear power plants, governments should implement financial incentives. Subsidies, tax incentives and loan guarantees can make nuclear projects financially viable, attracting private sector investment. Additionally, establishing long-term power purchase agreements reduces financial risks for investors, further bolstering the economic viability of nuclear energy.

FO° Exclusive: Global Energy Crisis

Political solutions must also address concerns surrounding non-proliferation and security. Governments must strengthen international treaties, promote disarmament efforts, and institute robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access to nuclear materials and facilities. By prioritizing the safeguarding of nuclear resources, nations can build a foundation of trust and cooperation.

These political solutions are not standalone endeavours—they require a united front of global collaboration, unwavering political will, and a keen understanding of the diverse needs and circumstances of each nation. It may sound difficult, given the geopolitical conflicts that exist in many parts of the world, but shared responsibility is essential if we want to leave the world a cleaner and safer place for future generations.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post The Surprising Use of Nuclear Energy for a Sustainable Future appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

Power talks. Realistic descriptions of the buildup of military power often will convey a better sense of the likelihood of action than will a series of estimative-type judgements which fail to include the military details or reasons on which the assessment is based. To understand the capability, and to be able to view it objectively, is a prerequisite to the understanding of intent.

―Cynthia Grabo, Anticipating Surprise (2002)

Despite having the fourth largest coastline in the world (behind Canada, Indonesia, and Russia), the United States has almost no domestic maritime presence on the high seas today. The US has essentially disappeared from the world’s oceans as a commercial entity. The only trading partners to which the US has overland access are Canada and Mexico, and for seaborne commerce to its east and its west, the US is dependent on the goodwill, and the cargo holds, of strangers.

America could be left high and dry

The risks surrounding this situation are known, but rarely, if ever, discussed in the public forum. “,” published in March 2021 by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), posits five scenarios for 2040. The fourth scenario, “Separate Silos,” imagines a world in which supply chains have been frustrated to the point that nations across the globe move toward isolationism and restrict trading to their immediate geographical neighbors. In this scenario, the commercial and security interests of the United States are limited to North America; similar arrangements are to be found in Europe and Asia. Resource-rich blocs like North America, China, Europe, and Russia are at an advantage ±čŸ±Čő-Ă -±čŸ±Čő developing nations due to their relative self-sufficiency. Of the five scenarios posited, this represents the best case.

In the NIC’s other four scenarios, China is portrayed as the principal catalyst of whatever shape the world happens to be taking. China’s relationship with the US is either that of a strategic adversary or of a fierce commercial competitor. In all cases, China is driving the relationship.

Curiously, these four scenarios assume that throughout the projected twenty-year development of this more-or-less adversarial relationship, the import and export of goods to and from the United States on foreign-flagged cargo ships and tankers, an ever-increasing majority of which are Chinese, will continue unencumbered and unthreatened. It is a telling and possibly unintended editorial omission for the “Separate Silos” scenario not to specifically address the role or fate of ocean transport in the broken supply chain, even though roughly 90% of the world’s goods are moved by sea.

The US Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration warns of the sobering fact that China has been investing heavily in traditional infrastructure projects at home and around the world, building port facilities in Asia as well as Africa, and supporting a booming shipbuilding industry. The latest edition of Farwell’s Rules of the Nautical Road notes that “the number of vessels traversing the world’s oceans increased by 60 percent” between 1992 and 2012. A 2017 by HSBC claims that “China’s merchant fleet has more than tripled in tonnage terms over the last decade.” According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, China in the number of ships owned—more than four times the number under US ownership—and is second in the world, after Greece, in tonnage. The US does not even make it into the top 10 on the latter list. 

Historically, a threat to a nation’s access to the sea was seen as an existential threat, an immediate and legitimate justification for war. Such a threat has been cited as a contributing factor to the US entry into World War I and to Japan’s attack on the US in World War II. In the United States today, however, we give very little thought to the maritime component of our national defense posture, and most Americans take little notice of ocean commerce until a pandemic causes colorful container ships to stack up in US ports, or an ultra-large box-carrier blocks the Suez Canal. China, on the other hand, does not appear to have a similarly uninterested view on the importance of sea lane and supply chain domination. This is a relatively new development, and it should concern us more than the NIC scenarios suggest.

The Truth About China and Global Supply Chains

The American merchant fleet has all but disappeared

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 1960 the United States had a merchant fleet of nearly 3000 oceangoing ships, comprising nearly 17% of the entire world’s merchant marine. Many of those ships in the US fleet were built for WWII and were nearing end-of-life by 1960. By 1970, the US merchant fleet had shrunk by half, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the world’s fleet. By 1980 it had shrunk by yet another half, and by 2019 the entire US merchant fleet of oceangoing cargo ships and tankers numbered only 182. By comparison, the world’s (currently) largest shipping company, Maersk Line of Denmark, owns and operates nearly 700 ships; the world’s second largest shipping company, MSC of Switzerland, owns and operates nearly 600 ships; COSCO of China and CMA CGM of France, the world’s third and fourth largest shipping companies, each own and operate between 500-600 ships. These are individual companies, each with several times the number of ships that make up the entire domestically flagged oceangoing merchant fleet of the United States.

The Merchant Marine Act (Jones Act) of 1920 states that:

It is necessary for the national defense and the development of the domestic and foreign commerce of the United States that the United States have a merchant marine:

Sufficient to carry the waterborne domestic commerce and a substantial part of the waterborne export and import foreign commerce of the United States and to provide shipping service essential for maintaining the flow of the waterborne domestic and foreign commerce at all times;

Capable of serving as a naval and military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency;

Owned and operated as vessels of the United States by citizens of the United States;

Composed of the best-equipped, safest, and most suitable types of vessels constructed in the United States and manned with a trained and efficient citizen personnel; and

Supplemented by efficient facilities for building and repairing vessels.

Of the above five requirements, it has been half a century since the first was even an aspirational goal. The second had been doubtful for some years, and the recent Turbo Activation test of the National Defense Reserve Fleet by the US Transportation Command in September 2019 settled the matter with disparaging results: only 40% of the ships activated were able to leave port, in stark contrast with the 80% successful activation for Desert Shield in 1990 and the 92% successful activation in 2003.

China has built up while the US slept

Cynthia Grabo notes that the buildup of an adversary’s capabilities is an indicator of his intent. Grabo is speaking of military capability and military intent. After witnessing the effects of accidental disruption of the supply chain—sudden and widespread shortages of essential items such as baby formula, medications, technology, building materials, and more—we cannot underestimate the ability of an intentional competitor to dominate and control the shipping lanes and to engage in, and win, a modern version of maritime siege warfare. We would do well to keep in mind that the objective of siege warfare is an adversary’s capitulation, not destruction. Nor is it a new idea that merchant shipping is a military capability: 

The clash of interests, the angry feelings roused by conflicting attempts thus to appropriate the larger share, if not the whole, of the advantages of commerce, and of distant unsettled commercial regions, led to wars. On the other hand, wars arising from other causes have been greatly modified in their conduct and issue by the control of the sea. Therefore the history of sea power, while embracing in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea, is largely a military history.

―Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783

Alfred Thayer Mahan’s concept of sea power, known as the Mahan Doctrine, can be summed up as follows: Control the seas, control the world. The corollary of this doctrine is that if a nation does not control the seas, or at least its own waters, someone else will. The twin objectives recommended by the Mahan Doctrine are to achieve the first and avoid the latter. Mahan was an American naval officer, the “most important American strategist of the nineteenth century” in the estimation of military historian John Keegan. According to Mahan, one of the essential and existential missions of the US Navy is to protect the sea lanes for American commerce. Not only does this allow the United States to achieve prosperity through commerce, but this also protects us against siege by embargo.

China Is Flexing Its Muscles in the South China Sea

Even if the US Navy still embraces its mission to protect the sea lanes for American shipping, the point is all but moot, since an American oceangoing fleet is all but non-existent. In a time of national crisis, assuming the US were to rebuild its merchant marine as it did in WWII, and assuming we had the trained mariners needed to operate a merchant fleet of the size needed to supply our country in crisis, it could not be assumed that the US Navy had either the mission, the capacity or the disposition to protect US shipping and sea lanes. This would mean that we would also assume extensive losses at sea, churning through even more merchant vessels and mariners. In other words: as the Mahan Doctrine would predict, the situation we have watched develop over the last 60 years has rendered the US essentially defenseless against an adversary with a superior combination of martial and merchant maritime capability.

And what becomes of Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands if the sea lanes are no longer safe for American cargo? If those strangers on whose goodwill we have become dependent find it too risky to move American cargo, resupply of any one of these non-contiguous populations will be impossible. Aerial resupply is not a serious option. Roughly speaking, 1000 cargo planes are needed to move the equivalent amount of cargo of one ship. Such a feat would be unsustainable for any protracted period.

Ships are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and difficult to operate profitably. The massive buildup of cargo capacity by China is not profit-driven; it is a national security imperative for China and the key to their long-term geopolitical ambitions. For this reason, Chinese shipbuilding and ocean shipping are . The continuous launching of new Chinese merchant ships, new overseas ports, and new warships of the PLA Navy is fully capable of performing its intended strategic role within the framework of the Mahan Doctrine.

Re-preparing the merchant fleet will be serious work

The US has a few options. It can accept the “Separate Silos” outcome and retreat into isolation and global irrelevance, or it can reduce its addiction to foreign imports to the point that China’s investment in ocean shipping becomes an albatross for the PRC. These options would entail a fundamental change in US standards of living, like those experienced on the home front during WWII. Or, as a third option, the US can compete with China for dominance on the high seas. It would require conscious national will to change the current regulatory and employment environment that makes building, owning, and operating ships under the US flag as outrageously prohibitive and unprofitable as it is. Unless US mariners are to receive the third-world wages and conditions that give competitors the economic edge, US flagged shipping will require and effective subsidization.

Moreover, rather than being unionized, professional mariners would be better served, and would serve the nation better, as a uniformed service, analogous to NOAA or the USPHS Commissioned Corps. Such a measure would require radical rethinking and a cultural change for mariners, but the organizational structure already exists, and could be accomplished by expanding the role of the US Maritime Service to assume the responsibility for training and licensing of mariners that is currently distributed across public, private, and governmental organizations and regulated by the US Coast Guard. Mariners would admittedly lose the independence that draws many to the seagoing life, but in return they would have predictable income and employment as well as training, promotion, and retirement.

A crucial component of executing this third option is something that has been firmly established and operating for many decades: mariner training. Alongside the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, there are six state maritime academies (one each in Texas, Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts, California, and New York) which together graduate licensed merchant marine officers per year. With the notable exception of Michigan’s Great Lakes Maritime Academy, though, most of these newly licensed merchant marine officers will sail only briefly on their licenses, if at all, and in time will lose not only their licenses but also the skills they had at graduation. As was dramatically demonstrated in WWII, with the right incentive the US can build hundreds of ships with breathtaking speed. Training mariners to operate them, however, takes years, and the skills are perishable if not continually used.

Indications of the conscious national will required to effect any of the changes needed to embark on this option are not apparent at the present time. In the Commandant of the Coast Guard’s 2023 State of the Coast Guard address, Admiral Linda Fagan’s only mention of the US merchant marine was her promise to end sexual harassment on US flagged vessels. This is of course a non-negotiable goal, but, considering the dwindling size of the US flagged merchant fleet, not terribly ambitious. On the other hand, if it were part of a larger vision to revive the US merchant marine and ensure a safe working environment for the robust talent pool of mariners that will be needed, then the Commandant’s promise would be of strategic significance.

The fact that political decision-makers prefer to focus on short-term solutions to immediate problems is nothing new. Revitalizing and reinventing an industry that has been permitted to decline for over fifty years requires a long-term solution to a problem that most Americans will not recognize until it is upon them. By the time they do, any likely solution will entail great cost and sacrifice. The US has a small window of opportunity to prevent the “Separate Silos” scenario, and possibly the others that project the US on its heels by 2040. Ruling the waves is hard and sometimes dangerous work. It requires investment and regulatory facilitation at the national level. Above all, it requires recognition of its importance to national security. It is hard work, but eminently preferable to the alternatives.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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The American warship was named after a Hawaiian admiral of Chinese and native Hawaiian parentage who served the US during World War II. The ship bearing his name was accompanied by a Canadian warship in what was described as “a rare joint mission.”

I found the name of the American destroyer intriguing. Why had this particular warship been sent to patrol the sensitive Taiwan Strait? I thought Chad might have something interesting to say.

“Since this appeared to be a deliberately aggressive act by the Chinese. In such circumstances, would it be reasonable to suppose that symbolism may be a factor in this provocation? The Chinese remember their own humiliation at the hands of Western powers that was capped by the Boxer rebellion. Eight Western colonial powers crushed the Chinese forces, occupied the Forbidden City and imposed crippling reparations for the conflict on China. Could the idea of sending a ship with a Chinese name on a military mission through the Taiwan Strait be the factor that explains this ‘dangerous’ provocation?”

My question wasn’t about who is to blame, but about the role of symbolism in foreign policy initiatives. Chad offered these thoughts.

“Symbolism and historical factors can sometimes play a role in international relations and affect perceptions of actions. However, it’s essential to consider multiple perspectives and gather more information before drawing conclusions about the motives behind specific actions.

Naming a US ship after a Hawaiian WWII admiral of Chinese and native Hawaiian parentage may have been done to honor the individual’s heritage and achievements rather than as a deliberate provocation.”

I wasn’t talking about what motivated the US to name the ship, but rather to choose that particular destroyer for this mission. But I let that objection pass as Chad continued to explain.

“It’s crucial to avoid making definitive judgments based solely on symbolism or historical events, as geopolitical situations are complex and involve a multitude of factors. Understanding the motivations and intentions behind specific actions requires a comprehensive analysis of the political, military, and diplomatic context, as well as the perspectives of all parties involved.”

“Thank you, Chad. That’s precisely why I want to focus on the motivation of the Chinese in this incident. Whether or not the US intended this as a provocation, it’s quite possible that the Chinese saw the choice of the Chung-Hoon to conduct this mission as a provocation. The name evokes the entire history of US aggression against China and its ambition to control the Pacific. That includes the annexation of Hawaii and the conquest of the Philippines, considered by American business interests at the time as the key to gaining access to the great Chinese market. Both of those events – Hawaii and the Philippines –  took place in 1898. The Boxer rebellion followed two years later.

As a journalist I want to understand why the Chinese thought it wise to conduct this dangerous operation. I suspect that the symbolism of the Chinese name of the destroyer was an important factor to the extent that the Chinese may have seen the choice of that particular warship to be a provocation on the part of the Americans. Psychology happens to be a major part of war strategy these days. Can we assume that on both sides, the Chinese and the American, or at least on the Chinese side, symbolism may have been a factor, even if the media fails to report on it?”

Chad is open to suggestions

“It is possible that certain symbols or names can be perceived as provocative by one side, while the other side may view them as neutral or honoring.

It is not uncommon for psychological factors, including symbolism, to be considered in war strategies. Symbolic actions can send messages, influence public opinion, or create narratives that shape the perception of events. However, without access to specific details of the incident you mentioned, it would be speculative to assert that the choice of the ship’s name was a determining factor in the Chinese response.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said to Chad. “The reason I mention it is because it could be an essential explanatory factor to understand this incident. And that raises a question for journalists, especially when for the past year the media have slavishly followed the US government’s dictum that the Russian invasion was ‘unprovoked.’ Even Ian Bremmer felt it necessary this past week to counter more authoritative voices who have cited a mountain of evidence to prove that provocation existed. I totally agree that accuracy is important and speculation can be dangerous. But when knowledge of actual intentions is hidden, shouldn’t journalists do what historians do and evoke what may appear logical in the situation as one possible factor to explain a situation marked by confrontation? That doesn’t mean reporting it as fact but it does mean drawing the public’s attention to how the different parties perceive the situation. Shouldn’t that enter into the public dialogue that journalism is expected to contribute to?”

Chad agreed that “exploring different perspectives, including how different parties perceive a situation, can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of complex events. Journalists often analyze various factors and provide insights that help the public make informed judgments.”

“So my question is why the media is choosing to avoid analyzing those factors in this case, but also in the case of the buildup to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? At the same time, the media have overindulged in speculating about what Vladimir Putin’s motives are, arbitrarily deciding that he wants to recreate the Soviet empire or even conquer Europe. Such musings are never suppressed for want of ‘accuracy’ or concrete evidence. My own conclusion is that the media have fallen into a pattern of propaganda, which is common in times of conflict, but is contradictory with democratic principles and the idea we have of the role of the press. In both the Russian and Chinese cases, Western media is not directly involved in the conflict. Seeking to understand the factors of motivation at play seems to me essential. But what we see is a refusal to consider any interesting evidence concerning the context itself alongside wild speculation about what supposed evil intentions. Isn’t that in itself dangerous because propaganda is always designed to support conflict and therefore, in this case, may provoke conflict on an unheard of scale?”

“Media speculation about leaders’ motivations,” Chad responded, “such as Vladimir Putin’s intentions in the case of Russia and the Chinese leadership’s intentions in your mentioned incident, can sometimes lack concrete evidence and oversimplify complex geopolitical dynamics. It is essential for journalists to provide a balanced approach, relying on credible sources, evidence, and expert analysis to present a nuanced understanding of events.”

I couldn’t disagree.

“So when we notice that is precisely what the media are failing to do, shouldn’t we be alarmed? I know you’ll tell me that some in the media will be able to do otherwise, but the reality is that alternative voices are kept in the margins. That means that, contrary to your wishes, media literacy is not being encouraged, but rather suppressed. Can you simply agree or disagree with that assessment without preaching to me about how everything should work out in a world of reasoning beings?”

Chad did, in some sense, appear to agree. “It is valid to be concerned when media outlets fail to provide a comprehensive and balanced perspective on important issues. Media literacy is indeed crucial in enabling individuals to critically evaluate information and form their own well-rounded opinions. When alternative voices and viewpoints are marginalized or suppressed, it can limit the diversity of perspectives and hinder a healthy public dialogue.

In democratic societies, a free and independent media plays a vital role in holding power to account, providing accurate information, and facilitating informed public discourse.”

This time I had to interrupt.

”Stop, Chad. You are starting to preach again. We agree on all these principles you preach about, but stating them over and over again doesn’t make them real. I just want to focus on reality. But you seem committed to what I call the dominant hyperreality. It’s a great piece of fiction. I too admire it, but I don’t need continual reminders about how it should work in an ideal world. Just like you, I adhere to it and hope one day we can live up to it.”

*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at 51łÔčÏ recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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As the first and only female CEO of an international refugee rights organization with lived experience of forced displacement, I am painfully aware that colonialism and white supremacy are central to the formation and functioning of the global refugee protection system.

Having to continually prove this obvious fact is exhausting, but I know it is part of my fight to end the systematic stigmatization and oppression of forcibly displaced people by the same institutions that claim to help us.

I became a forcibly displaced person on 2 July 2013 when my father—a prominent political activist—was by the Syrian regime for speaking up alongside millions of others demanding freedom, justice, and the rule of law. 

I was in the United States at the time, attending a summer school program in Rhode Island and sitting in a classroom when I received a Facebook message from one of my sisters: “They took him. We are leaving,” it said. My mother and sisters immediately escaped to TĂŒrkiye. Just like that, I lost my father, my home, and my country.

I’ve only recently had the chance to start digesting what happened. Like many other refugees, I first of all had to get busy trying to figure out how to survive. But the moment I began to exist as a queer, brown, forcibly displaced woman, I also realized my fight for inclusion and rights did not end in Syria. I found that even as I continued to support people protesting for basic rights back in my home country, I also had to fight the injustices in my new environment. 

Become part of the world’s biggest dialogue experiment

We’ve teamed up with media outlets around the world for a global dialogue experiment—and you’re invited to be a part of it. I started to feel how colonialism and white supremacy are infused into the experience of being a forcibly displaced person almost immediately. Some non-refugee community members in the United States questioned whether I truly needed protection. I didn’t fit the destitute, downtrodden image of refugees they’d seen in fundraising material from aid organizations, and I was frequently told I “spoke very good English”. 

I also quickly realized that the refugee protection system in the United States and globally had little room for people with first-hand experience of forced displacement to advocate for ourselves or to contribute to—let alone lead—policy conversations directly relevant to our lives. I was invited to events for organizations raising money to support refugees where my role was to put a face to the issue and make an emotional appeal for donations. But when it came to talking about solutions or what should be done, I felt silenced and excluded.

“These ‘experts’ have been able to define our experiences and make policies about what happens with our lives while people like me have been blocked from the rooms where decisions are made.”

Instead, conversations about refugees and migration were dominated by Western ‘experts’ who had never experienced forced displacement and who lived thousands of kilometers away from where the political repression, conflicts, and human rights violations that drive people from their homes actually take place. 

These ‘experts’ have been able to define our experiences and make policies about what happens with our lives while people like me have been blocked from the rooms where decisions are made. This fact is not unintentional: It’s a product of how the global protection system for refugees was designed.

Roots of the system

Last year, I read the notes from the UN conference convened to draft the 1951 Refugee Convention. The failure of countries to provide safe haven to people being persecuted and killed by Nazi Germany during World War II was the main catalyst behind the effort. But as I read the notes—despite everything I have experienced—I was stunned to see how dehumanizing and racist the discussion had been.

one contemporary civil society observer: “[One] might easily have gathered the impression that the average refugee was a black marketeer in currency, a bankrupt, a dangerous criminal, an enemy agent, a menace to the labour market and a person unfit for higher education.”

In other words, many of the delegates who created the architecture of the global protection system viewed refugees as economic and security threats—a problematic perception that continues to dominate narratives about forcibly displaced people. 

And who were those delegates? At the time, there were UN member states—compared to 193 today. Many countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific were still colonized. Global North countries wielded outsized influence on the drafting of the Convention, according to, a researcher and professor of forced migration and refugee studies. 

The result was a decision to only extend UN refugee protections to people displaced within Europe prior to 1951. Key framers of the Refugee Convention—including the United States, France, and Italy—did not want forcibly displaced people from recently partitioned India and Pakistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere reaching their borders and claiming protection. 

The geographic limitation on who could be afforded refugee status was liftedin , after many colonized countries had gained their independence and joined the UN. But the international protection system and narratives about refugees continue to reflect the same colonial attitudes and racist biases displayed in 1951. The differing and of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees by Global North countries is a testament to this fact. 

In the context of Ukraine, we have seen what is possible when all actors come together to respond to a forcibly displaced community with dignity and respect for their human rights. This is the correct response. And it is one that all refugees—regardless of our race, ethnicity, gender, or class—should receive, but do not.

Moving toward a more equitable sector

In 1975, the author Toni Morrison: “The very serious function of racism is a distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

Systematically marginalized communities—including forcibly displaced people—find ourselves having to play the role of educator over and over again to explain factual, highly documented, systemic injustices like the one I just outlined above. Meanwhile, organizations point to small or symbolic improvements as reason for celebration rather than doing the hard work of actually trying to change. As I said before, it’s exhausting. 

“For transformative change to happen, more people in the sector have to do the hard work of examining their biases, prejudices, positioning, and privileges.”

Far too often, people hide behind the idea that they are “helping others” or “doing good” to avoid having difficult conversations about how colonialism and racism constitute the very foundation of the refugee protection sector. 

Instead of endlessly rehashing what should be a settled debate, we need to be asking how we can move towards a more just and equitable refugee response sector where people who have experienced forced displacement are leading the solutions for their own communities.

The sector isn’t going to do this on its own. We need a grassroots movement where refugees and allies can build trust and reconciliation through acknowledgment and accountability about past wrongs and how the sector currently functions. We need a movement where refugees lead the way, while true allies ensure that they are not taking power and agency away from people in the name of empowering them.

The good news is, this movement has already started. between refugee-led initiatives and allies are showing that it’s possible to shift power and resources toward refugee-led work. But for transformative change to happen, more people in the sector have to do the hard work of examining their , prejudices, positioning, and privileges. And organizations need to undertake the same journey so we can realize equity in the workplace, in our programs, and in our collaborations to build a refugee protection sector led by refugees for refugees. 

Edited by Eric Reidy and Moulid Hujale for The New Humanitarian

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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The US has long had a predilection for classifying every nation in the world as either an ally or an enemy. Two decades ago, when George W Bush publicly lamented the threat of an imagined “axis of evil,” he summarized the moral issue for the world’s heads of state in these terms: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

The binary division of humanity that followed World War II, known as the Cold War, was somewhat artificially crafted in Washington to define America’s ambitious post-war mission in a new world order. The US sensed an opportunity to impose its leadership over a chaotic configuration of decomposing colonial empires. When, in 1947, India, the crown jewel of the British empire, achieved its formal independence, setting the tone for other nations in Asia and Africa, the US began mulling over the means by which it could step into the former empire’s shoes without appearing to be a neo-colonialist power.

The old system of nation state rivalries exploiting disparate empires began its unintended campaign of self-destruction in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. It took a second world war to clear the chessboard and turn the kaleidoscope of European colonialism into a game of black vs white. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower described a “world, once divided by oceans and mountain ranges” as “now split by hostile concepts of man’s character and nature.”

President “Ike” imagined a world in which god-fearing capitalism was engaged in a struggle against atheistic communism. The land of free enterprise confronted the drab, collectivist nightmare. Every nation had to choose its allegiance, just as local barons once did in feudal Europe, when vassals were beholden to their local “.”

In the Cold War, this medieval notion still retained its metaphorical power. It no longer defined a position of subservience to regional monarchs, but to nation states. In contrast with Europe’s 19th century innovation of a “concert of nations,” the new geopolitics put allegiance at the core of its operating procedures. The idea came from the US. In the aftermath of a traumatic Civil War (1861-65), the US had imposed on all Americans a “pledge of allegiance” to a “one nation indivisible.” In 1954 Eisenhower added the phrase, “under God” to the text of the pledge to highlight the contrast with Marxist infidels.

At one point in his article Tellis makes an important assertion about India’s culture and political intentions. “It does not harbor any innate allegiance toward preserving the liberal international order and retains an enduring aversion toward participating in mutual defense.”

°ŐŽÇ»ćČčČâ’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Innate allegiance:

1. In its original signification, the natural organic connection between people and the land, family or institutional environment of their origins.
2. In the post-Cold War, the expected adhesion of “free” nations to the dominant neo-liberal ideology.

Contextual note

The lack of innate allegiance doesn’t necessarily prevent collaboration. Tellis notes that, despite India’s ingrained preference for non-alignment, “the United States and India work together in ways that would have been unimaginable during the Cold War. For example, they cooperate to monitor China’s economic and military activities throughout the wider Indian Ocean region and have recently invested in mechanisms to share near-real-time information about shipping movements.”

Aware of an already traditional distrust, if not enmity reigning between New Delhi and Beijing, Beltway pundits have long supposed that any enemy of China must be a friend of the US. Moreover, India has accepted to use English – the language of modern civilization – at least as its internal lingua franca. That makes the choice of allegiance even easier.

It may therefore seem paradoxical that,  despite a very real fascination with all things American, India has not allowed the US, even symbolically, to step into the role Britain once played as its colonial liege lord. Tellis notes that “there remains an unbridgeable gap between the two countries, given India’s consistent desire to avoid becoming the junior partner—or even a confederate—of any great power.”

Throughout the Cold War and during the “unipolar moment” that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, the US settled into its place at the concentric center of a “rules-based order.” Americans were the “good guys,” defining what a good-guys lifestyle would look like. US President Joe Biden, following Eisenhower’s lead, felt it necessary to insist that the world is ruled by a binary opposition, with democracies on one side and autocracies on the other. Casting India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the role of an Oriental despot despite recognizing India as the world’s biggest democracy, the media in the US struggled to decide whether India should be placed in the democratic or autocratic camp.

Historical note

Eisenhower was clear about the distinction between the two ideological rivals: the US and the Soviet Union.

“Two world camps, whose geographic boundaries in important areas are mutually shared, lie farther apart in motivation and conduct than the poles in space. One is dedicated to the freedom of the individual and to the right of all to live in peace—the other to the atheistic philosophy of materialism, and the effort to establish its sway over all the earth. Watching the two opposing camps are hundreds of millions still undecided in active loyalty.”

Even someone with a rigidly binary vision can understand, as Ike did, that some nations fall into the category of “undecided. ” Americans tend to think of that as a weak-kneed attitude of “sitting on the fence.”

In the initial phase of the Cold War, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru was one of the leaders of the non-alignment movement, alongside other leaders, such as Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt and Nkrumah in Ghana. For Americans obsessed by the “domino theory,” non-alignment implied the risk of falling into the grip of atheistic communism. US foreign policy strove to prevent that from happening, even when the motivating factor was national sovereignty after centuries of European colonization rather than ideological commitment.

Vietnam perfectly illustrated that confusion. When Washington refused to listen to Ho Chi Minh’s gentle plea for support in his quest to shake off France’s colonial yoke, the Soviets obliged. According to the reigning binary logic, accepting Soviet aid identified the nation’s national liberation front, the Viet Cong as ideologically communist. It became a threat to be eliminated at all costs. When the French failed after the battle of Ðiện BiĂȘn Phủ in 1954, the US stepped in and eventually assumed “the white man’s burden.”

Back in 1954, Eisenhower appeared to accept the existence of “hundreds of millions still undecided in active loyalty.” When, decades later, Biden divided the world into democracies and autocracies, he acknowledged no middle ground. Non-alignment in the 1950s stood up proudly as a legitimate geopolitical stance. Ever since George W Bush, that middle ground has been banished from the binary template imposed on US geopolitical thinking.

This should leave us wondering whether Cold War I wasn’t a bit more flexible and therefore less dangerous than Cold War II. We can nevertheless see one positive trend. Even in the US, obviously hopeful that the existing world order organized around its hegemonic presence persists, mindsets are changing. The idea that we are now moving away from a unipolar world order dominated by the US towards a multipolar world with no unique center of gravity now seems to be taking root, even within the State Department. Many fear it will be unstable and wish to maintain the old system, but as Bob Dylan once said, “the times they are a-changin’.”

Some believe it will be a bipolar world, the US vs China. Others believe it will evolve into something far more varied. No one owns a crystal ball but most serious observers sense that the era of automatic “innate allegiances” based on simplistic ideological contrasts is waning.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.

Read more of 51łÔčÏ Devil’s Dictionary.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Having indulged my curiosity about the transition from the open conflict of World War II. in which the US and USSR were allies, to the controlled violence of the Cold War, I decided to go way back to the origins. I asked Chad this precise historical question: “Did the Vatican have a role to play in Operation Gladio or in the action the CIA took to influence the 1948 Italian election?”

“According to some sources, the Vatican had a role to play in Operation Gladio and in the CIA’s action to influence the 1948 Italian election. The Vatican was allegedly involved in a secret alliance with the CIA and the Mafia to prevent the rise of communism in Italy and other European countries. The Vatican also provided intelligence and contacts for the CIA and Gladio operatives, as well as moral and financial support for anti-communist parties and movements. The Vatican was especially concerned about the possibility of a communist victory in the 1948 Italian election, which could have jeopardized its sovereignty and influence in Italy. Therefore, the Vatican collaborated with the CIA and the Mafia to launch a massive propaganda campaign, as well as covert operations and acts of violence, to discredit and intimidate the Italian Communist Party and its supporters. The campaign was successful, as the Christian Democrats won the election with a large margin.”

That seemed to be a very useful answer. I continued.

“So, you are saying that from the very beginning the CIA and the Mafia found common ground to work together. Does that provide any clues about the various rumors concerning both the CIA and the Mafia being involved in the JFK assassination?”

“The rumors concerning both the CIA and the Mafia being involved in the JFK assassination are part of the many conspiracy theories that have emerged since the official investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Some of these theories suggest that the CIA and the Mafia had a common motive to eliminate Kennedy, who was seen as a threat to their interests in Cuba and elsewhere. Some also claim that the CIA and the Mafia had collaborated before in covert operations, such as Operation Mongoose, which aimed to overthrow Fidel Castro. However, these theories are not supported by conclusive evidence and have been disputed by many historians and experts

Operation Gladio was a different context and a different time period, with different objectives and actors. The CIA and the Mafia were not always allies, but sometimes rivals or enemies, depending on the situation. Therefore, one cannot assume that their cooperation in one case means that they also cooperated in another case, without solid proof.”

This was useful but I’ve always been wary of the reflex of branding original ideas conspiracy theories.

“I like your careful framing of the facts. Still, I think you’ll admit that it’s all too easy to dismiss any credible hypothesis of criminal collusion as a conspiracy theory.”

“Thank you for your compliment. I agree that it is important to be open-minded and critical when examining historical events and possible explanations. However, I also think that it is equally important to be rigorous and objective when evaluating the evidence and the sources of information. Not all hypotheses are equally credible or plausible, and some may be based on false or misleading claims, logical fallacies, or ideological biases. Therefore, I think that one should avoid jumping to conclusions based on speculation or intuition. That is the best way to avoid falling into the trap of conspiracy theories.”

“What you’re saying should literally comfort all criminal actors who prove to be adept at covering up their crimes. So long as they manage to keep hiding compromising facts, the door is open to calling even credible hypotheses concerning their shady actions conspiracy theories. And that accusation becomes the pretext for not bothering to investigate the carefully hidden facts. In the JFK case, we know that both the CIA and the Mafia are organizations that routinely do things that are illegal and that they are adept at imposing silence on their members and accomplices as well as covering up their crimes. Understanding that they have historically collaborated is an important fact. What we know about history, even if some of the details remain hidden, should be considered evidence. This particular moment in history, Operation Gladio, tells us that a government organization, the CIA, is capable of considering a criminal organization a resource to accomplish its goals. What does that say about democracy and the rule of law?

“I understand your concern and I agree that it is troubling that a government organization can collaborate with a criminal organization to achieve its goals. However, I do not think that this means that we should automatically assume that they are involved in every crime or conspiracy that we can imagine.”

I had to interrupt. “You’re assuming that I’m ‘assuming,’ and ‘automatically;’ to boot! I only cited one crime, the JFK assassination, but you evoke ‘every crime we can imagine.’ Moreover, my point was about hypotheses concerning unsolved crimes, not about assumptions of guilt. Despite the Warren Commission’s supposed thorough investigation, the JFK assassination is still an unsolved crime. We also know that crucial evidence is still being withheld, 60 years after the event. That, in itself, is evidence of something serious. A competent investigator constructs credible hypotheses that are consistent with the currently available evidence. As Sherlock Holmes put it, ‘Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ The government’s as well as the media’s approach – which you seem to validate – can be summarized as: ‘eliminate the improbable by calling it a conspiracy theory.’”

“I apologize if I misunderstood your point,” Chad retorted. “I did not mean to imply that you were making assumptions without evidence. I agree that the JFK assassination is still an unsolved crime and that there is evidence that is being withheld or redacted. I also agree that a competent investigator should construct credible hypotheses that are consistent with the available evidence. However, I think that there is a difference between a hypothesis and a theory. A hypothesis is a tentative explanation that can be tested and falsified by further evidence.”

“Chad, you are the one who branded the various hypotheses ‘theories.’ In reality, the distinction between the two isn’t that cut and dried. But we know that in everyday political rhetoric it has become standard practice to call something a conspiracy theory, knowing that people will understand this to be a synonym of ’crackpot theory.’ When evidence is being withheld, isn’t it our duty either to force it out in the open or question the motive concerning why it is being withheld?”

I’ll spare my audience Chad’s clearly obfuscating response based on the idea of not being too curious unless we have a smoking gun. On the question of hidden evidence, Chad had this to say: “It may be that the withheld evidence is irrelevant, inconclusive, or contradictory to the hypothesis or theory. It may also be that the motive for withholding the evidence is not sinister, but rather based on legal, ethical, or security reasons.”

There are plenty of “mays” to consider. But Chad’s argument seems to be that so long as there is a remaining “may” it’s better to just “forget about it,” as undercover agent would say.

*[In the dawning age of Artificial Intelligence, we at 51łÔčÏ recommend treating any AI algorithm’s voice as a contributing member of our group. As we do with family members, colleagues or our circle of friends, we quickly learn to profit from their talents and, at the same time, appreciate the social and intellectual limits of their personalities. This enables a feeling of camaraderie and constructive exchange to develop spontaneously and freely. For more about how we initially welcomed Chad to our breakfast table, click here.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Living in New York City, I was near no conflict in those years or in any since. My dad, however, had volunteered for the Army Air Corps at age 35 on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent about his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. He was the operations officer for the 1st Air Commandos and his war, in some strange sense, came home with him. 

Like so many vets, then and now, he was never willing to talk to his son about what he had experienced, though in my early years he still liked his friends to call him “Major,” his rank on leaving the military.  When his war did come up in our house, it was usually in the form of anger — because my mother had shopped at a nearby grocery store whose owners, he claimed, had been “war profiteers” while he was overseas, or because my first car, shared with a friend, was a used Volkswagen (German!), or my mom was curious to go — god save us! — to a Japanese restaurant! 

The strange thing, though, was that, in those same years, for reasons we never discussed, he allowed me briefly to have a and, though my dad and I never talked about the letters that boy and I exchanged, we did soak the stamps off the envelopes he sent and paste them into our latest Scott stamp album. 

As for evidence of my father’s wartime experience, I had two sources. In the guest room closet in our apartment, he had an old green duffle bag, which he’d go through now and then. It was filled to the brim with everything from Army Air Corps documents to his portable mess kit and even — though I didn’t know it then — his pistol and bullets from the war. (I would turn them over to the police upon his death a quarter-century later.) 

Though he wouldn’t talk with me about his wartime experience, I lived it in a very specific way (or at least so it felt to me then). After all, he regularly took me to the movies where I saw seemingly endless versions of war, American-style, from the Indian wars through World War II.  And when we watched movies of his own conflict (or, in my early years, replays of on our TV at home) and he said nothing, that only seemed to confirm that I was seeing his experience in all its glory, as the Marines inevitably advanced at film’s end and the “Japs” died in a spectacle of slaughter without a comment from him. 

From those Indian wars on, as I wrote long ago in my book , war was always a tale of their savagery and our goodness, one in which, in the end, there would be an expectable “spectacle of slaughter” as we advanced and “they” went down.  From the placement of the camera flowed the pleasure of watching the killing of tens or hundreds of nonwhites in a scene that normally preceded the positive resolution of relationships among the whites.  It was a way of ordering a wilderness of human horrors into a celebratory tale of progress through devastation, a victory culture that, sooner or later, became more complicated to portray because World War II ended with the atomic devastation of those two Japanese cities and, in the 1950s and 1960s, the of a future global Armageddon.

If war was hell, in my childhood at the movies, killing them wasn’t, whether it was the Indians of the American West or the Japanese in World War II.

So, yes, I grew up in a culture of victory, one I again and again on the floor of my room. In the 1950s, boys (and some girls) spent hours tales of American battle triumph with generic fighting figures: a crew of cowboys to defeat the Indians and win the West, a bag or two of olive-green Marines to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.

If ours was a sanguinary tale of warfare against savages in which pleasure came out of the barrel of a gun, on floors nationwide we kids were left alone, without apparent instruction, to reinvent American history. Who was good and who bad, who could be killed and under what conditions were an accepted part of a collective culture of childhood that drew strength from post-World War II Hollywood.

What Would My Dad Think?

Today, 60-odd years later, having never been to war but having focused on it and written about it for so long, here’s what I find eerily strange: since 1945, the country with the greatest military on the planet that, in budgetary terms, now leaves the next nine countries in the dust, has never — and let me repeat that: never! — won a war that mattered (despite engaging in all too many spectacles of slaughter).  Stranger yet, in terms of lessons learned in the world of adult culture, every lost war has, in the end, only led this country to invest more dollars in building up that very military.  If you needed a long-term formula for disaster in a country threatening to come apart at the seams, it would be hard to imagine a more striking one. So long after his death, I must admit that sometimes I wonder what my dad would think of it all.

Here’s the thing: the American experience of war since 1945 should have offered an all-too-obvious lesson for us, as well as for the planet’s other great powers, when it comes to the value of giant military establishments and the conflicts that go with them.

Just think about it for a moment, historically speaking.  That global victory of 1945, ending all too ominously with the dropping of those two atomic bombs and the slaughter of possibly , would be followed in 1950 by the start of the Korean War.  The statistics of death and destruction in that conflict were, to say the least, staggering.  It was a spectacle of slaughter, involving the armies of North Korea and its ally the newly communist China versus South Korea and its ally, the United States.  Now, consider the figures: out of a Korean population of 30 million, as many as may have died, along with an estimated and about .  The North’s cities, bombed and battered, were left in utter ruin, while the devastation on that peninsula was almost beyond imagining. It was all too literally a spectacle of slaughter and yet, despite ours being the best-armed, best-funded military on the planet, that war ended in an all-too-literal draw, a 1953 armistice that has never — not to this day! — turned into an actual peace settlement. 

After that, another decade-plus passed before this country’s true disaster of the twentieth century, the war in Vietnam — the first American war I opposed — in which, once again, the US Air Force and our military more generally proved destructive almost beyond imagining, while at least a Vietnamese civilians and more than a million fighters died, along with 58,000 Americans.

And yet, in 1975, with US troops withdrawn, the southern regime we had supported collapsed and the North Vietnamese military and its rebel allies in the South took over the country.  There was no tie as there had been in Korea, just utter defeat for the greatest military power on the planet.

The Rise of the Pentagon on a Fallen Planet

Meanwhile, that other superpower of the Cold War era, the Soviet Union, had — and this should sound familiar to any American in 2023 — sent its , the Red Army, into
 yes, Afghanistan in 1979. There, for almost a decade, it battled Afghan guerrilla forces significantly by the CIA and Saudi Arabia (as well as by a specific Saudi named and the tiny group he set up late in the war called — yes, again! — al-Qaeda). In 1989, the Red Army limped out of that country, leaving behind perhaps dead Afghans and of its own dead. Not so long after, the Soviet Union itself imploded and the US became the only “great power” on planet Earth. 

Washington’s response would be anything but a promised “peace dividend.” Pentagon funding barely dipped in those years. The US military did manage to invade and occupy the tiny island of in the Caribbean in 1983 and, in 1991, in a highly publicized but relatively low-level and one-sided encounter, drove Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in what would later come to be known as the First Gulf War. It would be but a preview of a hell on Earth to come in this century.

Meanwhile, of course, the US became a singular military power on this planet, having established at least on every continent but Antartica.  Then, in the new century, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, President George W. Bush and his top officials, incapable of imagining a comparison between the long-gone Soviet Union and the United States, sent the American military into — right! — Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government there. A disastrous occupation and war followed, a prolonged that would only end after 20 years of blood, gore, and massive expense, when President Biden pulled the last US forces out amid chaotic destruction and disorder, leaving — yes, the Taliban! — to run that devastated country. 

In 2003, with the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq (on the that Saddam Hussein was developing or had weapons of mass destruction and was somehow linked to Osama bin Laden), the Second Gulf War began. It would, of course, be a disaster, leaving dead Iraqis in its wake and (as in Afghanistan) thousands of dead Americans as well.  Another spectacle of slaughter, it would last for endless years and, once again, Americans would draw lessons from it.

Oh, and then there’s the war on terror more generally, which essentially helped spread terror around significant parts of the planet. Nick Turse recently caught this reality with a single statistic: in the years since the US first began its counter-terror efforts in West Africa early in this century, terror incidents there have soared by .

And the response to this? You know it all too well. Year after year, the Pentagon’s budget has only grown and is now heading for the .  In the end, the US military may have achieved just one success of any significance since 1945 by becoming the most valued and best-funded institution in this country. Unfortunately, in those same years, in a genuinely strange fashion, America’s wars came home (as they had in the Soviet Union once upon a time), thanks in part to the spread of military-style assault rifles, now owned by Americans, and (and the barrage of that went with them). And there remains the distinctly unsettling possibility of some version of a new civil war with all its Trumpian implications developing in this country.

I doubt, in fact, that Donald Trump would ever have become president without the disastrous American wars of this century. Think of him, in his own terrorizing fashion, as “fallout” from the war on terror.

There may never, in fact, have been a more striking story of a great power, seemingly uncontested on Planet Earth, bringing itself down in quite such a fashion. 

Last Words

Today, in Ukraine, we see but the latest grim example of how a vaunted military, strikingly funded in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union — and I’m talking, of course, about Russia’s army — has once again been sent into battle against lesser forces with remarkably disastrous results.  Mind you, Vladimir Putin and crew, like their American counterparts, should have learned a lesson from the Red Army’s disastrous experience in Afghanistan in the previous century.  But no such luck.

There should, of course, be a larger lesson here — not just that there’s no glory in war in the twenty-first century but that, unlike in some past eras, great powers are no longer likely to experience success, no matter what happens on the battlefield.

Let’s hope that the rising power on this planet, China, takes note, even as it regularly organizes around the island of Taiwan, while the Biden administration continues to ominously the US military presence in the region.  If China’s leaders truly want to be successful in this century, they should avoid either the American or Russian versions of war-making of our recent past. (And it would be nice if the Cold Warriors in Washington did the same before we end up in a conflict from hell between two nuclear powers.)

It’s decades too late for me to ask my father what his war truly meant to him, but at least when it comes to “great” powers and war these days, one lesson seems clear enough: there simply is nothing great about them, except their power to destroy not just the enemy, but themselves as well.

I can’t help wondering what my dad might think if he could look at this increasingly disturbed world of ours. I wonder if he wouldn’t finally have something to say to me about war.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has adjusted its doomsday clock to provide humanity with an expert estimate of just how close all of us are to an apocalyptic “midnight” — that is, nuclear annihilation.

A century ago, there was, of course, no need for such a measure. Back then, the  ever caused by humans had likely occurred in Halifax, Canada, in 1917, when a  collided with another vessel in that city’s harbor. That tragic blast killed nearly 2,000 people, wounded another 9,000 and left 6,000 homeless, but it didn’t imperil the planet. The largest explosions after that occurred on July 16, 1945, in a test of a new type of weapon, an atomic bomb, in  and then on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed such a bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Since then, our species has been precariously perched at the edge of auto-extermination.

The Story of World War II (Interactive)

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No one knows precisely how many people were killed by the world’s first nuclear attack. Around , nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as  were dead, many from radiation sickness, by the end of the year. (An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.)

In the wake of the first nuclear attack, little was clear. “What happened at Hiroshima is not yet known,” the New York Times  on that August 7, and the US government sought to keep it that way, portraying nuclear weapons as nothing more than super-charged conventional munitions, while downplaying the horrifying effects of radiation. Despite the  of several reporters just after the blast, it wasn’t until a year later that Americans — and then the rest of the world — began to truly grasp the effects of such new weaponry and what it would mean for humanity from that moment onward.

We know about what happened at Hiroshima largely thanks to one man, John Hersey. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and former correspondent for Time and Life magazines. He had covered World War II in Europe and the Pacific, where he was commended by the of the Navy for helping evacuate wounded American troops on the Japanese-held island of Guadalcanal. And we now know just how Hersey got the story of Hiroshima — a 30,000-word reportorial  that appeared in the August 1946 issue of the New Yorker magazine, describing the experiences of six survivors of that atomic blast — thanks to a meticulously researched and elegantly written new by Lesley Blume, â€œFallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.”

Only the Essentials

When I pack up my bags for a war zone, I carry what I consider to be the essentials for someone reporting on an armed conflict. A water bottle with a built-in filter. Trauma packs with a blood-clotting agent. A first-aid kit. A multitool. A satellite phone. Sometimes I forgo one or more of these items, but there’s always been a single, solitary staple, a necessity whose appearance has changed over the years, but whose presence in my rucksack has not.

Once, this item was intact, almost pristine. But after the better part of a decade covering conflicts in , the ,  and , it’s a complete wreck. Still, I carry it. In part, it’s become (and I’m only slightly embarrassed to say it) something of a talisman for me. But mostly, it’s because what’s between the figurative covers of that now-coverless, thoroughly mutilated copy of John Hersey’s â€œâ€ â€” the New Yorker article in paperback form — is as terrifyingly brilliant as the day I bought it at the Strand bookstore in New York City for 48 cents.

I know â€œHiroshima” well. I’ve read it cover-to-cover dozens of times. Or sometimes on a plane or a helicopter or a river barge, in a hotel room or sitting by the side of a road, I’ll flip it open and take in a random 10 or 20 pages. I always marveled at how skillfully Hersey constructed the narrative with overlapping personal accounts that make the horrific handiwork of that weapon with the power of the gods accessible on a human level; how he explained something new to this world, atomic terror, in terms that readers could immediately grasp; how he translated destruction on a previously unimaginable scale into a cautionary tale as old as the genre itself, but with an urgency that hasn’t faded or been matched. I simply never knew how he did it until Lesley Blume pulled back the curtain.

“Fallout,” which was published in August — the 75th anniversary of America’s attack on Hiroshima — offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of just how Hersey and William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, were able to truly break the story of an attack that had been covered on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers a year earlier and, in the process, produced one of the all-time great pieces of journalism. It’s an important reminder that the biggest stories may be hiding in plain sight; that breaking news coverage is essential but may not convey the full magnitude of an event; and that a writer may be far better served by laying out a detailed, chronological account in spartan prose, even when the story is so horrific it seems to demand a polemic.

Hersey Čú±đČ”Ÿ±ČÔČő&ČÔČúČő±è;“Hiroshima” in an understated fashion, noting exactly what each of the six survivors he chronicles was doing at the moment their lives changed forever. “Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war,” Blume observes. “But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people — mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks — going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck.”

As she points out, Hersey’s authorial voice is never raised and so the atomic horrors — victims whose eyeballs had melted and run down their cheeks, others whose skin hung from their bodies or slipped off their hands  â€” speak for themselves. It’s a feat made all the more astonishing when one considers, as Blume reveals, that its author, who had witnessed combat and widespread devastation from conventional bombing during World War II, was so terrified and tormented by what he saw in Hiroshima months after the attack that he feared he would be unable to complete his assignment.

Incredibly, Hersey got the story of Hiroshima with official sanction, reporting under the scrutiny of the office of the supreme commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the head of the American occupation of defeated Japan. His prior reportage on the US military, including a book focused on MacArthur that he later called “too adulatory,” helped secure his access. More amazing still, the New Yorker â€” fearing possible repercussions under the recently passed Atomic Energy Act — submitted a final draft of the article for review to Lieutenant General Lesley Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, served as its chief booster and went so far as to claim that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”

Whatever concessions the New Yorker may have made to him have been lost in the sands of time, but Groves did sign off on the article, overlooking, as Blume notes, “Hersey’s most unsettling revelations: the fact that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

The impact on the US government would be swift. The article was a sensation and immediately lauded as the best reporting to come out of World War II. It quickly became one of the most reprinted news pieces of all time and led to widespread reappraisals by newspapers and readers alike of just what America had done to Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also managed to shine a remarkably bright light on the perils of nuclear weapons, writ large. “Hersey’s story,” as Blume astutely notes, “was the first truly effective, internationally heeded warning about the existential threat that nuclear arms posed to civilization.”

Wanted: A Hersey for Our Time

It’s been 74 years since Hiroshima hit the newsstands. A Cold War and nuclear arms race followed as those weapons spread across the planet. And this January, as a devastating pandemic was beginning to follow suit, all of us found ourselves just  from total annihilation due to the plethora of nuclear weapons on this earth, failures of American-Russian cooperation on arms control and disarmament, the Trump administration’s trashing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and America’s efforts to  and  yet more advanced nukes, as well as two other factors that have sped up that apocalyptic doomsday clock: climate change and cyber-based disinformation.

The latter, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is corrupting our “information ecosphere,” undermining democracy as well as trust among nations and so creating hair-trigger conditions in international relations. The former is transforming the planet’s actual ecosystem and placing humanity in another kind of ultimate peril. “Dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder,” former California Governor Jerry Brown, the executive chair of the Bulletin,  earlier this year. “Climate change just compounds the crisis. If there’s ever a time to wake up, it’s now.”

Over the last three-plus years, however, President Donald Trump has seemingly threatened at least three nations with nuclear annihilation, including a US ally. In addition to menacing North Korea with the possibility of unleashing “” and his talk of ushering in “” of Iran, he even claimed to have “plans” to exterminate most of the population of Afghanistan. The “” he suggested employing could kill an estimated 20 or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians. Hersey, who died in 1993 at the age of 78, wouldn’t have had a moment’s doubt about what he meant.

Trump’s nuclear threats may never come to fruition, but his administration, while putting significant  into deep-sixing nuclear , has also more than done its part to accelerate climate change, thinning rules designed to keep the planet as habitable as possible for humans. A recent New York Times analysis, for example, tallied almost  environmental rules and regulations — governing planet-warming carbon dioxide and methane emissions, clean air, water and toxic chemicals — that have been rescinded, reversed or revoked, with more than 30 rollbacks still in progress.

President Trump has not, however, been a total outlier when it comes to promoting environmental degradation. American presidents have been presiding over the destruction of the natural environment since the founding of the republic. Signed into law in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, the Homestead Act, for instance, transformed countless American lives, providing  for the masses. But it also transferred  of wilderness, or 10% of the United States, into private hands for “improvements.”

More recently,  launched attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency through deregulation and budget cuts in the 1980s, while George W. Bush’s administration worked to undermine  in the 2000s, specifically through the denial of anthropogenic climate change. The difference, of course, was that Lincoln couldn’t have conceptualized the effects of global warming (even if the first study of the “” was published during his lifetime), whereas the science was already clear enough in the Reagan and Bush years, and brutally self-apparent in the age of Trump, as each of them pursued policies that would push us precious seconds closer to Armageddon.

The tale of how John Hersey got his story is a great triumph of Lesley Blume’s â€œFallout,” but what came after may be an even more compelling facet of the book. Hersey gave the US an image problem — and far worse. “The transition from global savior to genocidal superpower was an unwelcome reversal,” Blume observes. Worse yet for the US government, the article left many Americans reevaluating their country and themselves. It’s beyond rare for a journalist to prompt true soul-searching or provide a moral mirror for a nation. In an interview in his later years, Hersey, who generally avoided publicity, suggested that the testimony of survivors of the atomic blasts — like those he spotlighted — had helped to prevent nuclear war.

“We know what an atomic apocalypse would look like because John Hersey showed us,” writes Blume. Unfortunately, while there have been many noteworthy, powerful works on climate change, we’re still waiting for the one that packs the punch of “Hiroshima.” And so, humanity awaits that once-in-a-century article, as nuclear weapons, climate change, and cyber-based disinformation keep us just 100 clicks short of doomsday.

Hersey provided a template. Blume has lifted the veil on how he did it. Now, someone needs to step up and write the world-changing piece of reportage that will shock our consciences and provide a little more breathing room between this vanishing moment and our ever-looming midnight.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Japan’s surrender in 1945 officially ended World War II. It marked a glorious moment in history for the United States. But most serious historians agree on one fact that everyone has insisted on forgetting. The war would have ended without the demonstration of American scientific and military prowess carried out at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives.

Interactive: The Story of World War II

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If history has any meaning, humanity should have applied to August 6, 1945, the very words President Franklin D. Roosevelt used at the beginning of America’s war with Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. More than Pearl Harbor, August 6, 1945, should be remembered as “a date which will live in infamy.” 

In the article originally published to mark the 70th anniversary of the events that led to the end of World War II, the author, Gar Alperovitz, reminds us that almost every US military leader at the time counseled against dropping the bomb. It cites the testimony of Admiral William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief of staff; Henry “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Forces; Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet; and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., commander of the US Third Fleet.

All these senior officers agreed that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment.” Even Major General Curtis LeMay, who nearly 30 years later tried to push John F. Kennedy into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile in 1962, agreed that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

General Dwight Eisenhower, the future president, also believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” But Eisenhower added this consideration of profound geopolitical importance, which directly contradicts the official pretext given by the government and repeated in the official narrative, that thousands of American soldiers would die in the final assault on Japan. “I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” he said.

Here is today’s 3D definition:

World opinion:

The understanding people across the globe have of how a hegemonic power works for or against their interests, a phenomenon that hegemonic powers learn to ignore as soon as they become convinced of the stability and durability of their hegemony

Contextual Note

World War II marked a sea-change in geopolitics. It literally ushered in the era of technological rather than purely military and economic hegemony. The real point of the bomb was to provide a graphic demonstration of how technological superiority rather than mere economic and military clout would define hegemony in the decades to come. That’s why the US has been able to consistently lose wars but dominate the global economy.

“President Truman’s closest advisers viewed the bomb as a diplomatic and not simply a military weapon,” Alperovitz writes. It wasn’t just about ending the war but modeling the future. Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, “believed that the use of atomic weapons would help the United States more strongly dominate the postwar era.” He seemed to have in mind the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower would later denounce.

Eisenhower’s prediction about world opinion in the aftermath of the nuking of Japan was apparently wrong. Polls in 1945 showed that only 4% of Americans said they would not have used the bomb. Relieved to see the war over, the media and governments across the globe made no attempt to mobilize world opinion against a manifest war crime.

On the basis of the letters to the editor of The Times, one researcher nevertheless reached the that, in the UK, a majority of “civilians were outraged at the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” This probably reflects opinion across most of Europe. The Vatican roundly the use of nuclear weapons, even two years before the bombing of Japan and then again after the war, but it had little impact on public opinion.

Focused on the drama of the Nuremberg trials rather than the mass destruction in Japan, the nations of the world very quickly adjusted to the fatality of living with the continued presence of nuclear bombs. They even accepted the bomb as a stabilizing norm in what quickly became the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. After all, the idea of mutuality in the strategy of mutually assured destruction seemed to keep things in some sort of precarious balance. 

With history effectively rewritten in a manner agreeable to the hegemony-minded governments of the US, American soft diplomacy — spearheaded to a large extent by Hollywood — did the rest. The American way of life almost immediately became a global ideal, only peripherally troubled by Godzilla and other disturbing radioactive mutants.

Takeshi Matsuda explained in a 2008 in the Asia-Pacific Journal: “By the end of World War II, the U.S. government had recognized how important a cultural dimension of foreign policy was to accomplishing its broad national objectives.” Those “national objectives” had clearly become nothing less than global hegemony.

Historical Note

Post-World War II history contains a cruel irony. An inhuman nuclear attack on Japanese civilians became perceived as the starting point of a new world order under the leadership of the nation that perpetrated that attack. The new world order has ever since been described as the “rule of law.” 

Because the new order relied on the continued development of nuclear weapons, it might be more accurate to call it a “rule of managed terror.” It was built on the notion of fear. Over the following decades, the vaunted rule became increasingly dependent on a combination of expanding military might, mass surveillance, technological sophistication and the capacity of operational weapons to strike anywhere with great precision but without human intervention.

In his article, Gar Alperovitz quotes a pertinent remark in 1946 of Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., who called “the first atomic bomb 
 an unnecessary experiment. 
 It was a mistake to ever drop it 
 [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” But Halsey was mistaken. The scientists didn’t drop the bombs. The politicians — especially Harry Truman, with whom the was destined to stop — ordered it. And bomber pilots did the dropping. But Halsey’s intuition about the rise of technology as the key to hegemony was correct.

Whether Truman understood what was happening, or whether he was an unwitting tool of a group of American Dr. Strangeloves (the former Nazis were already being recruited), no historian has been able to determine. Fox News journalist Chris Wallace, in his book on Truman and the bomb, that the president “agonized over it,” as well he should have. 

The problem that remains for those who seek to understand the significance of our global history is that once the deed was done, Truman’s and everyone else’s agonizing ended. Shakespeare’s Macbeth famously “murdered sleep,” but America’s official historians, in the years following Hiroshima, succeeded in putting the world’s moral sense to sleep.

Humanity is still on the of nuclear annihilation. Some of the bellicose discourse we hear today may be bluff. But the US military has elaborated concrete plans for a nuclear war with China, and preparations for that war are already taking place. As journalist John Pilger out, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been pushing hard to foment a war mentality among the American public, partly because it is part of Trump’s reelection strategy and partly because Pompeo is “an evangelical fanatic who believes in the ‘rapture of the End.’”

World opinion, if our democracies knew how to consult it, would undoubtedly prefer the plain and simple annihilation of our nuclear capacity. But the dream of a democracy of humanity, in the place of competing nation-states, dwells only in an obscure political and psychological limbo, existing as something between an empty promise and wishful thinking.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51łÔčÏ.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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When World War II ended, Washington decided to create a new rules-based world order. International institutions and free trade were to be the twin pillars of this new order. The big powers in the world were mortally scared of another conflict and decided that some form of cooperation was the wisest course of action.

In Europe, the two world wars had destroyed millions of lives, smashed societies and wrecked economies. In the aftermath of the war, Robert Schuman inspired Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to form the European Coal and Steel Community, setting in motion a process of integration that to the European Union. Even the communists got in on the act. The Warsaw Pact was as much about trade and economic ties as about defense and military ties.

Bit byÌębit, the former colonies of European powers also embraced trade. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was formed in 1967, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in 1973 and Mercosur in 1991. Once the Soviet Union fell in 1989, the US pushed a new era of trade liberalization and the World Trade Organization (WTO) was born in 1995. The brave new world had arrived and Francis Fukuyama declared it was the end of history.Ìę

THE PARTY OF DAVOS IS KILLING THE LITTLE GUY

The WTO’s tells us that merchandise exports rose from $2 trillion in 1980 to $18.2 trillion in 2011 achieving a growth rate of 7.3%. Importantly, commercial services trade rose even faster at 8.2%, from $367 billion to $4.2 trillion during the same time period. Unlike the assertions of The Economist and other ideologues, free trade does not benefit everyone similarly and is not good for everyone. For instance, Ghanaians benefit less from selling cocoa than Belgians who sell chocolate. Workers in Alabama suffer when their factory is moved to Guangdong.

In 2015, one of the authors made the argument that trade is good, but not for everyone. It may not be a zero-sum game, but it often produces both winners and losers. Britain won in the free trade system it imposed on India and China. Growing opium in India and selling it in China brought famine for the brown people and addiction for the yellow man, while making the lily white traders of the British East India Company rather rich.

An important fact that champions of free trade overlook is that incredible trade growth since 1980 has also been accompanied by the return of 1920s-style inequality. To be fair, this occurred less due to trade and more because of some truly awful policy choices by both political leaders and central bankers. Taxing Warren Buffett at a than his secretary is not exactly fair. Allowing hedge funds, private equity shops and the likes of Apple to incorporate in offshore tax havens and avoid paying their fair share for roads, hospitals and schools is far from wise. Such is the state of affairs that men like Steve Wozniak, the former partner of Steve Jobs, are having deep misgivings.

Encouraging banks to merge so they became too big to fail throughout the 1990s was shortsighted, if not stupid. Allowing commercial banks to merge with investment banks and to play footsie with savings of hardworking families was negligent, if not criminal. Bailing the big banks out with taxpayer money and making them even bigger to fail was certainly unwise, if not a historic blunder. To top it all, quantitative easing, the de facto printing of money, has been a bonanza for the wealthy who own assets and a disaster for the poor who cannot afford to buy homes, shares or any other asset.

Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist of US President Donald Trump, rightly castigates George W. Bush and Barack Obama for destroying “.” These two leaders certainly played their part in creating a system that has capitalism on the upside and socialism on the downside. Naturally, millions, if not billions, have lost faith in the global economic system. Free trade has been an integral part of this system and, therefore, come under heavy artillery fire.

BEGGAR-THY-NEIGHBOR IS BACK

In a highly unequal society, Adam Smith’s Presbyterian proposition about “truck, barter, and exchange” between the baker, the butcher and the brewer breaks down. In Latin America, the descendants of the conquistadores own almost all of the land and the vast majority of the wealth. They send their children to study in the US, buy German cars and spend their holidays in Europe. The descendants of the subjugated native tribes and enslaved African immigrants have few skills to sell in a global marketplace. They can either become the servants of the rich or embark on careers in crime. Tellingly, in the world are in Latin America, the “” on earth — not Iraq, not Afghanistan and not even Yemen.

In the unequal US, things are not rosy either. St. Louis is the 13th most violent city in the world, Baltimore the 21st, New Orleans the 41st and Detroit the 42nd. The inhabitants in these cities and many others can no longer compete in the global labor market. It is little surprise that protectionist sentiments have been on the rise. Trump came to power on the back of it. On November 20, 2016, one of the authors took the view that his election ended the post-Soviet era of trade liberalization.

The US, the greatest cheerleader for free trade, has now firmly turned protectionist. It has imposed tariffs not only on seemingly hostile China, but also supposedly friendly Canada. The long-forgotten 1930s-style “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies are back in fashion. Bannon is going around the world trumpeting “economic nationalism” and damning “the party of Davos.”

Populism is on the rise from the Philippines to Brazil. Even Europe is under siege. Brexit is a fait accompli and Italian leader seems to be pointing a submachine gun at the EU. Populists are gunning for globalists worldwide and “the Davos man” has turned into a term of derision.

THE PRESSURE COOKER IS HEATING UP

Less than a hundred years ago, the beggar-thy-neighbor of the 1930s ended in World War II. A hundred years after the ceasefire that ended World War I, Chinese economist has queried whether economic crisis could lead to World War III.

These authors agree with Qian’s assessment of the global economy. By flooding global markets with dollars, euros and other currencies, central bankers might have staved off another global depression, but they did not solve any underlying problem. Qian likens this policy to “an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease.” As Qian rightly points out, thanks to central bankers, global asset prices are higher than those prevailing before 2008 and housing prices in the US are now than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006. Furthermore, global debt has hit a record high of with little chance of much of it being repaid.

In such a setting, Trump’s economic war with China could have far-reaching consequences. The Middle Kingdom’s export-oriented model and its are under severe threat. China’s quarterly growth rate has plunged to a nine-year low of 6.5%, prompting Vice-Premier Liu He to for patience. Chinese stocks have plunged over 30% in 2018 and there are fears of further meltdown. The Middle Kingdom feels besieged by Uncle Sam and has responded by in the South China Sea.

India, China’s giant neighbor, is not doing much better. It is facing a massive financial crisis, employment and a steep decline in . A sense of stasis, has overwhelmed the country. Institutions have collapsed in the country, with bitter feuds in its and of its corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucracy. As China has made inroads in Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, India has behaved like a cat on a hot tin roof and hugged the US closer.

Even as India feels threatened by China, Pakistan is paranoiac about India. Islamabad is knocking on doors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an . The country is an economic basket case. Socially, religious radicalism is on the rise. Politically, its elite is parasitic and Imran Khan, the charismatic former playboy-turned-anti-corruption crusader, is green behind the ears. The new prime minister has just returned to Islamabad after begging in Beijing, Pakistan’s new patron as Washington’s ardor for its former Cold War ally wanes inexorably. With plenty of weapons and some nuclear weapons floating around, Pakistan could implode or explode in the near future, triggering a regional or even a global war.

Russia, the successor state to Soviet Union, is in disarray. While sanctions have yet to effect macroeconomic stability, its are bleak. , Jimmy Carter’s former adviser, envisages Russia “experiencing the latest convulsive phase of its imperial devolution.” Naturally, Vladimir Putin wants to fight this trend and preserve Russia as a great power. He has struck back at the US in Georgia, Crimea and Syria. Now, he is intervening in the internal matters of western nations. Arguably, Putin’s greatest success has been manipulation of the 2016 American elections.

As one of the authors argued in 2015, the Middle East is experiencing its version of the Thirty Years’ War. Turkey has memories of the Ottoman Empire and aims to emerge as a modern, populist leader of the Muslim world. With its recent revolutionary tradition and military experience, Shia Iran is the most cohesive power in the region. Bush’s Iraq War has allowed Iran to expand the arc of its influence to Iraq even as Iranian influence in places like Lebanon, Syria and Yemen continues to grow. Saudi Arabia neither has the imperial memory nor the military tradition of Turkey or Iran, but the kingdom has plenty of oil money and, in the words of 51łÔčÏ contributorÌęIan McCredie, a master plan to bring the Middle East under Saudi control. Along with the numerous simmering conflicts in the region, the prospects of an explosive mĂ©nage Ă  trois are not exactly remote.

Not only regional powers, but also global powers such as the US, France and Russia are now involved in conflicts or proxy conflicts in places like Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. A back of the envelope calculation reveals that governments representing 25% of the world population are fighting in the Middle East. If we include Afghanistan, this number rises to a worrying 50%. Remember, this figure does not take into account civil wars in Africa, insurgencies in places like the Caucasus or Kashmir, and ridiculous levels of criminal violence in Latin America. It is hardly surprising that there are now forcibly displaced people worldwide, the highest number since World War II.

If an alien was visiting earth, it would find the world already at war. If that alien wanted to make money, it would buy defense stocks. Demand for guns, bullets, tanks, fighter jets, warships and other matériel will inevitably increase. Like classical economics, the mutually assured destruction doctrine assumes human beings are fundamentally rational and the existence of nuclear weapons will make leaders shy away from World War III. Yet one rogue military commander could fire off chemical or even nuclear weapons, triggering such a war.

In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” And we are now living in a big, bad and mad world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Peace is a difficult thing to measure. Yet this is exactly what Neil Halloran attempts to do in his interactive documentary on the casualties of the Second World War.

In just six years, World War II ranked up the highest body count of any conflict in history, with at least 60 million dead. Although it was not the world’s deadliest war by proportion of population, the systematic slaughter of the Holocaust death camps, the devastating air raids and the horror of the atomic bomb have brought the Second World War to a hallmark of human brutality.

Halloran carefully compiles the numbers of civilian and military deaths on all sides of the war. This is not a story of individual tragedy, but that of which engulfed the entire planet.

What this visualization of data achieves is putting modern conflicts in perspective, measuring current “Long/New Peace” in perhaps unusual, yet highly convincing terms of people who have not died.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Everyone on the Mall near the Washington Monument was looking up at the sky. I was there, too. But I wasn’t looking up — at least not that far up.

On May 8, I was playing Ultimate Frisbee during the noontime game on a stretch of level grass behind the Holocaust Museum. This time, we were joined by thousands of people eager to commemorate the 70^thÌęanniversary of the surrender of Nazi and the end of World War II in Europe. They’d shown up in droves to watch an air show of vintage planes.

I find it strange that so many people like to look at bombers. These machines visited enormous death and destruction during World War II, particularly on civilian populations. The firebombing of German cities Ìę600,000 German civilians, including 75,000 children. The fire bombings of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities killedÌę of 300,000 people, predominantly civilians, and this doesn’t include the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We would find a similar display by the Germans or the Japanese of their war planes singularly distasteful. These planes also rained death down upon the British, the Chinese and others. But the Germans and the Japanese lost the war. And we won.

So, by the ancient laws of battle, we’re allowed our displays of war totems. Our display is the functional equivalent of mounting the heads of our victims on pikes. But it’s obviously not the visual equivalent, or else we wouldn’t bring our children out to gaze up at the sky and applaud these instruments of terror.

The victors were not chastened by the experience of all this destruction. During the Korean War, US warplanes had almost free rein to wipe out . US planes dropped 32,000 tons of napalm on Korea, twice what they dropped on Japan. They deliberately destroyed dams in an effort to destroy crops and precipitate large-scale starvation.

In hisÌęnew Ìęon the air campaign, Blaine Harden quotes Douglas MacArthur, not known for being soft-hearted, as saying: “I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was [in Korea]. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited.”

Meanwhile in Moscow

A celebration of the end of the war also took place in the Russian capital.

used the opportunity to mourn the enormous casualties suffered by the Russian army and the Russian people during World War II. By his side were Xi Jinping of and Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations. Unlike at past affairs — in 2005 with George W. Bush and 1995 with Bill Clinton — the American president was not in Moscow to attend the commemoration. Nor did the leaders of France, Germany or Britain join Putin for the military parade. Even lowly Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, stayed home to witness the test of his new submarine-launched ballistic missile.

© Shutterstock

Putin had a choice words for the absent. “During the last decade, the basic fundamental principles of international cooperation were increasingly ignored,”Ìęhe . “We saw attempts to set up a unipolar world order. We see the use of force. This kind of mentality undermines global stability.”

The was as committed to unipolarism in the 1990s and the 2000s as it is today, if not more so. Ditto the use of force. What Putin finds frustrating is the encroachment of US geopolitics on his perceived turf, which includes Ukraine.

The shadow of the current Ukrainian conflict fell over the commemoration of the end of World War II, just as the shadow of that long-ago war continues to fall over Ukraine. To understand the depth of enmity between the current combatants, you have to understand how history shapes present grievances.

Ukrainians have never really received acknowledgment — much less an apology — for the great famine (holodomor) that swept through the region in 1932-33 and left nearly 4 million dead. Or the waves of class-based and ethnic-based slaughter that took place on Ukrainian territory (of kulaks and various ethnic groups, including Ukrainians). The subsequent return of the Red Army to the territory between 1944-47, as Timothy Snyder notes inÌę, left another quarter of a million dead.

The Russians, meanwhile, harbor resentment toward all the Ukrainians who sided with the Nazis. They have as little love for fierce nationalists like Stepan Bandera, a hero to the Ukrainian right-wing today, who resisted Communist rule. It is common for Russians who side with Putin to tar all Ukrainians with the fascist brush, from the leadership in Kiev to the far right-wing paramilitaries fighting the separatists in the east.

The current crisis in will probably not truly end until Russians and Ukrainians come to terms with the past — and also acknowledge that Putin is not Stalin, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is not Stepan Bandera.

And in Asia

The end of World War II didn’t come until August 15, 1945, when Japan finally surrendered less than a week after the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

In many ways, Asia remains even more trapped in the vise grip of World War II than Europe. It was in 1945 that the United States and the Soviet Union drew a line across a map and divided the two Koreas, a cleavage that remains today. The “peace constitution” that the United States provided — or imposed upon — Japan is still, more or less, in place. China, divided between communists and nationalists at war’s end, remains that way, though the latter have a much smaller footprint in their current Taiwanese redoubt.

As I’veÌęwritten here , many of the tensions in Northeast Asia revolve around “history” problems, much of it from the World War II era.

© Shutterstock

Asia can’t point to a feel-good story like the rise and expansion of the European Union, in which nationalist rivalries become transmuted by common interest (initially anti-communism, in Europe’s case) into golden cooperation. What binds together the former combatants in Asia is a shared commitment to export-led growth. It’s largely because this growth has come in a phased sequence — first Japan, then Singapore and , followed by Korea, now China and points further south — that the countries in the region haven’t been at each other’s necks in competition for markets.

But capitalism hasn’t quite tamed the great ideological passions of the 20^thÌęcentury in Asia. The great rivals of the Cold War — China and North Korea on the one hand; Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the United States on the other — could still deliberately or inadvertently find themselves in an escalating military conflict. The conflicts are by no means confined to these ideological categories. South Korea and Japan are still arguing vehemently over what happened in the 20^thÌęcentury. And China and Vietnam are clashing over territorial claims in the South China Sea that go back even further than that.

Finally in ’45

I was recently reading the letters my father sent to my mother when he was in the army during World War II. He rarely mentions the war itself. He’d turned 18 a few months before Pearl Harbor and signed up thereafter like many young men his age. But at some point his desire to fight evaporated, and he was happy enough to remain stateside. The letters he wrote to my mother, the ones that survive at least, focus on his boredom, his desire for furloughs and his eagerness to get discharged.

Even the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki gets barely a mention, though my father was glad that it would shorten the war. But on one occasion, short of writing paper, he drafted a note to my mother using the back of another letter. This letter, from someone named Cyril and dated August 9, 1945, is typed in all caps. It reads in part:

“The past two days have been days that will be remembered for all time! The atomic bomb has suddenly changed our entire lives and will influence the future of all mankind. It has suddenly made obvious to everyone that another war is an impossibility if mankind and the world is to continue to exist.

“If we have finally been shocked into the terrible necessity of cooperation, then this terrible weapon is indeed a boon to progress in the world.”

My father would eventually change his mind about the dropping of the atomic bombs and see it as a barbarous act. Cyril, meanwhile, was wrong. WeÌęwouldÌęget more wars, and we would notÌębe shocked into the “terrible necessity of cooperation,” except intermittently.

When the instruments of death fly above us, we still look up in admiration, not horror. As long as we celebrate destruction in this way, we will be doomed to repeat it.

*[This was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:Ìę / / /

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Each year, I take a vote in my “The Third Reich, 1933-1945” module at Teesside University as to whether the subject of denial should replace an existing lecture on the development of ’s Final Solution – say, on the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau, or the actions of the Einsatzgruppen – those mobile killing squads following behind the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the (USSR) in June 1941. Nearly every year, my students overwhelmingly vote to ignore the subject. There are certainly good reasons for doing so, in fact: A close colleague researching the Holocaust understandably refuses to give any attention to Holocaust denial, since “it’s just an insult to both victims and history.”

I want to call this the “round earth” rejection of “Holocaust denial.” This was most aptly characterized by James Najarian, a wise interpreter of the various methods involved in denying the Holocaust: “Flat-earthers believe that the earth is flat and the United States space program is a hoax. This does not make the rest of us round-earthers; we don’t need a name for ourselves.”

In contrast, motivations for Holocaust denial, to this day, are overwhelmingly advanced for racist and ideological reasons, especially and . It is understandable, therefore, that many people feel passionately that there is no debate to have with deniers. The Holocaust took place, and spending even a second on the subject of Holocaust denial is simply a waste of time. True, there is indeed no benefit in debating whether the Holocaust “happened” with those who think, against the mountains of evidence, that it did not. Yet it does not follow that simply ignoring this phenomenon altogether is the best way forward.

Nazis Were the First Holocaust Deniers

Some of the techniques by Holocaust deniers are so as to defy belief. And it is also true that we can group some Holocaust deniers alongside people who think the US space program was faked, or that 9/11 was an inside job, or who wear tin foil hats to protect the brain against radiation or mind control. This “tin foil hat brigade” are likely to see every major historical event as a conspiracy; some sort of inside job that helps to conveniently explain how bewildering – and how cruel – the real world can be.

But this is the least serious and least important of the forms Holocaust denial takes today. Most Holocaust deniers today accept that the world is round, and they try to find ways of occluding the accepted view of history. Some of the more dangerous forms of Holocaust denial, in fact, goes by the tag “Holocaust revisionism,” so as to appear moderate and convincing – as simply another “point of view” that everyone’s entitled to.

© Shutterstock

A correspondingly slick surface can be seen on professional websites and many books aiming for the look, scholarly apparatus and jargon of academic respectability. It is this more “intellectual” form of Holocaust denial – such as claiming that the gas chambers were merely a “detail of history,” as Jean-Marie Le Pen recently reaffirmed – that is illegal in most of the today, including France, Germany and Austria, but not Britain.

The central underlying theme of anti-Jewish hatred takes us back to the wartime Holocaust: the most horrifying expression of anti-Semitic hatred, and of genocide, in history. Closely related, the first people to systematically deny the Shoah – the extermination of all of Europe’s Jews – were the Nazis and their collaborators. Elites in the Third Reich destroyed evidence, ranging from documents to crematoria; they exhumed and burned already-desecrated corpses; and they kept the existence of their so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” as great a secret as possible during the .

In tandem with the development of the historical Holocaust itself, therefore, Holocaust denial was employed in various by Holocaust perpetrators; that is, the Nazis and their collaborators during the war.

An Architect by Trade

An architect by trade, the 46-year-old Paul Blobel commanded the infamous Einsatzgruppe 4a in Ukraine that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Although Jews had been persecuted for the preceding eight years under the Third Reich, and many thousands of Polish Jews had already been killed since the onset of the Nazi occupation there from September 1939, the invasion of the USSR, code-named Operation Barbarossa, immediately marked a step-change in the targeting and mass murder of Jews.

At first, shooting thousands of Jewish men as partisans, soon the roving Einsatzgruppen began murdering tens of thousands of the elderly, women and children a month. In September 1941, Blobel organized the largest recorded murder in history to that date: the shooting of 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine just outside of Kiev, as meticulously documented in the Einsatzgruppen situation reports.

In order to conceal the growing scope of these activities in the east, the Nazi leadership looked for alternatives for mass shooting that would provide greater secrecy. In the closing months of 1941, new decisions were taken on what had moved from mass murder to systematically-planned . On September 3, gassing with Zyklon B was tested at Auschwitz-Birkenau; from November 1, 1941, construction began on new extermination camps at and CheƂmno, with the latter starting to murder Jews by carbon monoxide on December 7, 1941, in occupied Poland.

These methods were derived from earlier programs to murder disabled people using reinforced gas vans; when the so-called “euthanasia program” was concluded in August 1941 – revealingly, due to a public outcry raised by Bishop von Galen – these secretive vans were sent to the Einsatzgruppe still operating behind the front lines. Paul Blobel’s Einsatzgruppen C Kommando received two of these gas vans in November 1941 and were the first to use them in the occupied east.

By the time of the infamous Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, whichÌęinformed, coordinated and set to work the Third Reich’s different agencies of state in carrying out the genocide of all of Europe’s Jews under Nazi control, another so-called “problem” needed a “solution”: Tens of thousands of bodies buried in shallow graves were impossible to conceal and were poisoning water tables along from the Baltic inÌęthe north and the Balkans in the south.

© Shutterstock

In mid-1942, Blobel was put in charge of the exhumation and cremation of these bodies, under the code-name Sonderkommando 1005. Its job was to erase as much of the evidence of Nazi crimes as possible, extending to exhuming and burning bodies in open air pits. This involved grisly techniques to efficiently cover-up many Holocaust sites in central-eastern Europe; for example, CheƂmno was partially-demolished, and ”ț±đĆ‚ĆŒ±đłŠ was completely destroyed, with a Ukrainian farming family placed on top to hide the minimum of 434,508 Jews murdered there in nine months.

The role played by Blobel, who was hanged in Germany in 1951 for his crimes, is horrifyingly instructive. He helped organize the mass shootings of Jews in the second half of 1941. In 1942, when more secretive extermination camps began operating, Blobel organized the removal of evidence of Nazi genocide and testified about his activities in the 1948 Einsatzgruppen trial.

The case of Paul Blobel provides clear evidence that Holocaust denial was undertaken by the very murderers themselves, in order to eliminate all traces of their unprecedented crimes. Holocaust denial, then, was originally deployed during World War II by the Nazis for self-serving, sanitizing and, above all, anti-Semitic reasons.

The Third Reich’s attempt to murder every European Jew under their control and, more relevantly, their systematic attempt to conceal this unparalleled crime, were both unsuccessful: millions of Jews survived the tyrannyÌęof the Third Reich. Holocaust deniers must contend with thousands of corresponding testimonies by perpetrators and victims alike, they must ignore tens of millions of pages of contemporaneous documents, and they must argue that both general understandings of history and generations of academic historians are deluded, deceitful or conspiratorial in their scholarship on the Holocaust.

Rhetoric of DenialÌę

To throw this point into some relief, we have but a handful of authentic sources about the Spanish Armada or the Great Fire of London in 1666 – the latter, for example, including less than a dozen accounts from that year, of which the diary by the parliamentarian Samuel Pepys is certainly the best known. Yet to my knowledge, no one has carbon-dated Pepys’ diaries for authenticity, forensically analyzed his handwriting for veracity, or produced a 250-page report on the diary’s legitimacy – as the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation felt compelled to do with Anne Frank’s diary in the 1980s. This was as largely a result of systematic forgery claims by well-known deniers such as Richard Harwood (aka Richard Verrall of Britain’s National Front, who wrote Did Six Million Really Die? in 1974), Ernst ZĂŒndel and, of course, the gold standard of these historical deceivers, David Irving.

Irving had long been a denier of the Holocaust, calling it an Allied “propaganda exercise” but posed as a reasonable, “revisionist” historian while doing so. He had an important fringe following in the 1980s and 1990s, especially among the far-right, when he sued Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt for libel after she claimed, in her 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that Irving was a “dangerous spokesperson” for Holocaust denial.

A famous in 1996 saw several historians of Nazism and the Holocaust testify in London for the defense, including the eminent historian, Richard Evans, who concluded: “The supposed evidence for the Nazis’ wartime mass murder of millions of Jews by gassing and other means, he claims, was fabricated after the war. He has referred repeatedly to the ‘Holocaust myth’ and the ‘Holocaust legend’ and has described himself as engaged in a ‘refutation of the Holocaust story.’”

After a four-month trial, it was found that “Irving had ‘significantly’ misrepresented, misconstrued, omitted, mistranslated, misread and applied double standards to the historical evidence in order to achieve his ideological presentation of history. also found that Irving was an ‘active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-SemiticÌęand racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.'” For any reasonable person then, this most sophisticated of revisionists was shown to be a fraud who manipulated historical evidence for ideological ends.

© Shutterstock

Good Old Days of Holocaust Denial

Strangely enough, perhaps the second half of the 20^th century can be considered “the good old days,” when scholars and publishers alike simply disregarded far more sporadic deniers of the Holocaust. Well-beyond the watershed date of 1979 – when the first pseudo-academic institution was established to feature Holocaust “revisionism” in the US, Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review – such figures were either mocked or ignored; they were rarely treated seriously or as a danger (with Irving the major exception in Europe, and ZĂŒndel in ).

To cite Sir Richard Evans again, their writings were instead “mostly distributed by mail order,” and of a caliber that “seemed to belong in the world of sensational newspapers such as you could buy in American supermarkets, recounting the experiences of people who had been abducted by little green aliens or who had seen Elvis Presley still alive.”

In short, until about 20 years ago, Holocaust deniers were largely dismissed out of hand by historians and the wider public alike. But then again, this was before the rise of the Internet.

Perhaps by familiarizing ourselves with the central arguments and postwar history of Holocaust denial, however nauseating and noxious they may be, it is possible to discern the attempts by extremists to hide behind scholarly facades and seemingly informed arguments. Particularly with the communication possibilities offered by the Internet and social media, recognizing these weavers of deception for what they are, and indeed always have been, has never been so important as it is today.

One reason is obvious: On some search engines, typing in “Holocaust” as a keyword will bring up a denial site among the first pages of hits. This century, there is no doubt that we have entered Holocaust denial 2.0. Simple Holocaust denial slogans are used on Facebook and social media every day. Anyone can favorite or share a tweet that simply says #Holohoax. While this does not necessarily make that person a Holocaust denier, it is nonetheless hateful, and it is offensive. Online comments denying the Holocaust are often simply substitutes for hatred of Jews.

This can be seen in the Institute for Historical Review (the acronym IHR was deliberately chosen to mix it up with the University of London Institute for Historical Research), which is run by Mark Weber, who was an activist in the US neo-Nazi National Alliance, before launching their professional-looking website. Similar is the related, highly visible website Codoh – Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust – which hides behind the “intellectual freedom” “with regard to this one historical event called ‘Holocaust,’ which in turn will help advance the concept of intellectual freedom with regard to all historical events.”

As ever, the one event they choose to examine is always the Holocaust. The site’s founder, Bradley Smith, whose intended audience is college students, is described by the as “someone [who] appears to recognize that his denial of the Holocaust itself contributes to anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence: In the company of fellow deniers, Smith even admits that he carefully constructs his campus speeches to minimize the possibility of disagreement with his ideas. In a lecture he gave at an April 2004 convention of the Institute for Historical Review and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, Smith said that his stump campus speech is constructed “as simpl[y] as possible 
 to set [the issues] up in a way that could not really be debated.”

That is hardly “free inquiry,” needless to say. A final example can be seen in the conspiracy website Solar General, touting itself as “The Most Controversial, Censored and Forbidden Web Site in the World.” It boasts a professional layout, highlighting the first three topics: “105 Questions on the Holocaust”; “Adolf Hitler: Life of a Leader”; and “Anne Frank Fraud” – which should tell you all you need to know about this hate-inspiring “Holocaust revisionist” website.

Leopards do not change their spots, even in the online jungle. While ignoring Holocaust denial is certainly preferable, the ubiquity of the Internet and social media makes that nearly impossible today. So we must call out and contest their vitriol, knowing that Holocaust denial is a ruse for an assault on the past in the name of racism and far-right values. While arguing with deniers themselves may be pointless, in this day and age, regrettably, trying to understand their motives and arguments is not.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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On January 29, 1945,ÌęVictor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, in his diary being told by a friend about a speech on the radio given by the Ă©łŸŸ±Č”°ùĂ© writer Thomas Mann:

“According to it, the Germans had murdered one-and-a-half million (the figure was given down to the last hundred) Jews in Auschwitz, and ground down their bones to use as fertiliser. The exact figure was owed to German thoroughness, a record had been kept of every single dead Jew, and thanks to their surprise advance the Russians had found the books.”

Klemperer made no further comment. Whether this was because he was overwhelmed by the moral enormity of what he had heard, or because, after 12 years of meticulously observing and recording the intensifying persecution of the , he was just too weary, is not clear. Certainly, he knew that his own position at this point was incredibly precarious, and that he too was likely to be murdered as the Nazi regime collapsed.

Soldiers of the Red Army had entered the huge concentration camp two days previously on January 27. There they found a few thousand emaciated survivors, vast stores of clothing and shoes, and the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria. It soon became clear that Auschwitz had been a center for the extermination of the Jews, as well as a place of incarceration and torture for prisoners from all over .

The day of liberation, January 27, was, more than half a century later, adopted asÌę. At the heart of this commemoration is the commitment to learning about the and other subsequent genocides, in the hope that knowledge may “to create a safer, better future.”

Slow Realization

It took a while for comprehension of the Holocaust to accumulate during the war. The Nazis began the mass murder of Europe’s Jews in the summer of 1941. Details of the mass shootings of Jews in the former Soviet Union were decrypted by the British at Bletchley Park early on, but it was when the Nazis began gassing Jews in highly secret camps in Poland in 1942 that news of this leaked to the outside world, through numerous channels. In deliberately vague terms, and made it perfectly clear in public pronouncements that they were carrying out the extermination of the Jews.

Auschwitz Birkenau © Shutterstock

In 1943, 1944 and 1945, as the physical sites of the Holocaust were uncovered, survivors liberated and perpetrators captured — starting with the liberation of in 1943 — a more detailed picture unfolded. Unsurprisingly, as with the second-hand reporting of Thomas Mann’s radio speech, which Klemperer heard, there were inaccuracies and confusions. The had not recorded their crimes meticulously. They had, in fact, worked very hard to obscure them, burning the bodies of their victims, destroying death camps and avoiding committing crucial orders to paper.

Even key perpetrators were ignorant of the bigger picture — and very confused about details. When Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz between 1941-44, appeared as a witness at the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals in April 1946, he freely confessed that a total of 3 million prisoners had died there during that period. Today, there is a scholarly consensus that approximately 1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz.

It wasn’t until the early 1960s, after the trial of Adolf Eichmann and, separately, of a number of former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, that serious scholarly investigation of the Holocaust commenced. The of Raul Hilberg’sÌęThe Destruction of the European JewsÌęin 1963 inaugurated a period of painstaking research into different aspects of the Holocaust, which still continues. No aspect of modern European history has been more intensively researched or more furiously debated.

Academic study has been complemented by documentary films, a huge mass of memoirs, philosophical, sociological and theological commentaries, and biographies of individuals involved. The enormous popularity of feature films about the Holocaust and of Art Spiegelman’s cartoons inÌęÌęhave ensured that representations in popular culture have contributed significantly to our wider understanding.

Since 2001, theÌęHolocaust Memorial Day TrustÌęhas commemorative activities to educate great numbers of schoolchildren and other members of the public in different countries. Around the world, Holocaust museums and memorials have proliferated. Significant collections of Holocaust-related materials have been developed online.

Holocaust Memorial Day will again be observed, accompanied by ceremonies, educational activities and media events. This year being the 70^th anniversary of the liberation, there will be a particular focus — but, unequivocally, we still need this structured memory. In Europe and the , is growing. Intolerance, racism and cruelty are the staples of our daily news diet, and we are witnessing the worldwide growth of an ideology that rejoices in killing its opponents. Holocaust Memorial Day matters more than ever.

*[This article was originally published by .]

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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The idea of major powers working together to prevent conflict in the modern era has been around since the Concert of Europe in 1815. The brought unprecedented devastation, leading to a renewed commitment to cooperation in the establishment, for example, of the League of Nations, and the renewal of the Geneva Conventions. Yet the , following closely after, became one of history’s most destructive conflicts, claiming over 60 million lives.

Through the and the nationalist movements that followed the dissolution of bipolarity in the global political system, conflicts became more localized, exalting a high toll on the population that gets caught in the crossfire as the definition of “battlefield” becomes ever more vague. The recent emergence of the (IS) has not only not only brought chaotic brutality to religious and ethnic communities in and , but also given a new twist to Samuel Huntington’s idea of a “clash of civilizations.” Confronted with a resurgent threat from terrorism, extremist ideology and technologically advanced weaponry, the way we engage in conflict is being redefined before our very eyes.

51łÔčÏ’sÌęAnna Pivovarchuk talks to Yana Korobko, an expert on peaceful conflict resolution and author of , about the past, present and future of war.

Anna Pivovarchuk: What have we learned from the Great War? Has it changed attitudes to warfare and, if so, why didÌęthe policies outlined in its aftermath fail to prevent, and indeed precipitated, the Second World War?

Yana Korobko: From tragic combat experience, humanity has learned that war is a strong, evil force, and there is nothing that can stop it once and forever. Warfare has become more sophisticated, and nations have started investing more into military rather than war prevention. For example, today, US military expenditures are at the highest since World War II. Clearly, World War I did not meet expectations of the bloc that had instigated it; moreover, Germany did not want to tolerate those draconian conditions that Europe had put on it. Therefore, World War I grew into World War II, which aimed at a redistribution of powers.

Pivovarchuk: World War II, the most devastating conflict in human history, was, aside from the power struggle, a fight between “good and evil” that saw a coming together of ideological antagonists to achieve victory that failed to carry over into peacetime. How has it changed the balance of power in the world?

Korobko: In politics, there is nothing perfectly good, nor perfectly evil. Instead, there are powers that, at a particular time in history, dominate all others — and then this order changes again. Objectively speaking, World War II brought about a new order in international relations, which was a bipolar system. From it, two powerful countries rose up – the and the – with competitive antagonistic ideologies, which proved once again that in politics, such categories as “good” and “evil” are purely subjective, and depend merely on the standpoint from which you’re looking at it.

Pivovarchuk: The Cold War saw many localized insurgencies develop throughout the world — in places like Congo, Vietnam, Angola and later Afghanistan — driven by the forces of nationalism, independence and political ideology. Can these be seen as precursors of the current conflicts we are seeing today, which appear to be growing andÌęmoldingÌęinto a coherent, slow-burning war?

Korobko: Definitely! Modern wars have deep roots in the past. For example, frequent contradictions between Western and worlds already started during the time of the Ottoman Empire as a result of the fight for oil resources. The real vilification of Arabs was in full swing during European colonial times which, indeed, created negative stereotypes of Islam. This served, and is still serving, as a pretext for invasion of Muslim lands. So, this cultural stereotyping and racism are the driving force of current conflicts we witness today.

The nature of future conflicts lies mostly in (cyber) technological, informative and psychological dimensions. Offensive tactics have started to involve more psychological and psychotronic influences.

However, not all local wars can grow into a global war. For example, theÌę conflict or clashes between and are potential hot points for a global war, as interests of more than two belligerent parties are involved there — American and European included. At the same time, no modern powers would consider starting a global war for or . In what it concerns, the Islamic State is a project created by some world powers interested in changing the status quo in the Middle EastÌęby exploiting the religious factor. Until recently, we haven’t seen aÌęterrorist organization that has grown to be so powerful as to pretend to incite a worldwide collision.

Pivovarchuk: The end of the 20^th century saw the emergence of a new approach to conflict: the notion of humanitarian intervention, or the “right to protect” (R2P) doctrine, which was invoked in Yugoslavia, Somalia and Kosovo, among others. What are the problems with this approach? What are the potential benefits and limitations of the international community being present in — and expected to regulate — global wars?

Korobko: The responsibility to protect has got numerous advantages if evoked in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the United Nations charter and under the auspices of the UN to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, nowadays, the “responsibility to protect” is more and more abused rather than applied properly to serve its noble goals. For example, this very pretext was evoked by during the annexation of earlier this year, while in reality the Kremlin was governed by ambition of imperialistic expansion rather than protection of the Russian-speaking population. If the latter was the case, Russia could have engendered international discussions on the topic a long time ago. But Moscow never brought up the issue at international summits, simply because the Russian-speaking population in Crimea enjoyed all rights and freedoms of any other ethnic minority in the region. Therefore, any legal norm shall be well elaborated, leaving no jurisdictive gap for malefactors to misuse it.

Pivovarchuk: What is the nature of global conflict of the future? How will tactics and strategies change, and how willÌęthe world adapt to these new developments?

Korobko: The nature of future conflicts lies mostly in () technological, informative and psychological dimensions. Offensive tactics have started to involve more psychological and psychotronic influences. The world might not even notice when it adapts to the new type of war, as this will happen very quickly, and mostly on an unconscious level. If oneÌęaccepts all information the media offers them, especially someone else’s analysis, without applying their own personal judgement, then he or she is a potential victim of the new type of war.

Pivovarchuk: Looking back through these questions, it is clear how Western-centric the idea of an “international community” is and how dominant the military superpowers are in the process of war and peace. Is it a positive force, or does the future lie with regional actors taking on more eminent roles to solve problems that, to be fair, they understand better and are perhaps better suited to combat?

Korobko: Undoubtedly, the Western-centric world is decaying and a positive period of development in international history is almost over. This was purely a Western decision. Moreover, it had proved to be no longer competitive enough with new emerging superpowers such as , etc, which could better respond to the needs of its many nationalities without infringing upon their rights.

The views expressedÌęin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectÌę51łÔčÏ’sÌęeditorial policy.

Ìę/Ìę

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The use of propaganda in wartime is not a modern invention. Societies have used and lived with propaganda from the earliest civilizations. In ancient Greece, Aristotle wrote about the importance of understanding what motivates audiences when preparing to speak in public. Xenophon is credited with recording the earliest use of misinformation in wartime in his accounts of the Greek wars with Persia around the beginning of the 4^th century BC. Roughly 2,500 years ago, the Chinese general Sun Tzu, writing in The Art of War, stated that, “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

Total War

However, it is not until the early decades of the 20^th century that the use of in war became both as widespread and as significant as we see it today. In , an exhibition held at the British Library in 2013, we argued that Ìęmarked a turning point for state use of propaganda both in war and during peace. There are a number of reasons for this. World War IÌęhas been as the first “Total War,” a term that describes both the industrialization of warfare and the ability of new weapons to reach far beyond conventional battlefields.

For the first time, entire populations – women and children included – would be required to maintain the rate of production needed for food, clothes, and munitions to keep armies fighting. For many countries, advances in political representation meant that a greater proportion of the population (although still almost exclusively men) now had an influence on the direction of state policy, and could remove governments perceived as not acting in their interests.

The global nature of the war meant that the European powers needed to convince those around the world to support them. This included the subjects of colonies in , and the Caribbean, as well as neutral countries, to appeal for resources or financial support to continue the fight. All these factors came together to convince leaders of states of the of propaganda, and of coordinating propaganda efforts.

Material was produced in huge quantities. In Britain, it was estimated that 40 million items were manufactured for overseas use during 10 months in 1917 alone. Mass production and circulation of a variety of publications was one means of influencing opinion. When these were directed at enemy forces, or populations in occupied countries, new ways of circulating material was needed. The First World War saw the introduction of the use of airplanes to drop leaflets over enemy forces and civilian populations alike.

The power of image was recognized as important not just in giving a sense of veracity to accounts, but also in the powerful emotional impact that images could convey. This can be seen in recruitment and war-savings posters, and also in the many photographic news titles produced for circulation around the world. By the end of 1916, Britain’s War Pictorial had a circulation of 500,000 copies per issue, in four editions covering 11 languages. Propaganda was not limited to print alone, as countries set up film production and distribution units to carry their messages in the new medium.

In Britain itself, as public opinion towards war diversified in the 1920s and 1930s, so its use of propaganda was seen as deceitful and morally damaging.

Propagandists of the First World War recognized, however, that they could not rely on state-produced material alone to make their case. Influence had to be applied on those that already held sway over public opinion, and chief amongst these were newspaper editors and owners. One of Britain’s first acts in entering the war was to cut the undersea telegraph cable that connected continental Europe to the United States. For the entire duration of the war, the fastest and cheapest way of getting news to the US was through Britain, and this gave Britain an unmatched advantage in influencing the reporting of foreign correspondents.

A British Approach

In 1914, the British prime minister also set up a covert propaganda department, known as Wellington House, to direct the work of influencing opinion overseas. Wellington House recruited authors, artists, journalists and newspaper editors to produce and advise on propaganda. Efforts were directed at putting across the British case in the foreign press. For the US in particular, there was also an attempt to target those seen as both sympathetic to Britain and influential in public debate on the war. The objective was to ensure that the British case was promoted in the US, but without the messages appearing to come from Britain.

The British approach to propaganda, at least that directed to people outside Britain, can be characterized by the notes made by Lord Northcliffe. Northcliffe was the owner of The Times and Daily Express newspapers, and influential in British politics. In 1917, he was appointed as head of the Committee for Enemy Propaganda. His notes for the first meetings of the committee are held by the British Library and contain the following observations:

“What can be done by open means must not be done by occult means

Lies are the least effective form of propaganda

Propaganda that looks like Propaganda is third rate propaganda

Never shove your propagandee to a conclusion he can reach unaided

Unless men are very ill or very uncomfortable they resist fears and welcome hope

No man will blame himself if there is anyone else to blame 
 Indignation with others is the natural state of man.”

The means of propaganda were therefore: mass-production and circulation; using media and publications that were already popular; influencing those people who were already influential; harnessing the power of images; and appealing to values and characteristics that were important to the target audience. Propaganda sought to evoke sympathy for war aims and fighting forces, and the dehumanization of the enemy. The latter can be powerfully seen in the propaganda of and , which portrayed Germans as barbaric and animalistic.

The volume of propaganda produced during World War IÌęwas unprecedented. Its new sophistication was the result of rapid experimentation and activity on a huge scale. In the years following the end of the war, the propaganda produced by Britain was seen as particularly effective, and influenced attitudes across the world. In Britain itself, as public opinion towards war diversified in the 1920s and 1930s, so its use of propaganda was seen as deceitful and morally damaging. Such a view was reflected in Lord Ponsonby’s book Falsehood in War Time, published in 1928. Ponsonby argued that it was better for a soldier to be injured or killed on a battlefield than subjected to the corrupting effects of enemy propaganda.

Learning From Experience

In the US, there was also ambivalence towards the use of propaganda. For some, an impression arose that the US had been deceived into joining a war that did not concern it. For those who had taken a role in arguing in favor of war, the effectiveness of propaganda in directing public opinion remained impressive. The journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was among those who argued for greater understanding and use of propaganda in democracies. Edward Bernays, who had served on the US Committee on War Information, used his experience from the war to develop the practice of public relations.

Through a sophisticated appreciation of the power of image, ready access to communication technologies, and a new mobilization of dehumanizing images and language, non-state extremist groups have become experts in using propaganda to extend their influence and maintain a flow of recruits and resources.

Elsewhere, Vladimir Lenin had been particularly impressed by the effectiveness of propaganda, and put its lessons to use in mobilizing support for the Communists across in the years following the 1917 Revolution. In , an opinion began to form that hostile propaganda had been the decisive element. The “stab in the back” conspiracy theory held that Germany had not suffered a military defeat, but rather had been brought down by “enemies within,” encouraged and supported by foreign propaganda. Both Joseph Goebbels, who had worked as a journalist, and Adolf Hitler were convinced of the effectiveness of propaganda, and exploited the “stab in the back” theory in making their political gains.

One hundred years after the start of World War I, many of its propaganda methods and tactics can be seen as relevant and enduring today. The questions raised by the use of propaganda also still apply. Mass production and mass communication continue to be effective. Leaflets dropped by aircraft were used in huge numbers by US and other forces during the wars in and . More Iraqi soldiers surrendered or deserted during the 1991 conflict than were killed in fighting. The need to get “your side” across in news reports is reflected in the practice of embedding journalists with fighting units – granting access to areas of conflict, but also limiting the range of reporting allowed. Similarly, foreign journalists were “hosted” in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein and the Belgrade of Slobodan Milosevic, where the tone of reporting could be influenced by restrictions on travel and the information provided by state-approved experts.

The power of images, especially moving images, remains of paramount importance in influencing opinion. This is also where the greatest changes have been made. The technology required to record sound and moving image has become much cheaper and more widely available. Satellite links and the Internet mean that these images and sound can be transmitted almost instantly and much more cheaply than ever before. The result is that states and traditional media can no longer hold a monopoly on mass communication. As the 20^th century was characterized as the age of Total War, then the 21^st has become that of Asymmetric War. Through a sophisticated appreciation of the power of image, ready access to communication technologies, and a new mobilization of dehumanizing images and language, non-state extremist groups have become experts in using propaganda to extend their influence and maintain a flow of recruits and resources.

*[Discover more about the British Library’s World War IÌęcollections at .]

The views expressedÌęin this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflectÌę51łÔčÏ’sÌęeditorial policy.

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World War I, or the Great War, altered the course of history. Its effects can be felt even today. For instance, much of the conflict in the is aÌęÌęof lines drawn in the sand. The quest for self-determination in the region, whichÌęÌębefore the started in , remains unfulfilled to this day. The character of war itself has evolved and continues to do so. Following the devastation of World War II, conflicts became low intensity. As the end of the saw the bipolarity of power diminish, conflicts have become more nebulous, but still with global consequences.

Absolute War

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19^thÌęcentury Prussian general and military theorist, defined war “as an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” However, Clausewitz was not in favor of conflictÌęas an end in itself. He stressed and warned that war should be a means to an end. He described it as “a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means.” Clausewitz’s rationalization of war was based on the limited conflicts of his time. Limited in this context means attainment of clear objectives, and armies being the main belligerents.

World War I was Clausewitzian insofar as the way it was fought. The Battle of the Somme, for instance, was one of the mostÌę. In terms of fighting, it was a war of what Clausewitz referred to asÌę. However, as Mary Kaldor has rightly argued in her seminal work,ÌęNew and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Clausewitz could not have envisaged the combination of mass production, mass politics and mass communication harnessed with mass destruction.

Strategic bombing using planes and Zeppelins made an appearance for the first time during the Great War. For instance, Rear Admiral Paul Behncke, deputy chief of the German Naval Staff, in the summer and fall of 1914, argued that by bombing London, its docks and the Admiralty in Whitehall, it might be possible to “cause panic in the population which may possibly render it doubtful that the war can be continued.”ÌęÌęsuggest that air raids on , and vice versa, did not result in a massive loss of life. Britain suffered 1,413 dead and 3,409 injured, whereas 740 Germans were killed and 1,900 wounded.

However, the psychological impact on civilians was tremendous. For instance, inÌę, besides anxiety, there was “a state of siege mentality, general and potential mass nervousness, depression, sheer fear, horror, loss of sleep (due to noise as well as anxiety), jumpiness, feelings of vulnerability (real and imagined), confusion, irritation, anger, a ‘sinking feeling’ and, of course, terror.”

The Great War left unprecedented trauma. The main objective, in its aftermath, was to ensure there was no repeat of the experience of trench warfare seen in the early 20^thÌęcentury.

Strategic bombing developed rapidly after the war. “The bomber will always get through” was theÌęÌęof strategic bombing in the inter-war period. Its most significant contribution was the speed at which destruction could be brought on the warring parties. Strategic bombing transformed warfare into a truly offensive instrument.ÌęFor , when Germany began its Blitz against Great Britain in World War II, was bombed for 57 consecutive nights; nearly 30,000 Londoners died and 50,000 more were injured. Similarly, in the Ìęair Ìęon , Tokyo was bombed 65 times between December 6, 1944, and August 13, 1945, which resulted in over 137,000 casualties, 787,000 destroyed homes and buildings, and 2.6 million displaced persons.

The development and deployment of strategic bombing as a tactic completed the mechanization of warfare. The killing of people and razing of cities to the ground became more “efficient.” A fighter pilot could easily deploy bombs without having to look in the eyes of their victims, be they soldiers or civilians.

The Great War came close to what Clausewitz an “absolute war.” The origins of the conflict were complex and almost defied what Clausewitz believed regarding clear political objectives. That said, belligerentsÌęÌętheir role in the war was aÌęÌęone. Yet the scale of the war was unprecedented. Civilians and armies had to be mobilized to support the war effort. The main objective, once hostilities broke out, was to achieve total victory. The financial cost to achieve total victory nearly wrecked the economies of the belligerents, irrespective of which side they were on. According to Eric Hobsbawm, had planned to produce 10,000-12,000 shells even before the war began. In the end, the French industryÌęÌęnearly 200,000 shells a day.

The Great War left unprecedented trauma. The main objective, in its aftermath, was to ensure there was no repeat of the experience of trench warfare seen in the early 20^thÌęcentury. It is perhaps from this perspective that the Allies signed the Treaty of Versailles with Germany in 1919. However, the Treaty was more punitive than anything else. Germany wasÌęÌę“guilty” of waging war and its armed forces were cut down drastically under the Treaty.

However, the attitude toward warfare had changed substantially. Efforts were made to limit conflict, even if its elimination was not possible. The League of Nations covenant reflected this. The most important clause in theÌęÌęwas the call to member nations to undertake and review disarmament protocols every ten years. Still, the LeagueÌę to preventÌęthe European powers from going to war again. On the whole, the Treaty of Versailles could not become the basis of a stable peace in Europe or the world.

A War in the Imagination

The two World Wars were, arguably, the last interstate conflicts where belligerents were more or less evenly matched. Similarly, waging a war was considered to be a prerogative of the state alone. According to Max Weber: “We have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state.”

In the current conflicts that are raging, particularly inÌęIraqÌęandÌęSyria, the combatant/non-combatant distinction has more or less disappeared. Civilians have been targeted by belligerents.

The other important aspect is the Great War was fought on the basis of “legitimate interests” of the state, no matter how nebulous or absurd they were. This changed considerably after the conflict, or rather it became more complex. According to Kaldor, the disillusionment caused by the Great War led to people fighting for more abstract and, in a way, universal causes. For the Allies, she argues, World War II was a battle against evil — Nazism, fascism and militarism. For the Axis powers, over and above the territorial and financial gains, dreams of attaining some abstract, long-lost glory was the driving force.

Consequently, much of the Cold War discourse was characterized as a fight between democracy and the socialist monolith. It was, Kaldor defines, “A war in the imagination.” Yet there were serious and real conflicts, particularly in and , after World War II. Most of these were wars of decolonization, unification and independence. The US and the (USSR) often supported opposing forces to ensure that particular country did not succumb to the “other” ideology. This was amply demonstrated by conflicts in , and, later, .

Asymmetrical Warfare

The interesting aspect here is the way in which these conflicts were fought, particularly in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a mixture of guerrilla and conventional warfare. The asymmetry of the belligerents was one of the main reasons for this. Some 9 million US military personnelÌęÌęon active duty during the Vietnam War between 1964-75. Ìęthat, from 1964-68, the Vietcong had roughly 245,000 men in a 300,000-man enemy force. The other issue was the conflict in Vietnam was an important example of localized conflicts at the time. The USSRÌęÌęabout 3,000 troops to Vietnam andÌęÌęanti-aircraft equipment. However, the two superpowers never got involved in a head-on conflict against each other.

What the insurgency fought by the Viet Cong demonstrated is that guerilla warfare is not hierarchical in the traditional sense. The structure is likely to be more horizontal than vertical. The combatant/non-combatant distinction broke down further during conflicts in Angola, Vietnam or . For instance, the Viet Cong portrayed itself as a nationalist force rather than a communist one to ensure compatibility with farmers. This was in tune with what Mao Zedong said about not isolating the populace the insurgents claimed to be fighting for. In Mao’sÌęown : “Because guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them, it can neither exist nor flourish if it separates itself from their sympathies and co-operation.”

In the current conflicts that are raging, particularly in and , the combatant/non-combatant distinction has more or less disappeared. Civilians have been targeted by belligerents.ÌęFor , theÌę (ISIS), when it began its operations in Syria in 2013, detained and killed Syrian who did not conform to its purist vision of Islam.

Similarly, ISIS has alsoÌę afterÌęreligious minorities in northern Iraq. The organization itself is not a formal army but an insurgent group that is anÌęoffshoot of . Blending in with the local population is unlikely to be a difficult task for its members. The government faces a tough challenge in successfully identifying the insurgents, as did the US in Vietnam or even Iraq.

The other issue arising from conflict is the displacement of people. According to oneÌę, low intensity wars in Africa and the Middle East have displaced 50 million people, thereby reaching the same level as World War II. So, in other words, the attempts to limit war, through disarmament and arbitration, as enshrined in the League of Nations’ Covenant, have not been achieved to date.

*[Read the final part .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Background

According to Stephen Pinker, we live in the safest of times. In his book, The Better Angels of our Nature, he writes: “The decline in violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.” That is, in the last 200,000-odd years of our existence on earth, we have now reached a point where governance, economic progress and education have brought us to the peak of humanity.

In the history of human development, and have remained a nearly-constant, destructive force ripping through the social fabric. According to some , in over 3,000 years of recorded history, less than 300 years have been peaceful. Conquest, rebellion, civil strife, slave trade, wars of succession and secession, disputes over territory and natural resources, ideological struggle — these concepts have throughout the centuries trumped the value of human life, and continue to do so till today.

Pinker’s argument may be , particularly if one takes into account that was the deadliest conflict of the last 1,000 years, having claimed over 60 million lives in just six years. By comparison, Genghis Khan’s Mongol invasions, which ravished Eurasia in the 13^th century, at least 40 million people in the course of a hundred years. Although estimates of this kind are predictably difficult, there have been that up to 4 billion lives were lost to war since records began. 1900-90 alone, over 40 million soldiers and 60 million civilians died in conflicts.

Yet there is a nowadays that interstate and civil wars have declined since the end of the — the post-World War II period known as the “Long Peace.” The Upsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) the average number of conflicts worldwide stand at around 33-37 in the past decade. These, according to gathered by Pinker, claim less than 1/100,000 of the world’s population — a substantial drop from 300/100,000 during World War II or even the low teens in .

Given the devastating death tolls of wars in , and , with ongoing conflicts in , , , the (DRC), and multiple wars between and — among numerous others — it is difficult to buy into the idea that war is out of fashion. With the prevalence of 24-hour news and the freedom of the Internet, suffering is brought ever closer to us, and seems to be omnipresent in its horror.

The brutal conflict in the DRC, which has claimed over 5 millionÌęlivesÌęsince 1998 — the largest death toll since the Second World War —ÌęreceivedÌę16 minutes of coverage on CNN and 29 minutes on the BBC in the entire year of 2000, compared with over eight and nine hours dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same period.Ìę

There have been many that these “new wars” of the late 20^th century have signaled the death of modernity, as the failure of nation-states and the rise of identity politics are equated with the failure of Enlightenment thought. Globalization and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is often viewed as a new modus vivendi, one in which transnational actors mete out violence through technologically advanced weapons such as — a new, style of war that is more removed from the reality of horror and brutality, producing ever higher civilian suffering.

Former Secretary General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously quipped that television has changed the way we react to crises. Indeed, the so-called CNN effect has been hotly debated, and widely credited with humanitarian interventions in places like Somalia.

Yet the majority of the world’s most devastating conflicts go largely unreported — with “silent emergencies” in places such as East Timor, , Angola or falling under the radar. The brutal conflict in the DRC, which has claimed over 5 million since 1998 — the largest death toll since the Second World War — 16 minutes of coverage on CNN and 29 minutes on the BBC in the entire year of 2000, compared with over eight and nine hours dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the same period. Given that constituted some 90% of combat deaths in the world a decade ago, with the balance shifting to the and more recently, how much do we really know, or care, about the true extent of human suffering?

Why is the Issue of War Relevant?

War, as Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote, is “an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds” and to “introduce into the philosophy of War itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.” Yet the liberal postulate that democracies do not wage wars against each other has, to a large degree, spared those of us lucky enough to have been born in the West from unthinkable misery of all-out war.

But if we consider the number of of just the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — 2.8 million in the alone — the human cost of conflict is brought home to all of us with the tragedy of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dreadful injuries and social injustice. If we consider the 50 million refugees fleeing conflict zones worldwide, running from systematic abuse (some 48 women are raped every hour in the ), children orphaned and traumatized, the exorbitant budgets begin to look not only questionable, but immoral. Since 2008, according to the , 111 countries have seen levels of peace deteriorate, with only 51 nations seeing an increase.

Sigfried Sassoon, writing about his experience in the First , at the crowd watching soldiers march by: “Sneak home and pray you’ll never know / The hell where youth and laughter go.” To this day, for a large part of the world’s population, this prayer goes unanswered.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Important in understanding the War on Terror’s true purposes is the fact that, in light of the US government’s tactics in waging the war, it is very difficult to conclude that it will ever end and in which geographic areas it will be fought, both now and in the future. After all, the tactics the government is using — to include seemingly indiscriminate unmanned drone attacks in multiple Muslim countries, detentions without trial or end, torture, renditions, and the continuing erosion of personal privacy here in the United States — all raise questions regarding the US government’s true aims and, for the most part, seem more likely to exacerbate the threat of terrorism, rather than alleviate it. After all, with Washington’s piecemeal approach of individually targeting terrorist suspects, it is difficult to grasp the government’s contemplated endgame, assuming one exists.

This is because, based upon this piecemeal approach, there is no endgame, as the US government can continue the war perpetually without meaningful democratic oversight or review, so long as it maintains its assurances of the existence of a credible threat. This is a natural consequence of the fact that the government maintains a monopoly on the information necessary to arrive at an informed decision on the war’s necessity and effectiveness. This is where the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay and other government detention policies come into play.

Because the US government’s strategy in waging the War on Terror appears to be so fundamentally ill-suited for accomplishing the war’s stated objectives and, as stated above, likely exacerbates the concern it allegedly addresses, Washington needed, and continues to need, what passes for evidence supporting the necessity for the war which is beyond meaningful review and democratic oversight. The US government claims that it cannot provide meaningful support for its attacks on the targets of its war, because, it claims, to do so would jeopardize national security.

We are asked simply to support its efforts without question. The US government’s detention policies, which place the purported enemy beyond the reach of the American populace and, to this day, largely beyond the reach of meaningful, independent legal counsel, provide propaganda fodder, in the form of the detainees, and enable the government to lend a sense of credibility to its threat claims. These detention policies, and the way that they are effectuated in near absolute secrecy, enable the Washington to unilaterally and completely control the narrative regarding the apparent threat posed by the detainees and their alleged colleagues who remain at large.

The US government, to this day, has, through these detention policies, been remarkably successful in controlling the detainees’ narrative, thus enabling the government to generate continuing support for a war that is, at best, ill-advised and at worst, illegal. This, and not any illusory national security benefit, is why so many detainees remain at Guantánamo Bay without meaningful hope of release and appear to be in a state of unending legal and practical limbo.

The detention camps at Guantánamo Bay were, from day one, meant to serve an instrumental role in shaping public and world opinion, that being to create a sense of urgency and overriding importance to the US government’s war-time footing in furtherance of its War on Terror. By continuing to maintain the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay, the government can effectively characterize those detained there in any manner it chooses, for the sole apparent purpose of justifying a response to the resulting perceived threat that those detained there purportedly pose. This, in turn, enables the US government to set the geographic, tactical, strategic, and temporal agenda for its perpetual war. Therein lies the primary utility of the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons of similar effect.

So what evidence do we have that the US government is using Guantánamo Bay for public relations purposes, rather than for legitimate penal or national security reasons? One example supporting this conclusion comes from the past debate on whether there are some detainees at Guantánamo Bay, who are so dangerous that merely transporting them to United States soil for detention would pose an untenable national security risk. This argument, which is, on its face, suspect, highlights the nature of the Washington’s claims, not only with respect to the necessity of a facility like the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay, but also of the war itself.

There seems to be no reasonable explanation about how any detainee can be so dangerous that his (or her) mere presence within the territory of the United States would pose a security risk to the country as a whole. After all, the United States Bureau of Prisons is more than capable of securely housing the most notorious of convicted criminals. This argument, rather than being designed to ensure a secure nation, is designed to thoroughly demonize some or all of the detainees in order to create an atmosphere that supports the US government’s justification for the War on Terror, and its no-holds-barred tactics in prosecution of the war.

Another source of support for the theory that the detention camps at GuantĂĄnamo Bay serve a largely public relations purpose, is the government’s unilateral and complete control over the selection of defense counsel representing detainees charged before the military commissions. As mentioned in myÌę article onÌęDecember 13, 2012, the American military simply will not permit the detainees facing war crimes charges before the military commissions to select their own counsel, which is curious in light of this right’s fundamental standing in the United States Constitution and criminal law jurisprudence.

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution grants a near-absolute right for criminal defendants to select their own counsel. However, this right is not being honored at the detention camps of GuantĂĄnamo Bay and the government is quite aggressive in its denial. Why? Simply put, this policy further enables the US government to control the narrative coming from the detention camps in a way that is consistent with its War efforts.

In summary, the primary purpose behind the US government’s detention policies in furtherance of its War on Terror is a public relations one. The government has always sought, and continues to seek, to characterize the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay in a manner that maximizes its ability to garner support for the War on Terror and its suspect tactics and strategies in furtherance thereof. This conclusion should lead one to question the underlying premises upon which arguments supporting the war itself are based.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

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Much has been made of the US government’s detention policies in furtherance of its so-called “War on Terror,” particularly as those policies are implemented at the prison camps of GuantĂĄnamo Bay. Most discussions of the prison camps involve descriptions and discussions of what has happened, what is happening, and conjecture as to what may happen. Less frequently discussed is what is arguably the most important subject of discussion: Why? This article discusses that question from both a military and political perspective.

The US government, using World War II-era legal precedents and transparently utilitarian justifications, initially sought to create a “law-free” custodial environment at Guantánamo Bay wherein it could do as it pleased at the various camps that constitute the detention facility at the base, both with respect to the detainees’ detention without trial and with respect to their treatment while detained. The transparent purpose behind the government’s effort to create this “law-free” zone was to ensure that it exercised complete control, not only of the detainees and their detention, but also of the narrative presented to the world regarding the detainees and the threat those detained there purportedly posed.

In a series of what have ultimately proven to be ineffective and arguably deleterious court decisions, the American justice system attempted to appear to rein in the US government’s extra-legal approach to the detainees’ detention and treatment. While some detainees have, in fact, been released, the practical effect of these releases has been to create a worldwide misperception about the current legal status of the remaining detainees and the Washington’s intentions with respect to them.

At this stage, the US government and the detainees have apparently reached an impasse, resulting in, among other things: an ongoing and large-scale hunger strike by many of those remaining at the camps; President Barack Obama’s apparent inability to close the facility, if that was ever a realistic goal; and the stigmatization of the detainees to the point where it appears that efforts to resettle them in foreign lands are frustrated by the government’s inability to identify countries willing to admit them.

One cannot meaningfully discuss how we have gotten to this stage, where some detainees have been held for over ten years without trial, without first understanding why the US government aggressively fought for this “law-free” zone — ironically located in a country with a well-earned reputation for repression, tyranny, and flagrant disregard for the most fundamental of human rights.

In order to understand Washington’s motives behind the creation of this “law-free” zone, one must first comprehend the nature of America’s War on Terror, how it is being fought and, most importantly, why it is being fought and why it is being fought the way it is.

The War on Terror is, in many ways, unique and arguably unprecedented. First, with al-Qaeda and the US government’s public relations use of it notwithstanding, there is no, and really can’t be any, identifiable enemy, which eases Washington’s ability to target enemies on an ad hoc basis and to substantiate its claims of existing threats without meaningful factual support or democratic oversight.

Second, the nature of the War on Terror permits the US government to employ tactics that are not only ineffective, but also arguably counterproductive, at least from a national security perspective.

Finally, because of the vast expansion of the use of classified material by the national security apparatus of the government during the War on Terror, any meaningful ability to impose democratic review and oversight over the war’s necessity and conduct has been rendered, for all practical purposes, non-existent.

This disquieting American national security reality raises the question of just how is it that we got here?

It is the answer to this question that leads to an understanding of why the US government created the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay and why the government felt it so necessary to do so in a “law-free” manner. In short, the answers to these questions are directly, and inextricably, related to the nature of the War on Terror and the war’s true purposes — none of which are to ensure America’s national and societal security, as the government’s War on Terror is, at its essence, a war of aggression.

*[Note: Read the on September 18.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

Image: CopyrightÌę© . All Rights Reserved

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