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The US Is a Bully – Israel Should Stop Giving the Same Impression

The Pentagon’s New Mission Statement: Neo-Colonialism & Hegemony Unmasked

By John Wight
RT News

July 6, 2018

 

The US has long sought to deny its hegemonic character while emphasizing its democratic character. It now seems all such pretence has been abandoned.

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know,” Shakespeare writes, in words that for time immemorial should have sat pride of place under the Great Seal of the United States on front of the podium whenever any president, cabinet member, congressman, or indeed any US official proclaimed their country a champion of democracy.

Now, with the US Department of Defense amending the mission statement of the US military from a ‘deter war’ stance to a ‘sustain American influence abroad’ stance all pretense, as mentioned, is over, allowing the country’s political and military elite to bask in the warm glow of hegemony unmasked.

According to Task & Purpose – a news site tailored to US veterans – this semantic shift in mission statement ‘seems a significant change for the department [Department of Defense] under President Donald Trump.’ But though perhaps for some it may constitute a ‘significant change’, students of US history will no doubt counter this particular assertion with the point that though it may constitute a change in form, it is anything but when it comes to content.

How could it otherwise when imperialism and hegemony are the very fulcrum of US foreign policy, and always have been? Both, in fact, lie at the very foundations of the country’s existence, reinforcing a muscular identity rooted in nationalism, exceptionalism and supremacy – a toxic brew responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in human history.

From the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, resulting in the US seizing half of Mexico at that time – an episode lambasted by former slave and famed US abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, as a “disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic” – all the way up to the war for regime change in Libya in 2011, under the rubric of NATO, the US has been the single greatest threat to peace, stability, and justice around the world.

That champions of US expansionism wave the banner of democracy, human rights, and liberty to justify its objectives only adds an extra layer of mendacity to the character of what has proved an insatiable beast of conquest and domination.

Writing in the introduction to his classic work – ‘’ (Zed Books, 2014) – author William Blum identifies the influence of the national propaganda which accompanies US hegemony: “No American has any difficulty believing in the existence and driving passion for expansion, power, glory, and wealth of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or the British Empire. It’s right there in their schoolbooks. But to the American mind…‘The American Empire’ is an oxymoron.”

And lest anyone lapse into the mistake of believing that US foreign policy differs according to the occupant of the White House; this is a fatuous misreading of reality on the same level of absurdity as the claim that the character of a crocodile differs according to the colour of its eyes.

Perhaps the most unabashed and unapologetic encomium to US expansionism of recent times was that proclaimed by prominent US newspaper columnist Thomas Friedman in the pages of the New York Times in 1999. At a time when the US was wallowing in post-Soviet triumphalism, Friedman encouraged the notion that America truly was the world’s one indispensable nation.

Friedman writes: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

When it comes right down to it, it really isn’t rocket science. After all, those 800 US military bases in over 70 countries across the world are not there for ornamentation, and certainly not to help make the world safe for democracy. Instead, per Friedman, those bases exist to make the world safe for Western global corporations to plunder and exploit the world’s human and natural resources untroubled by the inconvenience of national sovereignty and self-determination.

Continue reading…

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

The Internet – Human Design, But Not Human Planning

Happy Birthday, Web

March 13, 2014

Today is the 25th anniversary of the most important invention that any individual ever came up with: the World Wide Web. Not even Gutenberg matched it. Korea had moveable type two centuries before he invented it.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, all by himself, on March 12, 1989. Then he implemented it over the next two years.

He did not patent the idea. He gave it away. He changed the world, mostly for the better.

He converted an invention of the United States government’s DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — into a decentralized, international institution that represents the greatest threat to political centralization in man’s history.

The Web is the incarnation of what F. A. Hayek called the spontaneous order. Out of a decentralized system of communication comes a series of mini-orders created by individuals. There is no central planning committee. The Web is the antithesis of a planning committee. Yet there is order at our fingertips.

The Web gives the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency enormous power to spy on the world. It also gave one man, Edward Snowden, the power to expose the spies as no one ever had before. Never before in the history of the spooks has there been this much bad publicity. One man did it.

Today, the lead story on Google News was this: Feinstein shifts tone in calling out CIA search. Senator Feinstein had been the Senate’s leading cheerleader in its use of the Web for snooping. Then she found out that she and her colleagues in Congress have been the targets. She is now on a rampage against the CIA. The story is all over the Web.

 

The head of the CIA insists that the CIA never spied on Congress. No one believes him, especially no one in Congress.

The Web has changed our world, and it will change it far more. That is because no one owns it as a whole. No one controls it. But its parts are privately owned. It is customer-centric. The users are in control.

PROFIT-SEEKING AND CREATIVITY

In an article in Britain’s Left-wing Guardian, the author bewails these aspects of the Web. They are the reasons I cheer it. These are the reasons it has changed our lives for the better. They all boil down to this fact: The state does not control it.

His first observation is true, and he applauds it.

1 The importance of “permissionless innovation”The thing that is most extraordinary about the internet is the way it enables permissionless innovation. This stems from two epoch-making design decisions made by its creators in the early 1970s: that there would be no central ownership or control; and that the network would not be optimised for any particular application: all it would do is take in data-packets from an application at one end, and do its best to deliver those packets to their destination.

It was entirely agnostic about the contents of those packets. If you had an idea for an application that could be realised using data-packets (and were smart enough to write the necessary software) then the network would do it for you with no questions asked. This had the effect of dramatically lowering the bar for innovation, and it resulted in an explosion of creativity.

What the designers of the internet created, in effect, was a global machine for springing surprises. The web was the first really big surprise and it came from an individual — Tim Berners-Lee — who, with a small group of helpers, wrote the necessary software and designed the protocols needed to implement the idea. And then he launched it on the world by putting it on the Cern internet server in 1991, without having to ask anybody’s permission.

In short, it is the product of one man’s creativity — not a committee.

This bothers him: free men are using a government-invented system to make profits. The horror!

3 The importance of having a network that is free and openThe internet was created by government and runs on open source software. Nobody “owns” it. Yet on this “free” foundation, colossal enterprises and fortunes have been built — a fact that the neoliberal fanatics who run internet companies often seem to forget. Berners-Lee could have been as rich as Croesus if he had viewed the web as a commercial opportunity.

I am such a fanatic. Whenever individuals can appropriate a government-funded project, profiting from it by removing it from government control, I’m in favor of it.

A free man gave something away. He took a government-funded operation, which was designed to overcome the threat of a nuclear bomb on a centralized military communications system — and made it productive. In short, he made tax money productive. In doing so, he reduced government power. This horrifies our critic.

4 Many of the things that are built on the web are neither free nor openMark Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook because the web was free and open. But he hasn’t returned the compliment: his creation is not a platform from which young innovators can freely spring the next set of surprises. The same holds for most of the others who have built fortunes from exploiting the facilities offered by the web. The only real exception is Wikipedia.

This has placed private ownership at the top of the benefits of the Web. Private ownership unleashed has enormous creativity. It has mobilized the spontaneous order, merely by making opportunities available to all comers.

This has placed private ownership at the top of the benefits of the Web. Private ownership unleashed has enormous creativity. It has mobilized the spontaneous order, merely by making opportunities available to all comers.

7 Power laws ruleIn many areas of life, the law of averages applies — most things are statistically distributed in a pattern that looks like a bell. This pattern is called the “normal distribution”. Take human height. Most people are of average height and there are relatively small number of very tall and very short people. But very few — if any — online phenomena follow a normal distribution. Instead they follow what statisticians call a power law distribution, which is why a very small number of the billions of websites in the world attract the overwhelming bulk of the traffic while the long tail of other websites has very little.

Pareto’s 20-80 law governs the Web. Surprise, surprise! It dominates many things. It is an order that emerges out of an unplanned environment. Why should anyone complain? But this horrifies our critic. Why? Because of this:

8 The web is now dominated by corporationsDespite the fact that anybody can launch a website, the vast majority of the top 100 websites are run by corporations. The only real exception is Wikipedia.

Private enterprise has made the customer king of the Web, and therefore king of the Internet. This has passed control to individuals. The corporations must serve individuals. Individuals decide what they want the Web to do for them. The government does not.

This is the heart of liberty:

9 Web dominance gives companies awesome (and unregulated) powersTake Google, the dominant search engine. If a Google search doesn’t find your site, then in effect you don’t exist. And this will get worse as more of the world’s business moves online. Every so often, Google tweaks its search algorithms in order to thwart those who are trying to “game” them in what’s called search engine optimisation. Every time Google rolls out the new tweaks, however, entrepreneurs and organisations find that their online business or service suffers or disappears altogether. And there’s no real comeback for them.

The public likes to use Google. Google makes money because it serves customers. Producers try to game the system; then Google takes away their advantage. This is exactly what I want as a consumer.

10 The web has become a memory prosthesis for the worldHave you noticed how you no longer try to remember some things because you know that if you need to retrieve them you can do so just by Googling?

Plato made the same argument against writing. I remember this because I read it somewhere. I don’t know where. But I can find out on the Web. So can you. I won’t bother. If you do not believe me, you can follow Casey Stengel’s dictum. You can look it up.

Because of the profit-seeking nature of the decentralized Web, this is true:

12 The web has unleashed a wave of human creativity. Before the web, “ordinary” people could publish their ideas and creations only if they could persuade media gatekeepers (editors, publishers, broadcasters) to give them prominence. But the web has given people a global publishing platform for their writing (Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Tumblr), photographs (Flickr, Picasa, Facebook), audio and video (YouTube, Vimeo); and people have leapt at the opportunity.

There are causes. There are effects. Our critic does not like the causes, but he likes the effect. That is, he is a Leftist. They have been the free market’s free riders for over two centuries. They have been blessed by liberty, and they have used this liberty to attack the economic institution that gave them liberty: the free market.

He worries about the environment. He says no one knows what the Web is doing to the environment, but he is worried. That is because he is a Leftist. He worries about the environment, even though he does not understand cause and effect.

20 The web has an impact on the environment. We just don’t know how big it isThe web is largely powered by huge server farms located all over the world that need large quantities of electricity for computers and cooling. (Not to mention the carbon footprint and natural resource costs of the construction of these installations.) Nobody really knows what the overall environmental impact of the web is, but it’s definitely non-trivial. A couple of years ago, Google claimed that its carbon footprint was on a par with that of Laos or the United Nations. The company now claims that each of its users is responsible for about eight grams of carbon dioxide emissions every day. Facebook claims that, despite its users’ more intensive engagement with the service, it has a significantly lower carbon footprint than Google.

Keep those servers absorbing electricity! Keep those carbon footprints growing! As long as companies are keeping customers happy, the spontaneous order will continue to displace the governments’ central planners. The free market’s decentralized invisible hand will continue to place ever-tighter limits on the government’s centralized visible hand. If this takes a little extra carbon — or extra nuclear power — so be it. It is a small price to pay.

CONCLUSION

The Web is overcoming the Left. It is delivering information to customers and their servants, profit-seeking corporations. It is making it difficult for the government’s bureaucrats to hide. Even Diane Feinstein is slowly catching on.

The mainstream media are fading in importance. They are being pushed out into the “long tail.” Matt Drudge has more leverage than any television network — surely more than CNN and MSNBC combined. The public has spoken.

It will continue to speak.

Happy Birthday, Web. May you have many more!

From GaryNorth.com, here.

This Cannot Be Repeated Too Many Times: States Create Their Own ‘Terrorists’

America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group

By Garikai Chengu
Global Research, June 25, 2018
Global Research 19 September 2014

Incisive article originally published by GR in September 2014.  

Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region.

The fact that the United States has a long and torrid history of backing terrorist groups will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore history.

The CIA first aligned itself with extremist Islam during the Cold War era. Back then, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side, the Soviet Union and Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side, Western nations and militant political Islam, which America considered an ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation.”

During the 1970’s the CIA used the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a barrier, both to thwart Soviet expansion and prevent the spread of Marxist ideology among the Arab masses. The United States also openly supported Sarekat Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, and supported the Jamaat-e-Islami terror group against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan. Last but certainly not least, there is Al Qaeda.

Lest we forget, the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980’s. Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told the House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Mr. Cook explained that Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of “the database” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan.

Continue reading…

From Center for Research on Globalization, here.

Di Velt, Yene Velt, Und Roosevelt

America’s World War II Prison Camps

By 

December 11, 2001

Most Americans have never heard of the prisoner of war camps in the United States during World War II. Hans Sennholz, a Luftwaffe pilot and later a Misesian economist, worked on a prisoner-run farm in Arkansas after he had been shot down by British anti-aircraft fire in North Africa. They sent him from Britain through Canada to the West Coast and then to Arkansas.

Most estimates that I have seen place the number of prisoners of war in the U.S. in the range of 50,000 to 70,000, but one reputable and detailed Website says it was 425,000.

More than 150,000 men arrived after the surrender of Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in April 1943, followed by an average of 20,000 new POWs a month. From the Normandy invasion in June 1944 through December 30,000 prisoners a month arrived; for the last few months of the war 60,000 were arriving each month. When the war was over, there were 425,000 enemy prisoners in 511 main and branch camps throughout the United States.

This is a good example of history that never gets to the general public. This is a little-known and long-forgotten story, but it is not shocking.

What follows is shocking. I begin with low-level shock.

The Japanese Camps

Most Americans know about the concentration camp system that the United States created for Japanese residents of the West Coast. There were 120,000 of these internees in a dozen camps, mostly in the mountain states, but with two camps in eastern Arkansas. A few Americans know that the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover had opposed these mass arrests. Fewer still know of the forced sale of everything these people owned at substantial discounts. They were only allowed to bring into the camps what they could carry in their arms in one trip. But until this year, only a handful of Japanese-Americans knew that in 1944, the U.S. government drafted the young men housed in these camps, and about 300 refused to be inducted. They said they were prisoners who were not being treated as citizens, which they were. So, some of them were put in jail for draft resistance, and the others became pariahs in the camps. The other Japanese internees regarded them as traitors. This story became public knowledge only this year, in law professor Eric Muller’s book, Free to Die for Their Country (University of Chicago Press, 2001). You can get chapter one on the Web.

The Western Hemisphere Kidnap Camps

The following story would be a great case study for Memory Hole 101 (second semester). I stumbled onto it about three years ago. It was on the Website of a local affiliate of NBC television. That Web page is long gone, but because of www.google.com, I was able to track down other pages in a few minutes. I used these search terms: Japanese, Germans, Peru, World War II, Texas, camps. Of course, had I not found that NBC affiliate site three years ago, I never would have known which search terms to use. I never would have known about this story. Prepare yourself for a shock. This is from the Handbook of Texas Website. Its title is “World War II Internment Camps.” And what remarkable camps they were! You will find no reference to these camps in any textbook on U.S. history, I guarantee you.

Although many Americans are aware of the World War II imprisonment of West Coast Japanese Americans in relocation centers, few know of the smaller internment camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Under the authority of the Department of Justice, the INS directed about twenty such facilities. Texas had three of them, located at Seagoville, Kenedy, and Crystal City. Prisoners included Japanese Americans arrested by the FBI, members of Axis nationalities residing in Latin-American countries, and Axis sailors arrested in American ports after the attack on Pearl Harbor. About 3,000 Japanese, Germans, and Italians from Latin America were deported to the United States, and most of them were placed in the Texas internment camps. Twelve Latin-American countries gave the United States Department of State custody of the Axis nationals. Eighty percent of the prisoners were from Peru, and about 70 percent were Japanese. The official reasons for the deportations were to secure the Western Hemisphere from internal sabotage and to provide bartering pawns for exchange of American citizens captured by Japan. However, the Axis nationals were often deported arbitrarily as a result of racial prejudice and because they provided economic competition for the other Latin Americans, not because they were a security threat. Eventually, very few Japanese ever saw Latin America again, although some Germans and Italians were returned to their Latin American homes. The majority of Texas internment-camp prisoners were Axis nationals from Latin America. . . .

In addition, prisoners were taken to Crystal City from other INS internment camps in Hawaii and Alaska (not states at the time), the United States, Puerto Rico, the West Indies, and South and Central American countries. . . .

As we shall see, there is some debate about the numbers of these victims of American-supervised international kidnapping. Was it 3,000, total? Or were there more? I think there were far more, for reasons that you will soon see. In any case, what you have read so far is a whitewashed version of the story. It gets worse — much, much worse.

Add one word to the Google search list: “exchanged.” Again, had I not found that NBC affiliate site, I would not have known to use this term. This brought me to a site run by the Freedom of Information Times. This revealing site specializes in World War II internment of German American civilians.

Here, we read the grim reality regarding what other use these kidnapped Latin Americans had for the American government. I will bet that nothing that you have ever read mentioned this legacy of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Facts: During the hearings before the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Edward J. Ennis, the Director of the Alien Enemy Control during World War II, on November 3, 1981 testified:

Mr. Macbeth [a member of the Commission]: Did you have any experience with the internment of enemy aliens who were outside of the United States.

Mr. Ennis: Oh yes, we had two programs…Now the other program was taking alien enemies from other countries in South America…If we couldn’t get the [Latin American] countries to intern them we had to transmit them to the United States for internment…It was an aborted program, I don’t think it accomplished anything. It had a security purpose to do in these countries [Latin America] what we were doing in the United States, about 5,000 German aliens were interned, and a few hundred German aliens in Cuba and in other countries in South America. But it didn’t work very well. [Source: pp.157-159, Testimony of Edward J. Ennis before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians on November 3, 1981, R.G. 220. . . .

The Latin Americans of German ancestry who [about 5,000] were brought to this country by the United States were incarcerated in several camps, most were in either of the following camps: Crystal City, Texas; Seagoville, Texas; Camp Kenedy, Texas; Fort Lincoln, Bismarck, North Dakota; and Ellis Island, New York Harbor, New York.

Hundreds of the interned Latin Americans, many of whom were, by birthright, citizens of one of the republics, were exchanged for persons of the Americas held by the Third Reich, i.e., they were deported to Germany.

Stephen Fox, “The Deportation of Latin American Germans, 1941-47: Fresh Legs for Mr. Monroe’s Doctrine,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 32 (1997): 117-42.

Prior to the exchange, lists of internees in the U.S., including the names of German-Jews, were provided to the authorities of the Third Reich.

The State Department citations herein are included in their entirety in Volume IV, The World War Two Experience of German-Americans of German-Americans in the World Wars, Edited by: Don Heinrich Tolzmann, K.G. Saur, Munich, 1995, pp. 1671-1674.

Got that, folks? The U.S. government went to the trouble of identifying the kidnapped victims of Jewish German background, sent their names to Hitler’s bureaucrats, knowing that these were “high priority items,” and then shipped them off to Germany in exchange for Americans who had been inside the Third Reich when Hitler declared War on December 11.

The only other explanation is that American bureaucrats deliberately identified the captive Jews in order that the Germans might be able to keep out those Germans whom they really didn’t want. That’s the “favorable interpretation.”

“My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” etc., etc.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration did many horrible things. This is just one more example. Most of these things were covered up then, and professional historians still do their best to cover them up today, 56 years after FDR’s death.

For the New Deal-justifying liberals who write all of the American history textbooks, seeing just isn’t believing. Facts like these are dropped down the memory hole, where they are thought to belong.

Why don’t Jews know about this neglected aspect of American history? Because they haven’t been told. Why not? Because most academic Jews are political liberals, and their commitment to the Roosevelt Administration has been greater than their commitment to historical accuracy. So, politically conservative Jews don’t know the story.

Conclusion

Anyone who points out this sort of thing is dismissed by the Establishment press and the Establishment academic community (guild) as a “conspiracy nut.” I confess: guilty as charged.

December 11, 2001

From Lewrockwell.com, here.