WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

From Substack:

Part 3 of what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and the second chapter of it is titled:

The War on Southeast Asia

Noam began his high-profile political activism during the Vietnam War, with his essay on the responsibilities of intellectuals. It was published in 1967, the year after Ed Herman’s first book on Vietnam. Noam began the chapter by noting how the Ken Burns documentary titled The Vietnam War depicted the war as an American tragedy that arose from good intentions from “decent people.” Noam noted how that paradigm was set by New York Times journalist Anthony Lewis, who framed the bludgeoning of Indochina as “blundering efforts to do good.” That is the “mistake” excuse that Klaus Barbie and Hermann Goering used regarding the extermination of Jews. As Noam often remarked for more than 50 years, nations and empires only make “mistakes” and never commit crimes.

Noam then cited magazines, historians, and politicians who attributed Vietnam to benevolence gone awry. Noam wrote:

“In fact, the true story of the Vietnam War was not the story of noble motives in pursuit of a futile objective. It was a story of crime, committed for indefensible reasons.”

Noam discussed the transformation of Daniel Ellsberg from a Vietnam skeptic in 1961, as far as whether the USA would succeed. Ellsberg initially believed in the USA’s good intentions. Even after the escalation in 1964, Ellsberg continued to believe in the noble mission of the United States in Vietnam. It was not until Ellsberg began working on what became known as the Pentagon Papers that he realized that he was wrong. He finally realized that the Vietnam War was a great, evil crime. Ellsberg’s transformation reminds me of Ralph McGehee’s. Very few people had that awakening and then did something about it, like Ellsberg and Ralph did.

Noam laid bare the Big Lies of the USA’s charade of trying to protect Vietnam from communism. The USA helped France try to recolonize Vietnam immediately after World War II, and when France failed, the USA took over. Hồ Chí Minh approached Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and submitted a paper at the postwar Paris Peace Conference after World War I, as he argued for Vietnamese independence. Hồ was involved in resistance to Japan in World War II and is seen by the Vietnamese as George Washington is seen in the USA today, as the father of his nation. Hồ wrote to Harry Truman in 1946, asking for help against the French attempt to reconquer Vietnam. Truman not only did not help Hồ, the USA almost completely funded and armed the French attempt to reconquer Vietnam. When the Vietnamese defeated the French in 1954, then the USA got involved. In Eisenhower’s memoirs, he wrote:

“I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held at the time of the fighting, possibly 80% of the population would have voted for the Communist Hồ Chí Minh.”

Faced with that reality, the USA undermined the Vietnamese elections that the Geneva settlement had prescribed, to prevent Vietnamese democracy from arising. The USA used a puppet, Ngô Đình Diệm, to rule Vietnam from 1955 until he had outlived his usefulness and the CIA had him murdered weeks before JFK’s murder, which shocked JFK.

The ruling class of South Vietnam openly admitted that they were not popular with the Vietnamese people. Noam wrote that JFK escalated the war in 1961-1962, and by the 1965 land invasion, 150,000 Vietnamese citizens had already died. War correspondent Bernard Fall, who died in Vietnam and was fiercely anti-communist, said that Vietnam was “threatened with extinction” as the “countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” The USA outdid the Nazis at times, and the war escalated under Nixon. Nixon proclaimed, “We will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated.” Millions of peasants died, mostly in South Vietnam, the very people that the USA was supposedly protecting from communism. Forests and fertile fields were rendered into moonscapes in what one Vietnamese scholar said was a “deliberate destruction of the environment as a military tactic on a scale never seen before.”

Part of the American logic of bombing South Vietnam was driving the peasants to “safety” in what were essentially concentrations camps (“strategic hamlets”), to deprive the communists of human resources. What the USA practiced in Vietnam began in World War I and has reached its apotheosis today in drone warfare. The “warriors” sit behind computer screens in the USA and rain death onto the USA’s unfortunate targets, with plenty of “collateral damage” such as wedding parties and other social gatherings. That practice is intended to ensure that American casualties are minimized and enemy casualties are maximized.

General Westmoreland, who ran the Vietnam operation, was deeply racist. His attitude was reflected in the “mere gook rule” attitude that American soldiers had toward the murders, rapes, and other abuses of the Vietnamese.

I vividly remember the TV news when I was around ten years old, with the TV’s talking heads announcing the daily death counts, as the USA killed ten times as many “enemies” as American soldier deaths, as the skewed casualties supposedly showed that the USA was prevailing. The My Lai Massacre was a typical slaughter of a village in those days. The only difference was that My Lai was eventually publicized, and Seymour Hersh broke the story a year after it happened.

Former Vietnam solder Philip Caputo wrote of his instructions:

“Your mission is to kill VC. Period. You’re not here to capture a hill. You’re not here to capture a town. You’re not here to move from Point A to Point B to Point C. You’re here to kill Viet Cong. As many of ‘em as you can.”

Noam then had a section titled, “The ‘sideshows’: Laos and Cambodia.” Noam noted that it was misleading to call what happened in Indochina the Vietnam War. USA dropped one ton of explosives for every person who lived in Laos, and 10% of the Laotian population died. When JFK was president, Ike handed him the “grenade” of Laos, and JFK defused the situation, allowing Laos to become fairly neutral. RFK later told Ellsberg that JFK intended to handle Vietnam like he did Laos, and that JFK would have never allowed ground troops in Vietnam. Jack and Bobby visited Indochina in 1951 and were determined that the USA would not repeat what the French were doing there. Laos became the most bombed nation in history, with more bombing than the bombings of Japan and Germany combined.

Laos became a model for subsequent “secret” wars, in which the president and CIA could wage wars without Congressional oversight or public awareness. Laos is still one of the most contaminated places on Earth, with about 10,000 children killed after the war ended by initially unexploded bombs.

Noam wrote on the effort to dispose of still deadly bombs and noted that in 1969 it was revealed in Senate testimony that there was no military rationale for bombing Laos: it was just to give the planes something to do. At the current rate of disposing of the unexploded bombs, it will take another century to clean them up, and there are dozens of explosions annually. Laotian schoolchildren are taught to recognize such bombs.

Noam then covered Cambodia and quoted Kissinger’s instructions to General Alexander Haig that Nixon wanted a “massive bombing campaign on Cambodia. Anything that flies, on anything that moves.” Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died under that bombardment, which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Noam noted that when Pol Pot came to power, the USA encouraged China to support his regime. Kissinger said after their revolution was successful, “We will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.” But Noam and Ed were tarred and feathered as Khmer Rouge supporters, in a smear campaign that lasts to this day. Even after the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge and sent Pol Pot into exile and the genocide became undeniable, the USA still supported Pol Pot as a counterweight to the hated Vietnamese.

The overthrown king of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, laid the destruction of Cambodia entirely at Nixon and Kissinger’s feet. Noam called the war against Southeast Asia, from 1945 to 1975, one of the greatest crimes of the 20^th century, and that is saying something. For every American who died in the war, about 40 Vietnamese died.

One point that Noam has made for many years is that what happened in Southeast Asia was not exactly a defeat for the United States. While the communists eventually prevailed, the region was so devastated that it would not present the threat of a good example. The Godfather made an example of the disobedient. Johnson advisor Walt Rostow later explained that while what “Johnson did was more costly perhaps than it needed to be,” the outcome was that Johnson “saved Southeast Asia and we hold the balance of power in Asia today.”

Noam finished the chapter by noting that none of the USA’s noble rhetoric withstood minimal scrutiny. It was not a war to help the South Vietnamese (they were the bulk of the casualties), to give them “democracy,” and the USA knew it the moment that it supported France’s reconquest efforts. The USA did not “defend” Vietnam but invaded it, and there will never be war-crimes trials for the USA, even though it outdid the Nazis at times.

Noam discussed the experience of Vietnam veteran W. D. Ehrhart, who joined the anti-war movement when he arrived home. Ehrhart eventually realized that he had been brainwashed by John Wayne movies, thinking that the Vietnamese would welcome him. He discovered that the Vietnamese hated him, for good reason, as he was there to help “restore the colonial subordination of the Third World.”

Noam noted that few Americans have ever faced up to what was done to Indochina, and the USA has never even apologized, not even the “human rights” president Jimmy Carter, when pressed on the issue. Carter defended the USA with the Big Lie that the destruction was “mutual” between the USA and Vietnam. I don’t recall that my neighborhood was napalmed. Noam concluded the chapter by observing that the grim history of the USA’s crimes in Indochina had to be reshaped so that the state did not have to deal with future domestic dissidence. In the conclusion of the second volume of their 1979 work, Noam and Ed noted that the reconstruction of imperial ideology in the wake of the Indochina wars “worked brilliantly.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

Part 4 of what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and the third chapter of it is titled:

9/11 and the Wrecking of Afghanistan

As with other events like 9/11, Noam usually takes them at face value and accepts the official explanation. As Chris Black learned from Slobodan Milošević, Bill Clinton protected Osama bin Laden as late as 1999, so there was far more than met the eye happening with the 9/11 attacks, and conspiracy theorists have had a field day with it.

Noam was more interested in the aftermath, in which George Bush the Second asked why they hate us. Bush’s answer was that they hated American freedoms. The public statements by bin Laden aired real grievances, such as American support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the many atrocities that came from that. Bin Laden specifically mentioned the Israeli slaughter of more than 100 people that huddled in a UN refugee camp in Lebanon after Israelis displaced them from their homes. It became known as the Qana Massacre.

While bin Laden was from the fundamentalist fringe that the USA utilized in Afghanistan, Noam discussed interviews with Islamic professionals after 9/11, many of whom were pro-American, but they often called out the USA’s propping up hated despotic oil regimes and the hypocrisy of American treatment of Israel versus Iraq. But the American propaganda machine buried those issues, to portray the motivation as hatred of American virtue.

Noam observed that the 9/11 attacks were the first attack on the USA’s national territory since the War of 1812. Noam discussed that the 9/11 attacks could have been treated as crimes, as events such as the Oklahoma City bombings and IRA London bombings had been, and not as a reason to invade other nations. Instead, Bush launched a nonsensical “war on terror.” Millions of people have died from that “war.” Brown University’s Costs of War project tallied nearly five million deaths and 38 million people displaced, for the largest displacement since World War II. The USA is responsible for more than a thousand times the deaths attributable to 9/11.

The Taliban in Afghanistan offered to put bin Laden on trial if the USA could provide any evidence of his responsibility. The USA refused to and instead ordered Pakistan to stop shipping food to Afghanistan, which put millions of Afghanis at risk of starvation. The USA ignored the cries of alarm from aid groups to prepare for its invasion of Afghanistan, which was one of the poorest nations on Earth.

Less than a month after 9/11, the USA invaded Afghanistan. The USA used all sorts of high-tech weaponry on villages and huts (in shades of Vietnam), and soon ran out of targets. In the midst of the invasion, the Taliban offered up bin Laden if the USA would stop the bombing, but the USA was only interested in victory, not something resembling justice. Many remote villages with no Taliban presence were bombed, and NPR reported that “the bombing was traumatizing the Afghan civilians whom it was supposed to be liberating.” An NPR editor attacked that NPR reporter for her stories. She soon quit reporting and tried to help rebuild Afghanistan.

After a brief survey of the innocent Afghani civilians killed by American bombs, Noam wrote: “The wanton killing of innocent civilians is of course the opposite of a ‘war on terrorism.’ It is terrorism itself. But U.S. officials reacted with indifference.”

After an American aircraft killed dozens of villagers, a Pentagon official remarked: “The people there are dead because we wanted them dead… We hit what we wanted to hit.” Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld declined to comment on the slaughter in that village. Even the Taliban’s opponents in Afghanistan were appalled by the carnage. One of the opposition’s leaders said that the USA was “Trying to show its muscle,” but did not “care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.” The leader (who soon died) argued that the USA’s bombing actually undermined anti-Taliban efforts. He was far from alone in his assessment.

The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan condemned the USA’s invasion. Rumsfeld denied any American responsibility for any civilian deaths in Afghanistan, because “We did not start this war.” Noam noted the insane nature of Rumsfeld’s claim, as the Taliban certainly had not attacked the USA, and the USA violated international law to invade Afghanistan. Bush himself said, “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”

The “war” was over in six weeks, and the Taliban offered to surrender, but Rumsfeld said, “We don’t negotiate surrenders.” The USA’s refusal to negotiate with the Taliban led to a guerilla war that became the USA’s longest war ever.

Bush soon lost interest in Afghanistan as he ginned up the propaganda machine to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush’s regime tried to manufacture a connection, but it was laughably bogus and was soon abandoned.

Noam noted that great sums of money were pumped into Afghanistan, in theory, but virtually none of it improved the lives of Afghanis, who remain among the world’s poorest people. The corruption under the American occupation was surreal. Ironically, the American occupiers drove Afghanis into the Taliban’s arms, as they saw the Afghani government as an American puppet and the Taliban could provide some security from the wanton predation of the corrupt officials and occupiers. The Afghani police comprised more than 90% of the government casualties during the occupation, not the Western occupiers.

That former NPR reporter stated that the Afghani people just want a government that was competent and did not prey on them. She said that the USA’s policies were actually “standing in the way of democracy.”

Noam extensively quoted Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock, who wrote the renowned The Afghanistan Papers. Whitlock noted that the lying under the Bush administration got worse under Obama. In 2011, Hillary Clinton told the USA’s Senate that life was better for Afghanis, but the statistics that she cited were bogus, and the Obama administration knew that the statistics were false.

In 2010, WikiLeaks released the Afghan War Logs, which showed how the American slaughters of civilians were regularly attributed to killings of militants. One American strike was on a Doctors Without Borders hospital, which burned patients alive and killed 42 people. Doctors Without Borders had previously given its hospital’s coordinates to the USA.

As usual, the USA set up torture chambers in Afghanistan and brought people from all over that region and the Middle East to be tortured. James Risen wrote: “No one was ever held to account for the American torture regime in Afghanistan.”

Noam discussed the rise of drone warfare in Afghanistan, which killed countless civilians while the USA nearly always portrayed the victims as Taliban, etc. Entire villages would join the Taliban after such atrocities. Noam wrote how Trump took the mayhem to new levels and just wanted to get out of Afghanistan, which Biden hastily accomplished, while leaving the Afghanis who had been allies of the American regime to the tender mercies of the Taliban, who quickly took over after the Americans left.

The last missile that the USA launched in Afghanistan in 2021 killed an aid worker and seven children, which the USA naturally lied about, claiming that the missile killed terrorists. When the New York Times uncovered the lie, the government then called the slaughter a tragedy, but nobody was held accountable, as usual.

At the end of 2021, the World Food Program reported that 98% of Afghanis were hungry and millions faced starvation. Organ sales have become a way to make ends meet, and even parents sell their children’s organs. The USA was directly responsible for the postwar nightmare when it froze $9 billion from the Afghani central bank and Biden announced that half of the money would go to the families of 9/11 victims. It was simply piracy in pinstripes. The economic warfare may kill more people than the bombs did. The Biden administration rejected 90% of the applications for Afghanis to enter the USA on humanitarian grounds, with rigid requirements that were relaxed for Ukrainians the next year.

Noam wrote: “The Afghanistan war was often discussed as a kind of noble failure, another episode of the United States’ good intentions going hopelessly awry… In fact, the attack on Afghanistan was a major crime, with no justification whatsoever. Neither the Afghan people nor the authoritarian Taliban government had planned or executed the 9/11 attacks (in fact, the Taliban publicly condemned the attacks and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice).”

Noam asked why the USA attacked Afghanistan. He mentioned Bush’s desire to “show muscle,” and another described it as “cathartic” for Americans. It was also called an “insult to American honor,” which would not have been satisfied by a lengthy investigation and trial. Noam called the American attack rooted in the familiar Mafia logic of “using extreme violence as a means of asserting strength and discouraging opposition.”

Noam asked why the USA stayed in Afghanistan. It was partly because no president wanted to “lose,” because the USA supported a wildly unpopular puppet government. Noam noted that no president, from Bush to Biden, cared about the welfare of the Afghani people. Today, Afghanistan is the unhappiest nation on Earth, by far.

Noam noted that pundits still defend the USA’s good intentions in Afghanistan so that Americans could “sleep better.” Noam rebutted that argument with, “If the Bush administration had wanted to defend Americans from another terrorist attack it would have pursued the criminal network responsible for the original attack. Instead it wanted vengeance, and launched an illegal war that killed thousands of innocent people.”

Noam finished his chapter by noting that the Taliban may have been on their way out in 2001, as their fundamentalist approach was unpopular. In the end, the war strengthened Taliban rule. As Noam mentioned in a later chapter, this is not the first time that the USA devastated Afghanistan. I’ll discuss that when summarizing the chapter in which Noam mentions it.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My fifth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and the fourth chapter of it is titled:

Iraq: The Crime of the Century

Noam began this chapter with, “The United States’ war on Iraq from 2003 to 2011 remains the deadliest act of aggressive warfare in this century, and perhaps the worst crime committed during the last 30 years.” Noam’s other contender for the title was the USA’s climate policy, which he covered in a later chapter.

Noam put the Iraqi death toll at a half million, and most were violent deaths. I don’t know if I have studied this subject more than Noam has, however, I have seen far higher numbers. I see the war as lasting from 1991 to 2011, and the excess deaths have been calculated to be around four million a dozen years ago. In 1980, Iraq’s life expectancy compared to neighboring Iran was five years longer, and in 2021, it was five years shorter. A ten-year decline relative to its neighbor is all on the USA. Similarly, Syrian life expectancy fell by five years from 2010 to 2015. These are very real human costs of American interventions in the Middle East. Libya had Africa’s highest standard of living before the overthrow of its government in 2011, and it is a disaster today. What those nations all have in common is that they were on the USA’s hit list after 9/11. Many millions of lives were shattered and shortened by the USA as it worked through its hit list.

Noam surveyed the devastation of Iraq and noted how the war’s cheerleaders (neocons in particular) either went silent, lied about it (William Kristol, a neocon warmonger, wrote in 2015 that “We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008”), or called it another noble mistake, as William Sullivan did. Noam discussed Sullivan’s logical gyrations at length, going from an enthusiastic warmonger (a “just” war) and lauding the USA as one of the world’s few “moral” nations, to later complaining that he was a duped innocent that belatedly learned of the countless atrocities, of people “killed, tortured and maimed in the Rumsfeld-created vortex.” Sullivan eventually retreated to calling the war “imprudent,” if “noble,” but that the Bush administration was too “incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively.”

Noam discussed that many critics of the Iraq War, such as David Ignatius of Washington Post, were like Vietnam War critics in that they did not fathom that the USA may have committed a crime, but instead that it was unable to get the job done. Noam has likened such critics to those who criticized Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union as a strategic error, not a historic crime. Obama also called Iraq’s invasion a “strategic blunder.” Noam concluded that section with, “Very few mainstream criticisms of the war call it what it was: a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence. A great deal of this criticism has focused on the cost of the war to the United States, with barely any attention paid to the cost to Iraq and the surrounding countries.”
Noam then did a little survey of Saddam Hussein’s reign from the 1970s, noting that Hussein was a favored partner as long as he was useful, such as with his war on Iran. Noam could have gone back to the 1950s, when the CIA protected Hussein after his participation in a failed assassination attempt on Iraq’s prime minister. The CIA put him up in a safe house in Cairo. When Hussein finally seized power in the 1970s, Noam observed, “Hussein’s brutal rule was tolerable to the extent that he aided U.S. goals in the Middle East and intolerable to the extent that he challenged those goals.” That is a familiar theme throughout Noam’s book. Noam wrote that the USA “happily armed and assisted Hussein during the worst of his crimes.” When Hussein used chemical weapons (and he got materials from the USA for them, and the USA suspected what they would be used for), the USA covered for him. The CDC gave Hussein samples of several diseases to use for biological-weapons development. Noam wrote, “in keeping with Godfather logic, the U.S. accepted Hussein when he followed our rules and turned on him when he disobeyed.”

Noam discussed when the USA blew an Iranian airliner out of the sky, killing all 290 people aboard. George Bush the First, who was president at the time, declined to even apologize and said, “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are. I am not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”

During the war with Iran, when Hussein’s military used chemical weapons, the CIA tried to cover it up. American officials were well aware of what Hussein was doing, and Foreign Policy noted that what the internal documents showed was “tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.” Noam quoted American officials who justified the chemical attacks. When Bush the Second cited Hussein’s chemical weapons crimes as justification for the upcoming invasion of Iraq, he never admitted that the USA was fully complicit at the time, even lying to the international community to cover it up.

Regarding the 1988 Halabja massacre, committed by Iraq with chemical weapons, the USA publicly accused Iran of the crime, while knowing full well that Iraq did it. When the USA later used Halabja as justification for invading Iraq, Joost Hiltermann wrote of the hypocrisy of it, as the Bush the First administration supported Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (“WMD”) program, “Giving the regime a de facto green light on chemical weapons use,” “turning a blind eye to Iraq’s worst atrocities, and then lying about it.”

Noam called Hussein’s regime “nightmarish” but built with the USA’s “protection and support.” The USA loved Hussein when he attacked Iran in 1980, but a decade later, when the Soviet Union had disintegrated and no longer provided a balance of power in the Middle East, the USA used Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait as the pretext for the next 20 years of bloodshed. The American ambassador gave Hussein the alleged “green light” to invade Kuwait. Bush the First undermined all attempts to negotiate an end to the conflict. Why negotiate when one possesses superior means of violence? Bush the First constantly compared Hussein to Hitler in the run-up to the short-lived “turkey shoot” war, as Iraq was no match for the world’s greatest killing machine. Noam noted the USA’s propaganda barrage, such as the fake incubator story.

Like father, like son. Bush the First said that Hussein would “get his ass kicked.” As usual, the American boasts of precision weapons were belied by the reality on the ground. I had a personal encounter with that carnage inflicted on the women and children of Iraq that was carefully hidden from Americans. Noam discussed some of the American atrocities, such as bombing a bomb shelter full of women and children, which killed 400 people. The American government lied about it when it could not cover it up. The Highway of Death was another American war crime during its “turkey shoot.” Iraqi conscripts were buried alive by American bulldozers. A genocidal songbook by American soldiers was leaked. American pundits called for dropping nuclear weapons on Iraq.

Arguably the greatest war crime that the Americans made was targeting Iraq’s infrastructure, including water-treatment facilities. Then the USA followed it up with economic warfare to prevent the repair of the infrastructure, which contributed to the deaths of about a half million children, which Secretary of State Madeline Albright said was “worth it.” Two UN aid officials in a row called the USA’s economic war against Iraq “genocidal.”

Bush the First called for an Iraqi uprising against Hussein, but when they did, the USA militarily supported Hussein’s brutal response that killed tens of thousands of people as, in Noam’s words, the Bush administration had “quietly decided that it actually preferred a weakened Hussein to an unknown alternative.” As Noam said, the Bush administration and pundits said that they did not necessarily want Hussein, but “any dictator would do.” As Colin Powell explained, “Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile to the United States.” That was American idealism in action.

By the time that Bush the Second invaded Iraq, the USA had already killed more than a million Iraqis, largely children. Noam noted that the USA also used cluster weapons on Iraq, which are particularly evil weapons that have been banned by various organizations. The USA also used uranium weapons (later used on Yugoslavia), which poisons people as well as being radioactive.

The next section of Noam’s chapter on Iraq was about how effortless the invasion of Iraq was. All of the buildup of the threat that Iraq posed to the world was a series of Big Lies. Noam noted how the USA immediately “squandered the goodwill” that the Iraqi people might have had toward Hussein’s removal by a brutal occupation. Iraqis were wantonly slaughtered on city streets, at checkpoints, etc.

Noam discussed the outrage of the Abu Ghraib prison, which was Hussein’s torture center that the USA then ran, and it even exceeded Hussein’s outrages. Noam noted that while the government tried to blame lower-level personnel for the tortures and murders at Abu Ghraib, the authorization for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” came straight from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Noam discussed the American siege of Fallujah in 2004, which has been compared to Hitler’s attack on Stalingrad.

Noam wrote: “There has never been, and likely never will be, a full meaningful account of what was done to Iraq.” Noam noted that what information we have comes from leaks, such as Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning’s leak of a video in which laughing soldiers slaughtered Reuters reporters and others. Noam wrote: “Some of the tragedies were accidents, albeit accidents of the kind that are inevitable when heavy firepower is used by those with little regard for civilian losses. Some were deliberate. But the war itself was the ultimate crime.”

The next section of Noam’s chapter on Iraq was the incessant lying by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion, such as there would soon be a “mushroom cloud” over New York City if Hussein was not stopped. The WMD drumbeat was nauseating for me to witness in the run-up to the invasion. It was all lies, and Noam mentioned this accounting of them. I went on the record during the drumbeat, and it has aged well.

Even some officials expressed their shock over the level of lying, such as General Anthony Zinni, who never saw a credible shred of evidence of Hussein’s WMD program. I lost friendships over the lies. Noam mentioned the completely fictional idea that Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Hussein was the sworn enemy of the jihadists, as a secular tyrant. Bush later backpedaled on the 9/11-Iraq link, stating that he never said it. In Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, he said that he had “removed an ally of al-Qaeda.” Noam quoted the more honest war cheerleaders, such as Kenneth Pollack, who stated before the invasion, intelligence showed that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and that Hussein did not want to be involved with al-Qaeda and get dragged into a war with the USA.

Noam discussed that in the wake of no WMDs found in Iraq after the laughably easy invasion, the rational suddenly shifted from the imaginary WMD threat to bringing democracy to Iraq. Noam quoted Augustus Richard Norton, who wrote: “the Bush administration increasingly stressed the Democratic transformation of Iraq, and scholars jumped on the democratization bandwagon.” But, as Noam noted, only 5% of Iraqis thought that the invasion was to help Iraqis. The rest saw it instead as an oil grab and “reorder of the Middle East to serve U.S. and Israeli interests.” In 2004, virtually all Iraqis saw the Americans as “occupiers,” not “liberators.” Noam wrote: “In a sign of how much the U.S. respects Iraqi democracy, when the Iraqi parliament voted to expel U.S. troops in 2020, Donald Trump responded by threatening the country with sanctions.”

Noam discussed the ludicrous idea of American altruism regarding Iraq’s invasion and occupation, and noted how the USA has always installed and supported dictatorships that catered to American interests. Hussein’s crimes that the USA used to justify the invasion were all committed with American support. Noam listed the Iran’s Shah, Chile’s Pinochet, the Saudi royal family, Indonesia’s Suharto, and Uzbekistan’s dictator as examples of warmly embraced dictators, no matter what human-rights abuses and genocides they might have inflicted.

Noam discussed that if the welfare of Iraqis was really an American priority, the government would have heeded the many warnings that a humanitarian catastrophe would likely follow an American invasion, which were proven out. Excess Iraqi deaths since the invasion of Iraq have run into the millions and destabilized the region as the USA worked through its hit list. Noam quoted various American officials who admitted that Iraqi democracy was the last thing that they wanted. As early as June 2003, the USA canceled elections in Iraq, as those who opposed the occupation would likely win.

Noam then had a section that discussed what the American motives were, when the stated rationales were all easily discerned Big Lies. In short, it was all about the oil, to the surprise of nobody whose head was not in the sand. The oil motivation has been clear from overthrowing Iran’s government, the “Carter Doctrine,” and onward. In explaining the first Gulf War, Bush the First was frank about it: “Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom, and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would suffer if control of the world’s great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein.” Bush added: “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless. And we won’t.” Noam quoted General John Abizaid, who said: “Of course it’s about the oil. It’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.” As Bucky Fuller said, if oil was priced at the benefit that humanity got from it, it would cost $1 million per barrel. I have roughly recalculated his estimate. Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize, oil is at the root of all Western involvement in the Middle East, and it is idiotic to deny it. This is nothing new. Economic motivations have always been at the root of all wars, and nothing is bigger than oil.

But Rumsfeld was able to say with a straight face that the invasion had “literally nothing to do with oil.” A decade after the invasion, I did not see one pundit who stated that it was about the oil, even though the president, vice president, and secretary of state were all former oil executives. It is like the pundits are trying to pull a Jedi Mind Trick on the public or they got Jedi-ed themselves.

The neocons who flogged for war, including Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, wrote to Bill Clinton in 1998 and stated: “If Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction… The safety of American troops in the region, our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.” Chuck Hagel, the secretary of defense under Obama, said in 2007, “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We are not there for figs.” Former chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan said, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everybody knows: the Iraq War is largely about oil.” Those people get credit for admitting the obvious.

Noam even downplayed oil, stating that the invasion being just “for oil” is simplistic. He then discussed Bush’s many reasons for displacing Hussein, including his stance toward Israel. I have seen this limitation with Noam before, as he could not seem to rank causes. Ranking causes is common in science, even part of its reason for existence. Oil is the ultimate cause for the West’s involvement in the Middle East, and everything else is a sideshow.

Notorious neocon Richard Perle said about it all: “Having destroyed the Taliban, having destroyed Saddam’s regime, the message to others is, ‘You’re next.’” As Zinni said, the “neocons didn’t really give a sh*t about what happened in Iraq and the aftermath.”

In the last section of the chapter, Noam noted the devastation of Iraq and how “Those responsible for the worst crime of the century have never been indicted or prosecuted. The idea is never even mentioned in U.S. discourse.” In light of the Trump years, Bush has been rehabilitated by Democratic politicians, such as Harry Reid, who said, “I look back on Bush with a degree of nostalgia, with some affection, which I never thought I would do.”

Noam wrote:

“It says something disturbing about our media that a man can cause well over five hundred thousand deaths and then have his paintings flatteringly profiled, while the deaths go unmentioned. George W. Bush intentionally offered false justifications for a war, destroyed an entire country, and committed major international crimes. He tortured people, sometimes to death. Yet his public image is now a goofy grandpa for whom even Democrats are nostalgic.”

Noam noted the comfortable lives that those responsible for the Iraq war went on to lead, with zero accountability. The USA has a penchant for naming weapons after its victims, as if the Nazis named a new weapon the “Jew” or “Gypsy.” Along with the Apache helicopter, the USA named a new amphibious vessel the USS Fallujah, to commemorate what was arguably the greatest atrocity of the American invasion and occupation.

Noam noted that Bush’s “war on terror” quickly succeeded in “exacerbating the very problem it was ostensibly launched to combat. Reducing the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. targets was never a serious priority for the Bush administration.” Noam cited one study that showed a 700% increase in terror incidents following Iraq’s invasion.

Noam wrote: “By fighting terrorism with terrorism, the United States handed jihadists an extraordinary recruiting tool. The CIA itself concluded that the Iraq occupation became ‘The cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.’”

Noam noted that when American civilian targets are attacked and radicalized Muslim-American jihadists are interviewed, they always cite American violence against Muslims and how they are motivated by the “feeling that Muslims are under attack.”

Noam finished the chapter with, “At the time of 9/11, Osama bin Laden was in a tiny area on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Thanks to the ‘war on terror,’ terrorism spread all over the world.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My sixth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and the fifth chapter of it is titled:

The United States, Israel, and Palestine

Noam is Jewish, lived in an Israeli kibbutz as a young man, and I imagine that his motivation to criticize Israel was similar to why he criticized the USA: he felt obligated to. Noam’s debilitating stroke happened a few months before the current genocide in Gaza began. Consequently, Noam’s co-author, Nathan J. Robinson, left the chapter as originally written but added his own addendum for events since October 2023.

Robinson wrote in the chapter’s preamble: “Chomsky argued long before October 7 that a ‘civilized reaction’ to the Israel Palestine conflict would be: ‘The U.S. and Israel could end the merciless unremitting assault and open the borders, and provide for reconstruction – and if it were imaginable, reparations for decades of violence and repression.’”

The chapter began with a quote from Nancy Pelosi: “If Washington, DC, crumbled to the ground, the last thing that would remain is our support for Israel.”

Noam discussed that the USA’s close relationship with Israel is partly from similar origin stories, of fleeing European persecution to “settle” virgin lands – well, once the natives were disposed of. Noam cited a British politician who noted that Americans were very familiar with the great task of wiping out the natives so that the lands could be “settled.”

Noam stated that the relationship between the two nations also had practical dimensions – namely, controlling Middle East oil. The violence that the Zionists unleashed on the Palestinians in 1948 impressed the Joint Chiefs of Staff so that it described the new nation as only second in the region to Turkey’s military prowess. The Joint Chiefs noted that the rise of Israel could counterbalance the decline of British power in the region. Long ago, I studied what led to the Jewish Holocaust, but I recently read the British Mandate chapter of this book. The British had a genocidal attitude toward Palestinians before World War II began, and one British official even boasted that the British could teach Hitler some lessons on how to run concentration camps. It was a stunning read, especially in light of today’s events in Israel.

In the 1950s, the National Security Council advised that the USA support Israel as the last Western counterbalance to Arab nationalism, and the 1967 Six-Day War was a watershed in Israeli-American relations, as Israel smashed the Arabs. Israel has had American carte blanche ever since. Noam described Joe Biden as honest when he stated that Israel protects American interests in the region. While the Shah was in power, the Senate’s oil expert, Henry Jackson, remarked that Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran protect American oil interests by keeping “radical” Arabs in line. Noam stated that as long as Israel served American interests, the USA supported Israeli land grabs and its transformation into a wealthy industrialized nation.

Noam said that so-called Israeli crimes are really “U.S.-Israeli crimes.” The USA supports all Israeli actions and can curb Israeli violence when expedient. Noam stated that the USA consequently bears responsibility for Israeli actions.

Noam then had a section titled, “Gaza, 2022.” He described the ruined and ended lives of Gazans by the wanton slaughters perpetrated by Israelis, and that was a year before the events of October, 2023.

Noam’s next section was titled, “Origins of a century-long conflict.” Noam identified the main obstacle to establishing what became Israel: a half-million people already lived in Palestine. In 1900, Palestine was 95% Arab, with a small Jewish minority. Noam wrote:

“The inconvenient existence of a large indigenous non-Jewish population across all of Palestine meant that those early Zionists who wanted to establish a Jewish state had to either give up the idea altogether, impose minority rule, or embark on a program of ethnic cleansing. The demographic reality of turn-of-the-last century Palestine meant that implementing the Zionist dream would turn out to be violent, undemocratic, and racist business.

Noam discussed that that grim reality was partly why Zionists were split on creating a Jewish state. Noam quoted Palestinian exile Fawaz Turki who observed that Israel’s “miracle in the desert” was accomplished at the expense of people “who were made to pay the price of a crime that others had committed.”

Some early Zionist rhapsodized that Palestine was virgin territory there to be settled. But even some of them admitted that the land was occupied and farmed by Palestinians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, various Jewish writers noted that Palestine had long been inhabited, and the mayor of Jerusalem begged the Zionists to “let Palestine be left alone.”

Noam wrote that honest supporters of Zionism admitted that it was a colonial undertaking that would oppress the indigenous population. Noam cited the work of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, that Palestinians, like all indigenous people, will resist colonial invaders to the end. Jabotinsky argued that any Zionist who thought that the settlement could be peaceful needed to leave the Zionist cause. Noam quoted several Israeli writers who admitted that Zionism would be a bloody business.

In my opinion, the Middle East’s fate was sealed when Winston Churchill changed the British Navy from coal to oil in 1911. In 1916, the British and French conspired to dismember the Ottoman Empire and turn it into controllable oil states. In 1917, the British Empire endorsed Zionism with the Balfour Declaration, and the brutal British Mandate soon began. Noam quoted Churchill, who wrote that the Zionists, “Take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” A 1919 American commission also noted that Zionists “Looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.” The commission noted that nearly 90% of Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants were against the Zionist program. Military experts knew that it meant prodigious violence would be needed to accomplish Zionist goals, as did that commission.

Noam noted how Zionists openly discussed how to get rid of the Arabs in Palestine, and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, said in 1930: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” It was an inevitable feature of Zionism.

Noam noted that the racist views of Arabs by Europeans were consistent with how the colonizers always viewed indigenous people. In 1929, an American journalist who supported Zionism changed his mind after a few months on Palestine, as the “settlers” considered the Arabs to be savages, and even used “Indian” rhetoric to describe them.

Noam wrote that for the next century, to this day, Zionists have portrayed Israel as an “outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Noam wrote:

“Just as American Indians were portrayed as scattered and nomadic, without real title to the land, so Arabs were portrayed as having little authentic connection to the place they inhabited.”

No people in history went quietly as their lands were stolen from them, and as Zionists kept taking land, it led to the Arab Revolt in the 1930s that the British defeated with extreme violence.

Zionism arose from European anti-Semitism, and the Jewish Holocaust was the watershed moment in the modern Jewish history. The Jews have had a rough ride. As one pal noted, people often do unto others exactly as was done unto them. Zionists responded to genocide with genocide.

Noam wrote that Palestinian rejection of the 1947 partition is “often portrayed as “unreasonable,” but Zionists were very open that it was just the first step in their land grab. Rashid Khalidi wrote that it was “inconceivable that any people would have accepted giving up more than 55 percent of their country to a minority.” The Zionist plan was accurately seen as a disaster in the making that would destabilize the entire Middle East.

Noam wrote that the 1948 war that the Zionists inflicted, known as the “Nakba” (catastrophe) among Palestinians, was intended to wipe out any resistance, as 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, including Sam Husseini’s father.

The next section of Noam’s chapter was to show the “colonial aspects” of today’s Israel, because Palestinian resistance is often portrayed as anti-Semitism. Noam has long noted that Zionist apologists unfailingly depict any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. David Ben-Gurion admitted that the Zionists were the “aggressors” and that Palestinian resistance is because “the country is theirs.” Noam noted that Israel has had to flip reality on its head, Orwell-style, to depict the people they are dispossessing as the aggressors. Menachem Begin told Israelis in 1969:

“If this is Palestine and not the Land of Israel, then you are conquerors and not tillers of the land. You are invaders. If this is Palestine then it belongs to the people who lived here before you came. Only if it is the Land of Israel do you have a right to live in it.”

Noam’s next section chronicled events since 1948 and the Palestinian struggle. Noam stated that Palestinians have lived under a brutal military occupation since 1967. Noam cited Amnesty International, which stated in 2017:

“Israel’s ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on Palestinians, depriving them of their basic rights… People’s lives are effectively held hostage by Israel.”

Amnesty International then stated that Israel demolished tens of thousands of Palestinian properties to make way for its illegal settlements, and noted that Israel has a “Long record of using excessive and often lethal force against Palestinian men women and children” in a “cycle of impunity” that has lasted for most of a century.

Noam noted that a stack of similar reports could be presented on Israel’s major crimes, including, in the words of Eqbal Ahmed, “Torture, extrajudicial assassination, and collective punishment in the service of the mission to [dispossess] the Arabs of Palestine of the four fundamental elements – land, water, leaders, and culture – without with an indigenous community cannot survive.”

Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that the reality of Israel’s behavior stands in stark contrast to the image that Israel presents, as the Israeli occupation, like other occupations, “was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.”

Noam then spent a couple of pages on Gaza, again before the October 2023 events. Noam called Gaza the “world’s largest open-air prison.” In 2012, the UN warned that Gaza would be unlivable by 2020. Noam wrote that the Israeli officials openly advocated starving Gazans, and that 10% of Gazan children had stunted growth, two-thirds of infants had anemia, more than half of school children, and a third of pregnant mothers. In 2022, the NGO Save the Children wrote that, “Fifteen years of life under blockade has left four out of five children in the Gaza Strip reporting that they live with depression, grief and fear” and “the mental well-being of children young people and caregivers has dramatically deteriorated since a similar study in 2018.”

Noam mentioned the 2006 “crime” by Gazans: electing Hamas. Noam noted that with American support, Israel began a siege of Gaza, which included cutting off its water supply. Noam discussed Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, as “Some of the poorest people in the world [were] preyed on by one of the world’s most advanced military systems (using, of course, U.S. arms and protected by U.S. diplomacy).” Israelis continually slaughtered Gazans, as entire families died beneath the onslaught.

Noam noted how Israel’s land grabs are nearly universally recognized as illegal. Noam stated that Israel’s “violations of agreements, international laws, and basic civil rights are too legion to list,” but he provided some examples. He noted that Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated that Israel was an apartheid state, just as South Africa had been, and as Ben-Gurion warned about if Palestinians were not completely eliminated. A former Israeli attorney general even admitted that Israel “established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories.” Noam discussed Israel’s semantics games over the “Occupied Territories.” Then he surveyed the reports of human rights groups, which regularly reported on Israel’s human-rights outrages against Palestinians.

Noam’s next section began with:

“The day-to-day oppression of the Palestinians has been accompanied by a long-standing refusal on the part of Israel (backed by the United States) to engage in good-faith negotiations to resolve the conflict. Despite a popular narrative about Palestinian rejectionism and Arab intransigence supposedly causing Palestinians to miss numerous opportunities to have a state of their own (and certainly there have been serious failures by the Palestinian leadership), Israel has made it clear that it does not wish for a just settlement.”

Noam then surveyed Israeli actions to defeat any chance of forming a Palestinian state. Benjamin Netanyahu “Proudly bragged that ‘I’ve de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords,’” and that he was “Only pretending to go along with the idea of a two-state solution.” In 2015, Netanyahu said that “there would be no Palestinian state on my watch.” Noam discussed several instances when Israeli officials sabotaged negotiations.

Noam noted how many Israelis see that Israel is on the path to disaster, and former security official Ami Ayalon stated in 2003 that “We are taking sure, steady steps to a place where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people.” Noam cited Israeli scholars who lamented Israel’s decline into “banana republic” status as it makes a mockery of human rights and democratic processes.

Noam then had a section on the USA’s role. More than half of the USA’s foreign military aid since 2001 has gone to Israel. Noam noted that the aid is all illegal, for Israel’s stupendous human-rights violations alone. Noam has noted previously that Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal also disqualifies Israel from receiving aid, but the USA has turned a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear arsenal to this day.

Noam noted that the USA has been the single greatest obstacle to a negotiated solution to the Palestinian issue. Noam traced it back to the USA’s veto in 1976 of a UN resolution backed by major Arab nations and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the USA has been undermining negotiations ever since. Noam listed American presidents who undermined diplomacy and noted how Obama “bragged that he had been more deferential to Israel than any previous administration.” Noam noted how Trump 1.0 was even more accommodative than Obama was, and that, “The Trump administration made special efforts to ensure Israel’s dispossession the Palestinians became permanent and irreversible.” Noam noted how Biden made no substantive changes. Noam finished that section with:

“Israel’s wrongdoing is the direct responsibility of the United States, which funds it and prevents international law from being followed. The miseries of apartheid in the West Bank and the horror of airstrikes on Gaza are the result of American policies.”

Noam had a section on Gaza in 2018 and Nathan Robinson had a postscript on Gaza through April 2024. Those will go into the next post.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My seventh post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and this is a continuation of this chapter:

The United States, Israel, and Palestine

The next section of the chapter was titled “Gaza, 2018.” Noam discussed the Gaza protests of 2018 and 2019, when Gazans marched to the border of Gaza and the rest of Israel to demonstrate their “right to return to the territory from which their families were expelled in 1948, as well as against the blockade of Gaza and the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Israelis could not countenance such demonstrations, and Israeli snipers murdered hundreds of protesting Palestinians and wounded thousands. Every few minutes, another shot would be heard, and another Gazan would fall. The UN condemned Israel’s murders of protestors, and the UN’s Human Rights Council released a damning report on it. Of course, the USA vetoed a Security Council resolution that called for an inquiry into Israel’s murders. Netanyahu shrugged off the UN reports with his usual lies, and the New York Times accused Gazans of exploiting their murders for “political ends.”

The last section of the chapter that Noam wrote was about the USA’s unconditional support for Israel, no matter what crimes it commits. Noam wrote of how a member of the “Squad,” Ilhan Omar, in 2019 caused a furor when she noted that all members of Congress were expected to show unwavering support for Israel. Omar was accused of anti-Semitism and attacked in media venues, including the New York Times. Noam wrote: “For the past fifty years, Israel has been pursuing the construction of ‘Greater Israel,’ taking over what is valuable in the West Bank step by step, while concentrating the Palestinian population centers in ever smaller and more isolated enclaves.”

Noam wrote that the century-long process of dispossessing the Arabs of Palestine has been successful and will continue to be as long as the USA supports it. Noam noted how pundits try to make the issue complicated, when it is really quite simple: Palestine was conquered by a major military power, with the support of the world’s superpower, and it has committed endless atrocities against the conquered people.

Noam finished his chapter with:

“The United States has long had a choice: Will it insist that Israel operate in accordance with basic democratic values and international norms, or will it fund and encourage the immoral, illegal, and self-destructive project of building a permanent apartheid state? Only through domestic public pressure in the U.S. can the pattern of this country’s policies be disrupted.”

As I have stated, Noam finished the chapter before his debilitating stroke in 2023, before Hamas’s uprising a few months later. So Noam’s co-author, Nathan J. Robinson, wrote a postscript as of April 2024.

Robinson quoted Noam, when Noam observed that Israel is far less secure than it would have been if it had allowed for a demilitarized Palestinian state. Noam stated that so-called defenders of Israel actually harmed Israel by encouraging its murderous treatment of Palestinians, making Israel into a pariah state that is morally degenerate. Noam argued that anybody who really wanted to help Israel would insist that the occupation and siege of Gaza be ended.

Robinson covered the massacre inflicted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which killed over a thousand people, and in which hundreds were taken hostage. Israel’s retribution was swift and merciless. Before long, Gazans were starving. and 90% of them did not eat every day. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stated that Israel’s killings of Gazan civilians were similar to the genocide in Rwanda.

Israeli officials openly declared that they did not care what happened to Gazan civilians, and some stated the ethically bankrupt logic that Gazans were fair game, as they had voted for Hamas. Robinson discussed how the Israeli magazine +972 reported that Israel intelligence admitted that Israel readily killed hundreds of civilians in order to kill a Hamas commander. Robinson noted that within months, more Gazan children were killed than all children killed in all wars globally in 2023. Robinson wrote: “More aid workers were killed in Gaza in 2023 than were killed in all the world’s combat zones combined in any previous year over the last three decades.” The official Israeli Twitter account actually mocked Palestinian casualties, suggesting that they were faking it. West Bank “settlers” took advantage of the situation and murdered hundreds of Palestinians.

Many current and former Israeli officials called for ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu planned to “thin” Gaza’s population to a “minimum.” Israel’s agriculture minister said that Israel was “rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” Officials called for outright genocide, as “human animals must be treated as such.” A 95-year-old Israeli Army reservist stated, in true Nazi style: “Don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.” On October 8, 2023, the New York Times quoted an American Congressman who advocated making Gaza “like Nagasaki and Hiroshima” (Israel did). Robinson presented several blood-curdling quotes from advocates of a Gazan genocide.

Robinson noted how Joe Biden fully supported the attack on Gaza. The USA kept supplying Israel with 2,000-pound bombs, even while asking Israel to use smaller weaponry. A letter of protest even came from members of Biden’s State Department.

Some Israelis were brave enough to admit the obvious: the siege of Gaza was vengeance. Robinson surveyed some of the reports of mass murder and devastation in Gaza. The USA repeatedly blocked Security Council resolutions for a ceasefire. The International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. It seems that one reason why the Biden administration did not want a ceasefire was that journalists could then witness the devastation of Gaza and report on it.

In April 2024, seven aid workers were killed in an Israeli air strike which was almost certainly intentional, which scared aid organizations away from working in Gaza. And weaponry flowed unabated from Biden’s imperial larder to Israel all the while.

That ended the chapter, but a lot has happened since April 2024, and I will survey it, along with my own observations.

I have a complex relationship to the Israel issue (1, 2). I began studying Noam’s work in 1990, and one of the many ironies of Noam’s work is that while he was shut out from the mainstream media in the United States, other than being attacked or trotted out every four years to say “Vote Democrat,” his views on Israel have been deemed crazy in the USA and marginalized, but he regularly graced Israel’s media, where he was a respected voice, as he was in the global media in general.

I don’t know if it is true today, but long ago I heard that Israelis could be divided into three categories regarding Palestinians. A third of them just tried to live their lives and didn’t really care one way or another about Palestinians. They didn’t like the violence inflicted on Palestinians, if only because they could retaliate and put the indifferent at risk. Another third of Israelis knew that Israel was inflicting a great crime on Palestinians, not far removed from Hitler’s pre-Holocaust persecution of Jews. The Palestinian issue troubled them greatly (but not enough for many of them to be very active about it). The final third were people like Netanyahu, and the genocide of Palestinians was fine with them.

Sam Husseini has been my go-to source on what is happening in Gaza, and it has been grim reading. Journalists have been slaughtered by Israelis in unprecedented numbers. I have studied genocide too much, and several official organizations have called what is happening in Gaza a genocide. The Gaza slaughter easily meets Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, and the numbers also bear it out. Ralph Nader made an estimate of 500,000 dead Gazans, out of a pre-genocide population of a little over two million. If it is a quarter of the population in two years, it is on its way to being the greatest proportional genocide since the Jewish Holocaust. East Timor’s was a greater proportion but over more years, so the Gaza genocide may have the steepest trajectory and could exceed a third of the population, which was what Indonesia did to East Timor’s citizens (with American support and weapons).

Ed Herman and David Peterson wrote a book on the politicization of the word “genocide,” and Noam wrote its foreword. Noam wrote that “genocide” has been so misused that he suggested that people stop using it “until the day, if it ever comes, when honesty and integrity can become an ‘emerging norm.’”

On the USA’s left, a big issue of contention is the USA’s role in Israel and vice versa. Noam had long called the USA-Israel relationship a marriage of convenience, and if Israel’s utility to the United States ended, Israel would be jettisoned like unwanted baggage. Others have argued that Israel is the tail that wags the American dog. Ed even hinted at it.

I’ll end the Israel issue for now with one last note, which is the issue of Israel and the JFK assassination, which I have written about plenty. It has become a hot topic in recent years, and I was in the middle of that controversy long ago. As I have written, John F. Kennedy was friendly to Arab nationalism, tried to resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees, tried to trim the feathers of the Israeli lobby, and tried to prevent Israel from developing nuclear weapons.

Israel was definitely a beneficiary of the JFK hit, and my friend who knew that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK three weeks after the assassination also put Mickey Cohen under surveillance as part of his professional duties. My friend repeatedly saw Cohen in the company of Jack Ruby and, years later, Menachem Begin. People do not have to connect many of those dots to put Israel in the JFK-assassination picture. My friend originated the “Israel-did-it” hypothesis, and my view is that Israel may have been involved, but I see them more as muscle than masterminds. My money is on the Eastern Oligarchy and Military-Industrial Complex as being behind the JFK hit. I don’t think it is all that important who was behind it. For me, the primary lesson of the JFK hit was the permanent demotion of the American presidency. The president could be killed in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses, and it would all be covered up. Every president since JFK was a puppet and knew it.

Noam has always been dismissive that JFK was different from any other president, and I have seen a great deal of dismay on the left regarding Noam’s stance. Noam even wrote a book that argued that the CIA would not have had any motivation to kill JFK. Noam was wrong. The man whom JFK fired over the Bay of Pigs disaster, Allen Dulles, who led the CIA for several years, led the “investigation” of JFK’s murder. Dulles despised JFK, and had highly “coincidental” connections to Oswald. Oswald was part of a CIA operation to stage a fake assassination attempt to frame Castro, to justify an invasion of Cuba. I recently made a video on the subject.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My eighth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and this chapter is titled:

The Great China Threat

Noam began the chapter with Donald Trump’s taking a “sledgehammer” to American-Chinese relations between 2017 and 2021, taking them to “their lowest point in decades.” Trump officials used McCarthyite language to describe China and how China was bent on ruining the “very way of life we have here in America and in the West.” Steve Bannon announced that China was the greatest threat that the USA ever faced. FBI director Christopher Wray announced that “the Chinese threat” imperiled “our health, our livelihoods and our security.”

Noam asked what threat China posed. Wray stated that China’s “ambition” is “to surpass our country in economic and technological leadership.” Noam stated:

“This is the true nature of the ‘China threat’: that the United States will no longer rule the world. A basic premise of our foreign policy is that we are fully entitled to do so indefinitely.”

A 2017 Trump strategy document declared that China sought to displace the United States in the vicinity of China. Noam asked how the USA would be “displaced” in Asia by China, when the USA is an ocean away. The strategy document never discussed why the USA and not China should be dominant in Asia. The USA’s solution in that strategy document to a rising China and Russia was to maintain an overwhelming military, to “overmatch” the “lethality” of those nations.

Another Trump planning document for the “Indo-Pacific” baldly stated one of the USA’s top priorities was to ensure that China did not create a new “sphere of influence.” Noam concluded, “In other words, we have to make sure that the largest Asian country does not have more power and influence in Asia than the much smaller United States.”

When Joe Biden ran for president, his anti-China rhetoric eclipsed Trump’s, and his campaign released material that was considered racist. An Atlantic opinion piece urged voters to back Biden in 2024 if they wanted to attack China, as “Biden has hit China harder than Trump ever did” and “inflicted acute damage on the country’s economy and geopolitical ambitions.” Noam wrote: “The entitlement to wreck the economies of other countries is, as usual, assumed.”

An official formerly in charge of Trump’s China policy stated that the Biden administration “views Chinese indigenous innovation as a per se national security threat” which was “a big leap from where we’ve ever seen before.” Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stated that China’s rise was “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order.” The USA’s solution is to heavily militarize American allies near China. Obama began the “pivot to Asia,” as he declared that “The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.”

The New York Times observed that the Trump and Biden administrations had to “grapple with the question of how to maintain America’s global dominance at a time when it appears in decline.” Noam wrote that, “A desire to ‘maintain global dominance’ is treated as a perfectly legitimate and benign aspiration.”

After the Chinese Revolution of 1949, American politicians accused each other of who “lost” China. Noam stated that, “The terminology contains the tacit assumption that the United States owned China. The idea of China being out of our control was horrifying.”

Noam discussed how the American response was to surround China militarily. China has no illusions about American goals in the region.

As usual, Noam said that China has many blemishes that its critics can point to, such as its treatment of the Uyghur population and its violations of international law in the South China Sea.

Noam then discussed Chinese practices, such as copying American technology and then undercutting it in the marketplace, using debt to dominate other nations, and using American politicians to gain friendlier terms toward China. Noam remarked:

“The problem with the list of charges, however, is that they either plainly pose no threat to the United States or are actions we ourselves claim the right to engage in.”

Noam stated that China’s human-rights violations of Uyghurs, while horrible, pose no threat to the USA, and he noted that the USA’s reaction to human-rights abuses is entirely dependent on who commits them. Saudi Arabia’s terrible human-rights record is not used to warn of the “Saudi threat,” but China’s human-rights crimes somehow threaten the world.

Noam discussed that some charges against China, such as debt traps, are exaggerated, while others “Might as well be lists of events in American history.” Noam noted that American industrialization was greatly assisted by intellectual-property theft from Europe. Noam wrote that Alexander Hamilton called for “a federal program to engage in industrial theft from other countries on a grand scale.” Only after becoming the world’s greatest industrial power did the USA begin advocating intellectual-property rights. The charges of Chinese influence peddling and economic warfare are quite hypocritical, as the CIA openly advocates it. China’s attempt to create a sphere of influence around it is no different from how the USA treated the Western Hemisphere as its imperial backyard.

The former prime minster of Australia stated, “By its mere presence,” China is “an affront to the United States.” Noam concluded that the “threat” posed by China is its existence. When China opened its first foreign military base in Djibouti, at the entrance of the Red Sea, it was treated as a threat to American and European dominance. The USA has more than 700 foreign military bases. When China explored opening a second base in the Solomon Islands, the USA began pressuring the Solomon Islands, in what Chinese officials called an “attempt to revive the Monroe Doctrine in the South Pacific.” Noam listed a litany of Chinese “offenses” that the USA regularly engages in but that receive unremitting American condemnation. Noam stated that those situations illustrate that “we do not seriously care about the ideals we profess.” China sees American hypocrisy very clearly. A Chinese official noted, “When international rules happen to be consistent with U.S. interests, they are cited as authority. Otherwise they are simply ignored.”

Noam discussed the case of Taiwan and China’s ominous stance. He surveyed the issue but noted that Taiwan itself considers it to be China’s legitimate government (in exile), and Taiwanese officials do not like Taiwan being referred to as Taiwan, but as part of China. Noam advised that if the USA really cared about Taiwan’s independence and Taiwan’s people, it would not be used as a pawn with China today. Noam stated that Taiwan’s fate needs to be worked out with China, not as an American pawn, as the Taiwanese will be the biggest losers if it comes to war.

Noam noted that instead of fostering friendly relations between Taiwan and China, the USA has been encouraging Taiwan to become a “missile-covered ‘porcupine’ that can resist a Chinese invasion.” Biden stated that he would go to war over Taiwan, and American actions are increasing the likelihood. Noam noted that China has wisely pursued a peaceful strategy with Taiwan, as any war would be harmful to China. But American officials are planning on a war over Taiwan. Noam ended the section with, “Rather than war being unthinkable, a diplomatic solution is unthinkable.”

The next section of the chapter was a discussion of the farce that the USA’s actions around China are “defensive” in nature. There is no Chinese fleet anchored off Los Angeles conducting military exercises. Noam noted that American writers cited the bellicose stance of Biden as a reason for why China was increasing its nuclear arsenal. John Mearsheimer said in 2005 that the USA “does not tolerate peer competitors” and is “determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon.” Noam wrote:

“The United States intends to rule the world, even if that requires escalating the threat of a war that will be possibly terminal to human civilization.”

Noam stated that reducing the tensions with China would require American introspection and honesty, but those qualities are rarely seen in American officials, or any officials, really. Noam said it gently, but American hypocrisy on these issues is stunningly obvious, and just ceasing the hypocrisy might end the crisis.

The last section of the chapter was a discussion of just how dangerous the situation is. China and the USA are currently involved in an arms race, which even Henry Kissinger said is leading to another world war. China never has posed a military threat to the United States. If any war breaks out, it will be about the USA’s trying to maintain its empire in the face of a rising China.

Noam ended the chapter with:

“There is little hope for the planet if the two leading powers cannot even discuss how to solve our most urgent problems. This is the road to disaster. The United States needs to stop needlessly stoking conflict, think about how things look from the Chinese perspective, and work sincerely to understand and collaborate with the country of 1.4 billion people we have to share the planet with.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My ninth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and this chapter is titled:

NATO and Russia after the Cold War

Noam began this chapter with noting that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the point of NATO was dubious. Noam asked, “Without any looming Soviet hordes, what was NATO for?” There were calls to honorably retire NATO, but Noam noted that NATO’s mission changed to “a U.S.-run intervention force with the worldwide mandate to secure the West’s strategic interests. Part of its mission was to maintain control of the international energy system.” NATO troops began guarding oil pipelines to the West, and Noam wrote that “NATO therefore laid claim to a worldwide jurisdiction.”

George Kennan was the architect of the containment policy toward the Soviet Union, which he admitted was not necessary when NATO was founded. Kennan warned that expanding NATO toward Russia would initiate a “new cold war.” Kennan observed that when Russia reacted to NATO’s expansion, NATO supporters would use it to prove that Russians were still a threat, even though NATO’s expansion predictably elicited a Russian response. One political scientist observed, “NATO exists to manage the risk created by its existence.” A Clinton advisor warned that expanding NATO would ruin Europe’s chance for lasting peace. In 1995, in a Foreign Affairs article, a political scientist wrote that the test of the success of NATO’s expansion would be “its effect on the peaceful coexistence of Ukraine and Russia.” A Cato Institute scholar wrote that “analysts committed to a U.S. foreign policy of realism and restraint have warned for more than a quarter-century that continuing to expand the most powerful military alliance in history closer and closer to another major power would not end well.”

Noam noted that American officials in 2022 admitted that the USA was fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Noam warned that it could lead to nuclear war.

Noam then had a section on NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo. As I will get to later, I doubt that Noam ever trusted any national leader on Earth. I believe that he sees it as just the nature of nations. NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo was a watershed moment in international relations. Yugoslavia was not a NATO nation, and NATO was intervening in a civil war for “humanitarian” reasons. Boris Yeltsin was the USA’s man in Russia, but the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, and especially Serbia, was a huge step in the souring of Russian relations after the Cold War was over.

Noam noted that the “humanitarian” aspect of the Kosovo bombings did not withstand minimal scrutiny. In a Foreign Affairs review on NATO’s Kosovo intervention, Michael Mandelbaum wrote that it was a “perfect failure” if its goals were truly humanitarian, as the people of the Balkans “emerged from the war considerably worse off than they have been before.” A Washington Post article claimed that “The U.S.-led NATO bombing precipitated the very humanitarian crisis that the administration claimed it was intervening to stop.”

Serbian atrocities escalated with the bombings. Some American politicians said that they “miscalculated” the Serbian response, but Wesley Clark, who commanded the NATO operation, said that the Serbian atrocities were “entirely predictable” and “fully anticipated.” Clark told the White House before the bombings that the Serbs would certainly attack the civilian population as a response. Noam quoted the “crazed” Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who advocated bombing Serbia into a medieval state.

Human-rights groups documented nearly one hundred instances when NATO’s bombs killed civilians. As usual, nobody at NATO was ever held accountable for those crimes.

Noam noted the illegality of NATO’s bombing, as it defied international law. The UN prohibits force except for self-defense. What NATO did in the Balkans – an offensive war – was one of the main charges at Nuremberg’s Nazi trials.

Writing about the West in the former Yugoslavia, and the media’s treatment of it, was one of the last great writing projects of Ed Herman’s life. I also wrote about it at length.

In 2000, Nelson Mandela said that the 1998 Iraq bombings and the 1999 Kosovo bombings were a threat to international law and were “introducing chaos in international affairs” and, in Noam’s words, “giving other countries license to do whatever they want.” Noam wrote a book on the Kosovo bombings titled The New Military Humanism. There has never been a clear-cut humanitarian military intervention in world history.

Noam discussed the laughable idea that the USA intervened in Kosovo out of humanitarian motivation. Noam quoted several American officials who basically said that Slobodan Milošević had to go. He died in custody at the USA’s kangaroo court at The Hague, and the credible debate was whether it was criminal negligence (Ed Herman) or murder (Chris Black (1)). Western officials later admitted that the “negotiations” were intended to goad Milošević into war.

In the chapter’s next section, Noam discussed how the Kosovo intervention began a steep slide in American-Russian relations, beginning with Yeltsin’s dismay, and Yeltsin was largely a Western puppet who presided over the demographic catastrophe of post-Cold War Russia (1).

Yeltsin had warned about NATO’s 1995 bombing of Bosnia and what could happen if NATO expanded to Russia’s border: “The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.”

Russians saw NATO’s expansion as a direct threat to Russia, which the secretary of state in those years, Madeleine Albright, admitted in her memoir. In 2008, when NATO announced that Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members, it was called a “unipolar” moment, in which the USA seemed to believe that it could shape the world to its liking. French and German leaders warned that the American/NATO disregard for Russian security issues was dangerous. Noam discussed WikiLeaks cables among American diplomats, including William Burns, who was the ambassador to Russia and later the head of Biden’s CIA, who wrote in 2007 that “NATO enlargement and U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe play to the classic Russian fear of encirclement.” Burns eventually stated that the admission of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO would present “an unthinkable predicament for Russia.”

Not only did Russian officials see NATO’s expansion as a direct threat but also a betrayal by Americans. Secretary of State James Baker famously stated, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, “We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps his presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in the eastern direction.”

Noam cited Robert Gates, the secretary of defense under Bush the Second and Obama, who wrote in his memoirs that the USA was “Recklessly ignoring what the Russians consider their own vital national interests,” that incorporating many Soviet states into NATO was a “mistake,” and that announcing that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO was a “monumental provocation.”

Noam then discussed that Russia’s fears were well founded, as NATO kept engaging in illegal invasions, such as Afghanistan in 2001, NATO members invaded Iraq in 2003, and NATO overthrew Libya’s government in 2011, after only being authorized by the UN to prevent slaughters of civilians in a civil war.

Throughout his political work, Noam portrayed the situation that the USA used to justify violence, but simply reversed the actors and took stock. Noam wrote:

“To understand the Russian attitude, it helps to imagine how U.S. policymakers would react if a military alliance led by China began, over the course of decades, slowly admitting countries of the Western Hemisphere and providing them with weaponry and training. The United States has reacted to fears that countries are slipping out of its control with violence and even outright regime change. There was no reason not to expect a similar response from Russia to what Gates called a ‘monumental provocation.’”

Noam then discussed Ukraine, and stated, “The West took the worst of all possible courses for Ukrainians. NATO declared that Ukraine would ultimately become a member, infuriating Russia, though it had no intention of actually admitting Ukraine to the alliance.”

In 2015, “realist” John Mearsheimer stated that the West was “Leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” Noam noted that Putin told Biden that NATO’s expansion was largely behind “his decision to send troops to Ukraine’s border.”

As I have stated, Noam is not a fan of any national leader, and he called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “a criminal war of aggression against a neighboring state” that “cannot be excused.” Noam wrote that “there is zero merit to Putin’s argument that U.S. hypocrisy justifies his own criminality. However, U.S. policy toward Russia over the last several decades made this decision more probable.” Even warmonger Thomas Friedman openly wondered why the USA “would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was weak.”

When Putin massed his troops on Ukraine’s borders and demanded that Biden commit to not allowing Ukraine to join NATO, Biden’s response was, “I don’t accept anybody’s red lines.”

I am going to end this post here, and the next post will be on the war in Ukraine.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My tenth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and this chapter is titled:

NATO and Russia after the Cold War

The last sections of the chapter were devoted to the war in Ukraine since 2022. Noam began the section with:

“The invasion of Ukraine was a culmination of a long conflict that had been becoming progressively more dangerous for years. In eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian separatists had been at war with the Ukrainian government for eight years.”

Noam called Putin’s invasion “homicidal insanity.” There was a negotiated settlement in 2015, called the Minsk II agreement, but it was not implemented. Specialists observed that the entire war would have been avoided had Ukraine stopped trying to join NATO and agreed to autonomy to the Donbas region. The former American ambassador to Ukraine, Jack Matlock, stated that if NATO had not expanded, there would have been no “basis for the present crisis.”

Noam wrote that the USA did not push for a settlement and kept alive its half-hearted idea of admitting Ukraine to NATO. In December 2021, NATO reaffirmed its intent to admit Ukraine to NATO. Noam noted that the USA did not want to negotiate a settlement, as a war in Ukraine would be much worse for the Soviet Union than the USA. A December 2021 Wall Street Journal article spelled out why it made strategic sense to stonewall Russia.

Noam then described an earlier situation with the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, in which Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, bragged that the USA armed and incited the rebels in Afghanistan to induce a Soviet invasion, to give them their “Vietnam.” I have long written on the issue. Brzezinski had no “regret” for using Afghanistan as cannon fodder against the Soviet Union, which killed millions and made millions of refugees. Noam cited Anatol Lieven repeatedly in that section and noted a 1989 conversation that Lieven had with an American official who stated that the USA’s goal was to “inflict the kind of humiliation on them that they inflicted on us in Vietnam.” Lieven was dismayed that “There was not a single scrap – not the slightest element – of concern for Afghanistan or the Afghan people,” and it “was totally irrelevant to him how many of the Afghan people died in the process.”

Like Brzezinski’s “Afghan trap,” Noam wrote at how the Biden administration tried to undermine any chance that the war’s end could be negotiated, as the administration openly stated that its goal was to “weaken” Russia. When some Congressional Democrats urged negotiation to end the war, they were attacked from all sides in Washington, D.C., and those “progressive” Democrats quickly retracted their letter. In April 2022, a Washington Post article discussed the “awkward reality” that “for some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.” The article noted that NATO nations did not think that it was entirely up to Ukraine whether it kept fighting or not.

Noam wrote about how the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, privately called for negotiation to end the war, which Biden and his staff rejected, and the New York Times reported an official’s observation that it was a “unique situation where military brass are more fervently pushing for diplomacy than U.S. diplomats.” (It was actually not so unique, as it was the same situation regarding nuking Japan at the end of World War II).

When Germany balked at sending tanks to Ukraine (something that Germany supposedly gave up after Hitler), American arm-twisting got Germany to relent and send the tanks. While Ukraine definitely has a Nazi problem (1), one Ukrainian politician said that it was only “seasoning,” as the central issue was NATO.

Noam reflected on the “ugly domestic atmosphere” in the USA, as anti-Russian propaganda reached levels unseen during the Cold War and the West began canceling Russian culture. Ed Herman wrote about Russia and Ukraine since the 2014 coup, noting how Russia and Putin were demonized. It reached new levels with the invasion of Ukraine. Noam noted the “glee” of American pundits and politicians over the war. Senator Mitt Romney said, “We are, by virtue of supporting Ukraine in this war, depleting and diminishing the Russian military.” Romney called weakening Russia a “very good thing.” The cheerleading from the USA rhapsodized over how greatly Russia was paying for the American-supported war and how it stimulated American weapons companies. David Ignatius wrote more than a year into the war that the West should not “feel gloomy” about Ukraine’s destruction, as “these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians).” One American professor used the example of Al Capone as a model for how Russia should be treated. Senator Lindsey Graham said, “I like the structural path we’re on. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.” This sentiment was sarcastically repeated by others, that the USA would fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian.”

Noam noted how Europeans began complaining that the USA was profiting from the war at the expense of Europe. Noam wrote that only a few non-white nations helped Ukraine, partly because, “The war is perceived by many around the world not as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism but as a great power conflict not worth getting involved in. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East find U.S. rhetoric about resisting aggression to be laughable hypocrisy.”

Noam wrote about how the war in Ukraine was bringing the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Noam argued that attacked nations deserve help, but that ending the war should be the top priority. Noam stated that avoiding diplomacy ensured a long war that ultimately harms everybody, although Ukraine became a “showroom” for American weaponry, “demonstrating their capacity to kill more and more people.”

Noam then discussed several ways the war could have been prevented or quickly ended, but the West, led by the USA, undermined all such attempts. The media promoted a ludicrous fiction that Putin wanted to conquer the world, while ignoring Russian offers for a ceasefire. Noam concluded that “It is impossible to know if diplomacy could have achieved a just peace, because it was never tried.”

Noam observed that as Ukraine took the West’s advice to “just fight,” the first-year casualties were a half-million. Ukraine is a devastated nation today. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Ukraine war was good for the American economy, with great profits for the military and fossil fuel companies.

Noam ended the chapter by noting that “undermining rival powers” is a formal part of American policy, but China keeps expanding internationally and the world is moving away from a U.S.-dominated world economy. Noam wrote: “The world outside of the Anglosphere and Western Europe has been unwilling to join what most see as a U.S.-Russia proxy war fought with Ukrainian bodies. The Global South does not admire the nobility of the U.S. defense of Ukraine, seeing the rhetoric as hypocritical and the fight as a contest for dominance between superpowers.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My eleventh post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and this chapter is titled:

Nuclear Threats and Climate Catastrophe

In September, I made posts (1) on the most recent assessment of where Earth’s key variables stood for an inhabitable Earth. All of them were environmental measures that humanity is impacting. The variables in an emergency state are genetic diversity and nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. Those are all related to farming and/or driving Earth’s species to extinction.

Noam’s chapter was on environmental catastrophe and the threat of a nuclear holocaust, as the USA leads the way on inflaming those existential threats. The USA had long been the world’s leading burner of hydrocarbon fuels, which is causing Global Warming. China has galloped past the USA, especially in coal (more than the rest of the world combined), and China’s now stands at about twice American fossil fuel consumption (but less than half on a per-capita basis). Combined, China and the USA burn nearly half of Earth’s fossil fuels.

Noam wrote: “Without understanding and addressing these two threatening crises of our time, organized human life will not survive our century.” Noam stated that we could also take Earth’s species with us. I agree.

The next section of his chapter was titled, “The omnicidal madness of nuclear weapons.” Noam discussed Steven Pinker’s “long peace” idea, which Ed Herman and David Peterson critiqued. Pinker argued that we are in an unprecedented era of peace, which Noam wrote was “exactly backward. The idea of a ‘long peace’ depends on minimizing the many millions of deaths in warfare that have occurred since the end of World War II, including the countless bloodbaths for which our country is directly responsible. It is more accurate to describe this era as by far the most dangerous time in human history, with extreme violence a greater threat than ever before.”

This is a huge, contentious issue, and it is somewhat paradoxical. As far as the daily lives of people go, especially those who live in industrialized societies, humanity is far more peaceful than it used to be. Noam blurbed a book by a “peacenik” anthropologist who argued that humans were peaceful in the distant past. I disagree. People were far more likely to die violently in the distant past than they are today, but only if we discount the chance of a nuclear holocaust. I have been dismayed by some of Noam’s blurbs over the years. The paradox is that Westerners have far less chance of dying violently than people did when they were hunter gatherers or peasants, as far as their daily lives go, but we also all live under the specter of a nuclear holocaust, and on that score, Noam is right.

Noam wrote: “The idea that we’re in a period of peace is a dangerous illusion. Nuclear weapons are not just lying around unused and in the background. They are in use at every moment to frighten adversaries just as a robber who points a gun at a store owner is using a gun, even though he doesn’t fire it. What is misleadingly and euphemistically called ‘deterrence’ is more accurately understood as a constant threat of extreme violence. Situations look more peaceful than they are if we do not understand the role of threats.”

In the next section of the chapter, Noam discussed dropping nuclear weapons on Japan, when the USA demonstrated that “we would soon be capable of destroying virtually all life on Earth.” Noam observed that technical feats eclipsed “moral capacities” and “showed how the godlike power to smite whole cities could be unleashed by a country that saw itself as humane and righteous.”

Noam wrote that the atomic bombings of Japan “sparked an arms race that nearly ended life on Earth for good.” When Robert Oppenheimer (the “father of the atomic bomb”) and Joseph Rotblat (who was a Manhattan Project physicist) began warning against nuclear weapons, the USA smeared both men as Soviet agents. Noam wrote of the Mainau Declaration of 1955, signed by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and dozens of other Nobel laureates, which stated: “All nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort.” Otherwise, they will “cease to exist.” Also in 1955, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell warned that the human species faced a choice, either an “end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”

The UN’s first general resolution in 1946 called for the elimination of “national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other weapons adaptable to mass destruction.” Noam wrote that “the United States was unwilling from the start to consider giving up a formidable means of coercing others.” The USA had plans in the late 1940s to obliterate the Soviet Union with atomic weapons. By 1946, about half of Americans wanted to renounce atomic weapons, as it was clear that the American nuclear monopoly would not last forever. Noam wrote of the American and Soviet insanity, as both nations built more than 30,000 weapons each, which were easily enough to make Earth uninhabitable.

Noam then discussed the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was the closest that the world has come to a nuclear holocaust so far. Noam credited Khrushchev with ending the crisis and blamed Kennedy for escalating it. In all of Noam’s criticisms of Kennedy that I ever saw, he never mentioned that JFK inherited Strangelovian military advisers that he was constantly battling. The next year, JFK unilaterally began nuclear disarmament as he tried to end the Cold War, and that, more than anything, likely cost him his life. As I have previously stated, I consider Noam’s Rethinking Camelot to be a misguided effort. The CIA was definitely involved in JFK’s murder, and the man whom JFK fired over the Bay of Pigs disaster covered up the murder of the man he despised. Noam can’t go there, whatever his reasons are. I think that Noam would largely agree with me that presidents are puppets, but he can’t wrap his mind around the event that largely made them that way.

Noam then discussed the near-misses that the USA and Soviet Union had on accidentally triggering a nuclear war. A former American general in charge of nuclear weapons said that humanity had survived the nuclear era so far by “some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

Noam discussed American plans to kill hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens with nuclear weapons, which appalled that general and Daniel Ellsberg. John Foster Dulles crafted the “brinkmanship” strategy of threatening attack with nuclear weapons, and his protégé Richard Nixon, in his turn as president, invented his “madman theory.”

Noam noted how even Democratic presidents who publicly argued for disarmament did the opposite when in office. Noam discussed Biden’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review that openly admitted that threatening nuclear attack is a “core part of U.S. foreign policy.” Noam wrote that China has a formal policy that renounces using nuclear weapons first, but the USA reserves the right to unilaterally nuke other nations. Noam finished that section with “But the amount of mainstream debate within the United States on whether the existing nuclear policy encourages proliferation and endangers the world is approximately zero.”

The next section of the chapter was about nuclear disarmament movements, which Noam credited with all steps taken to eliminate nuclear weapons. Noam can always be counted on to minimize JFK’s efforts, and in this instance, JFK made what is arguably the greatest presidential speech since World War II, which was about nuclear disarmament and ending the Cold War. JFK followed it with action, and less than two months later, the first nuclear disarmament treaty was signed (and a few months later, JFK was murdered). Noam wrote about Nixon's nuclear insanity, which included one alleged drunken night when he ordered North Korea to be nuked, and Kissinger forestalled the order until Nixon sobered up the next day.

Noam discussed how American presidents have few constraints on ordering the use of nuclear weapons and ended the section with “But then as now, the world’s fate depends on the president not going berserk.”

Noam began the next section by noting that there is one surefire way to eliminate the threat of nuclear holocaust: eliminate the weapons. Noam noted that there are treaty-provided nuclear-free zones on Earth, such as Africa and in the Southern Hemisphere. Even the infamous Saddam Hussein offered to help make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, but the USA was not interested, as it would then have to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear arsenal. In 2015, Obama blocked another attempt to make the Middle East nuclear-free, and he earned Netanyahu’s gratitude for his obstructionist effort.

Noam discussed global efforts to limit nuclear weapons, but the nuclear nations always reject them. Noam noted how the UN’s 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ignored by all nuclear powers. Noam observed: “Regrettably that level of civilization still seems beyond the range of the most powerful states, which are careering in the opposite direction, upgrading and enhancing the means to terminate organized human life on Earth.” The USA has led efforts to undermine such treaties, and even Jimmy Carter “blasted” the USA’s intransigence. Noam cited several officials, from Harry Truman to Robert McNamara to Sam Nunn, who remarked on the insanity of this completely avoidable path to “Armageddon.” Noam ended his section on nuclear weapons with:

“Given the risk, it would be wrong, even criminal, to fail to do what can be done to constrain the production and use of these terrible weapons. But we must also bear in mind that unless we address the nationalistic and militaristic drives that push us toward catastrophic confrontation with other powers, we are simply delaying a terminal conflict. Only the timing is in doubt.”

I am going to end this post here. The next post will be on the USA’s contribution to making Earth uninhabitable.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My twelfth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is on the realities of American idealism, and this chapter is titled:

Nuclear Threats and Climate Catastrophe

The second half of Noam’s chapter is titled: “Wrecking the Earth: The U.S. and Global Climate Policy.” Humanity has been “wrecking the Earth” for millions of years, beginning when rock-wielding apes began driving giant tortoises to extinction. The conquest of Earth was the first global catastrophe that humanity inflicted. The devastation has increased in ways, although the rise of fossil fuels reduced the incentive to raze forests. But the rise of fossil fuels is inflicting a new kind of devastation, as burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and is warming Earth. These are subjects that I have long written on, and Noam began his section by discussing the record-breaking heat waves that have washed over Earth in recent years.

Consistent with Earth’s history, the high latitudes are warming the fastest. Over Earth’s history, the polar regions had forests or ice covering them, depending on whether it was a warm or cold phase. I am witnessing that warming in my home state, as the glaciers melt and we have record-shattering heat waves.

Noam’s section began with heat waves in the United Kingdom (“UK”), and on one day in 2022 it reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit in London, which fanned more than a thousand London fires, for the UK’s busiest firefighting day since the Blitz. Mere weeks after the British disaster, a third of Pakistan flooded, which destroyed millions of houses, for one of the greatest natural disasters that any nation ever faced. Noam commented that it was “only the beginning.”

The next section was on the “harrowing” scientific literature, which had warnings that were always too conservative. I began studying the issue in the early 1990s, when oil-company shill Fred Singer and a few cronies began to challenge the idea of global warming or if humanity had any responsibility for it. And, indeed, all of the scientific predictions that I saw were too conservative. The reality was always greater than predicted. Climate scientists are terrified by what is happening, for good reason.

Noam quoted the UN secretary-general, who said in 2022, “We are on the highway to hell with our foot still on the accelerator.” An Israeli climate scientist stated that people do not “fully understand what we’re talking about… everything is expected to change: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the landscapes we see, the oceans, the seasons, the daily routine, the quality of life.” He finished with: “I’m happy I won’t be alive.”

Noam noted that half of Earth’s species may be wiped out by climate change alone. More than a billion people could become environmental refugees, but I see the most direct risk as epic crop failures from heat, drought, floods, and even cooling in regions if the Gulf Stream collapses, for instance. That could mean billions of starving people, which could trigger nuclear war.

Noam cited scientists who talked about how today’s carbon dioxide levels were last seen millions of years ago, when sea level was more than 60 feet higher than today. Many measures of Earth’s health nearly all “point in the same dismal direction, indicating continued momentum towards doomsday.” Scientists still think that the catastrophe is avoidable, but only if immediate action is taken.

As I stated in the previous post, the USA and China are responsible for nearly half of the world’s fossil fuel emissions. Noam kind of got it wrong by blaming the USA and West for the majority of fossil fuel emissions. China and India combined emit more than twice what the USA does (but they also have several times as many people), and on a per-capita basis, China is higher than the UK and has nearly caught Europe. That does not let the West off the hook of responsibility, but Noam could have been more precise there.

However, Noam was right that the rich are responsible for a far greater share than the rest of us. The top 1% are responsible for 16% of the emissions. Equatorial nations will likely suffer the most as parts may become uninhabitable, but the nations nearer the poles may get a net benefit (Canada and Russia would eventually have much more arable land, for instance).

Noam then had a small section on solutions and the Green New Deal in particular. In Brian O’Leary’s last years, he sought a research assistant to crunch the numbers on the costs and benefits of traditional energy alternatives, which he said were all too little and too late. I spent time reading at these links (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15), revisiting the issue before I wrote on it in this post. I have never seen a comprehensive accounting of the costs and benefits of traditional alternative energy.

One comment I have is that promoters of wind and solar power present very misleading statistics, as far as their solving our energy issues. I regularly see how much new electricity production comes from wind and solar, but those pronouncements fail to mention that electricity is only a third of American energy consumption (and more like 10% globally), and when all is said and done, wind and solar still comprise less than 3% of the USA’s energy production. Also, those traditional alternatives are often far more energy intensive (and even polluting) than fossil fuel sources and uses, and those costs have to be factored into the numbers, which is what Brian wanted done.

The numbers I have seen on American investment in the Green New Deal are at least $50 trillion. For $1 billion, which is 0.002% (one fifty-thousandth) of $50 trillion, we could have free-energy technology, which ends the world as we know it and solves all of our existential risks. In his last years, Brian was beside himself on how even the idea of free energy was forbidden in all “progressive” circles. As I was writing this, I read this article by one of my favorite medical bloggers on how vaccines became a religion (Amen!). It is legitimate to wonder if Noam’s debilitating stroke was caused by the COVID vaccine, which he wanted to inflict on all people.

Free energy faces similar religious dogma, but on the “laws of physics” and “conspiracy theory” objections. As Brian stated, there are no laws of physics, only theories. To even say “law” is invoking religious faith, not scientific inquiry. My friend witnessed a demonstration of anti-gravity technology, along with free energy and other mind-bogglers. In light of such a demonstration, the so-called law of gravity becomes something else: an incomplete theory.

All of humanity’s existential issues quickly end with the harmless and safe arrival of free-energy technology, but even discussing the issue is forbidden in nearly all venues on Earth. For me, initiatives such as the Green New Deal are willfully ignorant of free energy and related technologies and, as such, are just more government boondoggles, just as Carter’s energy tax credit almost all went to fraud (only Dennis’s heat pump really delivered, and solar systems were largely a scam).

Noam then had a section on how the Green New Deal was opposed by nearly all politicians in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration denies that global warming is even real and Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein from “progressive" California (ha!) immediately dismissed the Green New Deal. .

Noam wrote about how organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute have engaged in long-term propaganda campaigns to portray global warming as a “hoax.” Brian was also beside himself when Singer began the “hoax” drumbeat. People who deny global warming are singing the oil companies’ tune.

Noam wrote about how the business press waxes euphoric about greater oil extraction (even though we are mining the dregs), and he noted how Biden was worse than Trump and how the UN process is completely corrupted, as oil-industry lobbyists outnumbered the officials at the UN’s COP28 conference in 2023, which was actually chaired by an oil industry executive who “used his position to lobby for new oil and gas projects.” One climate scientist remarked that he was “almost at a loss of finding words to adequately conscribe the corruption and evil at COP28.” Biden actually hectored oil companies to increase production. Even the New York Times remarked on Biden’s hypocrisy, as he campaigned on combating global warming but did the opposite while in office. That despairing scientist quoted above also stated that he hoped that “Everyone would wake up and realize that none of our hopes and dreams will come to fruition if we don’t have a habitable planet.” Noam observed that “the hoped-for mass awakening has yet to occur.”

Noam finished a chapter with a section on how the media enabled global warming denial, as fossil-fuel companies are major advertisers, for another example of the Propaganda Model’s advertising filter. Noam noted that the media could report on disasters such as Colorado’s epic wildfires in the winter of 2022, without mentioning fossil fuels. Noam ended his chapter with:

“But the game is not over. There’s still time for radical course correction. The means are understood. If the will is there, it is possible to avert catastrophe. Here, too, however, popular mobilization is essential. We need people who take responsibility for safeguarding the welfare of future generations. To adopt the phrases used by Indigenous people throughout the world: Who will defend the Earth? Who will uphold the rights of nature? Who will adopt the role of steward of the commons, our collective possession?”

I know of a far easier way to avert the catastrophe, and I know whom I seek. Actually, it may be the hardest way, because the people I seek are very rare. But I have not given up. The most gracious reply that I ever received from the “left” on the free-energy issue was from Noam, but even he still politely brushed me off. I have never been able to interest the left (and I have tried plenty). The left does not have the answers, I am sorry to say. No political stripe does, as they all just reshuffle the deck of scarcity.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

In October, I made a post about Grokipedia’s bio of Ed Herman, which was infinitely better than the libelous bio at Wikipedia. I went through Ed’s Grokipedia bio last week, made some edit suggestions, and was pleased that it resulted in the mention of Ed and Noam Chomsky’s first collaboration. Their book was outrageously censored, and Grokipedia gave it a terse but adequate treatment.

This evening, I thought about other Wikipedia outrages and tried to improve Grokipedia’s treatment of George Washington’s Indian policy. Wikipedia is execrable on this, naturally, and my work was cited in 2007 on this issue.

Washington architected arguably history’s greatest swindle, but Grokipedia adhered to the fiction that Washington endeavored to treat the Indians fairly. I provided a link to Washington’s own letter, as well as four history books (1, 2, 3, 4) that discussed Washington’s criminal plan in depth. Grok straight rejected it, apparently didn’t even try to find those history books, and concluded that, even though Washington called the Indians “beasts” who did not deserve their land, he tried to treat the Indians fairly. That was a red, white, and blue whitewash of perhaps history’s greatest swindle. Grokipedia could not grok it.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My thirteenth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is about what Noam called “understanding the power system,” and this chapter is titled:

The Domestic Roots of Foreign Policy

My previous post ended Noam’s discussion of the realities of American idealism, and the book’s next section was about understanding how the system works. Noam began the section with a quote from Mikhail Bakunin, who wrote that monarchies and “democracies” rob the masses on behalf of the elite, but the robberies in “democracies” are performed on behalf of the “people’s will.” Elites always find a way to milk the system, and violence has always been used or threatened to achieve that goal.

In Noam’s chapter on “the domestic roots of foreign policy,” Noam quoted Henry Morgenthau that the USA’s ruling class since the American Civil War essentially runs the USA’s political system and has defeated all attempts to dethrone them. That was about as “conspiratorial” as Noam ever gets.

Noam then discussed that whatever the American public thinks has very little influence over American foreign policy, as elite interests are always primarily served.

Noam gave examples, such as the American public's overwhelming support for a two-state solution in Israel, its wanting the USA to stay neutral and refuse to aid either Israelis or Palestinians if they are not acting in “good faith” to that end, or its desire for efforts to address global warming. Noam then observed that “the U.S. government simply defies public opinion.”

Noam then ran down a list of the Americans’ opinions regarding, among others, such as the Reagan administration’s attacks on Nicaragua, the American embargo on Cuba, federal programs that spy on Americans, and recently, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. In each instance, the opinions of most Americans were simply disregarded. Noam noted that that was for situations that the public knew about. He stated that the American public is regularly not informed at all about the American government’s actions abroad, so people cannot even form an opinion on them. Noam wrote: “In cases like the ravaging of East Timor, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, or the drone assassinations around the world, the public had no idea what was done in its name.”

Noam quoted “realist” John Mearsheimer, who said that the public is “lied to about the situation on the battlefield, lied to about the real reason for going to war, and so forth…What we discovered is that public opinion… hardly matters at all in a decision-making process. A small number of the elites get together and they make the decisions.”

Noam noted that this was true in all nations, but that autocracies were more honest with their subjects, whereas in democratic societies the public has a means of electing officials so “must be manipulated more.”

Noam gave an example of this routine lying, when John McNamara told his staff on a flight home from Vietnam how badly the war was going but stepped off the plane to tell the press how well the war was going.

Noam cited the authors of The Foreign Policy Disconnect on the gulf between what the public wanted (peace, cooperation, strengthening the UN, limiting weaponry, using diplomacy instead of the military) and what officials did, including how the USA’s rejections of treaties and other international agreements have “flown in the face of the public’s wishes.”

Noam presented the situation of Iraq’s invasion, for which the public swallowed the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq and supported the invasion. When it became evident that the Bush administration shamelessly lied, the public stopped supporting it, but that change in public opinion was ignored. Noam quoted Dick Cheney’s disdain for what the American people thought, that the government “cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Noam stated that when American presidents did not think that the public would support their activities, the public was simply not informed about them. Noam specifically mentioned the CIA’s atrocities, and Nazi-inspired programs such as MK-ULTRA, which are rarely discussed in public. He was no fan of Stephen Kinzer but quoted Kinzer that the CIA “actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.” Noam then discussed instances when the American public was used as unwitting guinea pigs for bioweapons testing, such as in the New York City subway, for testing bacteria that became known as fatal to children.

Noam also noted the FBI’s “sordid” history, including trying to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr. (“MLK”) into committing suicide. I have seen Noam state in an interview that he suspected a high-level conspiracy in MLK’s murder. That is the only time I ever saw Noam mention it, but he wrote a book that argued that the CIA would not have been motivated to murder JFK. At the top it certainly was, which I regard as one of Noam’s failures.

Noam then discussed how internal documentation on these events would be kept secret for many years afterward on grounds of “national security” and will not be declassified until few people would care about it. When finally declassified, it would become obvious that national security did not have anything to do with it. The real “threat” was that “the public might assume it lived in a democracy and want to change the agency’s conduct.” Noam quoted Henry Kissinger, who baldly stated that covert operations were covert so that the public would not disapprove of them.

Noam then asked, “Why is there so little correlation between the public’s preferences and actual policy?” Noam replied that it was simple. In nations with high inequality, the public has little decision-making influence over foreign policy. In the USA and other nations, foreign policy is crafted and executed largely by business elites. Corporations are effectively unregulated in the USA, as Ed Herman noted, without even a pretense of catering to public opinion.

Noam has long cited Adam Smith in his work and quoted Smith that in his day, the “merchants and manufacturers” were “an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” Noam noted that little has changed since then.

Noam wrote: “Concentration of wealth yields concentration of power, particularly as the cost of elections skyrockets, which forces political parties even more deeply into the pockets of major corporations. This political power quickly translates into legislation that increases the concentration of wealth.” Basically, elites always win.

Noam noted that the public had little influence over the electoral process. He discussed how the public wanted smaller military budgets in times of peace, but the dominant political parties only competed on how to enlarge the military budget.

Noam noted that even in the small areas where votes might make a difference, “the centers of private power exert an inordinately heavy influence in obvious ways, through control of the media and political organizations and by putting forward the people who ultimately get elected.” Noam stated that the situation has not changed much since a 1969 study showed that the top 400 decision-makers in the USA’s national security state generally come from East Coast and Midwest business districts. Noam quoted John Dewey, who stated that “Politics is a shadow cast on society by big business.”

Noam observed that capitalists see themselves as “fighting a bitter class war” against the public. The public is simply “disenfranchised,” and “there is little role for unions or other civic organizations that might offer a way for the general public to play some role influencing programs and policy choices.”

Noam wrote that the Republican Party nakedly serves corporate interests, while the Democrats “have essentially abandoned whatever commitment they had to working people and the poor, becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street donors.”

Noam stated that a great achievement was diverting public anger from corporations to the government that serves them. Corporations have a vested interest in vilifying the government, as it has potential for enacting the public’s will. Noam noted that the trend is ever-increasing corporate power and control.

Noam again noted the deep roots of this situation, going back to the American Supreme Court’s first Chief Justice John Jay, who loved saying that those who own the country should govern it. The USA has been a plutocracy ever since its richest citizen became its first president, who was one of history’s greatest swindlers. The Founding Fathers firmly believed that the rich should run the nation. James Madison was one of the world’s great promoters of democracy in his day (although he owned slaves), and frankly stated that if everybody could vote, the voters would seize the wealth of the rich, so the system should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

When Noam and Ed Herman began writing on the media, they often quoted early 20^th-century figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann, who argued that the public was too stupid to know what was good for them, so that men of reason had to manage the “bewildered herd.” Propaganda, which had a positive meaning a century ago, was needed to manage the public mind. Noam quoted those intellectuals extensively in that section.

Noam cited, how he often has, the 1975 Trilateral Commission report titled The Crisis of Democracy. The “crisis” was that the USA was becoming too democratic and that “blacks” were creating systemic problems with their “demands.” The Harvard professor Samuel Huntington wrote in that work that there was a need to explore the “potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.” Noam noted that “matters are rarely stated that plainly.” In the Wall Street Journal was written: “democracy works well only when it is enabled and fortified by a great many institutions that are not in themselves democratic – or at least aren’t supposed to be democratic.”

Noam discussed how those elite interests unfailingly pursued their greedy agendas at the expense of everybody else in crafting and executing American foreign policy. They always take advantage of the public’s fear, such as after natural disaster, wars, or events such as the 9/11 terror attacks.

Noam noted, how he often has, that elites basically rule by keeping the public in fear or, as Orwell said, in a state of “controlled insanity.” During the Cold War, the boogie man was the Soviet Union, which was the fifth filter in Ed and Noam’s Propaganda Model. Noam noted how the Cold War helped entrench both American and Soviet elites.

After noting several examples of this, Noam wrote “This kind of fearmongering persists, with a revolving cast of enemies, both foreign and domestic, used to frighten the population into accepting state policies that ultimately harm us.”

Noam noted that “much” of the American public understands that American institutions do not serve their interests, that the media lies to them, and that voting does not matter. Noam wrote that if the system worked how the public wished that it did, it would look radically different.

Noam ended the chapter by discussing how the military system has expanded beyond all popular control. Dwight Eisenhower wrote that the military system stole from the public welfare and should be reduced. Joe Biden proposed a tremendous military budget in 2023, and Congress expanded it even further. Noam stated that the bloated military budget is best understood as theft from the public, but is called “national security.” Noam ended with “Securely for the rich, the corporate sector, and arms manufacturers: yes. But not for the rest of us.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My fourteenth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is about what Noam called “understanding the power system,” and this chapter is titled:

International Law and the “Rules-Based Order”

One of Noam’s first books that I read was What Uncle Sam Really Wants, and it may still be the best introduction to his work. I remember being struck by Noam’s statement that by the standards of the Nuremberg trials, every postwar American president should have swung from a noose. But war crimes trials are only for the losers of wars.

In this series of posts, I hope that it has become obvious that the USA disregards international law, and especially the UN, whenever it wants to. That chapter began with the 1989 invasion of Panama, which happened just when I was beginning my studies. Like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Noriega was on the CIA’s payroll before he outlived his usefulness.

Noam discussed the devastation of the world wars and the establishment of the UN. The UN’s charter is explicit that military force can only be used after UN approval and only in self-defense. Any other military violence is a war crime. The UN’s charter is the foundation of today’s international law. I have listed some of the UN’s votes on humanitarian issues, and the USA often stands alone on Earth in voting against them. Noam noted how the UN has voted annually since 1992 to condemn the USA’s economic warfare against Cuba. The 2022 vote was 185-to-2, as only Israel voted with the USA. Noam ended that section with:

“A country with basic respect for the rule of law would, in the face of such overwhelming opposition from the entire international community, change its policy. Instead, the U.S. issues the same challenge to the UN that Andrew Jackson infamously gave to the Supreme Court: they have made their decision, now let them enforce it. This defiance persists under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.”

In the next section, Noam discussed the USA’s proxy war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, using the Contras, which killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans. Nicaragua went to the World Court and won. The USA simply disregarded the ruling and escalated the war. Nicaragua then went to the Security Council and the General Assembly. Only the USA vetoed the Security Council resolution, and only Israel voted with the USA in the General Assembly.

Noam discussed how the USA constantly disregards international law with its invasions, genocides, and the like. The USA has refused to join the International Criminal Court (“ICC”), and even passed a law informally called The Hague Invasion Act, which authorized the USA’s military to invade the Netherlands if one of its citizens was held and prosecuted at the ICC.

Noam noted that the USA called for Putin to be prosecuted by the ICC over his invasion of Ukraine, and American officials served up sophistry to justify the call for Putin’s prosecution in a court that the USA refuses to recognize. Noam then had a section on the USA’s undermining of international agreements to ban cluster bombs, as an example. More than 100 nations have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the USA is naturally not one of them. The USA dropped over a thousand cluster bombs on Afghanistan while American officials defended their use. Noam again noted American hypocrisy when it called out Russia for using cluster bombs in Ukraine. The USA has also undermined the Biological Weapons Convention, and Noam provided a few more examples where the USA often stands alone on Earth in not joining international treaties, such as on the rights of women, children, and the disabled, the use of landmines, and global warming. It took over 40 years for the USA to ratify the Genocide Convention, and even then it exempted itself from any genocide charges.

Noam discussed how the USA regularly uses its veto power in the Security Council to defy the rest of humanity on issues such as South Africa’s apartheid regime and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Noam quoted an author in Foreign Affairs who stated that the USA rejects international treaties “as if it were sport.” Noam noted how the rest of the world accepts that the USA won’t join international treaties and will do whatever it wants.

Noam then had a section on the disregard for domestic law by American presidents. Noam noted the gross human-rights violations at the Guantanamo Bay prison on the island of Cuba, and observed that the only reason for that prison was to violate American laws. Noam wrote about how American presidents attack nations in violation of the USA’s War Powers Resolution. Obama ordered the murders of American citizens abroad and later boasted that he was “really good at killing people” as he went through his “kill list.” Noam observed that “This ‘strangest of bureaucratic rituals’ is, after all, possible only by eliminating the basic legal guarantees that date back to the Magna Carta.” Obama used specious logic to justify the attacks on Libya, which has been a catastrophe for that nation.

Noam then discussed how the American republic is supposed to work, with Congress making laws and the president executing them. But presidents frequently think that laws do not apply to them, as Richard Nixon said: “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”

Noam then discussed another pertinent example: American law bars aid to nations that systematically torture. As Noam and Ed tallied in their first uncensored book together, most of the world’s torturer regimes received aid from the USA, and the USA even taught torture techniques to those bloody regimes. When Colombia had the worst human rights record on Earth, billions of dollars of American aid poured into it. Turkey also committed heinous human rights violations, especially on its Kurdish minority, with thousands of towns and villages destroyed and tens of thousands killed, and 80% of Turkey’s weaponry was provided by the USA.

Noam discussed the example of Egypt in 2023, as it was a prodigious violator of human rights and a huge recipient of American military aid. Members of Congress pleaded with Biden to withhold aid, which he was legally required to do, but, in Noam’s words, Biden simply “waived” the law, citing national security reasons. Noam noted the simple lawlessness of continuing to arm a regime such as Egypt’s, but it does not matter.

Noam then discussed how it has become difficult to know when presidents break the law any longer, and the Snowden case was one of Noam’s examples, as Snowden exposed programs for spying on Americans that were “far beyond the scope of anything Congress had authorized, which may well have been unconstitutional.” Noam stated that Snowden should have become an American hero, not living in exile in Russia. Noam noted how American whistleblowers are regularly prosecuted. I remember when Bush the Second began attacking whistleblowers in defiance of American law, and Obama was even worse. This is one of many topics in Noam’s work that I already knew all too well. I could write the book on the corruption of the USA’s legal system, simply from my own experiences. So, this American corruption extends far past the Oval Office.

The next section of that chapter was about postwar presidencies. As I previously mentioned, all postwar presidents would have swung from a noose if the standards of Nuremberg had been applied. Noam then provided examples of those crimes, from Truman to Biden. Here is a brief recap:

Truman: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the “Grand Finale” bombing, and the invasion of Greece that killed 160,000 people, accompanied by widespread torture chambers;

Eisenhower: The bombing of North Korea killed off 20% of the population (Truman began it and Ike finished it), the coups in Iran and Guatemala;

Kennedy: Escalating the Vietnam conflict, including the authorization to use napalm, and beginning to bring Latin America under dictatorships;

Johnson: The huge escalation of the Vietnam War, and my reading of Latin American policy is that Johnson was the primary instigator of that, including sending the Marines to the Dominican Republic to ensure that it did not go “communist;”

Nixon: Further escalating the war in Indochina and supporting Pakistan’s killing of Bengalis, which reached genocidal levels (Nixon armed Pakistan over defiance of Congress’s weapons embargo, and Nixon was well aware of the genocide as it happened); and overthrowing Chile’s government did not even make Noam’s litany;

Ford: His short reign still managed to rack up big crimes, such as green-lighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and presiding over Operation Condor in South America; Ford tried to block the Church Committee’s investigation, which was the first and last time that the CIA was subjected to much government scrutiny;

Carter: He kept supporting the genocide in East Timor, and his support for Somoza in Nicaragua foreshadowed the decade of Central American genocide under Reagan and Bush the First, Noam noted “human rights” Carter’s support for many of the most repressive regimes on Earth, including the Shah’s Iran, Park’s South Korea, Pinochet’s Chile, Suharto’s Indonesia, Mobutu’s Zaire, and Brazil’s serial dictatorships; Noam did not even mention baiting the Soviet Union into Afghanistan;

Reagan: Noam noted that the World Court’s ruling on Reagan’s attack on Nicaragua, which cost tens of thousands of lives, made an enumeration superfluous, and Noam did not even mention the rest of Central America; Reagan strongly supported South Africa’s apartheid regime and even put Nelson Mandela on the USA’s terrorist list, a distinction that was not lifted until 2008 by Congress so that Mandela could freely visit the USA; not even mentioned was the support for bin Laden and friends in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran;

Bush the First: Noam stated that he already mentioned Panama’s invasion and the atrocities of the first Gulf War, so he did not need to recap them;

Clinton: He almost immediately began bombing Baghdad; half of his military aid went to Colombia when it had the worst human rights record on Earth; he bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan while falsely claiming that it was going to be used for chemical weapons; Noam did not mention bombing the former Yugoslavia or Clinton’s role in the Rwandan genocide, Ed Herman called Clinton the world’s leading active war criminal after he deposed Suharto; Noam did not even mention the genocide of Iraq’s children, which his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, said was “worth it”;

Bush the Second: Noam stated that he already covered the invasion of Iraq, so did not need to belabor it; Noam discussed how Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions against torture did not apply to Taliban or al-Qaeda prisoners, and Amnesty International (an imperial tool itself) recommended Bush’s prosecution for that; Noam went into a long discussion of the Bush regime’s use of torture;

Obama: Noam noted how Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize soon after his inauguration, and during his Nobel acceptance speech, Obama defended the American military but said that he had “ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed,” but it remains open today; Noam noted that Obama had “a mountain of evidence” of the Bush regime’s torture programs, but Obama shrugged it all off, stating that he was “looking forward” instead of backward; his “don’t look backward” approach is never applied to any other crimes; Noam then discussed Obama’s drone strikes around the world to kill people, even Americans; Noam didn’t even mention Libya, Syria, or overthrowing Ukraine’s government;

Trump: Noam stated that Trump escalated the criminality, such as boasting of sending federal agents to murder an Antifa member; Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani announced that any foreign officials on Earth were fair game; Trump waged an economic war against Venezuela, which “coincidentally” has the world’s largest oil deposits; that warfare killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans, partly from starvation, and displaced millions (Trump 2.0 resumed the attacks); Noam compared Trump’s stance toward Venezuela versus Putin’s with Ukraine, and noted that there were not significant differences (although the USA has not invaded Venezuela quite yet);

Biden: Biden’s term had not ended when Noam finished writing the book, but Noam mentioned many violations of international law, such as Biden’s air strikes on Syria, giving cluster bombs to Ukraine, and supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza (that was written before October 2023); and Noam mentioned that while Biden was better at global warming rhetoric than Trump, Biden was proud that oil production increased during his reign.

Noam ended the section by arguing no postwar president should have escaped prosecution and conviction for their international crimes, according to the UN Charter. Also, according to the USA’s Constitution, treaties become the law of the land, so the innumerable instances of international violence that all postwar presidents approved of also violated the Constitution.

The chapter’s final section was about the USA’s resort to a “rules-based order,” which is essentially American rules made on a whim. I remember a few years ago becoming aware of the media’s talking heads that stressed the “rules-based order,” and I really had not heard of it before. Emphasizing the “rules-based order” is just more sophistry to disregard international law, the UN in particular. Noam wrote that international law is “in many ways inadequate and unfair,” such as the Security Council and the veto powers of a few nations. Noam ended the chapter by observing that the USA rides roughshod over international law and rarely even bothers to justify those behaviors. Noam ended the chapter with, “The right to rule is assumed.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

While I spent the summer of 1974 touring Europe, my future wife worked in an orphanage for disabled children near London, with her sister. We both have some English heritage, and my wife has loved all things English since then, which is a common American predilection. I have been watching streaming TV for the past several years in the evenings with my wife, and we generally prefer British shows, which are usually intelligent, rarely violent, and often charming. My wife got me to watch the Downton Abbey TV series, as well as the movies. On Saturday, she had me watch the final Downton Abbey movie. It was charming, as usual, but as I have written lately, I am also in the middle of a tome on the British Empire and its prodigious violence. All empires relied on violence, and the USA is no different, as my series of posts on Noam’s latest and likely final book makes clear. While watching the final Downton Abbey movie, set in 1930, my mind regularly recalled the brutal imperial acts that made the world of Downton Abbey possible, with its vast estates, butlers and servants, etc. It would soon come to an end, which is probably part of Downton Abbey’s appeal – of a bygone era and social relations that are largely extinct.

But yesterday I kept thinking about something else. Before hearing of his murder, I was thinking about my encounter with Rob Reiner. In the summer of 1987, when Dennis Lee moved our company to my home town of Ventura, his wife Alison’s sister came to visit, as she had also done when we lived in Boston. Alison’s sister worked in New York City, and this was her first visit to California. She was my age, I picked her up at the LA airport, and she made it clear that she wanted to see a Hollywood celebrity. Because I grew up near LA and worked there three years, I continually encountered Hollywood celebrities and heard many stories of them. They were just people, often all too human, and I never approached them as I let them live their lives. When Alison’s sister said that she wanted to see a celebrity, I first took her to where I thought the odds were good: Century Plaza, next to Beverly Hills. I sometimes worked out of our Century Plaza office, and in those innocent days I parked in a Beverly Hills neighborhood for free and walked to the office. You couldn’t walk around there for long without seeing a celebrity.

So we walked into the plaza, looked around for a minute, didn’t see any celebrities, and then left to return to my car. As we walked away, on an empty sidewalk, coming toward us was Rob Reiner, with Elizabeth McGovern on his arm. As we passed them, she made eye contact with me, maybe cautiously waiting for a celebrity reaction, but we just kept going. After we passed them, I said to Alison’s sister: “There, you got your celebrity sighting.” She had no idea what I meant, as she did not even notice that the couple we had just passed were celebrities. So I turned us around, followed them into the plaza and passed them, and soon turned around to pass by them again. Then Alison’s sister got her celebrity sighting.

That happened when Reiner and McGovern were at the peak of their careers. She is three years younger than me. They had a standard Hollywood romance that lasted only a few years. I was a movie junkie, and I ran into celebrities at the movies in Westwood regularly. When Spinal Tap came out, I was shocked as I watched it that “Meathead” Rob Reiner was its director. It was his debut directorial effort, which remains a classic today. That began a run that few directors ever had, of hit after hit, several of which became American classics. It was fun to encounter him, and I had seen McGovern in a few movies by that time. In that final Downton Abbey movie, McGovern became the family matriarch, with the death of Maggie Smith’s character. Seeing her took me back, which was why I spent time yesterday thinking of my encounter with Reiner and McGovern, to then hear in the evening that Reiner and his wife had been murdered, likely by their drug addict son. I have had many such “coincidences” in my life, and I don’t know what they mean other than maybe that we are all connected.

RIP, Mr. Reiner.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My fifteenth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is about what Noam called “understanding the power system,” and this chapter is titled:

“How Mythologies are Manufactured”

I first heard about censorship of Orwell’s Animal Farm through Noam, and Noam began the chapter with it. Animal Farm was a satire of the Soviet system, and Orwell had a difficult time finding a publisher during World War II, as it made fun of the UK’s ally of the moment. In the preface, Orwell discussed censorship in the West, which was generally not performed by the government but by private interests. As if to prove Orwell right, the publisher suppressed that preface, which was only discovered many years later and still has never been restored to its rightful place. Noam got a lesson in private censorship when the publisher put its own subsidiary out of business to prevent the publication of Noam and Ed Herman’s first joint book.

Noam wrote: “The press can be free in the sense that the government does not interfere with it. But if those who own the press choose not to elevate certain viewpoints, those viewpoints stand little chance of reaching the public.”

Noam wrote that the media will “reliably reflect the assumptions and viewpoints of U.S. elites.” Ed said the same thing. Noam and Ed also wrote that most of those who work for media organizations internalize those perspectives and are not even aware that they have been brainwashed.

Noam wrote that a key assumption was that the USA deserves to dominate the world. Almost nobody in the public eye even questions that assumption, in government or the media. Noam wrote: “Even when there are debates over the wisdom of U.S. usage of force, rarely is any question raised of whether the U.S. has the right to use force.” Noam then discussed the invasion of Iraq and how no media figures challenged the American invasion on legal and ethical grounds, only focusing their criticisms on how successful it was. This reflects a longstanding issue of Noam’s, on how aggressors never commit crimes in their own eyes, only mistakes. Noam began his book with it. Ed wrote about it in 1970, and Noam and Ed wrote about it in 1979, about the American invasion of Vietnam, which the mainstream media has never called an invasion. Even the Nazis did it, as crimes were called mistakes.

Noam wrote at length on that phenomenon, as the goals are assumed (domination) and the only “debate” is whether the tactics achieve them. The hawks and doves are united on the goal of domination and never even think to question it. Noam gave examples of Nicaragua and Afghanistan, and finished the section with:

“Countries suffering from the long-term effects of our ‘interventions,’ from Haiti to Laos, are covered superficially or not at all. The ‘unpeople’ of the world might as well not exist.”

Noam’s next section was titled, “Terrorism: Anatomy of a propaganda concept.” Noam and Ed discussed the USA’s peculiar notion of “terror” in their first joint effort. Noam began the chapter by recounting a famous story of when Alexander the Great asked a pirate what justified his actions, and the pirate noted that Alexander did the same thing, but on a vast scale. Noam concluded, “Identical behavior can get one labeled a pirate or a great emperor.”

Noam quoted the Department of Defense’s definition of “terrorism” but noted how it perfectly described what Bush the Second, Kissinger, and Obama did. Noam discussed how the official definitions are ignored in American discourse because they applied to all presidents. Ed wrote books on this subject. Noam wrote:

“Even a cursory examination of how the word ‘terrorism’ is actually used in the United States reveals, therefore, that there is an implicit premise: terrorism is, by definition, something done to us or our allies. It cannot be done by us or our allies. The idea of terrorism by the U.S. is doctrinally inadmissible, regardless of the facts.”

Noam discussed how the USA has designated Cuba as a sponsor of terrorism, but Cubans have suffered from American terror for generations. The USA actually harbors people who stand accused of terrorism in Cuba and Haiti, and refuses to extradite them for trial. Noam noted that the USA accused Putin of aerial terrorism but described its own aerial terrorism in Iraq as “shock and awe.”

Noam ran through examples of this double standard and concluded that “terrorism” has “no place in honest discourse.” That is similar to how “genocide” has become a political football, and the double standards can become so surreal that Ed began using “chutzpah” to describe it. Noam quoted professor Michael Stohl, who wrote: “We must recognize that by convention” and violence inflicted by ‘great powers’ is “normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism,” even though it often means “the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes if it were not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic.” Noam noted that even “great powers” only applies to “favored states,” which Russia isn’t.

The next section was devoted to other kinds of government and media hypocrisy, such as the “hierarchy of victims” that the media uses. This goes back to Ed and Noam’s worthy and unworthy victims idea, and Noam mentions Ed’s famous study in Manufacturing Consent in which a killing of a “worthy” priest (victim of an enemy) received more than 100 times as much coverage as an “unworthy” one (victim of an ally or us).

Noam discussed the findings of FAIR, which has been studying the media’s double standards of reporting for 40 years, and a couple of examples should suffice. The media often reports on international violence as being inflicted by “Iranian weapons,” but never notes violence inflicted by “American weapons,” and there was more media coverage of a holiday Peloton ad than the new Pentagon budget.

Noam mentioned the media frenzy that accompanied coverage of a Chinese spy balloon, but in order to rationally assess the Chinese “aggression,” it would need to be compared to American spying. Noam discussed a 2010 incident in which the Chinese government discovered high-level infiltration by the CIA of China’s security and intelligence organizations. The Chinese reacted in alarm and began becoming more aggressive. Van Jackson said, “Nobody in American foreign policy talks about the fact that China stumbled onto the CIA having infiltrated them at the highest levels. Talk about surveillance, we’re worried about a balloon!”

Noam once again noted the selectivity, with endless puff pieces about Ukrainian soldiers (many of whom are neo-Nazis), while never giving such sympathetic coverage to Kurds in Turkey or Yemenis being attacked by Saudi Arabia, and Noam always marked the disparity in reporting on Israeli-Palestinian violence, as Ed did. Noam concluded the section with: “The value of a life is not determined objectively (with all persons treated equally) but in accordance with the priorities of U.S. foreign policy.”

Noam’s next section was titled, “The language of propaganda.” Noam cited Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell wrote that “defense of the indefensible” was accomplished through euphemism. Bombing villages becomes “pacification,” and ejecting people from their homes and land becomes “transfer of population.” Noam stated that a glossary of propaganda was needed, to translate Orwellisms into plain English. Ed devoted most of his Beyond Hypocrisy to that, and Noam provided examples: cluster bombs become “lethal aid,” imprisoned becomes “detained,” and torture becomes “enhanced interrogation.” Russian businessmen are called “oligarchs,” but the far richer and more influential American oligarchs are simply called “businessmen.” Noam noted that when the West bombs nations such as Serbia, the media calls the perpetrators the “international community,” even though nearly the entire world opposes the bombings.

Noam’s next section began with a lengthy quote of Ed, who noted that the extreme bias to serve elite interests is not a conscious conspiracy, but is

“built into the structure of the system, and flows naturally and easily from the assorted ownership, sponsor, governmental and other interest group pressures that set limits within which media personnel can operate, and from the nature of the sources on which the media depend for their steady flow of news.”

Noam then made one of his most trenchant observations, which I have seen regularly over the years:

“Journalists do not conspire to censor themselves. They are usually perfectly sincere and committed to their work. They may believe what they say, but if they held different beliefs, they wouldn’t be in their positions.”

Noam provided the example of Phil Donahue, whose show had a big audience (the biggest on MSNBC), but it was canceled when he challenged the lies that girded the coming invasion of Iraq. When Chris Hedges issued “warnings in public forums about the chaos and bloodbath” that Iraq’s invasion would lead to, he was formally reprimanded by his employer, the New York Times, which regularly promoted lies to support the Bush administration’s lies (such as Judith Miller’s work).

Noam quoted journalists who admitted that they were Bush administration lapdogs in the run-up to the invasion. Noam noted that there was some self-reflection in the wake of the invasion, during which journalists had relied on anonymous sources, which often turned out to be purveyors of outrageous disinformation, but a decade after the Iraq invasion, anonymous sources still abounded, and Noam finished the section with

“Cable news guests often have direct ties to the military-industrial complex. Opinions remain confined within a narrow range; the same mechanisms that silenced Phil Donahue in 2003 continue to operate.”

Noam began his last section with one of his most famous quotes (Noam has many famous quotes): “Propaganda is to a democracy as the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” Noam quoted David Hume on how all rulers need public opinion on their side, which requires thought control. In totalitarian states, dissidents are harshly and even fatally oppressed, but in freer societies, “thought control operates differently.”

Noam discussed how the American press helps the government create new enemies and recasts American crimes as “self-defense,” as our crimes are swiftly consigned to the “memory hole.” Noam quoted Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, to wit:

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. [… It is as if the crimes] never happened, even while it was happening. [The USA] has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.”

Noam’s book is littered with many of his famous quotes. Another is: “We have so much information and yet we know so little.” He said that the rise of the Internet has not helped the public much in understanding what is happening in the world, because the Internet is under corporate control. Noam ended the chapter with:

“A genuinely democratic media, operated in the interest of the public, could change this, and there are proposals for how one could be built. Until then, consumers of media should remember that their lack of knowledge is an important part of what allows the powerful to maintain their position.”

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

My sixteenth post on what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book is about his final chapter, which is titled:

“Hegemony or Survival?”

While reading the book, I was aware that quite a few of his statements were titles for his books, and Hegemony or Survival was published in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. One of Noam’s themes is that for the people who run the USA, they rank hegemony over survival. In my interview last summer with Green Party members, I said that the people who run the world would rather blow up the planet than give up their power. My observation is at the global level, while Noam’s is at the national level. I came to my understanding via a different path than Noam did, but they are the same observations.

Noam began the chapter by noting the USA’s extraordinarily blood-soaked past, as the USA has been at war for more than 90% of its history. Noam noted that the Founding Fathers regarded the USA as an “infant empire,” and my American Empire essay was specifically intended to show how the American Empire grew. If I find the time and the stomach for it, I will update that essay, but my other writings are adequate for now on the past 20 years of imperial behavior.

One of Noam’s influences was Bertrand Russel, whom Noam quoted: “Much that passes as idealism … is disguised love of power.” Noam wrote:

“Indeed, U.S. history can be traced along two parallel tracks: the track of rhetoric, appearing in newspapers and presidential speeches, and the track of fact, as experienced in the lives of the victims. In every age the press is full of pious statements. Meanwhile, beyond the annihilation of the indigenous population, the U.S. conquered the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Philippines, seized half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, and (since World War II) extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.”

Noam discussed that in the USA’s declassified high-level planning documents, the planners were frank that the purpose of American postwar foreign policy was to enslave the world, especially new nations that were emerging from their colonial past. The resources and labor of those nations were intended to be used by American capital, not to benefit the domestic populations of those nations. To that end, the USA generally overthrew the nascent democratic governments and installed and supported military dictatorships that often slaughtered their domestic populations on behalf of the USA.

Some kinds of weak democracies were allowed, as long as they were subservient to American interests. My summary of Noam’s book so far I hope has made that clear. Noam has said that William Blum’s Killing Hope is the best single volume, by far, on American imperial behavior since World War II, and I once had the pleasure of corresponding with Blum. The litany chronicled in Killing Hope is a grim one. Noam discussed the many American atrocities in World War II, but only the losing Germans and Japanese faced war crimes trials.

Noam noted that in spite of all the evidence, the “myth of American idealism has persisted.” The point of Noam’s book is that that myth threatens humanity’s future. Noam wrote:

“Sometimes, foreign policy is portrayed as vacillating between ‘Wilsonian idealism’ and ‘Kissingerian realism.’ In practice, the distinctions are mostly rhetorical. Every great power toys with the rhetoric of benign intentions and sacrificing to help the world. Our belief in our own exceptionalism is the most unexceptional thing about us.”

Noam noted how there was almost no foreign-policy difference between Trump and Biden, and Trump’s former secretary of state said, “continuity is the norm, even between presidents as different as Trump and Biden.”

The next section of Noam’s chapter was titled “on good intentions,” and Noam wrote: “No ruling powers have ever thought of themselves as evil. They believe they are good, and it is their opponents who are evil.” Noam argued that the imperial aspects of the American system are obvious for those with eyes to see, but that the reality is “suppressed, ignored, or denied.” Noam wrote that it is all predictable, as it is how nations and empires have always acted and is reflected in the dominant ideologies and institutions.

Noam argued that to profess good intentions is irrelevant. The behaviors of other nations are not judged on their intentions, but the results of their actions. This is like Jesus’s “by their fruits you will know them.” Noam wrote: “We recognize that even the worst monsters may have convinced themselves that they are engaged in something morally worthy.” Noam noted John C. Calhoun’s flowery defense of slavery as the best thing that ever happened to the slaves, and Noam remarked: “Do we care whether Calhoun was sincere in believing this? Does it mitigate anything if he was?”

Noam emphasized that deeds, not intentions, should be our guide, and wrote:

“If Fidel Castro had organized or participated in multiple assassination attempts against the United States president [ahem], or tried to destroy livestock and crops, he would be the very symbol of barbarian evil. Yet we’ve claimed the right to do just that to Cuba. We also took it for granted that we had the right to put missiles in the Soviets’ backyard. But when they tried to exercise the same right, we nearly started World War III. The inconsistencies are barely noticed.”

Noam wrote that examining the true nature of one’s society is rarely a pleasant task, but we “must engage in the exercise, because the danger of maintaining our delusions continues to grow.”

Noam noted how after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA was increasingly seen globally as the “rogue superpower.” But Americans are brainwashed into thinking that our international aggression is defensive. Noam noted that the USA spends more on its military than the next ten nations combined, and stated that “defense” should always be seen as “offense” regarding the American military. Noam continually remarked that the USA is doing what all empires did, and that the danger was seeing ourselves as different. Noam noted how the USA is trying to militarize space, in defiance of a 1967 treaty, and is developing AI-driven robotic killers (like something out of The Terminator).

Noam then ran through a litany of what the USA could do, if it lived up to its ideals: follow the UN charter, accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and World Court, sign and implement the Kyoto global warming treaty, stop vetoing Security Council resolutions, adhere to the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, and prioritize humanitarian spending over military spending. Noam ended that section with:

“For anyone who believes in democracy, all of these are mild and conservative suggestions. They are mostly supported by the overwhelming majority of the population. They just happen to be radically different from existing public policy.”

Noam’s next section was titled: “The responsibility to act.” He began with:

“Once we see the consequences of the attempt to impose U.S. hegemony through force, we have an obligation to oppose it. It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. It is cheap and easy to deplore the crimes of others, while dismissing or justifying our own. An honest person will choose a different course.”

Noam noted that with the USA’s unprecedented wealth and freedom, its citizens should at least have some “understanding of how power works and ask basic moral questions.” Noam wrote that even average people, the unheroic of us, can still contribute to turning the tide, and noted that mass movements relied on such people. Noam wrote that such courage exists, and “Wherever there is injustice, there are also people trying to stop it.”

Noam wrote of attempts to organize labor in the 19^th century, which were ultimately unsuccessful but their work influences us today, and the often-vilified labor movements in the United States were instrumental in turning the United States from fascism (sort of) to a nation that has Social Security and collective bargaining.

Noam then discussed the 1960s and its activism, which “Made the United States a better country, in ways that are permanent. Today, there is greater sensitivity to racist and sexist repression, more concern for the environment, more respect for other cultures and for human rights.”

Noam noted that there have been impressive efforts to improve understanding of American history and “present-day injustices.” Noam then cited his pal Howard Zinn’s work. But there is pushback from the cultural managers, to help “ensure that young people are only exposed to propagandistic narratives that uncritically celebrate and venerate the United States.”

Noam noted how rising protest in the USA helped end the Vietnam War, and how the Reagan administration had to operate secretly in Central America because there was little public support for such imperial adventures. Noam wrote that the invasion of Iraq spurred history’s greatest antiwar protest. It didn’t stop the war, but there was less tolerance of atrocities, which Noam attributed to the “civilizing effects” of the 1960s.

Noam noted the heroic actions of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden, and the heavy price that they paid. Noam wrote how Mordechai Vanunu spent nearly two decades in prison (and most of it in solitary confinement) for exposing Israel’s nuclear-weapons program. Noam mentioned Rachel Corrie’s death (a close friend knew her, and she was quite unassuming).

Noam said that such heroic acts, which were regularly fatal, “give a false impression of how movements succeed.” He quoted Zinn, who wrote: “what matters are the countless small deeds of unknown people, who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history.”

Noam then listed some inspiring acts performed by Palestinians, Kurds, and Zapatistas. Noam noted how environmental activists in the 1960s spurred a Republican administration (Nixon’s) into addressing pollution. Noam wrote that current activism had forced the Biden administration into more progressive stances, which was also how the New Deal came about.

Noam noted that escaping the propaganda system was not difficult, with “a little honest effort,” and how “The first step toward making change is to recognize the forms of oppression that exist.” Noam called for “revolutionary pacifism,” which recognizes the multifaceted evil in the world and refuses to be complicit with it. Noam noted that developing the requisite awareness is something that an average 15-year-old can do. Noam wrote: “We have to do a little work. We have to do some reading. But there is nothing too deep to grasp.” I agree. It isn’t rocket science.

Noam began his book’s final section with: “We are at a unique moment in history. Decisions that must be made right now will determine the course of our species’ future (If there is to be one). We have a narrow window to implement the measures necessary to avoid a cataclysmic destruction of the environment. Unfortunately, the ‘masters of mankind’ in the world’s most powerful state have been hard at work to close that window and to ensure that their exorbitant short-term profit and power will remain untouched as the world goes up in flames.”

Noam also discussed the nuclear “Doomsday” that humanity is on the brink of. Noam noted that in a recent poll of issues to rank in urgency, nuclear war did not even make the list and climate change was ranked almost last (only 13% of respondents named it a top priority).

Noam wrote that an extraterrestrial observer would conclude that we are a species bent on suicide, and that nearly ten thousand years of civilization may soon come to an “inglorious end,” and that “higher intelligence” may be an evolutionary dead-end. Noam wrote:


“We are a new species, having been around for a mere second in the evolutionary time scale, and so far we seem intent on proving the theory that intelligence leads to self-destruction.

“We are now engaged in an experiment to determine whether our humanity’s moral capacity reaches far enough to control our technical capacity to destroy ourselves. Unfortunately, the prospects look grim, and the observer might well conclude that the gap between moral capacity and technological capacities is too immense to prevent species suicide.

“But the observer could be mistaken. It is up to us to prove this judgment wrong.”


Noam noted the uncertainty of whether such efforts would succeed, but that inaction would guarantee catastrophe. He ended the book with: “Given the urgency of the crises we face, there is no time to lose.”

I have a lot to say about Noam and his likely final book, and that comes next.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

Last year I read Chomsky and Me, by Noam Chomsky’s longtime assistant at MIT, Bev Boisseau Stohl. This will be my reflections on the book (here is another). She began working for Noam in 1993 at MIT, around when Noam and I ended our brief correspondence. Here is an interview with Stohl. Noam turned 97 on December 7, and here is a birthday tribute to him.

Stohl was on the administrative staff at MIT and was working toward a master’s degree in psychology. She was trying to get a different position but lost it, and Noam’s previous assistant quit after less than a year, burned out. Noam was in a small suite of offices with other professors who were very protective toward him. The other professors went through the process of finding Stohl, and what sealed it was that she knew nothing about Manufacturing Consent. They did not want a Chomsky groupie working there.

Stohl could immediately tell that Noam’s mind was often in distant realms, but when he returned, he was affable and even playful. Her job was managing the bewildering flow of people and correspondence that was directed at Noam. Noam was arguably the world’s most approachable person, who has been described as directly talking to more Americans than anybody in history. She soon found a “nutcase” file, with all manner of bizarre correspondence in it. Noam’s wife Carol was very protective of him, and when a New Yorker journalist interviewed them at home and then wrote an attack piece (“coincidentally” just as the USA invaded Iraq), Carol never let another journalist into their home. Noam’s time was booked for years in advance. One of my friends visited Noam in his office (people just had to ask). He asked Noam if any national rulers ever really cared for the welfare of those that they ruled, and Noam replied with maybe the ruler of Andorra, for a few weeks, two centuries ago.

Stohl was drawn into Noam’s world, made friends with people such as Howard Zinn, and began to understand what she had gotten involved in. She eventually became part of the family. Noam had to have police protection at times, and Stohl began to understand why. Very much like Einstein, Noam was famously inept around technology. Through his endless typing (estimated at 15,000 words a week to public inquiries), Noam had rubbed off all of the labels of his keyboard’s keys. He lost his voice for days each month from all of the speaking that he did. As my mentor did, Noam could go to sleep with a problem in his mind and wake up with the answer.

When Noam was taken advantage of for home repairs, Stohl rescued him. She eventually helped at his Cape Cod summer cottage and on his speaking tours. She was amazed at Noam’s patience with people that she thought did not deserve it, especially angry, attacking ones. The students were always Noam’s highest priority, but he was a demanding professor.

Interestingly, from books that Noam was sent that she read, Stohl began to understand that Western medicine was a racket, especially when her mother was treated for cancer. After many years, she got the idea to write a book about her days with Noam. As she began writing, Noam read some of it and encouraged her to continue.

Finally, at nearly 90 years old, Noam packed it in at MIT and moved to sunny Arizona (where he was quickly made a professor). Stohl visited Noam in 2022, and she finally got an answer from Noam on why he replied to everybody (as I can vouch for). Noam responded with “Why? I don’t know. Arguably crazy. Just a feeling that people have a right to be taken seriously.” He likely lived that responsiveness more than any other person did in world history.

The Noam of Stohl’s book was wonderfully human. It became evident how much Stohl loved and respected Noam, which was the greatest praise that she could have given.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

Noam’s historical stature

Noam Chomsky is the only living human who can credibly be compared to Albert Einstein. Einstein is the iconic scientist who also used his towering scientific stature to promote peace. Noam is no scientific slouch and is sometimes called the “Einstein of linguistics” who influenced several scientific fields, including psychology and computer science. But Noam will be best remembered for his political work, especially by the world’s public. In Cold War Poland, many thought that there were two Noam Chomskys: the linguist and the political activist. Noam is perhaps the most-cited living author. There may never be another like him, and his passing will mark the end of an era. He will be remembered as the USA’s greatest dissident intellectual, and the debate will be how close to the top he ranks in world history.

Noam’s anarchist ideals, formed as a child, were wedded with his critiques of his nation’s foreign policy, which he described as only performing his duty as an American. Much of Noam’s political work is disarmingly simple, as he points out the obvious double standards of treatment of world events, depending on who the victims and beneficiaries were. In my summary of Noam’s likely final book, I hope that the simplicity of what I consider Noam’s best political work is clear. His primary thesis is that the USA, which is history’s richest and most powerful nation, is really an empire that acts as all empires have as it exploits the conquered on behalf of the conquerors, which the imperial class profits from.

Noam’s political work cuts through the propaganda with a childlike simplicity founded on the simple philosophical proposition that we are all the most responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions. I have watched all manner of imperial hack assail Noam since the 1990s, and they often could not seem to string two rational thoughts together as they defended the Empire. Ed Herman’s libelous Wikipedia bio clearly presents the dynamics. The movie Manufacturing Consent was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to its time, and it has never aired on American network television to my knowledge (which Noam predicted). That kind of says it all about the American propaganda system.

When Noam has been asked about Isaac Newton and his forays into alchemy, for instance, Noam replied that we are all products of our times and nobody sees everything clearly, although the scientific process seems to help us get closer to that ideal. The best scientists were modest about their work, as they freely admitted how little they knew. Even though Big Bang cosmology and E=MC² portray the entire universe as nothing but energy, the best scientists admit that they don’t know what energy is or where it came from. It is even suspected in orthodox circles that dark matter, dark energy, and the cosmological constant are fudges to preserve Einstein’s relativity equations. Newtonian physics was superseded by relativity, but that did not make Newton any less of a major figure in science, even arguably more significant than Einstein. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Einstein expected that his theories would be superseded by new theories but that the best parts of his would survive in the new theories. Noam stated something similar about the ephemeral nature of his scientific work.

Noam’s approachability and the Epstein affair

I am one of many thousands of people who were astounded at Noam’s replies to us. That alone was saintly behavior. On Friday, with the latest release of the Epstein files, a picture was published of Noam with Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s airplane. The Nation has weighed in on the issue, and Matt Taibbi criticized the Nation for its lack of dealing with the Epstein evidence. I lived only a few miles from Epstein’s first lair when it was in operation, and I heard about some of the sexual escapades at the time. I don’t know what Taibbi is trying to do with the series of articles that he is in the midst of, but Epstein was certainly involved in the spook world, and we do not have to connect very many dots to suspect that he was part of Israeli intelligence operations, quite possibly for blackmail purposes.

But Noam was so approachable that virtually anybody (1, 2) could get his time. Cultivating a relationship with Noam surely had its benefits for Epstein. It reminds me of how the Rockefeller Empire courted Mark Twain (1). I largely discovered Twain’s marginalized anti-imperial efforts through Noam’s work. As far as American critics of the Empire go, Noam and Twain sit in the first row, maybe by themselves. There are hundreds of clips and interviews of Noam on YouTube and maybe even more. I have watched many of them over the years.

Noam on energy and the Middle East

Bucky Fuller said if oil was priced at the benefit that humanity got from it, it would cost $1 million a barrel. I made a rough calculation to support his claim. Noam has long called Middle East oil “history’s greatest material prize,” similar to how the State Department called it during World War II. That explains everything about the West’s involvement in the Middle East, and everything else is a sideshow. But a decade after the invasion of Iraq, the American media never seemed to mention oil as a motive. This is nothing new. I recently witnessed the same punditry explain away oil as having anything to do with Trump’s bellicose stance toward Venezuela, which “coincidentally” has the world’s largest oil reserves. As Noam would have said, that pundit probably believed what he wrote.

Noam’s critics

From the very beginning of my media studies in 1990, even though I had witnessed the media’s lying for years by that time (1, 2, 3, 4), what Noam and Ed Herman wrote about flew in the face of mainstream “understanding,” and I sought critical perspectives of their work. Noam’s critics lined up to take a swing at him, and the lies and irrationality were striking. Ed Herman’s libelous Wikipedia bio is another example of this phenomenon at work. Noam and I do not see eye to eye on many topics, which I will discuss in coming posts, but it will be about Noam’s limitations, human as he is, and about the Left’s limitations in general. It will be done in a spirit of love, however. The Left’s members could have been the most formidable allies of free-energy efforts, but they have been trapped by their ideological positions, which has been a source of sadness over the years. I have not given up on them, however, at least not all of them.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

I was raised to be a scientist from the time I could walk. I began to diverge from orthodoxy at age 12 when my family changed its diet to whole food to save my father’s health, which resulted in a health miracle that “impossibly” reversed the hardening of his arteries. A decade later, the book that inspired that change was banned in the USA for being contrary to medical dogma. Medical dogma was wrong, that book was right, and its advice forms the first line of defense for orthodox medicine today. I am surprised that I lived to see that.

But I continued along the track of becoming a scientist until a fateful moment when I was 16 and had it spectacularly demonstrated to me that materialist models of consciousness are false. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was ruined as a mainstream scientist before my career even began. I would never be able to drink the Kool-Aid of materialism, which is the religion of our industrial societies and especially among mainstream scientists. Five years after that event, a future colleague, Brian O’Leary, had his scientific career ruined by the same kind of experience that I had.

The same year that I had that spectacular paranormal experience, I got my first dreams of changing the energy industry when my first professional mentor’s engine began making the news. It was hailed as the world’s best for powering an automobile. I had no idea what I was in for. Brian was sipping materialist sherry in Princeton’s physics department before his fateful paranormal experience. Near his life’s end, Brian half-joked that if he had known what he was in for, he would have kept sipping his sherry. This interview of him is worth reading (or watching).

Twice in my lifetime I made desperate prayers for guidance, and the answers (1, 2) radically changed my life’s direction in ways that even I sometimes have a hard time believing. That second prayer immediately led me on an odyssey that saw my life shattered over the next several years, but that journey awakened me and taught me my life’s most important lessons.

My energy journey began with the world’s best engine, and I got involved with the world’s best heating system. When we tried to marry them to produce so-called free energy, we got the boom lowered on us, but not until after my partner, Dennis Lee, turned down a $1 billion offer from the CIA to fold our operation. A few months after I became a partner in the business, we got what I now know was the initial friendly buyout offer, for $10 million. A couple of months after I met Dennis, I heard of free energy for the first time. Four years later, after my life had been ruined, I heard of a free-energy inventor with the goods and his travails. A few years after that, a close friend was kidnapped by a dissident faction of the global elite, who demonstrated free-energy, antigravity, and other exotic technologies to him.

Dennis was raised as a migrant farm worker who left home at age 13 and is a right-wing Christian who believes that the Bible is the word of God, but his first religion was American nationalism. Consequently, after I became his partner and we began attracting global attention, the first alternative political literature that I was exposed to was conspiracist, which focused on global elites and their plans for world domination.

To be introduced to such literature while we were being taken out by the global elites was one of the many strange “coincidences” of my life. I watched media attacks on our companies from nearly the day that I met Dennis (1, 2, 3, 4), and my life’s worst year was the year we were wiped out in my home town. Dennis was arrested with a $1 million bail mere weeks after he refused the CIA’s $1 billion offer, and the turning point of my life was several months later, when the prosecution tried to intimidate me as I testified.

In those days, I discovered that the county that I was raised in has a reputation for being among the most corrupt in the USA, but I was never told that while growing up. When it looked like Dennis would not live to see this side of the bars again, I contacted a former policeman, Gary Wean, who was fighting the same corrupt officials that we were. Gary’s advice was critical to my springing Dennis from jail a few months later.

Gary wrote a book about his adventures, and one chapter was devoted to what he knew about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Gary was close friends with war hero Audie Murphy, and three weeks after the JFK assassination, they heard from a frightened Senator John Tower about what had really happened. According to Tower, Lee Harvey Oswald was a military-intelligence operative who was recruited by E. Howard Hunt into a CIA operation that was intended to stage a fake assassination attempt on JFK and frame Fidel Castro for it, to justify an invasion of Cuba. But the operation was interposed and backfired. Ten years after Gary published his book, Operation Northwoods was declassified. Northwoods was the Pentagon’s plan to frame Castro for terrorist incidents, to justify an invasion of Cuba. Northwoods was first proposed in 1962, but JFK shot it down. It was surreptitiously revived in early 1963, at the same time that Hunt hatched his plan. JFK was unaware of both operations, for some of the many times that he was out of the loop, and that would be the last time. In my opinion, Gary’s reporting should have become the foundation of all subsequent JFK-assassination theorizing after Northwoods was declassified.

Earlier this year, in the wake of more declassified documents, the mainstream discussion of the JFK assassination has become almost exactly what Gary reported: Oswald, Hunt, the CIA, and Cuba. The only thing missing from the mainstream discussion is the interposed operation, but I am aware of a coming book from a high-profile author that will make the case that Oswald was involved in a false-flag operation, which Hunt’s plan and Northwoods were. The leading voices even discuss Northwoods and its relation to the JFK hit, and Gary’s testimony is still almost completely ignored. It is amazing that they can do that, but it only confirms my journey’s primary lesson.

When Dennis was in jail, I first heard of Noam Chomsky from a roommate. A year later, I heard about a new magazine that analyzed the media’s failings, and I was so ready for its message. Later that year, after I had moved away from California with my life shattered, I subscribed to that magazine. I subscribed for several years until it went out of business, but my first issue’s first page is the one I remember best, as it showed that the New York Times simply made it up as it went along when “translating” Arabic script for its readers, to portray all Arabs as religious fanatics. It was one of the “Wow!” moments of my journey. It turned out that Noam wrote an article a month for that magazine and Ed Herman was its editor. Thus began my media studies, and 27 years later I became Ed’s first and so far only biographer.

As ready as I was to study how the media lies, what Ed and Noam had to say was so alien to how I was raised that it took me about two years to truly understand it. At the end of that two-year study period, a movie came out about Noam’s life. My wife and I watched it at Ohio State University, and mere days later I was driven from my sleep to write a 17-page letter to Noam. I outlined my odyssey and ended by asking why the “left” did not cover the free-energy issue. Noam replied days later, and he stated that it might be because there were not enough resources to investigate it. We exchanged several more letters over the next several months, and I even sent him my first book before he politely brushed me off. That he answered at all was amazing. Thus began my relationship with the American “left.”

I eventually interacted with the left, right, center, the federal government, and other officialdom. None of them were fit for helping bring free-energy technology to the world, and it took me many years to understand why. That is why I am trying to roll my own.

I’ll begin with Noam, but this series will take in the entire spectrum of American politics that I encountered. Bucky Fuller’s work helped me understand what I was seeing. The bottom line is that free-energy technology will be the foundation of a world based on abundance, and all politics is based on slicing up the loaf of scarcity. Abundance is simply beyond nearly all people’s horizons of awareness. I witnessed the myriad ways that people mired in scarcity cannot comprehend abundance, and even the idea frightens them.

This series will take some time.

Best,

Wade

From Substack:

Ed Herman invented what became the Propaganda Model, which grew from his studies of corporations. In Noam Chomsky’s likely last book, he quoted Ed’s statement that the media’s propaganda flows naturally from the system’s structure of ownership and the impact of other elite interests. Noam continually remarked that nearly all journalists believe what they write. Ed’s Propaganda Model is known as a structural model, kind of like looking at the components of a car and how they work together, to describe why a car works as it does. An elite-dominated media will naturally serve elite interests, not the public’s need for accurate information, especially for information that can threaten elite interests. The Propaganda Model is essentially a conflict-of-interest model, which Noam said was just a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are subjected to.

Noam was a linguist, Ed was an economist, and they used the scientific method in their political work, Ed more so than Noam. Noam was known to be kind of skeptical of Darwinian evolution for explaining the development of language. The materialistic models of consciousness have it arising in mysterious fashion from the biochemical reactions of nervous systems. Near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences challenge that idea, as well as a mountain of psychic evidence that mainstream science is poor at dealing with. The structural model of how we came into being is that it was largely one big accident of chemistry: nobody planned or designed anything in the march of evolution – it just kind of happened. I also call it the theory of unconsciousness. But far from all scientists think that way. When Barbara McClintock accepted her Nobel Prize, she presented the challenge to discover how organisms direct their own evolution, because she witnessed it in her research.

Structural theorists generally dismiss the need for conspiratorial planning to serve elite interests and argue that events unfold more unconsciously than that. From the beginning of my relationship with Dennis Lee, our companies were targeted by conspiratorial behaviors, which likely also reached to the global elite from the beginning. But it took me many years to understand that.

Last month I did a video on organized suppression and how it works, and I have long written that the organized suppression that we encountered was at least 90% structural. I have called these situations 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity. The left generally denies the 1% conspiracy and the right generally denies the 99% complicity. It took many years of witnessing that mayhem before I began to understand the schism between those two camps. They both hold opposing and lopsided perspectives, but they are united in thinking like victims.

I eventually learned that the left has an ideological objection to the idea of global elites. Noam is great at citing declassified documents, but global elites do not leave a paper trail, just as the Mafia doesn’t. Almost nobody on Earth even knows who the global elite are, although a couple of religious organizations have been named. People will not encounter the global elite and their minions unless they do something that poses a threat, such as pursue free energy at a high level. The global elite know very well that if the public had access to free-energy technology, it would be Game Over for all elites. Those elite fears are not so different from the general fear that people often have in reacting to the idea of free energy: they see their place in the world going away.

Ed never denied that there could be elite intervention in the media. He just said that it was rarely needed, as the system chugged along on its own.

I will later deal with conspiracism a bit more, and the purpose of this post was to help explain why the left generally does not see conscious manipulation of the system as important. In their view, the system’s structure, more than covert manipulation, explains the outcomes of events. That is true, but there is definitely important covert manipulation that the left just can’t wrap its head around. Noam himself included, apparently.

Best,

Wade