It's ludicrous to think that all Evil has somehow accumulated in CIA and US Govt. It's not. Evil is plenty and it's everywhere. It's also in KGB, Russian Oligarchs, Kremlin, Siloviki and Nomenklatura. It's also in CCP & Chinese oligarchs. It's also in 3rd world nations with Nuclear weapons like Indian Fascists Modi, BJP, RSS & Hindutva organizations (many of them are also active in US). There's also Evil in Iranian Mullahs and Islamofascist regimes like Erdogan. It's also in Streets of London, British plutocrats & Royal family.
This is a nonlinear uncertain world and its continuously changing. US was bad guy for dropping Atomic bomb on Japan 78 years ago. But US also helped rebuilding of Japan and US-Japan are now the closest of allies. Of course this doesn't absolve US of it's mistake but both countries have turned on that chapter of book towards a future of partnership.
What about Russia? Russia allied with Hitler (Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) to divide & conquer Europe. Both Stalin & Hitler were devious scoundrels planning to stab each other in back at right opportunity (read Icebreaker). In run up to WW2, Stalin envisioned Hitler fighting with British & French, all forces decimating each other and Russians will come to pick up the pieces. Russia & Germany started the WW2 but Hitler was first to stab Stalin seizing the right opportunity.
US did NOT start WW2. When Hitler got too powerful and Stalin realized his mistake, US came to rescue with lend lease plan that provided industrial backing to Soviet war effort. Khrushchev admitted that Russia wouldn't have survived without US assistance. Dropping A-bomb on Japan was however a huge mistake. But US then help build Europe & Japan (Marshall plan).
But on present situation. Russia is the one threatening world with Nuclear war, wiping out Ukraine & Europe. US has NOT made any such threats. US posed no threat to Russia. Ukraine posed no threat to Russia. Prigozhin admitted that before he tried his coup but failed & killed by Putin. Gen Leonid Ivashov claimed the same thing even before start of Russian aggression.
Historical events offers clues to present & future but they have to be analyzed & understood with proper perspective. The perspective of people like Noam Chomsky, Jeffery Sachs, Ray McGovern etc is that they are still trapped in days of Neocon era - "US is bad. Russia is good. CIA bad." The world has changed a lot but these people didn't update their intellectual firmwares.
Thanks so much, Bandy, for this sobering look at where we are on this planet. Einstein also said something like, "we can't solve a problem with the same mindset that caused the problem in the first place." So another way of understanding why the "civilized" world has drifted toward catastrophe is that most of the people who COULD do something about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the international conditions that portend their use, are stuck in an old way of thinking. It's not enough to elect one President although who's at the top of the hierarchy makes a huge difference. The People would have to affect individual members of the Joint Chiefs, the House, the Senate, perhaps every member of the U.N.
Tragically, when scientists revealed the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change 30 or 40 years ago, not enough of the people who could have altered policies, including auto manufacturers and the oil industry, nor any but a small handful of global citizens, organized sufficiently to brainstorm real preventative solutions. Yet we all remember that when there was a competition for dominating space and JFK unleashed the research money, things happened relatively quickly. Competition where there are winners and losers always energizes certain kinds of people. A catastrophic situation where we'd all be "winners" or we'd all be "losers," tragically, doesn't galvanize the same response.
But please keep on writing and we'll keep on circulating this message. We definitely need to do some creative thinking about how to bring this issue back into the public's mind.
Dr. Lee observes that the US government uses the machiavellian methods of a totalitarian regime to silence critics of its nuclear war policies. She observes that the CIA exists in order to carry out the kinds of policies we associate with evil totalitarian regimes, inflicting death and devastation on millions of people in many countries around the world. She states that now, “Our nation is . . . being led into, largely without knowledge (and being conditioned to accept) an all-out World War.” In explaining this situation, she states that as “as a result” of our “collective suicidalilty,” “our country . . . seems to be in some kind of denial trance: we are both uninformed about what is really happening or inured to” it.
Freud said that denial is the strongest defense enabling people to retreat from reality into the comfort of fantasy. But denial is not an isolated or simple defense mechanism. It is often produced through complex psychodynamic processes employing an array of other defenses. Similarly, there is a complex relationship between, on the one hand, the aggressively nihilistic and evil US military-national security establishment that Dr. Lee describes, and on the other hand, our “collective suicidality.” The two of these are together now on course to destroy human civilization; but between them is a complex dynamic involving many entities.
It is helpful to begin with a larger perspective. As Randolph Bourne (author of the statement, “War is the health of the state”) wrote in his essay, “The State,” a nation is an organized herd with vast resources that can be repurposed for warfare, always prepared to hurl itself against other nations in a violent combat to the death. (That is why we have standing militaries.) Therefore as long as there are nation-states, humans will practice the collective suicidality of war.
Furthermore, war is intrinsically autocratic. The notion that the US Congress alone has the authority to declare war is self-deception (as is demonstrated by the fact that the alleged authority is never exercised). War against other states or peoples, declared or undeclared, is decided on in private by a handful of people, most of whom the public has never even heard of. Every military, as a matter of practical necessity, must be an absolutely hierarchical and authoritarian organization.
As Bourne also observes, when this handful of leaders declares war, the peoplehave known nothing whatever of the preparations for war, or of the geopolitical, diplomatic, or military events, conditions, considerations, or purposes associated with it. Yet they immediately become intoxicated with war hysteria, and prepare to sacrifice themselves, their families and everything else in their private and communal lives, in the interest of killing and being killed, on an industrial scale, in order to destroy the “enemy.” They do all this in the service of the “state,” which is something that doesn’t even exist. The nation and the government, in contrast, are real things that do exist. They consist of identifiable human beings engaged in identifiable actions, and they can be participated in, criticized, influenced, and changed. The “state,” which comes into being only with the onset of war, is a sacred phantasm, a narcissistic idol consisting of rhetorical ectoplasm, which is beyond principled, rational criticism, and on whose altar human lives must be sacrificed by the millions.
Who are these leaders who are always taking the US into permanent war? The term “military-industrial complex” has become entirely inadequate for describing the US national security state. This state-within-a-state, more powerful than the state it lives within, has metastasized throughout society so thoroughly that no significant part of American society remains fully civil. It has coopted industry, the academic world, the media, Congress, state governments, the police, NGOs, and more. It has created an army of psychopathic intellectual poseurs who circulate through the revolving doors of all three branches of government, industry, universities, the media, and think tanks that are funded by military contractors. They thereby build resumes that enable them to acquire prestige, influence, distinguished careers, together with very substantial monetary rewards and a place in the ruling class. Nearly all the wise talking heads with “expertise” who appear in the media to discuss war and geopolitics are or have been funded by military contractors. Being a war criminal does prevent anyone from being one of these talking heads and reaping the accompanying rewards.
Analyzing our modern American war psychosis is far more complex than understanding war psychosis in former centuries. Analyzing the psychodynamics that enable the psychopathic behavior of all these organizations and people who make up the US military-national security apparatus will require the efforts of generations of scholars and other thinkers (assuming there are future generations).
The military-national security state is above all inseparable from the modern corporatocracy, or inverted totalitarianism, under which we live. The American plutocratic elite is no longer merely one major component that any tyrannical government must satisfy: it runs the country and much of the world. As is illustrated by the example of Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933, and by the 2016 statement of Lloyd Blankfein (former CEO of Goldman Sachs) that if Bernie Sanders were the Democratic presidential nominee, Blankfein would vote for Donald Trump, a plutocracy prefers fascism to even the mildest European-style democratic-socialism. This is the same psychopathic plutocracy that is working as hard as it can to produce as much hydrocarbon energy as it can, as fast as possible, in order to destroy the earth as a habitat for living things as soon as possible. The recognition by the overwhelming body of Americans, left and right, that the American plutocratic establishment is wildly out of control may create the impression that the plutocracy is on the defensive. To the contrary, the plutocracy is progressing ever-faster towards its goal of dominating everything in American life, as is indicated by its annual astronomical increase in wealth.
The American plutocracy is in the condition of the psychopathic authoritarian ruler at the height of his success, totally dominating the nation he is also ruining. In this condition, the authoritarian feels invincible, totally secure in his fantasied omnipotence and omniscience. In this condition, the plutocracy that governs the US imperial state now thinks it can subdue the entire world, coercing most of the wealthy nations of the earth to submit to its suzerainty, while disabling Russia and China. That this is even theoretically possible is an authoritarian’s grandiose fantasy. After WWII, the US, with less than one-twentieth the world’s population, produced half its economic output. Now it produces 13%. The collective GDP of the BRICS nations is almost exactly the same as that of the G-7 nations. Twenty years ago, the US had twice the industrial capacity of China; now it has half. The proxy war in Ukraine has backfired, accelerating the efforts of the Global South to free themselves from American economic hegemony and control of international economic and technological infrastructure.
The US military-national security state has, using the time-honored device, exploited the war in Ukraine to distract Americans from its domestic and military tyrannies. As the plutocracy has enacted its “slow-motion coup” over American government during the last fifty years, so the US military-national security state has enacted a slow-motion provocation of Russia over the last thirty years, continually advancing its against Russia through NATO, an organization that a peace-loving nation would have dissolved after 1991. The US has done this despite repeated the requests of Russia, first to create an Atlantic-to-Pacific security structure, then to cease expanding NATO. The US has done this despite decades of warnings from nearly every informed party, in and out of government, in the US and Europe, that expanding NATO would eventually provoke Russia into a military response. (There is an excellent article on this by Caitlin Johnstone, available on Information Clearing House, “If Everyone Understood That the US Deliberately Provoked This War,” 2023-09-07/08.) Now it is an article of faith of nearly all Americans that the Russia invasion was an unprovoked evil committed by the latest new Hitler created by the US propaganda machine. This propaganda has reduced Americans to a state of infantile psychopathology in which the US is “all-good” while Russia is “all-bad.” Americans are drunk on moral self-righteousness, filled with paranoid aggression born of the fabricated fear against a phantasm that the US propaganda machine has created, and are too intellectually regressed even to begin to think about it clearly. It took the 2008 economic collapse for Americans finally to recognize the half-century old neoliberal slow-motion coup accomplished by the plutocracy. It will be years before they recognize the slow-motion US provocation of the Ukraine war, and by then they will only vaguely remember the war ever happened (as they only vaguely remember the wars in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and have never even heard of other US wars, such as the one in Yemen that is a far greater slaughter than the one in Ukraine.)
This is part of the framework in which efforts to oppose the US “collective suicidality” discussed by Dr. Lee must be undertaken.
I may have found a typo in “Being a war criminal does prevent anyone from being one of these talking heads and reaping the accompanying rewards.” I think you meant “doesn’t.”
At least you didn’t blame it all on Jews. The problem is people convinced that their own interests trump all others (double entendre intentional.) Jews certainly have no monopoly on that.
But you come dangerously close to holding up Russian interests as righteous. As if they are the innocent victims here, who only want world peace. Could it be that evil permeates the whole world? That no one in power is truly innocent? That elephants are struggling, and the grass is being trampled?
From an intelligence analysts POV, it has been critical to alert the American people & the leadership to the ongoing "ideological" & destabilization/corruption campaigns against our society & mental cohesion (remember when trump sided w/moscow against our own agency warnings). Putin, Beijing, far-right operatives "flooding the zone" with madness & targeted attacks, enabled by billionaires like Murdoch & Musk. Everyday we are seeing a coordinated ongoing "insurrection" from mar-a-lago to the capitol, an escalating malicious threat level, with many gop governors/candidates heaping on. Reminders for unprecedented response/action... VOTE BLUE & join David Hogg to get overwhelming turnout next year https://vote.org
I do not ordinarily respond to other subscribers’ negative responses to comments I post (responses that are rare or non-existent). However, a subscriber to this newsletter has just made a McCarthyite smear against me: “At least you don’t blame it all on the Jews.” He does not explain what he is referring to by the pronoun “it,” or what it might mean to blame “it all on the Jews.” (The following two sentences in his comment seem to be intended to elaborate, but the reasoning is unintelligible.)
There is absolutely nothing in anything I wrote that any normal person could conceivably interpret as suggesting anti-Semitism.
Making unfounded insinuations against another subscriber that his posts are anti-Semitic is not merely abusive, insulting, irresponsible, and offensive in the extreme. It is totally unacceptable. If I wanted to engage in gutter-level discourse, I would find websites other than Dr. Lee’s to do it on. This is the kind of trolling behavior that leads civilized people to give up posting on social media. It needs to be addressed promptly and decisively.
What occasioned this subscriber’s tantrum is apparently my assertion that the US deliberately provoked Russia into a military response by expanding NATO. Persisting with his technique of insinuation, he writes that I have “come dangerously close to holding up Russian interests as righteous. As if they are the innocent victims here, who only want world peace.” On a moral level, this subscriber has first shown that he has a problem with understanding that scurrilous insinuation is dishonest, anti-social behavior. Here he shows that he does not understand the moral principle that no one is entitled to put words into someone else’s mouth. Furthermore, on a rational level he has a problem with simple reading comprehension and ordinary logic. I never said the Russians were “innocent.” As for for my “dangerous” suggestion (which I did not make) that Russians have “righteous” “interests”--well, everyone has righteous interests (don’t they?), and those interests ought to be respected, oughtn't they?
This subscriber makes the irrational, magical transformation of my assertion that the US deliberately provoked a military response from Russia into a supposed suggestion that the Russians are “innocent victims.” This thinking is a precise reflection of the infantile “all-good” and “all-bad” understanding of reality that, as I wrote, the propaganda of all nations seeks to instill in its citizens, and US propaganda has obviously succeeded in instilling in him. (I wrote, “propaganda has reduced Americans to a state of infantile psychopathology in which the US is “all-good” while Russia is “all-bad.”) May I suggest that practicing basic reading comprehension is always a good start. Ignoring what others write in order to project your own psychological diarrhea onto it is, among other things, derived from a fundamental hatred of reality and a preference for fantasy and ignorance.
In the interest of defending the pursuit of reality (even if we don’t like it), following is a compendium of some of many experts’ warnings over three decades that expanding NATO was not a way to promote peace, but was “needlessly provocative”; would create an extremely dangerous geopolitical situation; and “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era.” In short, the US military-national security establishment was warned for three decades that by expanding NATO, it was needlessly and dangerously provoking Russia, very possibly into a military response. Now it claims that the invasion was totally unprovoked. It was inflicted upon the world, and the completely innocent US, solely by an evil madman. A rational, adult approach to reality tells us that this is paranoid machiavellianism. The US military-national security establishment knew perfectly well all along that it was deliberately provoking Russia. (See the remarks, #4 below, of Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., Retired Navy Rear Admiral and Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, including his statement that the official US position was “delusory, deliberately so.”)
I trust that that the intemperate subscriber will not now insinuate that all these distinguished experts are anti-Semitic, or assert that they have come “dangerously close” to claiming that the Russians are “innocent.”
(1) One might begin by noting that on February 28, 2022, the Guardian published an article by Ted Galen Carpenter entitled, “Many predicted Nato expansion would lead to war. Those warnings were ignored.”
(2) In 1951, when he assumed the position of the first supreme commander of NATO, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote: “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [i.e., NATO] will have failed.”
(3) In 1997, George F. Kennan, known as the architect of US post-WWI foreign policy, wrote: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected . . . to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
(4) In 1997, in one of the most plain-spoken analyses of the machiavellian nature of the US policy of expanding NATO, Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., Retired Navy Rear Admiral and Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Why have so many knowledgeable and responsible authorities . . . raised powerful objections to NATO expansion? . . . The long-term interest of the United States in Europe can best be served by actions that promote enduring peace in Europe through security arrangements that include Russia as a cooperative participant. . . . President Clinton and his counselors deny that expansion threatens Russia, [asserting that] the objective is ‘to build and secure a New Europe, peaceful, democratic and undivided at last.’ It is delusory, deliberately so, to argue that expanding NATO is a way to unite Europe. Certainly Henry Kissinger, a strong proponent of NATO expansion, was more candid and accurate . . . . stating that the real purpose of expansion is to create new dividing lines . . . [and in providing] a clear picture of Moscow’s perception of a new NATO threat moved closer to its borders. . . . [A]t its heart, NATO expansion is aimed at Russia. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confirmed this in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 23 . . . . NATO expansion is an attempt to extend Cold War divisions and strengthen the alliance against the chimera of a resurgent Russia bent upon imposing its hegemony in Eastern Europe. It may be safe to treat Russia as a prospective enemy today when it is helpless to prevent NATO expansion but there is the longer-term danger. A hard-line, anti-Western coalition will be strengthened in Moscow and give priority to anti-NATO measures in the future. Even in the short-term there may well be nuclear dangers. . . . Our arbitrary and threatening actions may convince the hard-liners that nuclear weapons remain the only vestige of Russian military and political leverage.”
(5) In the mid-1990s, as The Arms Control Association writes on its website, “a group of 50 prominent foreign policy experts that included former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academicians, sent an open letter to President Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansions.”
These policy experts include former Senator Bill Bradley; Susan Eisenhower; former Senator and Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart; former Senator Mark Hatfield; former Under Secretary of the Navy Townsend Hoopes; right-wing military strategist Edward Luttwak; Director or the American Foreign Policy program at Johns Hopkins University, Michael Mandelbaum; US Ambassador to Ukraine under President Reagan, Jack F. Matlock, Jr.; former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and former Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department Paul Nitze; former Senator Sam Nunn; right-wing historian and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes; and US Navy Admiral and Director of the CIA under President Carter, Stansfield Turner.
Their letter begins, “Dear Mr. President, We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO . . . is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.”
(6) In 2008, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and then-President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vehemently opposed President Bush’s reckless announcement that he wanted Ukraine to join NATO, thereby preventing the project from going forward at that time.
(7) On March 1, 2022 on the website, The Conversation, Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Michigan, recounted that President Biden’s own CIA Director, William J. Burns, started warning against NATO expansion in 1994 as an officer in the US Embassy in Moscow. When President Clinton moved to expand NATO, Burns wrote that the decision was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” In 2008 President Bush began a push to include Ukraine in NATO. Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to President Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). . . . I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interest.” Suny concludes, “Leaders like Putin who feel cornered and ignored may strike out.”
(8) On March 19, 2022 The Economist published an article entitled, “John Mearsheimer on why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis” Mearsheimer is a renowned political scientist and scholar of international relations, and professor at the University of Chicago. The article begins:
THE WAR in Ukraine is the most dangerous international conflict since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Understanding its root causes is essential if we are to prevent it from getting worse and, instead, to find a way to bring it to a close.
There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.
But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.
The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the eu and making it a pro-American democracy.
These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, after an uprising (which was supported by America) caused Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country.
We are not the solution, we are the problem. Not all of us, but all who follow the wicked one’s lies. Some love the lie, others are confused. But the truth has been available for millennia: mankind followed a Deceiver, a malignant narcissist promising greatness and freedom. But freedom from the Creator is slavery.
Our Creator has not abandoned us. Those who say he is running this world are blind. On TV tonight a Moroccan man was saying that the destruction of his home and the death of his son “was God’s will.” Such is the depth of Satan’s deception, that we blame evil on the one who is Love.
But indeed God has allowed Satan to rule. Why? To prove to all who the liar is: not a leader to freedom, but into ruin. The case is reaching its final destination. There is no more to prove. From the very beginning, at Genesis 3:15, God promised to crush the Rebel. He keeps his word. This beautiful earth belongs to Him, and the meek will surely inherit it, as surely as the sun rises in the morning.
So do not fear Armageddon. God will cut it short. Indeed, if he did not, “no flesh would be saved,” Jesus said (Matt 24:21, 22). And to those who scoff and say “we must save ourselves!” I will quote Dr Phil, “how’s that been going for you lately?”
That in fact is the whole point: Satan said we can, God knows we can’t. We were not designed with that ability. We need His kindly guidance. And that is coming. You pray for it, when you say “let your Kingdom come.” That kingdom is not “within you,” as some teach. But it IS “among” us (which is the correct rendering of that verse [Luke 17:21]) in the people being gathered onto God’s side, ready for its coming. No, not to sweep them away to the sky while the the earth is blown up. That is just another slander by the Enemy.
So much more to say! But surely that’s enough for now.
More religious mumbo jumbo BS. Religion is opium of masses and those addicted are high on this opium. Unfortunately, there's no rehab for this addiction. The more addicts quote religious verses & sermons indicates how bad their addiction is.
There certainly is a lot of religious mumbo jumbo bs out there. Real sigh and roll your eyes nonsense. So I sympathize. But you may be starting from the presumption that God does not exist. Were that true, indeed we are on our own, and are unlikely to survive the predicament we are facing. So I suggest that you explore your reasons for rejecting the idea that there is anything out there superior to us, anyone out there interested in our future. I am convinced that we, and all life, is a result of design, not purely accident or contingent response to immediate need. There is a greater purpose to life than reproduce and die.
For anyone interested, you could start with www.lifespurpose.net. Set aside the bs filling the world (the Enemy loves confusion, don’t fall into that trap) and think basics.
Religion is opium and it's also a response to death anxiety. Whether God exists or not - we don't know. For some people who cannot handle death anxiety, they develop a psychological defense mechanism of faith - that there is something beyond after life is over. A person's thought of him fading away from the world is too much to handle.
Most of what you said is correct. But I see evidence that convinces me that God does exist. Contemplate what is good in life. As for death anxiety, lies about death can be a comforting crutch, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth. And the truth is, there is no immortal soul. The dead are dead and know nothing. But God does exist, and has perfect memory. So raising (recreating) a person long dead is not difficult for him. And such resurrected one would feel he/she was the same person, because in effect, they would be. Amazing times ahead, once this mess is cleaned up.
It's ludicrous to think that all Evil has somehow accumulated in CIA and US Govt. It's not. Evil is plenty and it's everywhere. It's also in KGB, Russian Oligarchs, Kremlin, Siloviki and Nomenklatura. It's also in CCP & Chinese oligarchs. It's also in 3rd world nations with Nuclear weapons like Indian Fascists Modi, BJP, RSS & Hindutva organizations (many of them are also active in US). There's also Evil in Iranian Mullahs and Islamofascist regimes like Erdogan. It's also in Streets of London, British plutocrats & Royal family.
This is a nonlinear uncertain world and its continuously changing. US was bad guy for dropping Atomic bomb on Japan 78 years ago. But US also helped rebuilding of Japan and US-Japan are now the closest of allies. Of course this doesn't absolve US of it's mistake but both countries have turned on that chapter of book towards a future of partnership.
What about Russia? Russia allied with Hitler (Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) to divide & conquer Europe. Both Stalin & Hitler were devious scoundrels planning to stab each other in back at right opportunity (read Icebreaker). In run up to WW2, Stalin envisioned Hitler fighting with British & French, all forces decimating each other and Russians will come to pick up the pieces. Russia & Germany started the WW2 but Hitler was first to stab Stalin seizing the right opportunity.
US did NOT start WW2. When Hitler got too powerful and Stalin realized his mistake, US came to rescue with lend lease plan that provided industrial backing to Soviet war effort. Khrushchev admitted that Russia wouldn't have survived without US assistance. Dropping A-bomb on Japan was however a huge mistake. But US then help build Europe & Japan (Marshall plan).
But on present situation. Russia is the one threatening world with Nuclear war, wiping out Ukraine & Europe. US has NOT made any such threats. US posed no threat to Russia. Ukraine posed no threat to Russia. Prigozhin admitted that before he tried his coup but failed & killed by Putin. Gen Leonid Ivashov claimed the same thing even before start of Russian aggression.
Historical events offers clues to present & future but they have to be analyzed & understood with proper perspective. The perspective of people like Noam Chomsky, Jeffery Sachs, Ray McGovern etc is that they are still trapped in days of Neocon era - "US is bad. Russia is good. CIA bad." The world has changed a lot but these people didn't update their intellectual firmwares.
Thanks so much, Bandy, for this sobering look at where we are on this planet. Einstein also said something like, "we can't solve a problem with the same mindset that caused the problem in the first place." So another way of understanding why the "civilized" world has drifted toward catastrophe is that most of the people who COULD do something about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the international conditions that portend their use, are stuck in an old way of thinking. It's not enough to elect one President although who's at the top of the hierarchy makes a huge difference. The People would have to affect individual members of the Joint Chiefs, the House, the Senate, perhaps every member of the U.N.
Tragically, when scientists revealed the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change 30 or 40 years ago, not enough of the people who could have altered policies, including auto manufacturers and the oil industry, nor any but a small handful of global citizens, organized sufficiently to brainstorm real preventative solutions. Yet we all remember that when there was a competition for dominating space and JFK unleashed the research money, things happened relatively quickly. Competition where there are winners and losers always energizes certain kinds of people. A catastrophic situation where we'd all be "winners" or we'd all be "losers," tragically, doesn't galvanize the same response.
But please keep on writing and we'll keep on circulating this message. We definitely need to do some creative thinking about how to bring this issue back into the public's mind.
worldbeyondwar.org.
Dr. Lee observes that the US government uses the machiavellian methods of a totalitarian regime to silence critics of its nuclear war policies. She observes that the CIA exists in order to carry out the kinds of policies we associate with evil totalitarian regimes, inflicting death and devastation on millions of people in many countries around the world. She states that now, “Our nation is . . . being led into, largely without knowledge (and being conditioned to accept) an all-out World War.” In explaining this situation, she states that as “as a result” of our “collective suicidalilty,” “our country . . . seems to be in some kind of denial trance: we are both uninformed about what is really happening or inured to” it.
Freud said that denial is the strongest defense enabling people to retreat from reality into the comfort of fantasy. But denial is not an isolated or simple defense mechanism. It is often produced through complex psychodynamic processes employing an array of other defenses. Similarly, there is a complex relationship between, on the one hand, the aggressively nihilistic and evil US military-national security establishment that Dr. Lee describes, and on the other hand, our “collective suicidality.” The two of these are together now on course to destroy human civilization; but between them is a complex dynamic involving many entities.
It is helpful to begin with a larger perspective. As Randolph Bourne (author of the statement, “War is the health of the state”) wrote in his essay, “The State,” a nation is an organized herd with vast resources that can be repurposed for warfare, always prepared to hurl itself against other nations in a violent combat to the death. (That is why we have standing militaries.) Therefore as long as there are nation-states, humans will practice the collective suicidality of war.
Furthermore, war is intrinsically autocratic. The notion that the US Congress alone has the authority to declare war is self-deception (as is demonstrated by the fact that the alleged authority is never exercised). War against other states or peoples, declared or undeclared, is decided on in private by a handful of people, most of whom the public has never even heard of. Every military, as a matter of practical necessity, must be an absolutely hierarchical and authoritarian organization.
As Bourne also observes, when this handful of leaders declares war, the peoplehave known nothing whatever of the preparations for war, or of the geopolitical, diplomatic, or military events, conditions, considerations, or purposes associated with it. Yet they immediately become intoxicated with war hysteria, and prepare to sacrifice themselves, their families and everything else in their private and communal lives, in the interest of killing and being killed, on an industrial scale, in order to destroy the “enemy.” They do all this in the service of the “state,” which is something that doesn’t even exist. The nation and the government, in contrast, are real things that do exist. They consist of identifiable human beings engaged in identifiable actions, and they can be participated in, criticized, influenced, and changed. The “state,” which comes into being only with the onset of war, is a sacred phantasm, a narcissistic idol consisting of rhetorical ectoplasm, which is beyond principled, rational criticism, and on whose altar human lives must be sacrificed by the millions.
Who are these leaders who are always taking the US into permanent war? The term “military-industrial complex” has become entirely inadequate for describing the US national security state. This state-within-a-state, more powerful than the state it lives within, has metastasized throughout society so thoroughly that no significant part of American society remains fully civil. It has coopted industry, the academic world, the media, Congress, state governments, the police, NGOs, and more. It has created an army of psychopathic intellectual poseurs who circulate through the revolving doors of all three branches of government, industry, universities, the media, and think tanks that are funded by military contractors. They thereby build resumes that enable them to acquire prestige, influence, distinguished careers, together with very substantial monetary rewards and a place in the ruling class. Nearly all the wise talking heads with “expertise” who appear in the media to discuss war and geopolitics are or have been funded by military contractors. Being a war criminal does prevent anyone from being one of these talking heads and reaping the accompanying rewards.
Analyzing our modern American war psychosis is far more complex than understanding war psychosis in former centuries. Analyzing the psychodynamics that enable the psychopathic behavior of all these organizations and people who make up the US military-national security apparatus will require the efforts of generations of scholars and other thinkers (assuming there are future generations).
The military-national security state is above all inseparable from the modern corporatocracy, or inverted totalitarianism, under which we live. The American plutocratic elite is no longer merely one major component that any tyrannical government must satisfy: it runs the country and much of the world. As is illustrated by the example of Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933, and by the 2016 statement of Lloyd Blankfein (former CEO of Goldman Sachs) that if Bernie Sanders were the Democratic presidential nominee, Blankfein would vote for Donald Trump, a plutocracy prefers fascism to even the mildest European-style democratic-socialism. This is the same psychopathic plutocracy that is working as hard as it can to produce as much hydrocarbon energy as it can, as fast as possible, in order to destroy the earth as a habitat for living things as soon as possible. The recognition by the overwhelming body of Americans, left and right, that the American plutocratic establishment is wildly out of control may create the impression that the plutocracy is on the defensive. To the contrary, the plutocracy is progressing ever-faster towards its goal of dominating everything in American life, as is indicated by its annual astronomical increase in wealth.
The American plutocracy is in the condition of the psychopathic authoritarian ruler at the height of his success, totally dominating the nation he is also ruining. In this condition, the authoritarian feels invincible, totally secure in his fantasied omnipotence and omniscience. In this condition, the plutocracy that governs the US imperial state now thinks it can subdue the entire world, coercing most of the wealthy nations of the earth to submit to its suzerainty, while disabling Russia and China. That this is even theoretically possible is an authoritarian’s grandiose fantasy. After WWII, the US, with less than one-twentieth the world’s population, produced half its economic output. Now it produces 13%. The collective GDP of the BRICS nations is almost exactly the same as that of the G-7 nations. Twenty years ago, the US had twice the industrial capacity of China; now it has half. The proxy war in Ukraine has backfired, accelerating the efforts of the Global South to free themselves from American economic hegemony and control of international economic and technological infrastructure.
The US military-national security state has, using the time-honored device, exploited the war in Ukraine to distract Americans from its domestic and military tyrannies. As the plutocracy has enacted its “slow-motion coup” over American government during the last fifty years, so the US military-national security state has enacted a slow-motion provocation of Russia over the last thirty years, continually advancing its against Russia through NATO, an organization that a peace-loving nation would have dissolved after 1991. The US has done this despite repeated the requests of Russia, first to create an Atlantic-to-Pacific security structure, then to cease expanding NATO. The US has done this despite decades of warnings from nearly every informed party, in and out of government, in the US and Europe, that expanding NATO would eventually provoke Russia into a military response. (There is an excellent article on this by Caitlin Johnstone, available on Information Clearing House, “If Everyone Understood That the US Deliberately Provoked This War,” 2023-09-07/08.) Now it is an article of faith of nearly all Americans that the Russia invasion was an unprovoked evil committed by the latest new Hitler created by the US propaganda machine. This propaganda has reduced Americans to a state of infantile psychopathology in which the US is “all-good” while Russia is “all-bad.” Americans are drunk on moral self-righteousness, filled with paranoid aggression born of the fabricated fear against a phantasm that the US propaganda machine has created, and are too intellectually regressed even to begin to think about it clearly. It took the 2008 economic collapse for Americans finally to recognize the half-century old neoliberal slow-motion coup accomplished by the plutocracy. It will be years before they recognize the slow-motion US provocation of the Ukraine war, and by then they will only vaguely remember the war ever happened (as they only vaguely remember the wars in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan—and have never even heard of other US wars, such as the one in Yemen that is a far greater slaughter than the one in Ukraine.)
This is part of the framework in which efforts to oppose the US “collective suicidality” discussed by Dr. Lee must be undertaken.
I may have found a typo in “Being a war criminal does prevent anyone from being one of these talking heads and reaping the accompanying rewards.” I think you meant “doesn’t.”
At least you didn’t blame it all on Jews. The problem is people convinced that their own interests trump all others (double entendre intentional.) Jews certainly have no monopoly on that.
But you come dangerously close to holding up Russian interests as righteous. As if they are the innocent victims here, who only want world peace. Could it be that evil permeates the whole world? That no one in power is truly innocent? That elephants are struggling, and the grass is being trampled?
From an intelligence analysts POV, it has been critical to alert the American people & the leadership to the ongoing "ideological" & destabilization/corruption campaigns against our society & mental cohesion (remember when trump sided w/moscow against our own agency warnings). Putin, Beijing, far-right operatives "flooding the zone" with madness & targeted attacks, enabled by billionaires like Murdoch & Musk. Everyday we are seeing a coordinated ongoing "insurrection" from mar-a-lago to the capitol, an escalating malicious threat level, with many gop governors/candidates heaping on. Reminders for unprecedented response/action... VOTE BLUE & join David Hogg to get overwhelming turnout next year https://vote.org
PART 1
I do not ordinarily respond to other subscribers’ negative responses to comments I post (responses that are rare or non-existent). However, a subscriber to this newsletter has just made a McCarthyite smear against me: “At least you don’t blame it all on the Jews.” He does not explain what he is referring to by the pronoun “it,” or what it might mean to blame “it all on the Jews.” (The following two sentences in his comment seem to be intended to elaborate, but the reasoning is unintelligible.)
There is absolutely nothing in anything I wrote that any normal person could conceivably interpret as suggesting anti-Semitism.
Making unfounded insinuations against another subscriber that his posts are anti-Semitic is not merely abusive, insulting, irresponsible, and offensive in the extreme. It is totally unacceptable. If I wanted to engage in gutter-level discourse, I would find websites other than Dr. Lee’s to do it on. This is the kind of trolling behavior that leads civilized people to give up posting on social media. It needs to be addressed promptly and decisively.
What occasioned this subscriber’s tantrum is apparently my assertion that the US deliberately provoked Russia into a military response by expanding NATO. Persisting with his technique of insinuation, he writes that I have “come dangerously close to holding up Russian interests as righteous. As if they are the innocent victims here, who only want world peace.” On a moral level, this subscriber has first shown that he has a problem with understanding that scurrilous insinuation is dishonest, anti-social behavior. Here he shows that he does not understand the moral principle that no one is entitled to put words into someone else’s mouth. Furthermore, on a rational level he has a problem with simple reading comprehension and ordinary logic. I never said the Russians were “innocent.” As for for my “dangerous” suggestion (which I did not make) that Russians have “righteous” “interests”--well, everyone has righteous interests (don’t they?), and those interests ought to be respected, oughtn't they?
This subscriber makes the irrational, magical transformation of my assertion that the US deliberately provoked a military response from Russia into a supposed suggestion that the Russians are “innocent victims.” This thinking is a precise reflection of the infantile “all-good” and “all-bad” understanding of reality that, as I wrote, the propaganda of all nations seeks to instill in its citizens, and US propaganda has obviously succeeded in instilling in him. (I wrote, “propaganda has reduced Americans to a state of infantile psychopathology in which the US is “all-good” while Russia is “all-bad.”) May I suggest that practicing basic reading comprehension is always a good start. Ignoring what others write in order to project your own psychological diarrhea onto it is, among other things, derived from a fundamental hatred of reality and a preference for fantasy and ignorance.
In the interest of defending the pursuit of reality (even if we don’t like it), following is a compendium of some of many experts’ warnings over three decades that expanding NATO was not a way to promote peace, but was “needlessly provocative”; would create an extremely dangerous geopolitical situation; and “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era.” In short, the US military-national security establishment was warned for three decades that by expanding NATO, it was needlessly and dangerously provoking Russia, very possibly into a military response. Now it claims that the invasion was totally unprovoked. It was inflicted upon the world, and the completely innocent US, solely by an evil madman. A rational, adult approach to reality tells us that this is paranoid machiavellianism. The US military-national security establishment knew perfectly well all along that it was deliberately provoking Russia. (See the remarks, #4 below, of Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., Retired Navy Rear Admiral and Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, including his statement that the official US position was “delusory, deliberately so.”)
I trust that that the intemperate subscriber will not now insinuate that all these distinguished experts are anti-Semitic, or assert that they have come “dangerously close” to claiming that the Russians are “innocent.”
PART 2
(1) One might begin by noting that on February 28, 2022, the Guardian published an article by Ted Galen Carpenter entitled, “Many predicted Nato expansion would lead to war. Those warnings were ignored.”
(2) In 1951, when he assumed the position of the first supreme commander of NATO, General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote: “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project [i.e., NATO] will have failed.”
(3) In 1997, George F. Kennan, known as the architect of US post-WWI foreign policy, wrote: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected . . . to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
(4) In 1997, in one of the most plain-spoken analyses of the machiavellian nature of the US policy of expanding NATO, Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., Retired Navy Rear Admiral and Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Why have so many knowledgeable and responsible authorities . . . raised powerful objections to NATO expansion? . . . The long-term interest of the United States in Europe can best be served by actions that promote enduring peace in Europe through security arrangements that include Russia as a cooperative participant. . . . President Clinton and his counselors deny that expansion threatens Russia, [asserting that] the objective is ‘to build and secure a New Europe, peaceful, democratic and undivided at last.’ It is delusory, deliberately so, to argue that expanding NATO is a way to unite Europe. Certainly Henry Kissinger, a strong proponent of NATO expansion, was more candid and accurate . . . . stating that the real purpose of expansion is to create new dividing lines . . . [and in providing] a clear picture of Moscow’s perception of a new NATO threat moved closer to its borders. . . . [A]t its heart, NATO expansion is aimed at Russia. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confirmed this in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 23 . . . . NATO expansion is an attempt to extend Cold War divisions and strengthen the alliance against the chimera of a resurgent Russia bent upon imposing its hegemony in Eastern Europe. It may be safe to treat Russia as a prospective enemy today when it is helpless to prevent NATO expansion but there is the longer-term danger. A hard-line, anti-Western coalition will be strengthened in Moscow and give priority to anti-NATO measures in the future. Even in the short-term there may well be nuclear dangers. . . . Our arbitrary and threatening actions may convince the hard-liners that nuclear weapons remain the only vestige of Russian military and political leverage.”
(5) In the mid-1990s, as The Arms Control Association writes on its website, “a group of 50 prominent foreign policy experts that included former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academicians, sent an open letter to President Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansions.”
These policy experts include former Senator Bill Bradley; Susan Eisenhower; former Senator and Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart; former Senator Mark Hatfield; former Under Secretary of the Navy Townsend Hoopes; right-wing military strategist Edward Luttwak; Director or the American Foreign Policy program at Johns Hopkins University, Michael Mandelbaum; US Ambassador to Ukraine under President Reagan, Jack F. Matlock, Jr.; former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; former US Deputy Secretary of Defense and former Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department Paul Nitze; former Senator Sam Nunn; right-wing historian and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes; and US Navy Admiral and Director of the CIA under President Carter, Stansfield Turner.
Their letter begins, “Dear Mr. President, We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO . . . is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.”
(6) In 2008, then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and then-President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vehemently opposed President Bush’s reckless announcement that he wanted Ukraine to join NATO, thereby preventing the project from going forward at that time.
(7) On March 1, 2022 on the website, The Conversation, Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Michigan, recounted that President Biden’s own CIA Director, William J. Burns, started warning against NATO expansion in 1994 as an officer in the US Embassy in Moscow. When President Clinton moved to expand NATO, Burns wrote that the decision was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” In 2008 President Bush began a push to include Ukraine in NATO. Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote to President Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). . . . I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interest.” Suny concludes, “Leaders like Putin who feel cornered and ignored may strike out.”
(8) On March 19, 2022 The Economist published an article entitled, “John Mearsheimer on why the West is principally responsible for the Ukrainian crisis” Mearsheimer is a renowned political scientist and scholar of international relations, and professor at the University of Chicago. The article begins:
THE WAR in Ukraine is the most dangerous international conflict since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Understanding its root causes is essential if we are to prevent it from getting worse and, instead, to find a way to bring it to a close.
There is no question that Vladimir Putin started the war and is responsible for how it is being waged. But why he did so is another matter. The mainstream view in the West is that he is an irrational, out-of-touch aggressor bent on creating a greater Russia in the mould of the former Soviet Union. Thus, he alone bears full responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.
But that story is wrong. The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis which began in February 2014. It has now turned into a war that not only threatens to destroy Ukraine, but also has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war between Russia and NATO.
The trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, characterising this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it. According to a respected Russian journalist, Mr Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” America ignored Moscow’s red line, however, and pushed forward to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. That strategy included two other elements: bringing Ukraine closer to the eu and making it a pro-American democracy.
These efforts eventually sparked hostilities in February 2014, after an uprising (which was supported by America) caused Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country.
We are not the solution, we are the problem. Not all of us, but all who follow the wicked one’s lies. Some love the lie, others are confused. But the truth has been available for millennia: mankind followed a Deceiver, a malignant narcissist promising greatness and freedom. But freedom from the Creator is slavery.
Our Creator has not abandoned us. Those who say he is running this world are blind. On TV tonight a Moroccan man was saying that the destruction of his home and the death of his son “was God’s will.” Such is the depth of Satan’s deception, that we blame evil on the one who is Love.
But indeed God has allowed Satan to rule. Why? To prove to all who the liar is: not a leader to freedom, but into ruin. The case is reaching its final destination. There is no more to prove. From the very beginning, at Genesis 3:15, God promised to crush the Rebel. He keeps his word. This beautiful earth belongs to Him, and the meek will surely inherit it, as surely as the sun rises in the morning.
So do not fear Armageddon. God will cut it short. Indeed, if he did not, “no flesh would be saved,” Jesus said (Matt 24:21, 22). And to those who scoff and say “we must save ourselves!” I will quote Dr Phil, “how’s that been going for you lately?”
That in fact is the whole point: Satan said we can, God knows we can’t. We were not designed with that ability. We need His kindly guidance. And that is coming. You pray for it, when you say “let your Kingdom come.” That kingdom is not “within you,” as some teach. But it IS “among” us (which is the correct rendering of that verse [Luke 17:21]) in the people being gathered onto God’s side, ready for its coming. No, not to sweep them away to the sky while the the earth is blown up. That is just another slander by the Enemy.
So much more to say! But surely that’s enough for now.
More religious mumbo jumbo BS. Religion is opium of masses and those addicted are high on this opium. Unfortunately, there's no rehab for this addiction. The more addicts quote religious verses & sermons indicates how bad their addiction is.
There certainly is a lot of religious mumbo jumbo bs out there. Real sigh and roll your eyes nonsense. So I sympathize. But you may be starting from the presumption that God does not exist. Were that true, indeed we are on our own, and are unlikely to survive the predicament we are facing. So I suggest that you explore your reasons for rejecting the idea that there is anything out there superior to us, anyone out there interested in our future. I am convinced that we, and all life, is a result of design, not purely accident or contingent response to immediate need. There is a greater purpose to life than reproduce and die.
For anyone interested, you could start with www.lifespurpose.net. Set aside the bs filling the world (the Enemy loves confusion, don’t fall into that trap) and think basics.
Religion is opium and it's also a response to death anxiety. Whether God exists or not - we don't know. For some people who cannot handle death anxiety, they develop a psychological defense mechanism of faith - that there is something beyond after life is over. A person's thought of him fading away from the world is too much to handle.
Most of what you said is correct. But I see evidence that convinces me that God does exist. Contemplate what is good in life. As for death anxiety, lies about death can be a comforting crutch, but that doesn’t mean there is no truth. And the truth is, there is no immortal soul. The dead are dead and know nothing. But God does exist, and has perfect memory. So raising (recreating) a person long dead is not difficult for him. And such resurrected one would feel he/she was the same person, because in effect, they would be. Amazing times ahead, once this mess is cleaned up.