Chomsky & Barsamian on Trump & Co

October 3, 2017
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, A World in Peril

I first “met” Noam Chomsky in 1969 by reading these words of his about the My Lai massacre:

“And now there is Song My -- ‘Pinkville.’ More than two decades of indoctrination and counterrevolutionary interventions have created the possibility of a name like ‘Pinkville’ -- and the acts that may be done in a place so named. Orville and Jonathan Schell have pointed out what any literate person should realize, that this was no isolated atrocity but the logical consequence of a virtual war of extermination directed against helpless peasants: ‘enemies,’ ‘reds,’ ‘dinks.’”

Discussing various of America’s criminal acts in the larger war in Vietnam, Chomsky then added of the My Lai massacre itself:

“It is perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much concern. It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. It will, indeed, be a still greater national scandal -- if we assume that to be possible -- if they alone are subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have created and accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed one detail -- merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.”

Chomsky wrote “After Pinkville” -- areas like Song My were then colored pink on American military maps -- in 1969. Almost half a century later, the question is: Have things improved? After all, in Ken Burns’s new Vietnam extravaganza, his 18-hour documentary on that war, he seems to have captured the zeitgeist of the moment by carefully changing the word “murder” in the script for the My Lai episode to “killing.” “At lunch, Burns defended his change," wrote the New Yorker’s Ian Parker,"on the ground that My Lai continues to have ‘a toxic, radioactive effect’ on opinion. ‘Killing’ was the better word, he said, ‘even though My Lai is murder.’” To be thoroughly upbeat, perhaps by 2067 Americans will finally be able to take “murder” straight on television when it comes to My Lai.

Almost 50 years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was both celebrated by many and unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Nixon administration, in part under the Espionage Act, for releasing The Pentagon Papers, a massive secret trove of documents that revealed to the American people something of what the United States was actually doing in Vietnam. In our era, Chelsea Manning did something similar. She turned over a twenty-first-century trove of secret documents on the Afghan and Iraq wars -- on, that is, what she’s accurately termed “death, destruction, and mayhem” -- to WikiLeaks and for that she was celebrated by few and prosecuted and convicted by the U.S. military.  Pardoned by President Obama after seven years in military prison, she recently had her visiting fellowship to Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government rescinded after CIA Director Mike Pompeo cancelled a talk there, complaining that Manning had “betrayed her country,” and former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell, a senior fellow at the same school, resigned in protest. Or to put it another way, Harvard caved to men who represented an agency that had committed secret acts of horror betraying every imaginable American value. (To give credit where it’s due, significant numbers of Harvard faculty members protested this craven act.) The same institute felt no compunctions about offering a visiting fellowship to former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer and, despite alumni protest, not rescinding it. Perhaps there’s an essay, “After Punkville,” to be written about all of this.

Under the circumstances, it’s our good fortune that, with civilians regularly being “killed” by U.S. firepower across the Greater Middle East, Noam Chomsky continues to remind us what our world really looks like if we don’t censor either our language or our thoughts. It makes today’s TomDispatch post, a recent interview from his upcoming book with David Barsamian, Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, particularly relevant to our moment. Tom

The Trump Presidency
Or How to Further Enrich “The Masters of the Universe”
By Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

Read on here

Militarizing Homeland Security

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The New Face of "War" at Home

The United States just experienced its largest rainfall event in memory. For the first time in recorded weather history, two category 4 hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit in a single season (not yet over). And San Francisco, famed for its chilliness, experienced an unheard of 106 degree day as September began, while a record West Coast heat wave, essentially an unending Irma or Harvey of wildfires, left parts of the region, from Los Angeles to British Columbia, enwreathed in a pall of smoke and ash (without even an El Niño year to blame for it). And did I mention that both states hit by those recent hurricanes have climate-change denying governors? Or that the man now in charge in Washington also denies the reality of climate change (a Chinese hoax!) and has stocked his administration with a remarkable cast of fervent deniers (the latest such appointment being the head of NASA), who have essentially wiped all references to the phenomenon off every imaginable federal website, fired climate-change scientists, and -- as a crew regularly backed in their careers by big energy -- seem intent on recreating the fossil-fueled America of The Donald’s 1950s childhood.



Beyond Harvey and Irma
Militarizing Homeland Security in the Climate-Change Era
By Michael T. Klare, Sept. 17, 2017

Read on at TomDispatch

Avoiding War with Pyongyang

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As I suggest in my introduction, this is an increasingly dystopian moment in America, which makes it the perfect moment to remind TD readers that, for a contribution of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy of John Feffer’s riveting dystopian novel, Splinterlands. (Check out our donation page for the details.) And for just a few bucks, you can get an unsigned but no less riveting copy of that book, which Barbara Ehrenreich -- in a comment that has only become more apt by the week -- called “a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today.” Tom]
If you happen to be a dystopian novelist, as TomDispatch regular John Feffer is, then you’re in business these days.  Back in 2015, when Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency was just heating up and Feffer was writing Splinterlands, his vivid look back from the year 2050 at our shattered planet, he named the massive storm that would devastate Washington in 2022 “Hurricane Donald” -- and you can’t be more predictively on the mark or dystopian than that.  Now, in August 2017, armed bands of neo-Nazis and white supremacists are in our streets and we have a president whose deepest desire seems to be to support them (because they support him).  Meanwhile, the generals from our losing wars are manning the ramparts of an embattled administration (and being treated by the mainstream media as the “adults in the room”) and an unpredictable man-child is in the White House. In other words, the material is clearly going to be there for Feffer -- in his ordinary life a thoughtful columnist at Foreign Policy in Focus -- to devote the rest of his time to dystopian fiction.
And that’s without even mentioning America’s dystopian Asian wars of the past, present, and possibly future. They undoubtedly deserve their own grim set of novels, starting with the bloody and brutal American conquest of the Philippines.  Included would also have to be the Pacific War against Japan that ended when a new weapon of unimaginable power obliterated two Japanese cities and significant parts of their populations, leaving humanity to face the possibility of its own future obliteration (and you can’t get more dystopian than that); the Vietnam War that left millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians (and 58,000 Americans) dead; a quarter century of Afghan Wars (the second of them now the longest in American history); and last but hardly least, the Korean War, which began in June 1950 and halted in 1953, after millions of Koreans (and 36,000 Americans) had died.  By the estimate of the then-head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, 20% of the North’s population died in those years under a rain of 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm (more than was used against the Japanese in World War II), while the North was burned to a crisp without atomic weapons.
In a strange sense, that conflict became America’s first permanent war since no peace treaty was ever agreed to -- though all American wars now seem to be permanent.  Of course, with Donald Trump’s recent impromptu comment that North Korean threats “will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before,” an obvious nuclear reference made on the eve of the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, a future Korean inferno is once again on many minds here and elsewhere, John Feffer’s included. And yet he suggests that, if only American officialdom could rid itself of its own dystopian turn of mind when it comes to North Korea, there might be a perfectly peaceable and reasonable way forward. If only indeed... Tom

Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy
The Times They Are A-Changin’ in North Korea
By John Feffer

Read on at Tomdispatch 

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