Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to take out humanity. Sixty-odd years after secretly reading that book and wondering about the future that would someday be mine, I’m living, it seems, in that very future, however Martian-less it might be. Still, just in case you hadn’t noticed, our present moment could easily be imagined as straight out of a science-fiction novel that, even at my age, I’d prefer not to read by flashlight in the dark of night.

I mean, I was barely one when Hiroshima was obliterated by a single atomic bomb. In the splintering of a moment and the mushroom cloud that followed, a genuinely apocalyptic power that had once rested only in the hands of the gods (and perhaps science-fiction authors) became an everyday part of our all-too-human world. From that day on, it was possible to imagine that we — not the Martians or the gods — could end it all. It became possible to imagine that we ourselves were the apocalypse. And give us credit. If we haven’t actually done so yet, neither have we done a bad job when it comes to preparing the way for just such a conclusion to human history.

Let’s put this in perspective. In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years after two American atomic bombs left the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ashes, the world’s nuclear powers actually increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion more than they had put out the previous year. And that increase was only a small percentage of the ongoing investment of those nine — yes, nine — countries in their growing nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, if you happen to be an American, more than half of the total 2020 “investment” in weaponry appropriate for world-ending scenarios, $37.4 billion to be exact, was plunked down by our own country. (A staggering $13.3 billion was given to weapons maker Northrop Grumman alone to begin the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the one thing our thoroughly troubled world obviously needs.) In all, those nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000 a minute in 2020 to “improve” their arsenals — the ones that, if ever used, could end history as we know it.

In the dust of the history of death Imagine for a second if all that money had instead been devoted to creating and disseminating vaccines for most of the world’s population, which has yet to receive such shots and so be rescued from the ravages of Covid-19, itself a death-dealing, sci-fi-style nightmare of the first order. But how could I even think such a thing when, in the decades since this country dropped that first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it’s learned its atomic lessons all too well? Otherwise, why would its leaders now be planning to devote at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades to “modernizing” what’s already the most modern nuclear arsenal on the planet?

Let me just add that I visited Hiroshima once upon a time with a Japanese colleague who had been born on an island off the coast of atomically destroyed Nagasaki. In 1982, he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which, despite exhibiting a carbonized child’s lunchbox and permanently imprinted human shadows, can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home to New York City, I could barely talk about it.

Admittedly, though nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, most of them significantly more powerful than the single bomb that turned Hiroshima into a landscape of rubble, not one has ever been used in war. And that should be considered a miracle on a planet where, when it comes to weapons and war, miracles of any sort tend to be few and far between. After all, it’s estimated that, in 2020, this country alone had more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, at least 1,300 of them deployed and ready to use — enough, that is, to destroy several worlds.

Consider it an irony of the first order, then, that U.S. leaders have spent years focused on trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon, but not for a day, not for an hour, not for a second on keeping this country from producing ever more of them and the delivery systems that would distribute them anywhere on this planet. In that light, just consider, for instance, that, in 2021, the U.S. is preparing to invest more than $100 billion in producing a totally new ICBM, whose total cost over its “lifespan” (though perhaps the correct word would be “deathspan”) is already projected at $264 billion — and that’s before the cost overruns even begin. All of this for a future that… well, your guess is as good as mine.

Or consider that, only recently, the American and Russian heads of state, the two countries with by far the biggest nuclear arsenals, met in Geneva, Switzerland, and talked for hours, especially about cyberwar, while spending little appreciable time considering how to rein in their most devastating weaponry and head the planet toward a denuclearized future.

And keep in mind that all of this is happening on a planet where it’s now commonplace scientific knowledge that even a nuclear war between two regional powers, India and Pakistan, could throw so many particulates into the atmosphere as to create a nuclear winter on this planet, one likely to starve to death billions of us. In other words, just one regional nuclear conflict could leave the chaos and horror of the Covid-19 pandemic in the unimpressive dust of the history of death.

A slow-motion Hiroshima? And yet, here’s perhaps the strangest thing of all: we’re still convinced that, since the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how much world-ending weaponry has been stockpiled by China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, none has been used. Unfortunately, that should increasingly be seen as a Martian-less fantasy of the first order.

While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust. Hiroshima took place in literally seconds, a single blinding flash of heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even centuries of heat.

That all-too-apocalyptic phenomenon was set off in the nineteenth century via the coal-burning that accompanied the industrial revolution, first in Great Britain and then elsewhere across the planet. It’s only continued over all these years thanks to the burning, above all, of fossil fuels — oil and natural gas — and the release of carbon (and methane) into the atmosphere. In the case of climate change, there are no ICBMs, no nuclear-missile-armed submarines, no nuclear bombers. Instead, there are oil and natural gas companies, whose CEOs, regularly abetted by governments, have proven all too ready to destroy this planet for record profits. They’ve been perfectly willing to burn fossil fuels in a criminal fashion until, quite literally, the end of time. Worse yet, they generally knew just what kind of harm they were causing long before most of the rest of us and, in response, actively supported climate denialism.

No, there was no mushroom cloud, but rather a “cloud” of greenhouse gases forming over endless years beyond human vision. Still, let’s face it, on this planet of ours, not in 2031 or 2051 or 2101 but right at this very moment, we’re beginning to experience the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear war.

In a sense, we’re already living through a modern slo-mo version of Hiroshima, no matter where we are or where we’ve traveled. At this moment, with an increasingly fierce megadrought gripping the West and Southwest, the likes of which hasn’t been experienced in at least 1,200 years, among the top candidates for an American Hiroshima would be Phoenix (118 degrees), Las Vegas (114 degrees), the aptly named Death Valley (128 degrees), Palm Springs (123 degrees), and Salt Lake City (107), all record temperatures for this season. A recent report suggests that temperatures in famed Yellowstone National Park are now as high or higher than at any time in the past 20,000 years (and possibly in the last 800,000 years). And temperatures in Oregon and Washington are already soaring in record fashion with more to come, even as the fire season across the West arrives earlier and more fiercely each year. As I write this, for instance, California’s Big Sur region is ablaze in a striking fashion, among growing numbers of western fires. Under the circumstances, ironically enough, one of the only reasons some temperature records might not be set is that sun-blocking smoke from those fires might suppress the heat somewhat.

You should know that you’re on a different planet when even the most mainstream of news sources begins to put climate change in the lead in environmental pieces, as in this recent first sentence of a CNN report: “The incredible pictures of a depleted Lake Mead, on the Nevada-Arizona border, illustrate the effects of drought brought on by climate change.”

You could also imagine our modern Hiroshimas in the Florida Keys, where inexorably rising sea levels, due in part to the massive melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, are already threatening that especially low-lying part of that southern state. Or perhaps the Gulf Coast would qualify, since the heating waters of the Atlantic are now creating record tropical-storm and hurricane seasons that, like the heat and fires in the West, seem to arrive earlier each year. (One Florida city, Miami, is already contemplating building a massive seawall to protect itself against devastating future storm surges.)

In this desperately elongated version of nuclear war, everything being experienced in this country (and in a similar fashion around the world, from Australia’s brutally historic wildfires to a recent heat wave in the Persian Gulf, where temperatures topped 125 degrees) will only grow ever more extreme, even if, by some miracle, those nuclear weapons are kept under wraps. After all, according to a new NASA study, the planet has been trapping far more heat than imagined in this century so far. In addition, a recently revealed draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests that our over-heating future will only grow worse in ways that hadn’t previously been imagined. Tipping points may be reached — from the melting of polar ice sheets and Arctic permafrost (releasing vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere) to the possible transformation of much of the Amazon rain forest into savannah — that could affect the lives of our children and grandchildren disastrously for decades to come. And that would be the case even if greenhouse-gas releases are brought under control relatively quickly.

Once upon a time, who could have imagined that humanity would inherit the kinds of apocalyptic powers previously left to the gods or that, when we finally noticed them, we would prove eerily unable to respond? Even if another nuclear weapon is never used, we stand capable, in slow-motion fashion, of making significant parts of our world uninhabitable — or, for that matter, if we were to act soon, keeping it at least reasonably habitable into the distant future.

Imagine, just as a modest start, a planet on which every dollar earmarked for nuclear weapons would be invested in a green set of solutions to a world growing by the year ever warmer, ever redder, ever less inhabitable.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com (where this article originated). He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2021 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 July 2021

Word Count: 1,977

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President Biden’s first Pentagon budget, released late last month, is staggering by any reasonable standard.  At more than $750 billion for the Defense Department and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy, it represents one of the highest levels of spending since World War II — far higher than the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam wars or President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup of the 1980s, and roughly three times what China spends on its military.

Developments of the past year and a half — an ongoing pandemic, an intensifying mega-drought, white supremacy activities, and racial and economic injustice among them — should have underscored that the greatest threats to American lives are anything but military in nature. But no matter, the Biden administration has decided to double down on military spending as the primary pillar of what still passes for American security policy. And don’t be fooled by that striking Pentagon budget figure either. This year’s funding requests suggest that the total national security budget will come closer to a breathtaking $1.3 trillion.

That mind-boggling figure underscores just how misguided Washington’s current “security” — a word that should increasingly be put in quotation marks — policies really are. No less concerning was the new administration’s decision to go full-speed ahead on longstanding Pentagon plans to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles, including, of course, new nuclear warheads to go with them, at a cost of at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades.

The Trump administration added to that plan projects like a new submarine-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missile, all of which is fully funded in Biden’s first budget. It hardly matters that a far smaller arsenal would be more than adequate to dissuade any country from launching a nuclear attack on the United States or its allies.  A rare glimmer of hope came in a recent internal memo from the Navy suggesting that it may ultimately scrap Trump’s sea-launched cruise missile in next year’s budget submission — but that proposal is already facing intense pushback from nuclear-weapons boosters in Congress.  

In all, Biden’s first budget is a major win for key players in the nuclear-industrial complex like Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor on the new nuclear bomber and a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); General Dynamics, the maker of the new ballistic-missile submarine; Lockheed Martin, which produces sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs); and firms like Honeywell that oversee key elements in the Department of Energy’s nuclear-warhead complex.

The Biden budget does retire some older-generation weapons. The only reason, however, is to fund even more expensive new systems like hypersonic weapons and ones embedded with artificial intelligence, all with the goal of supposedly putting the United States in a position to win a war with China (if anyone could “win” such a war).

China’s military buildup remains, in fact, largely defensive, so ramping up Pentagon spending supposedly in response represents both bad strategy and bad budgeting.  If, sooner or later, cooler heads don’t prevail, the obsession with China that’s gripped the White House, the Pentagon, and key members of Congress could keep Pentagon budgets high for decades to come.

In reality, the principal challenges posed by China are diplomatic and economic, not military, and seeking militarized answers to them will only spark a new Cold War and a risky arms race that could make a superpower nuclear conflict more likely. While there’s much to criticize in China’s policies, from its crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong to its ethnic cleansing and severe repression of its Uyghur population, in basic military capabilities, it doesn’t come faintly close to the United States, nor will it any time soon.  Washington’s military build-up, however, could undermine the biggest opportunity in U.S.-China relations: finding a way to cooperate on issues like climate change that threaten the future of the planet.

As noted, the three-quarters of a trillion dollars the United States spends on the Pentagon budget is just a portion of a much larger figure for the full range of activities of the national security state.  Let’s look, category by category, at what the Biden budget proposes to spend on this broader set of activities.

The Pentagon’s “base budget” The Pentagon’s proposed “base” budget, which, in past years, has included routine spending for fighting ongoing conflicts, was $715 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2022, $10 billion more than last year’s request. Despite complaints to the contrary by advocates of even higher Pentagon spending, that represents no small addition.  It’s larger, for instance, than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No question about it, the Pentagon remains by a long shot the agency with the largest discretionary budget. 

One piece of good news is that this year’s request marks the end of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. That slush fund was used to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also included tens of billions of dollars for pet Pentagon projects that had nothing to do with current conflicts.

While off-budget emergency spending has typically only been used in the initial years of a conflict, OCO became a tool to evade caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011. That legislation has now expired and the Biden administration has heeded the advice of good-government and taxpayer-advocacy groups by eliminating the slush fund entirely.

Unfortunately, its latest budget request still includes $42.1 billion for direct and indirect war-spending costs, which means that, OCO or not, there will be no net reduction in spending. Still, the end of that fund marks a small but potentially significant step towards greater accountability and transparency in the Pentagon budget. Moreover, congressional leaders are urging the Biden administration to seize savings from the ongoing Afghan withdrawal to sooner or later reduce the Pentagon’s top line.

As for what’s in the base budget, there are a number of particularly troubling proposed expenditures that warrant attention and congressional pushback. Spending on the Pentagon’s new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile — known formally as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent — has nearly doubled in the new proposal from $1.4 billion to $2.6 billion.

This may seem like small change in such a budget, but it’s just a down payment on a system that could, in the end, cost more than $100 billion to procure and another $164 billion to operate over its lifetime. More importantly, as former secretary of defense William Perry noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them upon a warning of an attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war based on a false alarm.  In short, the new ICBM is not just costly but exceedingly dangerous for the health of humanity. The Biden budget should have eliminated it, not provided more funding for it.

Another eye-opener is the decision to spend more than $12 billion on the F-35 combat aircraft, a troubled, immensely expensive weapons system whose technical flaws suggest that it may never be fully ready for combat. Such knowledge should, of course, have resulted in a decision to at least pause production on the plane until testing is complete. House Armed Services Committee chair Adam Smith (D-WA) has stated that he’s tired of pouring money down the F-35 “rathole,” while the Air Force’s top officer, General Charles Brown, has compared it to a Ferrari that “you don’t drive to work every day” but “only drive it out on Sundays.”

Consider that an embarrassing admission for a plane once publicized as a future low-cost bulwark for the U.S. combat aircraft fleet. Whether the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, the three services that utilize variants of the F-35, will stay the course and buy more than 2,400 of these aircraft remains to be seen. Count on one thing, though: the F-35 lobby, including a special F-35 caucus in the House of Representatives and the Machinists Union, whose workers build the planes, will fight tooth and nail to keep the program fully funded regardless of whether or not it serves our national security needs.

And keep in mind that the F-35 is only one of many legacies of failed Pentagon modernization efforts. Even if the Pentagon were to acquire its new systems without delays or cost overruns — something rare indeed — its expensive spending plans have already earned this decade the moniker of the “terrible twenties.”

Worse yet, there’s a distinct possibility that Congress will push that budget even higher in response to “wish lists” being circulated by each of the military services. Items on them that have yet to make it into the Biden Pentagon budget include things like — surprise! — more F-35s. The Army’s wish list even includes systems it claimed it needed to cut. That the services are even allowed to make such requests to Congress is symbolic of a breakdown in budgetary discipline of the highest order.

The base budget also includes mandatory spending for items like military retirement. This year’s request adds $12.8 billion to the Pentagon’s tab.

Running Tally: $727.9 billion

The nuclear budget It would be reasonable for you to assume that the Department of Energy’s budget would primarily be devoted to developing new energy sources and combating climate change, but that assumption would, sadly enough, be wildly off the mark.

In fact, more than half of the department’s budget goes to support the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the country’s nuclear weapons program. The NNSA does work on nuclear warheads at eight major locations — California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico (two facilities), South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas — across the country, along with subsidiary facilities in several additional states. NNSA’s proposed FY 2022 budget for nuclear-weapons activities is $15.5 billion, part of a budget for atomic-energy-related projects of $29.9 billion.

The NNSA is notorious for poor management of major projects. It has routinely been behind schedule and over cost — to the tune of $28 billion in the past two decades. Its future plans seem destined to hit the pocketbook of the American taxpayer significantly, with projected long-term spending on nuclear weapons activities rising by a proposed $113 billion in a single year.

 Nuclear budget $29.9 billion

Running tally: $757.8 billion

Defense-related activities This is a catch-all category, totaling $10.5 billion in the FY 2022 request, including the international activities of the FBI and payments to the CIA retirement fund, among other things. 

Defense-related activities $10.5 billion

Running tally: $768.3 billion

The intelligence budget There is very little public information available about how the nation’s — count ’em! — 17 intelligence agencies spend our tax dollars. The majority of congressional representatives don’t even have staff members capable of accessing any kind of significant information on intelligence spending, a huge obstacle to the ability of Congress to oversee these agencies and their activities in any meaningful way. So far this year there is only a top-line figure available for spending on national (but not military) intelligence activities of $62.3 billion.  Most of this money is already believed to be hidden away in the Pentagon budget, so it’s not added to the running tally displayed below.

 National intelligence activities: $62.3 billion

Running tally: $768.3 billion

The military and Defense Department retirement and health budget The Treasury Department covers military retirement and health expenditures that should be in the Pentagon’s base budget. Net spending on these two items — minus interest earned and payments into the two accounts — was a negative $9.7 billion in FY 2022.

Military and Defense Department retirement and health costs: -$9.7 billion

Running tally: $758.6 billion

Veterans Affairs budget The full costs of war go far beyond the expenditures contained in the Pentagon budget, including the costs of taking care of the veterans of America’s “forever wars.” Over 2.7 million U.S. military personnel have cycled through war zones in this century and hundreds of thousands of them have suffered severe physical or psychological injuries, ratcheting up the costs of veterans’ care accordingly. In addition, as we emerge from the Covid-19 disaster months, the Veterans Affairs Department anticipates a “bow wave” of extra costs and demands for its services from veterans who deferred care during the worst of the pandemic. The total FY2022 budget request for Veterans Affairs is $284.5 billion.

Veterans Affairs budget: $284.5 billion

Running tally: $1,043.1 billion

International Affairs budget The International Affairs budget includes funding for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, integral parts of the U.S. national security strategy. Here, investments in diplomacy and economic and health activities overseas are supplemented by about $5.6 billion in military aid to other countries.  The Biden administration has proposed overall International Affairs funding for FY 2022 at $79 billion.

 International Affairs budget: $79 billion

Running tally: $1,122.1 billion

The Homeland Security budget In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created by throwing together a wide range of agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. The proposed DHS budget for FY2022 is $52.2 billion, nearly one-third of which goes to Customs and Border Protection.

Homeland Security budget: $52.2 billion

Running tally: $1,174.3 billion

Interest on the debt The national security state, as outlined above, is responsible for about 20% of the interest due on the U.S. debt, a total of more than $93.8 billion.

Interest on the debt: $93.8 billion

Final tally: $1,268.1 billion

Are you feeling safer now? Theoretically, that nearly $1.3 trillion to be spent on national security writ large is supposed to be devoted to activities that make America and the world a safer place. That’s visibly not the case when it comes to so many of the funds that will be expended in the name of national security — from taxpayer dollars thrown away on weapons systems that don’t work to those spent on an unnecessary and dangerous new generation of nuclear weapons, to continuing to reinforce and extend the historically unprecedented U.S. military presence on this planet by maintaining more than 800 overseas military bases around the world.

If managed properly, President Biden’s initiatives on rebuilding domestic infrastructure and combatting climate change would be far more central to keeping people safe than throwing more money at the Pentagon and related agencies. Unfortunately, unlike the proposed Pentagon budget, significant Green New Deal-style infrastructure funding is far less likely to be passed by a bitterly divided Congress.  Washington evidently doesn’t care that such investments would also be significantly more effective job creators.

A shift in spending toward these and other urgent priorities like addressing the possibility of future pandemics would clearly be a far better investment in “national security” than the present proposed Pentagon budget. Sadly, though, too many of America’s political leaders have clearly drawn the wrong lessons from the pandemic. If this country continues to squander staggering sums on narrowly focused national-security activities at a time when our greatest challenges are anything but military in nature, this country (and the world) will be a far less safe place in the future.

 

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

William D. Hartung, also a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the author, with Elias Yousif, of “U.S. Arms Sales Trends 2020 and Beyond: From Trump to Biden.”

Copyright ©2021 Mandy Smithberger and William D. Hartung — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 June 2021

Word Count: 2,515

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“I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point. While dimly aware that its publication qualified as a literary event, I felt no urge to read it. At that moment, I had more immediate priorities to attend to, chief among them: preparing for my upcoming deployment to Vietnam.

Had I reflected on Vonnegut’s question then, my guess is that I would have judged the present to be both very wide and very deep and, as a white American male, mine to possess indefinitely. Life, of course, was by no means perfect. The Vietnam War had obviously not gone exactly as expected. The cacophonous upheaval known as “the Sixties” had produced considerable unease and consternation. Yet a majority of Americans — especially those with their hands on the levers of political, corporate, and military power — saw little reason to doubt that history remained on its proper course and that was good enough for me.

In other words, despite the occasional setbacks and disappointments of the recent past, this country’s global preeminence remained indisputable, not just in theory but in fact. That the United States would enjoy such a status for the foreseeable future seemed a foregone conclusion. After all, if any single nation prefigured the destiny of humankind, it was ours. Among the lessons taught by history itself, nothing ranked higher or seemed more obvious. Primacy, in other words, defined our calling.

Any number of motives, most of them utterly wrong-headed, had prompted the United States to go to war in Vietnam. Yet, in retrospect, I’ve come to believe that one motive took precedence over all others: Washington’s fierce determination to deflect any doubt about this country’s status as history’s sole chosen agent. By definition, once U.S. officials had declared that preserving a non-communist South Vietnam constituted a vital national security interest, it became one, ipso facto. Saying it made it so, even if, by any rational calculation, the fate of South Vietnam had negligible implications for the wellbeing of the average American.

As it happened, the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were soon forgotten. Although that conflict ended in humiliating defeat, the reliance on force to squelch doubts about American dominion persisted. And once the Cold War ended, taking with it any apparent need for the United States to exercise self-restraint, the militarization of American policy reached full flood. Using force became little short of a compulsion. Affirming American “global leadership” provided an overarching rationale for the sundry saber-rattling demonstrations, skirmishes, interventions, bombing campaigns, and large-scale wars in which U.S. forces have continuously engaged ever since.

Simultaneously, however, that wide, deep, and taken-for-granted present of my youth was slipping away. As our wars became longer and more numerous, the problems besetting the nation only multiplied, while the solutions on offer proved ever flimsier.

The possibility that a penchant for war might correlate with mounting evidence of national distress largely escaped notice. This was especially the case in Washington where establishment elites clung to the illusion that military might testifies to national greatness.

Somewhere along the way — perhaps midway between Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016 and the assault on the Capitol in January of this year — it dawned on me that the present that I once knew and took as a given is now gone for good. A conclusion that I would have deemed sacrilegious half a century ago now strikes me as self-evident: The American experiment in dictating the course of history has reached a dead-end.

How could that have happened over the course of just a few decades? And where does the demise of that reassuring present — arrangements that I and most other Americans once took to be fixed and true — leave us today? What comes next?

Inflection point “So it goes.” As Vonnegut recounts the journey of his time-traveling protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five, that terse phrase serves as a recurring motif. It defines Vonnegut’s worldview: fate is arbitrary, destiny inexplicable, history a random affair. There is no why. Whatever happens, happens. So it goes.

Such sentiments are deeply at odds with the way Americans are accustomed to thinking about past, present, and future. Since the founding of our republic, if not before, we have habitually imputed to history a clearly identifiable purpose, usually connected to the spread of freedom and democracy as we understand those concepts.

Yet as crises without easy solutions continue to accumulate, Vonnegut’s cynicism – tantamount to civic blasphemy — might warrant fresh consideration. “So it goes” admits to severe limits on human agency. While offering little in terms of remedies, it just might offer a first step toward recovering a collective sense of modesty and self-awareness.

Because he’s president, Joe Biden must necessarily profess to believe otherwise. By any objective measure, Biden is a long-in-the-tooth career politician of no particular distinction. He is clearly a decent and well-meaning fellow. Yet his prior record of substantive achievement, whether as a long-serving senator from Delaware or as vice president, is thin. He is the Democratic Party’s equivalent of a B-list movie actor honored with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in tribute to his sheer doggedness and longevity.

That said, some Americans entertain high hopes for the Biden presidency. Especially in quarters where Trump Derangement Syndrome remains acute, expectations of Biden single-handedly charting a course back from the abyss toward which his predecessor had allowed the nation to drift are palpable. So, too, is the belief that he will thereby reconstitute some version of American political, economic, and military primacy, even in a world of Covid-19, climate change, a rising China, and a host of other daunting challenges. Despite this very tall order, “so it goes” can have no place in Biden’s lexicon.

During its decades-long interval of apparent global dominion, American expectations about the role presidents were to play grew appreciably. Commentators fell into the habit of referring to the occupant of the Oval Office as “the most powerful man in the world,” presiding over the planet’s most powerful nation. The duties prescribed by the U.S. Constitution came nowhere near to defining the responsibilities and prerogatives of the chief executive. Prophet, seer, source of inspiration, interpreter of the zeitgeist, and war-maker par excellence: presidents were expected to function as each of these.

In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt boosted the morale of Depression-era Americans by assuring them that they had a “rendezvous with destiny.” At the very moment when he entered the White House in 1961, John F. Kennedy thrilled his countrymen with a pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, [and] meet any hardship” to prevent the extinction of liberty itself globally. In his second inaugural address, delivered in the midst of two protracted wars, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that “ending tyranny in our world” had become “the calling of our time.” Even today, tyranny shows no signs of disappearing. Even so — and notwithstanding four years of Donald Trump — the delusion that presidents possess visionary gifts persists. And so it goes.

As a result, whether he likes it or not — and he probably likes it quite a lot — observers are looking to Biden to demonstrate similarly prophetic gifts. Even though expressing himself in less than soaring terms, he’s sought to oblige. According to the president, the United States — and by implication the world as a whole — has today arrived at an “inflection point,” a technocratic tagline that’s become a recurring motif for both him and his administration.

That “inflection point” conveys little by way of poetry in no way diminishes its significance. Quite the opposite, it expresses Biden’s own sense of the historical moment. Implicit in the phrase is a sense of urgency. Also implicit is a call to action: “Here we are. There is where we need to go. Follow me.” Consider it the very inverse of “so it goes.”

Three vectors Given both Biden’s advanced age and his party’s precarious majority in Congress, not to mention the legions of Americans hankering to return Donald Trump to the White House, the opportunity to act on this imagined inflection point may well prove fleeting at best, nonexistent at worst. If Republicans gain control of the Senate or House of Representatives next year, “so it goes” may become the mournful refrain of a lame-duck presidency. Hence, Biden’s understandable determination to seize the moment, before rising inequality at home, a rising China abroad, rising seas everywhere, and a potentially resurgent Trumpism swamp his administration.

So even though the Biden team is not yet fully in place, the inflection point already finds expression in three distinct commitments. Together, they give us a sense of what to expect from this administration — and what we should worry about.

The first commitment bears the imprint of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It assumes that vigorous government action under Washington’s benign and watchful eye can indeed repair a battered and broken economy, restoring prosperity, while redressing deep inequities. Given the necessary resources, that government can solve problems, even big ones, has for more than a century been a central precept of American liberalism. To demonstrate liberalism’s continued viability, Biden proposes to spend trillions of dollars to “build back better,” while curbing the excesses of a neoliberalism to which his own party contributed mightily. The spending and the curbs inevitably elicit charges that Biden has embraced socialism or something worse. So it goes in American politics these days.

The second commitment that derives from Biden’s inflection point centers on the culture wars. Its progressive purpose is to supplant a social order in which white heterosexual males (like Biden and me) have enjoyed a privileged place with a new order that prizes diversity. Creating such a new order implies expunging the non-trivial vestiges of American racism, sexism, and homophobia. Given trends within late modernity that emphasize autonomy and choice over tradition and obligation, this effort may eventually succeed, but rest assured, such success will not come anytime soon. In the meantime, Biden will catch all kinds of grief from those professing to cherish a set of received values that ostensibly formed the foundation of the American Experiment. So it goes.

The third commitment deriving from that inflection point relates to America’s once-and-future role in the world. Suffused with nostalgia, this commitment seeks to return the planet to the heyday of American dominion, putting the United States once more in history’s driver’s seat. Reduced to a Bidenesque bumper sticker, it insists that “America is back.” With decades of foreign policy experience to draw on, the president appears committed to making good on that assertion.

His much ballyhooed first trip abroad put this aspiration on vivid display, while also revealing its remarkable hollowness. As a start, Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a vapid revision of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, in essence posing as ersatz versions of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Few who witnessed the charade were fooled.

Then Air Force One delivered the president to Brussels where he cajoled the members of NATO into tagging China as a looming threat. Doing so meant ignoring the ignominious failure of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan and disregarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s reminder that “NATO is an organization that concerns the North Atlantic,” whereas China just happens to be located on the other side of the world.

The pièce de résistance came when Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a nearly substance-free “summit” in Geneva. Possessing neither the drama of Kennedy vs. Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, nor the substance of Ronald Reagan’s encounter with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, it proved an empty show, even if it did play to a full theater.

Still, the entire trip and the bloated media coverage it generated were instructive. They illuminated what Biden’s inflection point truly signifies for America’s role in the world. The Biden administration yearns to reinstall familiar verities dating from World War II and the Cold War as the basis of U.S. policy. Many members of the press corps share that yearning. Hence the inclination to define the present age in terms of a new Cold War version of great-power competition, while paying little more than lip service to the need for fresh thinking and vigorous action on matters like climate change, environmental degradation, refugee flows, and nuclear proliferation.

Modeled at least in part on a New Deal that Americans remember fondly but inaccurately, Biden’s economic policies will in all likelihood promote growth and reduce unemployment. Even taking into account the risk of unintended consequences such as inflation, the effort is probably worth undertaking.

By wading into the culture wars, Biden might also bring the country closer to fulfilling the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No doubt arguments about the proper meaning of freedom and equality will continue. But the correct goal is not utopia. Merely reducing the gap between professed ideals and prevailing practice will suffice. Here, too, the effort is at least worth undertaking.

When it comes to America’s role in the world, however, it becomes difficult to profess even modest optimism. If Biden clings to a calcified and militarized conception of national security — as he appears intent on doing — he will put his entire presidency at risk. Rather than restoring American primacy, he will accelerate American decline.

Harkening back to where the nation was when I received my commission in 1969, I’m struck today by how little we Americans learned from our Vietnam misadventure. Pain did not translate into wisdom. That we have learned even less from our various armed conflicts since appears only too obvious. When it comes to war, Americans remain willfully and incorrigibly ignorant. We have paid dearly for that ignorance and will likely pay even more in the years ahead. So it goes.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book, After the Apocalypse:  America’s Role in a World Transformed, has just been published.

Copyright ©2021 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 June 2021

Word Count: 2,326

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Groton and New London, Connecticut, are home to about 65,000 people, three colleges, the Coast Guard Academy, 15 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines capable of destroying the world many times over, and General Dynamics’ Electric Boat, a multi-billion-dollar private corporation that offers stock options to its shareholders and mega-salaries to its top executives as it pockets taxpayer dollars and manufactures yet more of those stealthy, potentially world-ending machines. Whew!  That was a long sentence!

Naval Submarine Base New London stretches along the east side of the Thames River, straddling the towns of Groton and Ledyard. Occupying at least 680 acres, the base has more than 160 major facilities. The 15 subs based there are the largest contingent in the nation. They’re manufactured just down the river at Electric Boat/General Dynamics, which once built the Polaris and Trident nuclear submarines, employs more than 12,000 people in our region, and is planning to hire another 2,400 this year to meet a striking “demand” for the newest version of such subs.

Some readers might already be asking themselves: Are submarines still a thing? Do we really still put men (and women) far beneath the ocean’s surface in a giant metal tube, ready to launch a nuclear first strike at a moment’s notice? At a time when the greatest threats to human life may be viruses hidden in our own exhales, our infrastructure is crumbling, and so much else is going wrong, are we really spending billions of dollars on submarines?

Yes!

Back in 2010, the Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review called for a “recapitalization of the nation’s sea-based deterrent,” as though we hadn’t been spending anything on submarines previously.  To meet that goal, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and now the Biden administration all agreed that, on a planet already filled with devastating nuclear weapons, the U.S. must begin construction of a new class of 12 Columbia ballistic missile submarines.

The Navy’s 2021 budget submission estimates that the total procurement cost for that 12-ship class of subs will be $109.8 billion. However, even a number that big might prove nothing but rough back-of-the-napkin figuring. After all, according to the Navy’s 2022 request, the cost estimate for the first submarine of the 12 they plan to build, the lead ship in its new program, had already grown from $14.39 billion to $15.03 billion.  Now, that may not sound like a lot, but string out all those zeros behind it and you’ll realize that the difference is more than $640 million, just a little less than what Baltimore — a city of more than 600,000 people — will get in federal pandemic relief aid.

Swirling around those submarines are descriptions citing “strategy” and “capability.” But don’t be fooled: they’ll be potential world killers. Each of those 12 new subs will be armed with 16 Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs, which have a range of 4,500 miles and can carry 14 W-76-1 thermonuclear warheads. Each one of those warheads is six times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the U.S. military detonated over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Start multiplying 12 times 16 times 14 times 6 and there isn’t enough world to destroy with math like that. After all, the single Hiroshima bomb, “small” as it was, killed an estimated 140,000 people and turned the city into rubble and ash.

The best way to understand the Columbia class submarine, then, is as a $100 billion-plus initiative that aims to deliver 16,128 Hiroshimas.

Submarine capital of the world My family and I live in New London and evidence of the military is everywhere here. There’s a cannon planted amid the roses at the entrance to the motel right off the highway near our house. And another in front of the laundromat. Huge American flags flap at the car dealership that offers special financing to Navy personnel.

Signs declaring New London/Groton to be the “Submarine Capital of the World” festoon the highways into town. The huge naval submarine base and the General Dynamics/Electric Boat yards dominate the Groton side of the Thames River. There’s a massive garage for half-built submarines, painted a very seventies shade of green, that chews up most of the scenery on the Groton side of the river, alongside cranes and docks and industrial buildings in various hues of grey. It’s dismal. New London’s waterfront homes and private beaches look out on three generations of military-industrial-complex architecture. We wouldn’t want to live in Groton, but at least they feast their eyes on our quaint downtown and the parks that stretch along our side of the river.

On the New London side, General Dynamics/Electric Boat looks more like a corporate campus than a shipyard. It employs a lot of people, but there are still plenty of New Londoners who work at jobs that have nothing to do with the military or the business of building and designing submarines. Unfortunately, that seems to be changing, because General Dynamics is ramping up its engineering and manufacturing operations in order to build that new fleet of submarines.

Local developers smell money in the air, which means that our downtown is getting a makeover intended to attract the sort of young professionals who will design and oversee the production of those subs. A new development right near New London’s General Dynamics complex is now renting studio apartments for $1,300 a month, even though ours is the fifth poorest city in Connecticut.

Side bonus? killer kitsch An uproar of protest over our rampant version of local militarism rose to a sustained din in the 1970s and 1980s but has since dulled to a whisper, despite regular protest vigils and demonstrations carried out by a stalwart handful of people. It’s tough to understand since the danger is still so imminent. After all, the symbolic Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now stands at 100 seconds to nuclear midnight, as close as it’s ever been in its 70 years of existence. Meanwhile, the United States will once again spend staggering sums on its military in fiscal year 2022.

The upside? Our local thrift stops are full of the strange kitsch that comes with military occupation. I drink my morning coffee out of a white mug that commemorates Electric Boat’s 1987 Christmas Blood Drive, emblazoned with a red drop of blood, the company’s logo, and the phrase “I give so that others may live.”

I’m a lifelong pacifist, the child of people who, as protesters, climbed over fences and cut through locks in order to enter U.S. weapons facilities like that naval base at Groton. I spent my childhood at the Pentagon, where, a few times a year, my parents and our friends made elaborate spectacles out of blood and ash and cardboard tombstones, leaving Pentagon workers to walk through the muck and mess, tracking it into the headquarters of the Department of Defense. And yet I’ll confess to you, in the privacy of TomDispatch, that I do have a genuine weakness for military kitsch.

My husband is a lifelong pacifist, too. His parents went to malls to hold “Stop War Toys” demonstrations and entered toy stores to put “this glorifies violence” stickers on G.I. Joe and Rambo dolls. He spent his summers outside Electric Boat in Groton. His family and their friends went to the commissionings and christenings of newly built subs, holding protest signs, blocking the entrances, and trying to leaflet the well-dressed guests coming to those strange ceremonies with oddly Christian baptismal overtones to them. And yet (or do I mean, and so?) he loves military kitsch, too. As a result, whenever we go to our local Goodwill, Salvation Army store, or neighborhood yard sales, we invariably keep a lookout for mugs and beer glasses from our corner of the military-industrial complex.

It’s the ultimate in-joke for us. Such killer kitsch helps us manage our deep discomfort with living in a militarized community.

One made-in-China coffee mug of relatively recent vintage that we own, for instance, has a picture on one side of a submarine and the phrase “Virginia Class: Confronting the Challenge, Driving Out Cost.” The other reads: “Designed for Affordability: General Dynamics, Electric Boat.”

That second mug always makes me snicker because the Virginia Class submarines were built by Electric Boat in New London/Groton in collaboration with Newport News Shipbuilding, part of Huntington Ingalls in Virginia.

Those boats cost a mere $3.45 billion each and that “two-yard strategy” — Connecticut and Virginia — was meant to keep both of those corporate entities from financial disaster. (“Afloat” is the word that comes to mind.) However, it made for an even more expensive product as partially assembled submarines had to be floated laboriously up and down the Eastern seaboard. According to Ronald O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service, “A primary aim of the arrangement was to minimize the cost of building Virginia-class boats at a relatively low annual rate in two shipyards (rather than entirely in a single shipyard) while preserving key submarine-construction skills at both shipyards.” Not likely, as it turned out. Then again, what weapons-building project doesn’t have staggering cost overruns in twenty-first-century America?

Honestly, can you imagine the federal government contracting with Hershey and Nestle to collaborate on a gigantic new candy bar and then paying extra for it because their workers needed to pass the product back and forth between their factories, hundreds of miles apart? Such thoughts regularly occur to me as I drink my morning coffee out of that hilariously labelled “Designed for Affordability” mug. The anger that follows is like a second jolt of caffeine!

Happy hour? Speaking of rage, we drink our happy-hour beers out of glasses commemorating the USS Pittsburgh, SSN 720. That Los Angeles class submarine was commissioned in 1985 and was one of two that launched Tomahawk Cruise missiles at Iraq during 1991’s Gulf War.

The beer glasses make me think of the dingy strip of bars right outside the main gate of the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton. They’re all closed now, but in the 1970s heyday of submarine manufacturing, bars like El Bolero (shortened to The Elbow) and Elfie’s served the shipyard workers and submariners alike. The lunch crowd was thick, the bar full of small glasses of beer, and the workers would drop dollar bills in garbage cans as they filed out and back across the street to work. Those bars estimated then that they made more in their daily lunchtime dollar-bill rushes than other local bars and restaurants made in a week.

At some point, the higher-ups at Electric Boat grew embarrassed by the daily spectacle of drunken workers, beer bottles littering the curbs, regular fender-benders, and the fights that tend to accompany excessive drinking. Their solution? They stopped letting the workers leave for lunch.

As a younger person, I imagined that daytime drinking served to dull the cognitive dissonance of working people who put food on the table for their children by welding the machines that threatened all children anywhere on this planet. As I grow older, however, I wonder if such daytime drinking wasn’t just fun.

The small no Another way we manage our discomfort with our local version of the military-industrial complex and what it means for this country and this planet is to be a small but visible “No” amid the ubiquity of militarism in this town, amid all those chubby, cute submarines that adorn our public spaces.

We stand on a bleak street corner near the base for at least an hour once a week to protest the world we find ourselves in. It’s admittedly a small thing, but we do it without fail. Souped-up trucks and fast cars with custom paint jobs rev their engines as they pass, cutting that corner uncomfortably close, while tossing gravel in their wake. The vehicles are mostly driven by clean-cut young men, often in the uniform of the Groton-New London Naval Submarine base. They’re off for an hour of freedom at the newly completed, squeaky-clean Chipotle up the hill or the seedy Mynx Cabaret across the street. If we have staying power, we’ll see the Chipotle crew come tearing back down the hill at the end of that hour.

On one corner is a grimy little liquor store with a big parking lot, the kind of place that should make you question your drinking habits. (If I don’t have a problem, why am I parked here?) On the second corner is an empty lot with the vestiges of a once-thriving car-repair shop. The third has a truck rental company, the signpost of a transitory community. And sure enough, the license plates on the cars streaming into the base hail from Navy-centered communities like ours around the country.

Route 12 is a mini-highway where cars regularly hit 70 miles an hour as they roar up the hill. We’re desperately small and slow by comparison. My mother paces the sidewalk, I stand still, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, while our friend Cal Robertson sits. A Vietnam Veteran, he came back from that long-gone war physically unscathed but deeply disturbed by everything he witnessed and experienced.

Cal holds a sign emblazoned with this question: “What About the Children?” Some cars honk in response.  My guess: not so much in support of his message as in recognition of his regular presence over these long decades. My mother and I are interlopers, occasional sign holders counting down the minutes, but Cal — comfortable in a walker that converts to a chair — could do this all day.

My mother holds a simple sign that reads “No Nukes.” For the men in trucks headed out to lunch, I painted on mine: “Meatball Subs, not Nuclear Submarines.” It receives an occasional nod or grin. And in the meantime, in our very community, the place where I’m raising my kids, the military-industrial complex continues to invest in and build vessels meant only for the end of the world.

Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and writes the Little Insurrections column for WagingNonviolence.Org. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.

Copyright ©2021 Frida Berrigan — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 June 2021

Word Count: 2,320

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West Virginia, a state first established in defiance of slavery, has recently become ground zero in the fight for voting rights. In an early June op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin vowed to maintain the Senate filibuster, while opposing the For the People Act, a bill to expand voting rights. Last week, after mounting pressure and a leaked Zoom recording with billionaire donors, he showed potential willingness to move on the filibuster and proposed a “compromise” on voting rights. Nonetheless, his claim that the filibuster had been critical to protecting the “rights of Democrats in the past” and his pushback on important voting-rights protections requires scrutiny.

After all, the modern use of the filibuster first emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to civil rights and anti-lynching legislation. In 1949, senator and southern Democrat Richard Russell, then a chief defender of the filibuster, unabashedly explained that “nobody mentions any other legislation in connection with it.”

Manchin’s apathy toward democracy actively harms millions of West Virginians in a state where 40% of the population is poor or low-income and voter turn-out rates remain dismally low. Indeed, that filibuster potentially stands directly in the way of billions of dollars in infrastructure and job-development funding that would buoy the Mountaineer State, as well as many other states across the country. At the same time, the protection and expansion of voting rights would benefit poor and low-income West Virginians significantly.

The debate on protecting voting rights and on the filibuster in Congress is only part of an assault on democracy underway nationally. Halfway through 2021, the very Republican extremists who continue to cry wolf about a “stolen” presidential election have introduced close to 400 voter suppression bills in 48 states (including West Virginia), 20 of which have already been signed into law. As journalist Ari Berman recently tweeted all too accurately, this wave of reactionary legislation is the “greatest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s.”

When history circles back on itself like this, it’s worth paying attention, especially since the years following the Civil War represented the most significant wave of democracy this country had ever seen. For almost a decade during that First Reconstruction, formerly enslaved men and women forged fragile but powerful political coalitions with poor whites across the South, leading state governments to advance the rights of dispossessed millions, while securing key federal legislation and constitutional amendments that would forever change the country.

The racist and violent backlash to Reconstruction was more than a reaction to the enfranchisement of former slaves and the empowerment of propertyless whites. It was a response to the threat a multiracial democracy from below posed to the still all-too-powerful remnants of the southern Slavocracy and the barons of Wall Street some thousand miles to the north. Today, the stirrings of a similarly transformative era are palpable and the growing antidemocratic counterattack suggests that the modern equivalent of those Slavocrats and the billionaire barons of this moment feel it, too.

As inequality and poverty continue to deepen, poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans favors commonsense policies like universal healthcare, wage increases, affordable housing, and voting rights. And from the multiracial Black Lives Matter uprisings last summer, which pulled in tens of millions of Americans, to the historic electorate that voted in the Biden-Harris administration, it may soon be increasingly clear that this majority is willing to act to make its needs and demands the order of the day.

In the wake of that First Reconstruction and what might be called the Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights era from the 1940s to 1970s, we may now be in the early days of a Third Reconstruction. Still, no one should ignore another reality as well: those who would stop such a moment still wield enormous power and will continue to use every imaginable tool of division and subterfuge, from suppressing the vote and maintaining the filibuster to limiting wages and supporting highly militarized police forces.

The first two Reconstructions have much to teach us about the possibilities and dangers that abound today.

A tale of two Reconstructions The First Reconstruction emerged in the bloody wake of the Civil War and 250 years of slavery. For roughly eight years, 1865-1877, formerly enslaved people were joined by poor white southern farmers who saw that they shared certain political aspirations and economic interests. Within just a few years, such cross-racial alliances controlled state houses in the South, passing some of the most progressive education, civil rights, and labor laws in this country’s history.

In several states, new constitutions granted the right to public education (to this day, still not federally enshrined). Such fusion coalitions, often led by the formerly enslaved, knew that their freedom depended on a vibrant democracy, so they expanded access to the ballot. At the federal level, these new Southern governments in conjunction with their Northern counterparts, helped advance the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, later known as the Reconstruction amendments.

For too brief a time, there was a historic redistribution of political and economic power that offered a glimpse of what true democracy could look like on American soil. But from the start, such a program faced enormous opposition. Not surprisingly, many former Confederates saw Black citizenship, as well as any kind of interracial working-class alliance,  as inherently illegitimate. As a result, old slave-holding politicians fought the use of taxes to support public education, especially for Black children, while working ceaselessly to suppress the Black vote.

In the process, violence and terror quickly came into use. It was within the crucible of Reconstruction that the Ku Klux Klan first took shape, with the goal of terrorizing Black and white leaders alike. White-led mob violence and outright race massacres in both the North and South shook this budding interracial democracy to the core and, after the federal government abandoned the effort, white extremists across the South wrested back power. In place of Reconstruction, they formulated a Jim Crow system that would again codify a strict racial hierarchy and stand until the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed deep into the next century.

That Second Reconstruction began quietly in the 1940s, gaining steam and strength in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, it’s better known than the first, though its currents are more complex than the conventional narrative suggests. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, community leaders and political organizers, Black and white, in the North and the South, continued to fight for the civil and economic rights that had briefly flourished after the Civil War. Through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II, Black leaders in particular focused on establishing an expansive vision of human rights amid the squalor of deeply entrenched inequality.

At the same time, using everything from race-baiting to anti-communism, the federal government worked diligently to suppress the very idea that political and civil rights might in any way be linked with economic rights (as physical and sexual violence continued to be directed at Blacks). In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court declared that segregation in education was unconstitutional, a ruling that helped fuel grassroots efforts to challenge its legitimacy in all public and private institutions. Following that ruling, the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 would prove a catalyst for the continued growth of Black freedom struggles. Soon enough, a massive reconstruction movement arose across the country demanding justice and equality.

That Second Reconstruction ushered in the end of legal segregation and Jim Crow. In its place, major democratic reforms were implemented; voting rights expanded; and, in some Southern states, Black politicians were elected to office for the first time in a century. As with the First Reconstruction, the impact of such breakthroughs were felt not just in the South nor in relation to a narrow set of issues, but by poor and dispossessed people nationwide. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty, creating significant new federal programs of social uplift. Sadly enough, however, by the late 1960s, as ever more government funding and attention was squandered on an increasingly disastrous war in Vietnam, government action still failed to meet the needs of millions of Americans and some of the new anti-poverty programs, starved for funds, began to falter.

Recognizing that this reconstruction moment might be lost, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others called for the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. Combining the energies of the Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and farm worker movements, the Poor People’s Campaign made plans to camp out on the Washington Mall until its demands for social justice were met. That encampment, called Resurrection City, was constructed in the late spring of 1968, just months after King’s assassination. Only six weeks later, it would be razed by the police, a sign of the times amid a growing wave of racist and anti-poor actions that had already begun to sweep the nation.

This counterattack on the Second Reconstruction to come would be encoded in politics as the Southern Strategy –  a conscious effort by extremist elites in the Republican Party to win back power across the South by rebuilding a regressive form of cross-class white solidarity. Having grasped American history, including the rise and fall of the First Reconstruction era, they knew that controlling the South was key to controlling the country. Using a new vocabulary of racist dog-whistles, they set out to undermine the gains of the previous decade, while rolling back the rights of the poor and people of color. In many ways, half a century later, the United States is still living through the fallout from that moment.

The stirrings of a Third Reconstruction In 2013, 17 people were arrested outside the General Assembly building in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were protesting the rise to power of extremists in all three branches of the state’s government. The result, in the previous decades, had been a full-spectrum assault on democracy and the rights of everyday North Carolinians, especially the poor and people of color. This had included attacks on public-school funding and public healthcare, as well as immigrant and LGBTQ rights. To tie it all together, the state politicians of that moment had used thinly veiled racist claims of voter fraud (sound familiar?) to pass the worst voter-suppression laws in a generation.

What began as a small action, however, quickly grew into the largest state-government-focused civil-disobedience campaign in American history. The architect of that campaign and the animating visionary for the Third Reconstruction was Reverend William J. Barber II. He and other leaders of what became known as the Forward Together Moral Movement had studied the history of the two Reconstructions in North Carolina and recognized the historic possibilities in their growing movement. Thanks to sustained organizing, they broke through the silos of single-issue politics and so flipped the governor’s house and, in the longer run, shifted the balance of power in the state supreme court. In the process, they overturned a monster voter-suppression law that, according to a federal court, targeted African-Americans “with almost surgical precision.”

This movement, which I first connected with in 2013, is a shining example of what might be called modern reconstruction politics. The trauma of the 2007-2008 recession and the brief rise of the Occupy movement helped transform a generation who found themselves with worse economic prospects than their parents. Many of them and the generation that followed have joined people from every walk of life to sustain movements ranging from Black Lives Matter and the Poor People’s Campaign (of which I’m the co-chair) to Indigenous people’s struggles and a rising wave of climate-justice activism on an ever more endangered planet.

These intersecting movements are, notably enough, generally multiracial in character and often led by poor people. Better yet, as the polls tell us, their calls for sweeping reforms have been backed by popular opinion — and even have growing support in Congress. In late May, for instance, Democratic congressional representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal (backed by other representatives) sponsored a congressional resolution aptly entitled “Third Reconstruction: Fully Addressing Poverty and Low Wages From the Bottom Up.” It called on the nation to raise the minimum wage, enact comprehensive and just immigration reform, and expand voting rights.

The First and Second Reconstructions both emerged during moments of significant political turmoil and socioeconomic change, similar to what we’re living through today. Hourly wages for most workers have essentially stagnated since the 1970s, while income and wealth inequality have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, technological innovation has made increasing numbers of people superfluous to the economy, while producing a historic shift in downward mobility for middle-income earners. In the richest country in world history, poverty, joblessness, and homelessness have become permanent fixtures of American life, with at least 140 million people living in poverty, often just a $400 emergency away from utter ruin.

They represent a sleeping giant that, amid much upheaval, may be waking up to the injustice of voter suppression, the denial of healthcare, the suppression of wages, the state-sanctioned murder of people of color and the poor, the poisoning of America’s waters and air, and so much more.

When I think about the possibilities of this social awakening, I’m reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., just months before he launched the Poor People’s Campaign and was then murdered: “There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”

Exactly such a force is possible today. Onwards to a Third Reconstruction!

Liz Theoharis writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

Copyright ©2021 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 June 2021

Word Count: 2,308

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Fifteen months ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus unleashed Covid-19. Since then, it’s killed more than 3.8 million people worldwide (and possibly many more). Finally, a return to normalcy seems likely for a distinct minority of the world’s people, those living mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and China. That’s not surprising.  The concentration of wealth and power globally has enabled rich countries to all but monopolize available vaccine doses. For the citizens of low-income and poor countries to have long-term pandemic security, especially the 46% of the world’s population who survive on less than $5.50 a day, this inequity must end, rapidly — but don’t hold your breath.

The global north: normalcy returns In the United States new daily infections, which peaked in early January, had plummeted 96% by June 16th. The daily death toll also dropped — by 92% — and the consequences were apparent. Big-city streets were bustling again, as shops and restaurants became ever busier. Americans were shedding their reluctance to travel by plane or train, as schools and universities prepared to resume “live instruction” in the fall. Zoom catch-ups were yielding to socializing the old-fashioned way.

By that June day, new infections and deaths had fallen substantially below their peaks in other wealthy parts of the world as well. In Canada, cases had dropped by 89% and deaths by 94%; in Europe by 87% and 87%; and in the United Kingdom by 84% and 99%.

Yes, European governments were warier than the U.S. about giving people the green light to resume their pre-pandemic lifestyles and have yet to fully abolish curbs on congregating and traveling. Perhaps recalling Britain’s previous winter surge, thanks to the B.1.1.7 mutation (initially discovered there) and the recent appearance of two other virulent strains of Covid-19, B.1.167 and B.1.617.2 (both first detected in India), Downing Street has retained restrictions on social gatherings. It’s even put off a full reopening on June 21st, as previously planned. And that couldn’t have been more understandable. After all, on June 17th, the new case count had reached 10,809, the highest since late March. Still, new daily infections there are less than a tenth what they were in early January. So, like the U.S., Britain and the rest of Europe are returning to some semblance of normalcy.

The global south: a long road ahead Lately, the place that’s been hit the hardest by Covid-19 is the global south where countries are particularly ill-prepared.

Consider social distancing. People with jobs that can be done by “working from home” constitute a far smaller proportion of the labor force than in wealthy nations with far higher levels of education, mechanization, and automation, along with far greater access to computers and the Internet. An estimated 40% of workers in rich countries can work remotely. In lower- and middle-income lands perhaps 10% can do so and the numbers are even worse in the poorest of them. 

During the pandemic, millions of Canadians, Europeans, and Americans lost their jobs and struggled to pay food and housing bills. Still, the economic impact has been far worse in other parts of the world, particularly the poorest African and Asian nations. There, some 100 million people have fallen back into extreme poverty.

Such places lack the basics to prevent infections and care for Covid-19 patients. Running water, soap, and hand sanitizer are often not readily available. In the developing world, 785 million or more people lack “basic water services,” as do a quarter of health clinics and hospitals there, which have also faced crippling shortages of standard protective gear, never mind oxygen and ventilators.

Last year, for instance, South Sudan, with 12 million people, had only four ventilators and 24 ICU beds. Burkina Faso had 11 ventilators for its 20 million people; Sierra Leone 13 for its eight million; and the Central African Republic, a mere three for eight million. The problem wasn’t confined to Africa either. Virtually all of Venezuela’s hospitals have run low on critical supplies and the country had 84 ICU beds for nearly 30 million people.

Yes, wealthy countries like the U.S. faced significant shortages, but they had the cash to buy what they needed (or could ramp up production at home). The global south’s poorest countries were and remain at the back of the queue.

India’s disaster India has provided the most chilling illustration of how spiraling infections can overwhelm healthcare systems in the global south. Things looked surprisingly good there until recently. Infection and death rates were far below what experts had anticipated based on the economy, population density, and the highly uneven quality of its healthcare system. The government’s decision to order a phased lifting of a national lockdown seemed vindication indeed. As late as April, India reported fewer new cases per million than Britain, France, Germany, the U.K., or the U.S.

Never one for modesty, its Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, boasted that India had “saved humanity from a great disaster by containing Corona effectively.” He touted its progress in vaccination; bragged that it was now exporting masks, test kits, and safety equipment; and mocked forecasts that Covid-19 would infect 800 million Indians and kill a million of them. Confident that his country had turned the corner, he and his Bharatiya Janata Party held huge, unmasked political rallies, while millions of Indians gathered in vast crowds for the annual Kumbh Mela religious festival.

Then, in early April, the second wave struck with horrific consequences. By May 6th, the daily case count had reached 414,188. On May 19th, it would break the world record for daily Covid-19 deaths, previously a dubious American honor, recording almost 4,500 of them.

Hospitals quickly ran out of beds. The sick were turned away in droves and left to die at home or even in the streets, gasping for breath. Supplies of medical oxygen and ventilators ran out, as did personal protective equipment. Soon, Modi had to appeal for help, which many countries provided.

Indian press reports estimate that fully half of India’s 300,000-plus Covid-19 deaths have occurred in this second wave, the vast majority after March. During the worst of it, the air in India’s big cities was thick with smoke from crematoria, while, because of the shortage of designated cremation and burial sites, corpses regularly washed up on riverbanks.

We may never know how many Indians have actually died since April. Hospital records, even assuming they were kept fastidiously amid the pandemonium, won’t provide the full picture because an unknown number of people died elsewhere.

The vaccination divide Other parts of the global south have also been hit by surging infections, including countries in Asia which had previously contained Covid-19’s spread, among them Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. Latin America has seen devastating surges of the pandemic, above all in Brazil because of President Jair Bolsonaro’s stunning combination of fecklessness and callousness, but also in Bolivia, Columbia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In Africa, Angola, Namibia, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are among 14 countries in which infections have spiked. 

Meanwhile, the data reveal a gargantuan north-south vaccination gap. By early June, the U.S. had administered doses to nearly half the country’s population, in Britain slightly more than half, in Canada just over a third, and in the European Union approximately a third. (Bear in mind that the proportions would be far higher were only adults counted and that vaccination rates are still increasing far faster in these places than in the global south.)

Now consider examples of vaccination coverage in low-income countries.

• In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Vietnam, and Zambia it ranged from 0.1% to 0.9% of the population.

• In Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, Senegal, and South Africa, between 1% and 2.4%.

• In Botswana and Zimbabwe, which have the highest coverage in sub-Saharan Africa, 3% and 3.6% respectively.

• In Asia (China and Singapore aside), Cambodia at 9.6% was the leader, followed by India at 8.5%.  Coverage in all other Asian countries was below 5.4.%.

This north-south contrast matters because mutations first detected in the U.K., Brazil, India, and South Africa, which may prove up to 50% more transmissible, are already circulating worldwide. Meanwhile, new ones, perhaps even more virulent, are likely to emerge in largely unvaccinated nations. This, in turn, will endanger anyone who’s unvaccinated and so could prove particularly calamitous for the global south.

Why the vaccination gap? Wealthy countries, none more than the United States, could afford to spend billions of dollars to buy vaccines. They’re home as well to cutting-edge biotechnology companies like AstraZeneca, BioNTech, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer. Those two advantages enabled them to preorder enormous quantities of vaccine, indeed almost all of what BioNTech and Moderna anticipated making in 2021, and even before their vaccines had completed clinical trials. As a result, by late March, 86% of all vaccinations had been administered in that part of the world, a mere 0.1% in poor regions.

This wasn’t the result of some evil conspiracy. Governments in rich countries weren’t sure which vaccine-makers would succeed, so they spread their bets. Nevertheless, their stockpiling gambit locked up most of the global supply.

Equity vs. power Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who leads the World Health Organization (WHO), was among those decrying the inequity of “vaccine nationalism.” To counter it, he and others proposed that the deep-pocketed countries that had vacuumed up the supplies, vaccinate only their elderly, individuals with pre-existing medical conditions, and healthcare workers, and then donate their remaining doses so that other countries could do the same. As supplies increased, the rest of the world’s population could be vaccinated based on an assessment of the degree to which different categories of people were at risk.

COVAX, the U.N. program involving 190 countries led by the WHO and funded by governments and private philanthropies, would then ensure that getting vaccinated didn’t depend on whether or not a person lived in a wealthy country. It would also leverage its large membership to secure low prices from vaccine manufacturers.

That was the idea anyway. The reality, of course, has been altogether different. Though most wealthy countries, including the U.S. following Biden’s election, did join COVAX, they also decided to use their own massive buying power to cut deals directly with the pharmaceutical giants and vaccinate as many of their own as they could. And in February, the U.S. government took the additional step of invoking the Defense Production Act to restrict exports of 37 raw materials critical for making vaccines.

COVAX has received support, including $4 billion pledged by President Joe Biden for 2021 and 2022, but nowhere near what’s needed to reach its goal of distributing two billion doses by the end of this year. By May, in fact, it had distributed just 3.4% of that amount.

Biden recently announced that the U.S. would donate 500 million doses of vaccines this year and next, chiefly to COVAX; and at their summit this month, the G-7 governments announced plans to provide one billion altogether. That’s a large number and a welcome move, but still modest considering that 11 billion doses are needed to vaccinate 70% of the world.

COVAX’s problems have been aggravated by the decision of India, counted on to provide half of the two billion doses it had ordered for this year, to ban vaccine exports. Aside from vaccine, COVAX’s program is focused on helping low-income countries train vaccinators, create distribution networks, and launch public awareness campaigns, all of which will be many times more expensive for them than vaccine purchases and no less critical.

Another proposal, initiated in late 2020 by India and South Africa and backed by 100 countries, mostly from the global south, calls for the World Trade Organization (WTO) to suspend patents on vaccines so that pharmaceutical companies in the global south can manufacture them without violating intellectual property laws and so launch production near the places that need them the most.

That idea hasn’t taken wing either.

The pharmaceutical companies, always zealous about the sanctity of patents, have trotted out familiar arguments (recall the HIV-AIDS crisis): their counterparts in the global south lack the expertise and technology to make complex vaccines quickly enough; efficacy and safety could prove substandard; lifting patent restrictions on this occasion could set a precedent and stifle innovation; and they had made huge investments with no guarantees of success.

Critics challenged these claims, but the biotech and pharmaceutical giants have more clout, and they simply don’t want to share their knowledge. None of them, for instance, has participated in the WHO’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), created expressly to promote the voluntary international sharing of intellectual property, technology, and knowhow, through non-restricted licensing.

On the (only faintly) brighter side, Moderna announced last October that it wouldn’t enforce its Covid-19 vaccine patents during the pandemic — but didn’t offer any technical assistance to pharmaceutical firms in the global south. AstraZeneca gave the Serum Institute of India a license to make its vaccine and also declared that it would forgo profits from vaccine sales until the pandemic ends. The catch: it reserved the right to determine that end date, which it may declare as early as this July.

In May, President Biden surprised many people by supporting the waiving of patents on Covid-19 vaccines. That was a big change given the degree to which the U.S. government has been a dogged defender of intellectual property rights. But his gesture, however commendable, may remain just that. Germany dissented immediately. Others in the European Union seem open to discussion, but that, at best, means protracted WTO negotiations about a welter of legal and technical details in the midst of a global emergency. 

And the pharmaceutical companies will hang tough. Never mind that many received billions of dollars from governments in various forms, including equity purchases, subsidies, large preordered vaccine contracts ($18 billion from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program alone), and research-and-development partnerships with government agencies. Contrary to its narrative, Big Pharma never placed huge, risky bets to create Covid-19 vaccines.

How does this end? Various mutations of the virus, several highly infectious, are now traveling the world and new ones are expected to arise. This poses an obvious threat to the inhabitants of low-income countries where vaccination rates are already abysmally poor. Given the skewed distribution of vaccines, people there may not be vaccinated, even partially, until 2022, or later. Covid-19 could therefore claim more millions of lives.

But the suffering won’t be confined to the global south. The more the virus replicates itself, the greater the probability of new, even more dangerous, mutations — ones that could attack the tens of millions of unvaccinated in the wealthy parts of the world, too. Between a fifth and a quarter of adults in the U.S. and the European Union say that they’re unlikely to, or simply won’t, get vaccinated. For various reasons, including worry about the safety of vaccines, anti-vax sentiments rooted in religious and political beliefs, and the growing influence of ever wilder conspiracy theories, U.S. vaccination rates slowed starting in mid-April.

As a result, President Biden’s goal of having 70% of adults receive at least one shot by July 4th won’t be realized. With less than two weeks to go, at least half of the adults in 25 states still remain completely unvaccinated. And what if existing vaccines don’t ensure protection against new mutations, something virologists consider a possibility? Booster shots may provide a fix, but not an easy one given this country’s size, the logistical complexities of mounting another vaccination campaign, and the inevitable political squabbling it will produce.

Amid the unknowns, this much is clear: for all the talk about global governance and collective action against threats that don’t respect borders, the response to this pandemic has been driven by vaccine nationalism. That’s indefensible, both ethically and on the grounds of self-interest.

Rajan Menon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.

Copyright ©2021 Rajan Menon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 June 2021

Word Count: 2,649

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Americans may already be lying themselves out of what little remains of their democracy.

The big lie uniting and motivating today’s Republicans is, of course, that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election.  Other big lies in our recent past include the notion that climate change is nothing but a Chinese hoax, that Russia was responsible for Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat in 2016, and that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was necessary because that country’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had something to do with the 9/11 attacks (he didn’t!) and possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the United States, a “slam dunk” truth, according to then-CIA Director George Tenet (it wasn’t!).

Those and other lies, large and small, along with systemic corruption in Washington are precisely why so many Americans have been driven to despair.  Small wonder that, in 2016, those “deplorables” reached out in desperation to a figure who wasn’t a product of Washington’s mendacious Beltway culture.  Desperate times engender desperate acts, including anointing a failed casino owner and consummate con man as America’s MAGA-cap-wearing savior. As the 45th president, Donald Trump set a record for lies that will likely remain unmatchable in its “greatness” — or so we must hope anyway.

Sadly, Americans have become remarkably tolerant of comfortable lies, generally preferring them to uncomfortable truths.  Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the military realm that I’ve inhabited most of my life.  The first casualty of war, so it’s said, is truth, and since this country has remained perennially at war, we continue to eternally torture the truth as well.

When it comes to war, here are just a few of our all-American falsehoods: that this country is slow to anger because we prefer peace, even if wars are often necessary, which is also why peace-loving America must have the world’s “finest” and by far the most expensive military on the planet; that just such a military is also a unique force for freedom on Planet Earth; that it fights selflessly “to liberate the oppressed” (a Special Forces motto) but never to advance imperial or otherwise selfish ambitions.

For a superpower that loves to flex its military muscles, such lies are essentially par for the course.  Think of them, in fact, as government-issue (GI) lies.  As a historian looking to the future, what worries me more are two truly insidious lies that, in the early 1930s, led to the collapse of a fledgling democracy in Weimar Germany, lies that in their own way helped to facilitate the Holocaust and that, under the right (that is, wrong) circumstances, could become ours as well.  What were those two lies?

Germany’s tragic lies after World War I During World War I, the German military attempted to defeat the combined forces of Britain, France, Russia, and later the United States, among other powers, while simultaneously being “shackled to a corpse,” as one German general described his country’s main ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  By the middle of 1916, the German Second Reich led by Kaiser Wilhelm II had, in essence, become a military dictatorship devoted to total victory at any cost.

Two years later, that same military had been driven to exhaustion by its commanders.  When it was on the verge of collapse, its generals washed their hands of responsibility and allowed the politicians to sue for peace.  But even before the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918, certain reactionary elements within the country were already rehearsing two big and related lies that would facilitate the rise of a demagogue and the onset of an even more disastrous world war.

The first big lie was that the German military, then considered the world’s finest (sound familiar?), emerged from World War I undefeated in the field, its troops a band of heroes covered in glory. That lie was tenable because Germany itself had not been invaded in World War I; the worst fighting took place in France, Belgium, and Russia.  It was also tenable because its military leaders had lied to the people about the progress being made toward “victory.” (This should again sound familiar to contemporary American ears.)  So, when those senior leaders finally threw in the towel in late 1918, it came as a shock to most Germans, who’d been fed a steady diet of “progress,” while news of serious setbacks on the Western Front was suppressed.

The second big lie followed from the first.  For if one accepted the “undefeated in the field” myth, as so many Germans did, then who was responsible for the defeat of the world’s finest military?  Not Germany’s generals, of course.  Indeed, in 1919, led by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, those same generals would maliciously claim that disloyal elements on the home front — an enemy within — had conspired to betray the country’s heroic troops.  Thus was born the “stab-in-the-back” myth that placed the blame on traitors from within, while ever so conveniently displacing it from the Kaiser and his generals.

Who, then, were Germany’s backstabbers?  The usual suspects were rounded up: mainly socialists, Marxists, anti-militarists, pacifists, and war profiteers of a certain sort (but not weapons makers like the Krupp Family).  Soon enough, Germany’s Jews would be fingered as well by gutter-inhabitants like Adolf Hitler, since they had allegedly shirked their duty to serve in the ranks.  This was yet another easy-to-disprove lie, but all too many Germans, desperate for scapegoats and undoubtedly bigoted as well, proved eager to believe such lies.

Those two big and insidious falsehoods led to an almost total lack of accountability in Weimar Germany for militarists like Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff who were significantly responsible for the country’s defeat.  Such lies fed the anger and fattened the grievances of the German people, creating fertile ground for yet more grievous lies.  In a climate of fear driven by the massive economic dislocation brought on by the Great Depression of 1929, a previously fringe figure found his voice and his audience.  Those two big lies served to empower Hitler and, not surprisingly, he began promoting both a military revival and calls for revenge against the backstabbing “November criminals” who had allegedly betrayed Germany.  Hitler’s lies were readily embraced in part because they fell on well-prepared ears.

Of course, a mature democracy like America could never produce a leader remotely like a Hitler or a militaristic empire bent on world domination.  Right?

America may indeed never produce its own Hitler, a demagogue who might indeed be described as a very unstable genius, and by “genius” I mean his uncanny ability to tap into and exploit the darker passions of his people and his age.  Yet the United States in 2021 certainly does have power-hungry, less-than-stable “geniuses” of its own — as all countries do in all times.  Men without principles or limits, willing to repeat big lie after big lie until they gain absolute power.  Someone like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Senator Tom Cotton perhaps?  Or perhaps an updated version of retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s fleeting national security advisor, who only recently expressed support for a military coup to overthrow the government. Or perhaps, in 2024, Trump himself.

America’s own big lies  Of course, Germany in the aftermath of World War I is hardly a perfect analog for the United States in the aftermath of two decades of its disastrous but distant war on terror.  And history is, at best, suggestive rather than duplicative.  Yet we study it in part because the past provides insight into potential futures.  Personalities and events change, but human nature remains much the same, which is why military officers still read the work of Athenian general and historian Thucydides with profit, despite the fact that his wars ended more than two millennia ago.

So, let’s return to the two big lies that, in retrospect, were fatal to Weimar Germany’s democracy.  How might they apply to the U.S. today?  Since 9/11, our military has prosecuted two big wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as numerous smaller conflicts in places like Libya, Syria, and Somalia. That same military has lost both of those big wars, while creating or exacerbating ongoing humanitarian crises and disasters in the “smaller” ones across the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Yet, in the American “homeland” (as it came to be known after the 9/11 attacks), it’s remarkable how seldom anyone notes how badly that same military has bungled all those wars.  Indeed, it’s generally celebrated in most of the country and certainly in Washington as the finest military force in the world, perhaps even in world history.  Its budget continues to rise as if in response to victories everywhere and therefore deserving of the lion’s share of taxpayer dollars.  Its retired generals and admirals are celebrated and rewarded with healthy pensions and even healthier pay and benefits if they so choose (and many do) to speed through the revolving door that links them to highly profitable war corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.

In essence, Americans have been sold on the idea that “their” military has been undefeated in the field, or, if “defeated” in the sense of suffering setbacks, not responsible for them.  But if America’s troops are the best of us and their losing commanders generally good enough to be eternally rewarded, who is to blame for America’s loss in Iraq?  In Afghanistan? Not them, obviously, not if you believe polling results which show that Americans have more “confidence” in the military than most other U.S. institutions (though those figures, still high, have been dropping recently).

If responsibility for defeat is not to be assigned either to the troops or their military commanders, and if we Americans most certainly can’t imagine that an enemy like the Taliban is capable of defeating our mighty forces, who is to blame?  An enemy within! Someone in the homeland who’s stabbing America’s noble heroes in the back.  But, if so, who exactly?

Senior leaders in the U.S. military are already complaining that Joe Biden’s troop withdrawal from Afghanistan may yet sow the seeds of defeat in that country (as if nearly 20 years of waging a disastrous war there had somehow set the stage for success).  Republicans, as is their custom, have their knives out, too. They seem to be preparing to stab Democrats for being weak on defense and appeasers of “dictators” like the leaders of Iran and China.

And if you’re thinking about a future “enemy within” narrative, don’t forget the recent letter signed by 124 of our retired generals and admirals who seek to blame the decline of democracy in this country not on Trump and his lackeys, but on the spread of progressivism, socialism, even Marxism.  That they might bear the slightest responsibility for the situation America finds itself in today would never occur to that company-sized gaggle of losers posing as self-appointed prophets.

But the truth is far harsher than those flag-rank opportunists are prepared to admit.  Incessant war, insidious militarism, and our failure to face it all should be considered the real enemies within.  And those “enemies” are helping to kill democracy in America, as James Madison, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, warned us about decades, even centuries, ago.

Here’s the simple truth of it: America’s wars since 9/11 were never this country’s to win.  They were pointless conflicts of opportunity, profiting the Pentagon (and its ever-rising budget). They were tainted by a need for vengeance and badly mismanaged by some of the same flag-rank officers who signed that letter.  Honest self-reflection would require a serious course correction within that military and most certainly a wholesale rejection of militarism and military adventurism.  And this is undoubtedly why so many in the military-industrial-congressional complex prefer the comfort of big lies.

We’ve seen versions of this before.  Ronald Reagan reinterpreted a criminal war in Southeast Asia as “a noble cause.”  George H.W. Bush referred to a rational and reasoned reluctance to fight needless overseas wars as “the Vietnam syndrome,” claiming the U.S. had finally “kicked it” with its ephemeral victory over Saddam Hussein in the Desert Storm campaign of 1991.  The Rambo myth in popular culture reinforced the notion that American warriors had won the war in Vietnam, only to be stabbed in the back by duplicitous politicians and antiwar protestors who also spit on the returning troops. (They didn’t.) Together such myths worked to shelter the U.S. military from radical reforms, ensuring an ongoing business-as-usual attitude at the Pentagon until, after 9/11, its true “mission (un)accomplished” years arrived.

Tough truths are the antidote to big lies  Americans need a day of reckoning that shows no sign of coming.  After all, we’re talking about a Congress that can’t even agree to form a joint commission to investigate the January 6th storming of the Capitol.  Still, a guy can dream, can’t he?  My own dream would involve the formation of a truth commission to hold senior leaders, military and civilian, accountable not only for their lies about America’s many wars but for the decisions to launch them and the pathetic performances that followed, as they did their unprincipled best to absolve themselves of responsibility.

Allow me to dream as well about what such an exercise in truth-telling and true accountability would involve:

1. Bipartisan Congressional investigations into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including sworn testimony by presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, as well as vice presidents Cheney, Biden, and Pence, and those failed former commanding generals of ours.

2. Bipartisan Congressional investigations into the military’s endless lies about progress in its wars, coupled with war crimes inquiries as needed.

3. Major reductions in military spending by Congress to curb present and future military adventurism.

4. An end to military adulation, a rejection of militarism, and a recommitment to democracy and truth-telling.

5. No future wars overseas without a Congressional declaration of the same, followed by mandatory conscription that would begin with the sons and daughters of members of Congress.

Through big lies and its allegiance to them, the United States today may be following a path already violently trod by Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.  Celebrating the military despite its defeats is a recipe for perpetual war and perpetual dishonesty.  Equating democratic forces within America with divisiveness and sedition is a recipe not only for unrest but for a potentially harsher, far more violent future.

Here history teaches a disturbing lesson.  What finally forced most Germans to face harsh truths, to reject militarism and megalomaniacal dreams of world empire, was catastrophic defeat in World War II.  What, if anything, will force Americans to face similar harsh truths?  Humanity can’t afford yet another world war, not one in which a president has the power to unleash a thousand holocausts via an eternally “modernized” nuclear arsenal.

Just remember: Big lies do have consequences.

William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated) and is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Copyright ©2021 William Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 June 2021

Word Count: 2,484

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These days my conversations with friends about the new administration go something like this:

“Biden’s doing better than I thought he would.”

“Yeah. Vaccinations, infrastructure, acknowledging racism in policing. A lot of pieces of the Green New Deal, without calling it that. The child subsidies. It’s kind of amazing.”

“But on the military–”

“Yeah, same old, same old.”

As my friends and I have noticed, President Joe Biden remains super-glued to the same old post-World War II agreement between the two major parties: they can differ vastly on domestic policies, but they remain united when it comes to projecting U.S. military power around the world and to the government spending that sustains it. In other words, the U.S. “national security” budget is still the third rail of politics in this country.

Assaulting the old New Deal It was Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill who first declared that Social Security is “the third rail” of American politics. In doing so, he metaphorically pointed to the high-voltage rail that runs between the tracks of subways and other light-rail systems. Touch that and you’ll electrocute yourself.

O’Neill made that observation back in 1981, early in Ronald Reagan’s first presidential term, at a moment when the new guy in Washington was already hell-bent on dismantling Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal legacy.

Reagan would fight his campaign to do so on two key fronts. First, he would attack labor unions, whose power had expanded in the years since the 1935 Wagner Act (officially the National Labor Relations Act) guaranteed workers the right to bargain collectively with their employers over wages and workplace rules. Such organizing rights had been hard-won indeed. Not a few workers died at the hands of the police or domestic mercenaries like Pinkerton agents, especially in the early 1930s. By the mid-1950s, union membership would peak at around 35% of workers, while wages would continue to grow into the late 1970s, when they stagnated and began their long decline.

Reagan’s campaign began with an attack on PATCO, a union of well-paid professionals — federally-employed air-traffic controllers — which his National Labor Relations Board eventually decertified. That initial move signaled the Republican Party’s willingness, even enthusiasm, for breaking with decades of bipartisan support for organized labor. By the time Donald Trump took office in the next century, it was a given that Republicans would openly support anti-union measures like federal “right-to-work” laws, which, if passed, would make it illegal for employers to agree to a union-only workplace and so effectively destroy the bargaining power of unions. (Fortunately, opponents were able to forestall that move during Trump’s presidency, but in February 2021, Republicans reintroduced their National Right To Work Act.)

The second front and the third rail There was a second front in Reagan’s war on the New Deal. He targeted a group of programs from that era that came to be known collectively as “entitlements.” Three of the most important were Aid to Dependent Children, unemployment insurance, and Social Security. In addition, in 1965, a Democratic Congress had added a healthcare entitlement, Medicare, which helps cover medical expenses for those over 65 and younger people with specific chronic conditions, as well as Medicaid, which does the same for poor people who qualify. These, too, would soon be in the Republican gunsights.

The story of Reagan’s racially inflected attacks on welfare programs is well-known. His administration’s urge to go after unemployment insurance, which provided payments to laid-off workers, was less commonly acknowledged. In language eerily echoed by Republican congressional representatives today, the Reagan administration sought to reduce the length of unemployment benefits, so that workers would be forced to take any job at any wage. A 1981 New York Times report, for instance, quoted Reagan Assistant Secretary of Labor Albert Agrisani as saying:

 “‘The bottom line… is that we have developed two standards of work, available work and desirable work.’ Because of the availability of unemployment insurance and extended benefits, he said, ‘there are jobs out there that people don’t want to take.’”

Reagan did indeed get his way with unemployment insurance, but when he turned his sights on Social Security, he touched Tip O’Neill’s third rail.

Unlike welfare, whose recipients are often framed as lazy moochers, and unemployment benefits, which critics claim keep people from working, Social Security was then and remains today a hugely popular program. Because workers contribute to the fund with every paycheck and usually collect benefits only after retirement, beneficiaries appear deserving in the public eye. Of all the entitlement programs, it’s the one most Americans believe that they and their compatriots are genuinely entitled to. They’ve earned it. They deserve it.

So, when the president moved to reduce Social Security benefits, ostensibly to offset a rising deficit in its fund, he was shocked by the near-unanimous bipartisan resistance he met. His White House put together a plan to cut $80 billion over five years by — among other things — immediately cutting benefits and raising the age at which people could begin fully collecting them. Under that plan, a worker who retired early at 62 and was entitled to $248 a month would suddenly see that payout reduced to $162.

Access to early retirement was, and remains, a justice issue for workers with shorter life expectancies — especially when those lives have been shortened by the hazards of the work they do. As South Carolina Republican Congressman Carroll Campbell complained to the White House at the time: “I’ve got thousands of sixty-year-old textile workers who think it’s the end of the world. What the hell am I supposed to tell them?”

After the Senate voted 96-0 to oppose any plan that would “precipitously and unfairly reduce early retirees’ benefits,” the Reagan administration regrouped and worked out a compromise with O’Neill and the Democrats. Economist (later Federal Reserve chair) Alan Greenspan would lead a commission that put together a plan, approved in 1983, to gradually raise the full retirement age, increase the premiums paid by self-employed workers, start taxing benefits received by people with high incomes, and delay cost-of-living adjustments. Those changes were rolled out gradually, the country adjusted, and no politicians were electrocuted in the process.

Panic! The system is going broke! With its monies maintained in a separately sequestered trust fund, Social Security, unlike most government programs, is designed to be self-sustaining. Periodically, as economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman might put it, serious politicians claim to be concerned about that fund running out of money. There’s a dirty little secret that those right-wing deficit slayers never tell you, though: when the Social Security trust fund runs a surplus, as it did from 1983 to 2009, it’s required to invest it in government bonds, indirectly helping to underwrite the federal government’s general fund.

They also aren’t going to mention that one group who contributes to that surplus will never see a penny in benefits: undocumented immigrant workers who pay into the system but won’t ever collect Social Security. Indeed, in 2016, such workers provided an estimated $13 billion out of about $957 billion in Social Security taxes, or almost 3% of total revenues. That may not sound like much, but over the years it adds up. In that way, undocumented workers help subsidize the trust fund and, in surplus years, the entire government.

How, then, is Social Security funded? Each year, employees contribute 6.2% of their wages (up to a cap amount). Employers match that, for a total of 12.4% of wages paid, and both put out another 1.45% each for Medicare. Self-employed people pay both shares or a total of 15.3% of their income, including Medicare. And those contributions add up to about nine-tenths of the fund’s annual income (89% in 2019). The rest comes from interest on government bonds.

So, is the Social Security system finally in trouble? It could be. When the benefits due to a growing number of retirees exceed the fund’s income, its administrators will have to dip into its reserves to make up the difference. As people born in the post-World War II baby boom reach retirement, at a moment when the American population is beginning to age rapidly, dire predictions are resounding about the potential bankruptcy of the system. And there is, in fact, a consensus that the fund will begin drawing down its reserves, possibly starting this year, and could exhaust them as soon as 2034. At that point, relying only on the current year’s income to pay benefits could reduce Social Security payouts to perhaps 79% of what’s promised at present.

You can already hear the cries that the system is going broke!

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Employees and employers only pay Social Security tax on income up to a certain cap. This year it’s $142,800. In other words, employees who make a million dollars in 2021 will contribute no more to Social Security than those who make $142,800. To rescue Social Security, all it would take is raising that cap — or better yet, removing it altogether.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has run the numbers and identified two different methods of raising it to eventually tax all wage income. Either would keep the trust fund solvent.

Naturally, plutocrats and their congressional minions don’t want to raise the Social Security cap. They’d rather starve the entitlement beast and blame possible shortfalls on greedy boomers who grew up addicted to government handouts. Under the circumstances, we, and succeeding generations, had better hope that Social Security remains, as it was in 1981, the third rail in American politics.

Welfare for weapons makers Of course, there’s a second high-voltage, untouchable rail in American politics and that’s funding for the military and weapons manufacturers. It takes a brave politician indeed to suggest even the most minor of reductions in Pentagon spending, which has for years been the single largest item of discretionary spending in the federal budget.

It’s notoriously difficult to identify how much money the government actually spends annually on the military. President Trump’s last Pentagon budget, for the fiscal year ending on September 30th, offered about $740 billion to the armed services (not including outlays for veteran services and pensions). Or maybe it was only $705.4 billion. Or perhaps, including Department of Energy outlays involving nuclear weapons, $753.5 billion. (And none of those figures even faintly reflected full national-security spending, which is certainly well over a trillion dollars annually.)

Most estimates put President Biden’s 2022 military budget at $753 billion — about the same as Trump’s for the previous year. As former Senator Everett Dirksen is once supposed to have said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Indeed, we’re talking real money and real entitlements here that can’t be touched in Washington without risking political electrocution. Unlike actual citizens, U.S. arms manufacturers seem entitled to ever-increasing government subsidies — welfare for weapons, if you like. Beyond the billions spent to directly fund the development and purchase of various weapons systems, every time the government permits arms sales to other countries, it’s expanding the coffers of companies like Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, Boeing, and Raytheon Technologies. The real beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s so-called Abraham Accords between Israel and the majority Muslim states of Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan were the U.S. companies that sell the weaponry that sweetened those deals for Israel’s new friends.

When Americans talk about undeserved entitlements, they’re usually thinking about welfare for families, not welfare for arms manufacturers. But military entitlements make the annual federal appropriation of $16.5 billion for Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) look puny by comparison. In fact, during Republican and Democratic administrations alike, the yearly federal outlay for TANF hasn’t changed since it was established through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, known in the Clinton era as “welfare reform.” Inflation has, however, eroded its value by about 40% in the intervening years.

And what do Americans get for those billions no one dares to question? National security, right?

But how is it that the country that spends more on “defense” than the next seven, or possibly 10, countries combined is so insecure that every year’s Pentagon budget must exceed the last one? Why is it that, despite those billions for military entitlements, our critical infrastructure, including hospitals, gas pipelines, and subways (not to mention Cape Cod steamships), lies exposed to hackers?

And if, thanks to that “defense” budget, we’re so secure, why is it that, in my wealthy home city of San Francisco, residents now stand patiently in lines many blocks long to receive boxes of groceries? Why is “national security” more important than food security, or health security, or housing security? Or, to put it another way, which would you rather be entitled to: food, housing, education, and healthcare, or your personal share of a shiny new hypersonic missile?

But wait! Maybe defense spending contributes to our economic security by creating, as Donald Trump boasted in promoting his arms deals with Saudi Arabia, “jobs, jobs, jobs.” It’s true that spending on weaponry does, in fact, create jobs, just not nearly as many as investing taxpayer dollars in a variety of far less lethal endeavors would. As Brown University’s Costs of War project reports:

“Military spending creates fewer jobs than the same amount of money would have, if invested in other sectors. Clean energy and health care spending create 50% more jobs than the equivalent amount of spending on the military. Education spending creates more than twice as many jobs.”

It seems that President Joe Biden is ready to shake things up by attacking child poverty, the coronavirus pandemic, and climate change, even if he has to do it without any Republican support. But he’s still hewing to the old Cold War bipartisan alliance when it comes to the real third rail of American politics — military spending. Until the power can be cut to that metaphorical conduit, real national security remains an elusive dream.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2021 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 June 2021

Word Count: 2,325

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Recently, I wanted to show my wife a picture, so I opened the photos app on my phone and promptly panicked when I saw what was there.

It’s not what you think.

A lot of people are worried about what’s lurking on their smartphones. Compromising photos. Illicit text messages. Embarrassing contacts. Porn.

What I noticed was a video in the photo stream between a picture of a document I sent to an editor and a shot of my dog — a clip of a man in Burkina Faso having his lower arm chopped off.

The still image of that act is bad enough. The video is far worse. The victim lies on the ground, pleading, screaming as another man, swinging a machete, forces him to place his right arm on a wooden bench. The attacker is trying to make the amputation easier, allowing him to make a cleaner cut. But “easier” is a relative term. The assailant hacks away, again and again and again, taking time to taunt his victim. You watch it happen. Slowly. You see the anguish on the face of the man whose arm is bleeding but mostly intact, then hanging at an odd angle, then barely attached. The video runs one minute and 18 seconds. It seems longer. Far longer. You hear the tortured screams. You watch the final swing, then see the victim kicking his legs back and forth, writhing in agony on the ground.

I shudder to think how many similar videos and images lurk on my phone — saved in the photos, in the files, sitting in text chains from sources, colleagues, fixers, contacts. There’s the man lying in a street in the Democratic Republic of Congo as an assailant with a machete attempts to cut off his leg below the knee. I still remember the exact sound of his cries even years after first viewing it. There’s the video of the captured Kurdish fighters. I recall how the second woman to be killed — just before she’s shot in the head — watches the execution of her comrade. She doesn’t plead or cry or even flinch. Not once.

There’s the bound man shot at point blank range and kicked, still alive, into a ditch. There are the women and children forced to march to their execution. “You are going to die,” says the Cameroonian soldier, who refers to one of the women as “BH,” a reference to the terrorist group, Boko Haram. He steers her off the road and a young girl follows. Another soldier does the same to a second woman who has a toddler strapped to her back. The soldiers force the women to kneel. One of those men directs the girl to stand next to her mother. He then pulls the girl’s shirt over her head, blindfolding her. Gunshots follow.

Binging on war porn My career in journalism tracks the global proliferation of “war porn,” a subject that TomDispatch first covered in 2006.

In the twentieth century, this particular genre consisted mostly of still photos that only rarely surfaced. The Japanese “rape” of Nanking. Murders by Nazis. Decapitations during Britain’s “Malayan Emergency.” Most of those images were trophy photos, taken by or with the consent of the perpetrators and they generally received only modest circulation. In rare cases, as in an execution in South Vietnam, they were documented by the press, made front-page news, and were sometimes even captured on film.

Such photos and footage have become ubiquitous over the last two decades. As mobile phone technology has improved, cell-phone prices have dropped, and social media and messaging platforms have proliferated, people in conflict zones from Syria to Myanmar — often the perpetrators of atrocities, sometimes the victims — have been increasingly able to share video and photographic documentation of human-rights violations. During the 2010s, the Islamic State flooded the online ecosystem with gruesome execution photos and videos. Israel’s most recent attacks on civilians in Gaza have also provided a seemingly endless stream of traumatic images and video.

While news consumers may increasingly be subjected to horrific images, exposure to limited amounts is, in most cases, unlikely to cause lasting distress. Binging on such footage is a different story. A 2014 analysis of exposure to media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, found that “repeated bombing-related media exposure was associated with higher acute stress than was direct exposure”; that is, those who consumed six or more hours a day of news coverage experienced greater stress than those who were at or near the actual bombing scene.

It’s clear that immersion in atrocity content is bad for your mental health. But what if your job is to binge-watch trauma? The work of certain journalists, social media content moderators, human rights researchers, and other analysts now has them awash in graphic “user-generated content” (UGC) or eyewitness video that can leave a lasting mark on one’s mind. The American Psychiatric Association’s 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, its official manual, states that post-traumatic stress can be brought about by exposure to the graphic details of another individual’s experience, including work-related exposure to disturbing television footage, movies, pictures, or other electronic media.

I’ve written articles based on video footage of executions and massacres. Sometimes atrocity photos figure in my reporting, so it’s not surprising that sources often send me war porn. Still, I’m not immersed in such brutal scenes as regularly as some of my colleagues. In 2015, the Eyewitness Media Hub conducted a survey of people who often work with graphic UGC. Even then, more than half of the 209 respondents reported that they viewed distressing media several times weekly. Twelve percent of the responding journalists and almost a quarter of the human rights and humanitarian workers said they viewed such traumatic content daily.

“You witness it a lot more with UGC,” said an anonymous senior editor at a news agency. “You’re exposed to more intense visual material than battle-hardened war cameramen sitting in Sarajevo in the middle of the 1990s because it’s coming at you from everywhere — even more so than, say, in Jerusalem. I was there at the height of the Intifada and there were body parts flying in and out of the office like nobody’s business, but there’s now a lot more of it.”

Forty percent of Eyewitness Media Hub survey respondents said that viewing such traumatic content had a negative impact on their personal lives, leaving them with feelings of isolation, flashbacks, nightmares, and other stress-related symptoms. One quarter reported high or even very high “professional adverse effects.”

In 2018, an anonymous staffer from Videre, an international charity that provides activists around the world with equipment, training, and support to gather video evidence of human-rights violations, offered a candid chronicle of the effects of two days of “cutting and splicing, frame by frame” video footage of a massacre of men, women, and children. “I went into auto-pilot: charred bodies, severed limbs,” that staffer wrote.

“They ceased to be human. I needed not to think of their lost hopes and dreams. And for two days I edited. Headphones stuck deep in my ears. The sound of desperate cries crashing around my head… And then, I started sleeping badly — waking in the night, bad dreams. I was distracted at work. It all felt so futile. A couple of weeks later, I was out walking with my partner and I started to cry.”

The next year, Casey Newton, writing for The Verge, offered a glimpse into the professional lives of Facebook’s 15,000 sub-contractor-employed content moderators. After three and a half weeks of training — immersed in hate speech, violence, and graphic pornography — “Chloe” was asked to “moderate” a post in front of her fellow trainees. It was a video of a murder, a man stabbed again and again as he begged for his life. Chloe, her voice quivering, correctly informed the class that the post needed to be removed since section 13 of Facebook’s community standards prohibits videos depicting murder.

As the next potential moderator took her place, Chloe left the room to sob. After that, the panic attacks began. They continued even after Chloe left the job and hers is not an isolated case. Last year, Facebook agreed to pay $52 million to 11,250 current and former moderators to compensate them for mental-health conditions resulting from the job. There is evidence to suggest that the situation may have worsened since then as Facebook has come under increased pressure to take action against online child abuse, forcing moderators to watch greater amounts of disturbing content.

“Even when the events depicted are far away, journalists and forensic analysts, deeply immersed in a flood of explicit, violent, and disturbing photos and video, may feel that it is seeping into their own personal headspace,” reads a fact sheet on working with traumatic imagery provided by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (where I was once a fellow) at Columbia University’s Journalism School. “Intrusive recollections — re-seeing traumatic images one has been working with — are not unusual,” wrote Gavin Rees, the Dart Center’s senior advisor for training and innovation in a 2017 guide for journalists. “Our brains are designed to form vivid pictures of disturbing things, so you may experience images popping back into consciousness at unexpected moments.”

A hammer to the skull Days before I saw that traumatic arm-amputation clip on my phone, I was rummaging around for an old file in the digital folders of a cloud-storage service. I noticed a folder of mine labeled “Graphic photos DRC.” I had uploaded those images — dozens of people butchered as if they were meat — while I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2018. Back then, I needed to get the images off my phone but carefully labeled the folder as a warning to my editor back in the U.S., who was monitoring the material, about what lurked in that innocuous-looking digital version of a manila folder.

Not long after finding that cache of Congo carnage, I needed to contact a source via a messaging platform. I didn’t realize that it was several years since we had communicated via that app and that our last “conversation,” still sitting there, included a photo of the corpse of a colleague who had been shot through the head.

I have many other atrocity photos on thumb drives, portable hard drives, and external hard drives that sit on my desk. I know some of those photos by heart. A few from the research I did for my book Kill Anything That Moves on American war crimes in Vietnam have resided somewhere deep in the recesses of my skull for close to 20 years. Several of them that I found in the U.S. National Archives were glossy photos of the victims of an American ambush. The dead were officially reported as enemy troops, but the investigation and those photos made it clear that they were just average Vietnamese civilians — men, women, and children.

One image burned into my brain is of a young Vietnamese boy lying lifeless on a forest floor. His glassy eyes, still open, evoke an enigmatic sense of serenity. It could be an art photo if you didn’t know that parts of his body had been obliterated by bullets and landmine fragments.

Newer photos stick with me, too, like one of a heap of mostly headless bodies that no one could mistake for art, for example. I could go on, but you get the picture — or rather, I got the pictures.

I once interviewed a Vietnam veteran who had kept grisly war trophies — a small collection of atrocity images — corpses of those his unit had killed, some visibly mistreated.

In Vietnam, a surprising number of American troops amassed such photos and made grim scrapbooks out of them. Some also collected actual body parts — scalps, penises, teeth, fingers and, most commonly of all, ears. For others, like this man, the preferred anatomical souvenirs were skulls.

That veteran had held onto those war “trophies” for most of his life but, ever more aware of his advancing age, he confessed to me that one day — soon, but not yet — he needed to burn the photos and take a hammer to the skull. He didn’t want his daughter to find them when, after his death, she came to clean out his home.

For years, I wondered what it must have been like for that man to live with the skull of a Vietnamese man or woman, to wake up every morning with that specter of atrocity in his home. Only years later did I begin to grasp that I might have some idea of what that was indeed like.

I’ve never actively collected war trophies, of course. I’ve left every skull, every corpse that I’ve encountered as I found it. But I’ve nonetheless amassed a horrific collection of war porn, far larger than anything that Vietnam veteran had.

While I don’t have a human skull in my closet, my atrocity collection is arguably far more gruesome. That veteran’s collection is still and silent, but the screams of the victims, people being butchered alive on video, are part of my collection. His trophy skull sat on a shelf hidden from view, while my compendium of horrors is scattered about my computer, cloud storage, my phone, my message chains — the totality of my digital life.

That man’s collection was finite and contained, the product of one war and one year of military service many decades ago. Mine lives with me and grows by the week. While I was writing this article, another video clip arrived. It’s horrific. At first, I couldn’t tell if the woman was dead or alive. The answer only became clear when… On second thought, you’re better off not knowing.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch (where this article originated) and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.

Copyright ©2021 Nick Turse — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 June 2021

Word Count: 2,302

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I went to a birthday party recently.

The celebrants greeted each other with hugs on the patio. After an outdoor barbeque dinner, we stood shoulder to shoulder around the island in the kitchen, eating cake from small paper plates. We sang “Happy Birthday.”

Ordinarily, an event like that wouldn’t be worth noting, but these aren’t exactly ordinary times. In this twilight world of ours, half-in and half-out of a pandemic, hanging around without masks and within spitting distance of vaccinated friends should be considered just this side of miraculous — a combination of luck, privilege, and a stunning series of events on a national scale that would strain credibility in a work of fiction.

To get to that birthday party required, first of all, surviving the pandemic, which has so far killed somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 Americans, while infecting as much as one-third of the population (including, months earlier, a couple of the guests at that very birthday party). No foreign enemy has ever inflicted such casualties on America, and never in our lifetimes have American civilians faced such a catastrophic breakdown in homeland security.

Nor has the international scientific community ever responded with such dispatch and efficacy to a global crisis. Less than a year from the date of the initial outbreak, not one but several Covid-19 vaccines had been developed, tested, and approved. Then came the anxious wait for eligibility and the constant refreshing of vaccination websites to try to schedule an appointment. Only when enough people like me had gone through the extended regimen of inoculation and after the infection rate had begun to fall rapidly did officials in my home state of Maryland begin to lift quarantine restrictions.

Even though everyone at that birthday party was fully vaccinated, I still felt uncomfortably vulnerable without my mask. I hesitated before hugging people. My hands itched for a squirt of sanitizer. It was, in other words, a celebration tempered by uncertainty. We were navigating new rules of social discourse: Handshake? Bear hug? Peck on the cheek? And no one dared jinx the celebration by saying, as we normally would have, “Next year, same time, same place.”

By temperament, I’m an optimist. By profession, however, I’m a pessimist. In my day job as a foreign-policy analyst and in the speculative realm as the author of the dystopian Splinterlands trilogy of novels, I’m constantly considering worst-case scenarios.

So, yes, I’m well aware that Covid-19 infection rates have dropped to levels not seen in a year and that the United States may indeed be on track to reach a 70% vaccination rate among adults by July 4th, which could, as the president has promised, offer us a new version of “Independence Day.” But this country is still experiencing the same number of infections (tens of thousands) and deaths (hundreds) as it did during the lull following the first outbreak last year. More infectious variants of the disease continue to emerge globally, most recently in India, where the numbers have been horrific, as well as in Vietnam. The current vaccines reportedly stave off such variants, but what about the next ones?

My professional dystopianism extends to the political sphere. I’m grateful on a daily basis that Donald Trump is no longer in the Oval Office or blathering on Twitter. I now take for granted a Democratic Congress (however marginally controlled), which seemed like a longshot last Election Day.

But let’s face it, politically, things could go south fast. Even though the Democrats are working overtime to inoculate this country’s economy with one stimulus shot after another, the Republicans could retake the Senate and even the House in 2022, and, three years from now, Donald Trump could still prove to be a viable presidential candidate.

By then, for all we know, an even more infectious strain of Trumpism — call it T.2 — might have emerged in the form of far-right challengers like Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, or even (god save us all) Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their followers who lurched from Reopen rallies to Stop the Steal protests were struck dumb by the failure of their Duce to cling to power in January 2021. In the months since Joe Biden’s inauguration, with a majority of Republicans still proclaiming his election stolen, they’ve again become restive.

Keep in mind as well that dystopia remains unevenly distributed around the globe. Trump is gone (for now), but other putatively democratic authoritarians remain in power. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is still effectively leader for life in Russia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro cling to their offices, and rebel-turned-tyrant Daniel Ortega just arrested the woman challenging him this year for the Nicaraguan presidency.

Meanwhile, not only has India been overwhelmed by Covid-19, but the numbers in Brazil remain terrifying and Taiwan has recently been hit with a first wave of infections — and that’s just to begin down a grim list. Even the Seychelles Islands off the coast of Africa, despite a world-leading vaccination rate of more than 60%, has recently experienced an unexpected uptick in cases.

In other words, as I left that party, it just didn’t feel like the right moment to exhale.

Human beings are adaptable creatures. We have an unfortunate ability to normalize worst-case scenarios. Rising temperatures? Guess it’s time to sell the beach house and move inland. Raging pandemic? A good opportunity to chill for a few months with Netflix and UberEats.

But dystopias are not just about objectively terrible things. Dystopia is about losing control over your life. It’s about a faceless bureaucracy trying to evict you from your home. It’s about a virus evading all your carefully constructed defenses. It’s about right-wing crazies subverting democracy even as they claim to revere it.

So, tell me the truth: in June 2021, do you really feel back in control yet?

The insurrection next time The last scene of a horror film often elicits a gasp. The eyelid of the supposedly dead serial killer snaps open. A mad scientist, reportedly cured, is released from the asylum clutching a briefcase full of plans for his next planet-destroying invention. A puppy scampers into the kitchen with the telltale orange rash of a disease that was allegedly extinguished.

Such scenes are obviously setups for sequels, but they’re also reminders that horrors seldom simply disappear. Instead, they mutate, hibernate, and burrow into our everyday world.

With that in mind, let’s revisit the final scene of this year’s most talked-about horror story, the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

Inflamed by the president’s lies and conspiracy theories, thousands of people overwhelmed the Capitol police, broke into what should have been one of the most protected buildings in the country, and launched a search-and-destroy mission against various politicians located inside. The noose set up on the West Front of the Capitol was an unambiguous indication of the insurrectionists’ intentions. Some of them had even brought bear spray, and they were indeed out for bear.

The story of the insurrection ended with order restored, legislators returning to their chambers to confirm the 2020 election results, and a modicum of bipartisan horror at what had just happened. But the very last scene elicited a gasp from the audience watching at home. Even as they condemned the violence that had just taken place in their midst, a handful of Republican legislators continued to claim election fraud. Early on the morning of January 7th, seven Republican senators and 122 members of the House refused to certify the election results in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Those votes were the sick puppy with the orange rash, the sign that the infectious horror of Trumpism had not been stamped out. At best, this country would experience a respite of unknown length before another surge captured the headlines. After all, Trump and his followers have been in the process of fundraising, assembling a cast and crew, enlisting thousands of extras, and beginning to film their sequel, while promising even bigger thrills and chills to come.

Their fans can’t wait.

While most Americans go about their calmer post-Trumpian lives under the Biden administration, a significant number of their fellow citizens live in a different reality entirely. For them, a world of dystopian intensity has just begun. After all, those Trumpsters are now experiencing their worst-case scenario — a Biden victory in a “stolen” election and Congress in Democratic hands. They have no desire to normalize what they consider a socialist regime in Washington. Astonishingly, one-quarter of Republicans belong to the church of QAnon with its imaginary global syndicate of Satan-worshipping child traffickers.

Although it was the Trump administration that helped spur the creation of the Covid-19 vaccines, 41% of Republicans still say they won’t get inoculated (compared to 4% of Democrats). Against all evidence, they believe the vaccines to be unsafe, ineffective, or even downright undemocratic in the way they subject their “victims” to nonstop surveillance through a supposedly injected microchip. Fixated on such imaginary threats, the anti-vaxxers are dismissive of a pandemic that is still a clear and present danger.

In the good old days, people with such a tenuous connection to reality would retreat to their armchairs to listen to Rush Limbaugh. They’d live in their own private dystopias — stocking their bomb shelters, polishing their guns, muttering to themselves — with lots of fire and fury but little real-world impact.

Thanks to Trump, the Proud Boys, and QAnon, however, the dystopians of today have turned their delusions into a political project even to the point of taking over the Republican Party. Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican who still believes that the 2020 election featured the “worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” repeatedly incited his followers to post-election violence. Gun nut Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, called Joe Biden a “tyrant” for his tepid gun-control proposals after a spate of mass killings this spring. Led by Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the party is now rewriting the events of January 6th to blame the violence on supposed left-wing agitators.

Equally troubling, true believers of this sort are still attempting to overturn the results of the election, beginning with the vote “recount” in Maricopa County, Arizona. The outfit in charge of that recount, Cyber Ninjas, has been set loose in a basketball arena in Phoenix like the Keystone Kops on a mad caper. In the process, they’re violating all the rules of a proper audit, from tolerating a huge error rate in tally sheets to flagging ballots as “suspicious” for things like folds, Cheeto stains, and suspected bamboo fibers (the result, supposedly, of having been sent from somewhere in Asia). According to Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the Maricopa recount is “a grift disguised as an audit.”

It’s not the 2020 election that hangs in the balance, of course, since no amount of imaginary bamboo fibers — in Arizona or any of the other states the Trumpsters are targeting — can overturn what Congress has already confirmed. What can potentially be overturned, however, is American democracy itself. After all, it’s now clear that the Trumpsters will treat every future election that doesn’t produce the results they desire as a globalist plot no different from a new vaccine or a new pronouncement by infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci. Each contested election has the possibility of generating another potential insurrection, with the rioters perhaps chanting, “Remember January 6th!”

The nonsense now being spouted by the loony right would be grist for satire if we hadn’t seen all this before. Karl Marx once proposed (and Groucho Marx proved) that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Trump has turned this dictum on its head, since many of the laughable things he said on his road to the presidency — his paeans to his future “big, fat, beautiful Wall,” his white nationalism, his love of Vladimir Putin — were indeed turned into tragic policy by his minions.

We laughed when Barack Obama roasted Trump at the Gridiron dinner in 2011, but those jokes likely kindled Trump’s ambition to become president. We would be wise not to laugh at the antics of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has spouted QAnonsense and compared mask mandates to the Nazi treatment of Jews, or else she could ride similar waves of derision to even greater political heights.

The power of the marginalized I have a great deal of empathy for many people in the Trump camp. I’ve never liked Washington, D.C., and its obsession with insider politics. I share the distaste that much of Trump country feels for the arrogance of the power elite and its incessant jockeying for influence.

After all, it wasn’t Trump who created our current mess. Sure, he turned up the heat under the pot and gave its contents a vigorous stir, but he didn’t assemble the ingredients or design the recipe. The climate crisis, the travesty of global military spending, the inequities of the global economy: these were created by the “adults in the room” backed by the mainstream political parties, Washington’s “Blob,” and an ever-ascendant military-industrial-congressional complex.

The MAGA crowd was right to reject this version of the status quo. With his economic populism, Trump gave voice to those who felt shafted by Wall Street, transnational corporations, and globalization in general. The wages of blue-collar workers, adjusted for inflation, had at best stagnated since the 1970s (while the incomes of America’s billionaires have done anything but). Because the mainstream parties abandoned these voters, economically speaking, many of them naturally basked in the attention Trump showered on them. They felt that their dystopia of economic marginalization might finally be on the verge of lifting.

In challenging one pillar of the status quo, however, Trump consciously reinforced two others, the power of the wealthy elite and of white privilege. In the process, legitimate economic grievances became entangled with anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, and blatant racist rhetoric. Trump’s electoral defeat has by no means silenced this white nationalism.

Fortunately, other voices have come to the fore as well, as millions of Americans rejected the status quo in more productive ways. One year ago, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, triggering the largest protests in American history (as well as demonstrations in more than 60 other countries). In exercising their freedoms of speech and assembly, those protestors were also very deliberately trying to regain control of their lives by rolling back a dystopia of police terror that has disproportionately harmed Blacks.

Similarly, the #MeToo movement has been a reassertion of control by women over their own bodies and lives. Thanks to such efforts, the dystopia of rape culture and patriarchal authority has begun to recede, though not everywhere or quickly enough.

Environmentalists are likewise standing up to the fossil-fuel companies, while economic justice advocates continue to challenge multinational corporations. Peace activists are protesting wars and military spending, while human rights demonstrators are rallying against authoritarian leaders. These efforts all contribute, little by little, to the possibility that we can regain control over our own lives. They are part of a long-term process whereby the powerless become subjects in their own stories rather than the objects of someone else’s tales. Such challenges to the status quo would become more powerful still if joined by some of the economically marginalized previously drawn to Trump (as long as they check their white privilege at the door).

I’ve tried to describe such historic efforts in essays and in fiction. In my Splinterlands series of novels, I’ve done my best to peer into our future and consider the worst-case scenarios of climate change, unrestrained corporate power, and nationalism run amok. However, in the standalone finale, Songlands, I let a little sunlight break through the dystopian storm clouds to tell the story of an international community of activists coming together in the face of a planetary crisis. (George Orwell, meet Greta Thunberg.)

As I said, by temperament I’m an optimist. Sometimes, that optimism even leaks into my professional life.

Sure, I continue to worry about what the next wave of Covid-19 might look like. I fear both the continued lunacy of the Republican Party and the pallid incrementalism of the Democrats. But I’m heartened by the energy of people all over the world determined to beat back dystopia, take control of their lives, and transform the optimists’ credo of “hope and change” into something a great deal more significant than a campaign slogan.

 

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series and the final novel in the trilogy, Songlands, has just been published. He has also written The Pandemic Pivot.

Copyright ©2021 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 June 2021

Word Count: 2,744

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