The gun I carried on the streets of New York City in the late 1960s was a Beretta, similar to the pistol James Bond packed in the early Ian Fleming novels. It was a small, dark beauty that filled me with bravado. I was never afraid when I had it in my pocket, which is why I’m so very afraid now.

I was packing it illegally, but I knew that a white man in a suit and tie was unlikely to be stopped by the police and frisked, even in a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country — laws that may soon be swept away if the Supreme Court continues what seems to be its holy war on democracy. In fact, its justices are expected to rule this month in a case that challenges New York’s constitutional right to deny anyone a permit to carry a firearm. That state’s current licensing process allows only those who can prove a “special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.” That means you can’t pack heat just because you want to feel stronger and braver than you are or because you feel threatened by people who look different from you.

It also means that you can’t enjoy the privileges of the past. In his history of gun rights in this country, Armed in America, Patrick Charles quotes this from a piece in a 1912 issue of the magazine Sports Afield: “Perfect freedom from annoyance by petty lawbreakers is found in a country where every man carries his own sheriff, judge, and executioner swung on his hip.”

Sadly enough, carrying such firepower is thrilling, oppressive, and often leads to calamity as hundreds of police officers and the would-be neighborhood defender George Zimmerman, the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, found out. It was something I, too, came to understand. Let me tell you how.

The hunter

The Beretta was not my first gun. That was a .22 bolt-action Savage Arms rifle that my favorite uncle insisted I needed to grow into true manhood. My dad was against harboring a gun in the house, but the masculinity argument must have swayed him. He had been too old for the Army and not having served disturbed him. Uncle Irving was his best friend and a World War II vet.

I was around 12 years old, about the age most kids in gun-owning families are first armed. I was an avid fan of the Western movies of that era, which were always resolved by a gunfight. The idea of owning a gun, that symbol of manhood, genuinely excited me. Somehow, because there were so many rules and restrictions, target practice became a duty, as well as a guilty pleasure. (Many years later, I spoke with an Army sergeant who described shooting as unlimited orgasms for less than six cents each.)

In my early teens, I enjoyed plinking away in the woods, knocking off cans and bottles (Indians and outlaws, of course) until the inevitable need to actually kill something became uncontainable. I had to test myself. I was a responsible kid and heeded my dad’s ban on shooting at birds and squirrels, even rattlesnakes, but I finally begged permission to go after the rabbit pillaging mom’s vegetable garden.

I got it on the first shot!

And that was the beginning of my conflict.

It just didn’t feel as good as I had dreamt it would, even though my hunting partner, my kid sister, cheered, while my parents appeared both dismayed and impressed. In death, the marauder of our food supply turned out to be just a hungry little bunny.

Was there something missing in the experience or maybe in me, I wondered? Where was the joy I expected in actually gunning something down? Nevertheless, I paid lip-service to what I thought I should have felt, turning the backyard ambush into the equivalent of an Ernest Hemingway safari, a tale told heroically until it became satirical. (Hemingway was my generation’s avatar of toxic masculinity in literature and in life. And, of course, he killed himself with a gun.)

My sister and I skinned our prey and kept those dried-out rabbit’s feet for years. But ever since, the idea of hunting, if nothing gets eaten, seemed noxious to me and, as the years passed, I began to think of sport hunters as the leatherette men, a gang of poseurs.

Though I kept that rifle, I never fired it again.

The shootist

Covering police stories early in my newspaper career, I found myself regularly around guns that were almost never drawn on duty, weapons worn by men and women mostly discomforted by their weight and bulge. But I found that I was still fascinated by them. It was only the idea of using them for hunting that bothered me then, not guns themselves.

Still, weapons training in the Army in 1961 turned out to be no fun. The instructors were even more restrictive than Dad and I proved to be a mediocre shot at best.

Basic training turned out to be boring and disappointing. I had, at least, hoped to get myself in better shape and work on some of those manly arts that were still on my mind, like hand-to-hand combat. But that didn’t happen. After basic, I was dumped into clerk/typist school, the Army’s numbing attempt to teach soldiers to be all they could be by doing paperwork. The secretarial training drove me so crazy that I went on sick call and started spending nights in the beer garden at Fort Dix, which only made everything worse.

Then, one night, en route to getting wasted again, I wandered into a free shooting range sponsored by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Oh, joy!

Unlimited orgasms, rifles and handguns, jolly instructors. I was still gripped by the fantasy of manly fun. The next thing I knew, I had joined the NRA by mailing in a card from one of its magazines. My mood lifted and, incredibly, I graduated at the top of my clerk/typist class. I then floated through the rest of my six-month active-duty enlistment in the Army information office, trigger happy all the way.

Back in civilian life, writing sports stories for the New York Times in the early 1960s, I discovered that my manhood credentials were unassailable, especially to the guys I now think of as the Bystander Boys. Those were the everyday dudes who genuflect to alpha males, especially the sports heroes they assumed I drank with. Those were specious creds, although it would take me years more to figure that out. Back then, I wasn’t yet paying attention to the various kinds of faux manhood that were around me everywhere. Quite the opposite, I was living my own version of it. Especially when I got my beautiful little Beretta.

My frat house roommate Marty, a naval officer, brought back one for each of us from a Mediterranean cruise. It fit our fantasy lives then. After all, we’d both studied combat judo with a drunken ex-Marine on a tough street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. We were both delusional apprentice bad asses at a time when actor Humphrey Bogart was considered a profile in manhood. We liked the way he smoked and handled a gun in his films. In addition, we had both read the James Bond novels and were proud that 007’s early pistol of choice, the Beretta, was now ours, too.

The gunslinger

To say that I felt bigger and harder with the Beretta in my pocket is true, even if it reduces the experience to a phallic cartoon (which, of course, is just what it was). But there was more. It was proof that I was neither weak, nor soft, and didn’t have to feel as vulnerable as I actually did covering stories on the mean streets of the city. It meant I could walk at night in the South Bronx assuming that I’d be able to respond to anything, that I would never have to run or surrender my wallet to some teenaged mugger.

So went my weaponized imagination then. I felt primed for action. I was daring the world, strolling through New York with what I took to be the pigeon-toed rolling swagger of that classic star of so many cowboy and war movies, John Wayne. I even began to fancy that I projected a dangerous aura that would intimidate anyone with bad intentions toward me.

Soon enough, I knew, that feeling of invulnerability would have to be tested. The emotional weight of that gun seemed to demand it. I would have to use it and it wouldn’t be on a rabbit this time.

I felt feverish with the desire for (and terror of) engagement. I suspect that a kind of temporary insanity set in, that I was gun crazy, drowning in testosterone — and the memory of that gives me a feeling for the state of mind of the mad boys now regularly slaughtering people in our country. And here was the strangest thing in retrospect: I don’t remember ever thinking that I didn’t really know how to use that gun, that I’d had no training with it, never even fired it. And in those days, there was no YouTube to show me how.

And then came one lunatic night on Manhattan’s lower East Side. For a magazine story, I was shadowing a young doctor who worked for a non-profit group visiting sick kids in their squalid rooms. Nervous that the drugs and syringes he was carrying in his medical bag might make him a target, he was hugging the shadows of the dark street as we made our way to his car, half a block away. Suddenly, a group of loud young men appeared, drinking beer. The doctor grabbed my arm. He wanted to duck back into the building we had just walked out of.

Filled with bravado, however, I pulled him along, my other hand in my pocket. I was suddenly on fire in a way that reminded me of my teen self and the rabbit. No punks were going to chase me off that street. I glared at them. They glared right back, but then separated so we could walk quickly through them to our car. I promptly flopped into the passenger seat, suddenly exhausted, wiped out by my own stupidity, my own madness.

Just thinking about it now, almost 60 years later, my spine tingles, my muscles lock, and I feel a deep sense of shame, especially for endangering that young do-good doctor. And the possible outcome, had I done something truly stupid? I imagine the gun snagging on my pocket lining as I tried to pull it out for the first time and shooting myself in the foot or, far worse, shooting someone else. I never carried a gun again.

The unarmed

When I gave the Beretta back to Marty, I told him only a piece of the truth. I said I was afraid of getting busted with it in a city with such rigorous gun laws. I promised to visit the pistol in California, where he would soon be living. And I did. I shot it there for the first time at a commercial range, along with Marty’s new .45. He was rapturous, but I was just going through the motions. There was no excitement or pleasure. I had changed.

I was done with guns and felt like a fool for ever thinking differently. But because of my experience I do understand why, in this thoroughly over-armed land of ours, so many others consider such weaponry (and far more powerful and deadly versions) so important to who they are. Having experienced a sense of that identity myself, I don’t look down on them for it. And I understand that behind the mostly male pleasure in being armed can lie complex feelings. As historian Adam Hochschild noted in the New York Review of Books several years ago:

Even more troubling is that many of them believe they will need those guns for defense against the rampaging gangs (calling themselves militias?) that would rise after the possible collapse of American democracy as we’ve known it, which any number of armed men don’t trust to protect them anyway. (Thank you, Donald Trump, most Republicans, and, alas, my old benefactor the NRA!)

Is stocking up on AR-15s and thousands of rounds of ammunition paranoia or preparation? While a Beretta would never be enough, it turns out that such lesser guns have done most of the damage to Americans. Mass murders with military-style automatic rifles, especially school shootings, have reaped so much of the attention, but it’s been handguns that have killed far more Americans every year, most often via suicide (which is why it’s so sad to see so many of us increasingly arming ourselves to the teeth).

More than half of the 45,222 gun-related deaths in 2020, the last year for which we have solid statistics, were suicides, while “only” (yes, put that in scare quotes) 513 of them were thanks to mass shootings, defined as an incident in which four or more people are shot, even if no one is killed.

Handguns, not long guns, were involved in 59% of the 13,620 deaths classified as murders that year as well, while assault rifles were involved only 3% of the time. So banning those military-grade weapons, manufactured to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible, while distinctly a sane idea amid this mounting firearms insanity of ours, would probably have little real effect on our proliferating gun culture. Given the politics right now, it’s hard to imagine any administration attempting to begin the disarming of America.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to imagine a future government eager to build that arsenal to ever more destructive extremes, both at home among individuals and throughout the world as arms merchants, the ultimate in gun culture.

It’s not hard to imagine this country strutting all too manfully toward the apocalypse with more than a Beretta in its pocket.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originally appeared) and is a former sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2022 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 June 2022
Word Count: 2,388
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In the last week of her life, my mother extracted a promise from me. “Make sure,” she said, “that Orion goes to college.”

I swore that I would, although I wasn’t at all sure how I’d make it happen. Even in the year 2000, average tuitions were almost 10 times what my own undergraduate school had charged 30 years earlier. I knew that sending my nephew to college would cost more money than I’d have when the time came. If he was going to college, like his aunt before him, he’d need financial help. The difference was that his “help” was likely to come not as a grant, but as life-defining loans.

“Orion,” by the way, is a pseudonym for my brother’s son, my parents’ only grandchild. To the extent that any of us placed family hopes in a next generation, he’s borne them all. Orion was only five years old when I made that promise and he lived 3,000 miles away in a depressed and depressing de-industrialized town in New York’s Hudson River Valley. We’d only met in person once at that point. Over the years, however, we kept in touch by phone, later by text message, and twice he even visited my partner and me in San Francisco.

A little more than a decade after I made that promise, Orion graduated from high school. I thought that with a scholarship, loans, and financial help from his father and us, we might indeed figure out how to pay the staggering costs of a college education, which now averages $35,000 a year, having doubled in this century alone.

It turned out, however, that money wasn’t the only obstacle to making good on my promise. There was another catch as well. Orion didn’t want to go to college. Certainly, the one guidance counselor at his 1,000-student public high school had made no attempt to encourage either him or, as far as I could tell, many of his classmates to plan for a post-high-school education. But would better academic counseling have made a difference? I doubt it.

A bright boy who had once been an avid reader, Orion was done with schooling by the time he’d turned 18. He made that clear when I visited him for a talk about his future. He had a few ideas about what he might do: join the military or the New York state police. In reality, though, it turned out that he had no serious interest in either of those careers.

He might have been a disaffected student, but he was — and is — a hard worker. Over the next few years, despite sky-high unemployment in the Hudson River Valley, he always had a job. He made and delivered pizzas. He cleaned rooms at a high-end hotel for wealthy equestrians. He did pick-up carpentry. And then he met an older tradesman who gave him an informal apprenticeship in laying floors and setting tile. Orion learned how to piece together hardwood and install carpeting. He proudly showed me photos of the floors he’d laid and the kitchens he’d tiled.

Eventually, he had to part ways with his mentor, who also happened to be a dangerous drunk. We had another talk and I reminded him of my promise to my mother. I’d recently gotten an unexpected windfall — an advance on a book I was writing, American Nuremberg — which put me in a position to help set him up in business. He bought a van, completed his tool set, and paid for a year’s insurance. Now, 10 years after graduating from high school, he’s making decent money as a respected tradesman and is thinking about marrying his girlfriend. He’s made himself a life without ever going to college.

I worry about him, though. Laying floors is a young person’s trade. A few years on your knees, swinging a hammer all day, will tear your joints apart. He can’t do this forever.

The rising of the women

Still, it turns out that my nephew isn’t the only young man to opt out of more schooling. I’ve seen this in my own classrooms and the data confirms it as a national and international trend.

I started teaching ethics at the University of San Francisco in 2005. It soon struck me that there were invariably more women in my classes than men. Nor was the subject matter responsible, since everyone had to pass a semester of ethics to graduate from that Jesuit university. No, as it turned out, my always-full classes represented the school’s overall gender balance. For a few years, I wondered whether such an overrepresentation of women could be attributed to parents who felt safer sending their daughters to a Catholic school, especially in a city with San Francisco’s reputation for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Recently, though, I came to realize that my classes were simply part of a much larger phenomenon already beginning to worry some observers. Until about 1990, men invariably outnumbered women at every level of post-secondary education and more of them graduated, too. At four-year colleges and in post-graduate programs or in community colleges (once they became more prevalent), more men earned two-year, four-year, master’s, and doctorate-level degrees.

It was during the 1970s that the ratio began to shift. In 1970, among recent high-school graduates, 32% of the men and just 20% of the women enrolled in post-secondary institutions. By 1990, equal percentages – around 32% — were going to college. In the years that followed, college attendance continued to increase for both sexes, but significantly faster for women who, in 1994, surpassed men. Since the end of the 1990s, men’s college attendance has stayed relatively stable at about 37% of high-school graduates.

Women’s campus presence, however, has only continued to climb with 44% of recent female high-school graduates enrolled in post-secondary schools by 2019.

So, the problem, if there is one, isn’t that men have stopped going to college. A larger proportion of them, in fact, attend today than at any time in our history. It’s just that an even larger proportion of women are doing so.

As a result, if you visit a college campus, you should see roughly three women — now about 60% of all college students — for every two men. And that gap has been growing ever wider, even during the disruption of the Covid pandemic.

Not only do more women now attend college than men, but they’re more likely to graduate and receive degrees. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1970, men received 57% of both two- and four-year degrees, 61% of master’s degrees, and 90% of doctorates. By 2019, women were earning the majority of degrees at all levels.

One unexpected effect of this growing college gender gap is that it’s becoming harder for individual women to get into selective schools. The Hechinger Report, a non-profit institution focused on education, lists a number of well-known ones where male applicants have a better chance of being accepted, including:

Even for Vassar, once a women’s college, having too many women is now apparently a problem.

In addition, in recent years, despite those lower acceptance rates for women at elite schools, colleges have generally had to deal with declining enrollments, a trend only accelerated by the Covid pandemic. As Americans postpone having children and have fewer when they do, the number of people reaching college age is actually shrinking. Two-year colleges have been especially hard hit.

And there’s the debt factor. Like my nephew Orion, more potential students, especially men, are now weighing the problem of deferring their earnings, while acquiring a staggering debt load from their years at college. Some of them are opting instead to try to make a living without a degree. Certain observers think this shift has been partially caused by a pandemic-fueled rise in wages in the lower tiers of the American work force.

A mystery

Why are there fewer men than women in college today? On this, theories abound, but genuine answers are few. Conservatives offer a number of explanations that echo their culture-war slogans, including that “the atmosphere on the nation’s campuses has become increasingly hostile to masculinity.”

A Wall Street Journal op-ed ascribed it in part to “labor-saving innovations in household management and child care — automatic washing machines, disposable diapers, inexpensive takeout restaurants — as well as new forms of birth control [that] helped women pursue college degrees and achieve new vocational ambitions.” But the biggest problem, write the op-ed’s authors, may be that girls simply do better in elementary and secondary school, which discourages boys from going on to college. This problem, they argue, is attributable not only to the advent of washing machines, but ultimately to the implementation of the Great Society’s liberal social policies. Citing Charles Murray, the reactionary co-author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, they blame women’s takeover of higher education on the progressive social policies of the 1960s, the rise of the “custodial” (or welfare) state, and the existence of a vast pool of jailed men. They write:

Critics to the left have also cited male incarceration as a factor in the college gender divide, although they’re more likely to blame racist police and policies. Sadly, the devastation caused by jailing so many Black, Latino, and Native American men has only begun to be understood, but given the existing racial divide in college attendance, I seriously doubt that many of those men would be in college even if they weren’t in prison.

Some observers have also suggested that, given the staggering rise in college tuitions, young men, especially from the working and middle classes, often make a sound if instinctive decision that a college education will not repay their time, effort, and the debt load it entails. Like my nephew, they may indeed be better off entering a well-paying trade and getting an early start on building their savings.

Do women need college more than men?

If some young men now believe that college won’t reward them sufficiently to warrant the investment, many young women have rightly judged that they willneed a college education to have any hope of earning a decent living. It’s no accident that their college enrollment skyrocketed in the 1970s. After a long post-World-War II economic expansion, that was the moment when wages in this country first began stagnating, a trend that continued in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan launched his attacks on unions, while the federal minimum wage barely rose. In fact, it has remained stuck at $7.25 per hour since 2009.

First established in 1938, the minimum wage was intended to allow a single adult (then assumed to be a man) to support a non-earning adult (assumed to be his wife), and several children. It was called a “breadwinner” wage. The feminism that made work outside the home possible for women, saving the lives and sanity of so many of us, provided a useful distraction from those stagnant real wages, rising inequality, and the increased immiseration of millions (not to speak of the multiplication of billionaires).

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, many women came to believe that working for money was their personal choice. In truth, I suspect that they were also responding to new economic realities and the end of that “breadwinner” wage. I think the college gender gap, which grew ever wider as wages fell, is at least in part a consequence of those changes. Few of my women students believe that they have a choice when it comes to supporting themselves, even if they haven’t necessarily accepted how limited the kind of work they’re likely to find will be. Whether they form partnered households or not, they take it for granted that they’ll have to support themselves financially.

This makes a college degree even more important, since having it has a bigger impact on women’s earnings than on men’s. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis confirmed this. Reviewing 2015 census data, it showed that the average wage for a man with only a high-school diploma was around $12 per hour. Women earned 24.4% less than that, or about $9 hourly. On the other hand, women got a somewhat greater boost (28%) from earning a two-year degree than men (22%). For a four-year degree, it was 68% for women and 62% for men.

In other words, although a college education improves income prospects for both genders, it does more for women — even if not enough to raise their income to the level of men with the same education. The income gender gap remains stubbornly fixed in men’s favor. Like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, it seems women still have to run faster just to avoid losing ground. This means that for us, earning a decent living requires at least some college, which is less true for men.

What does the future hold?

Sadly, as college becomes ever more the preserve of women, I suspect it will also lose at least some of its social and economic value. They let us in and we turned out to be too good at it. My prediction? Someday, college will be dismissed as something women do and therefore not an important marker of social or economic worth.

As with other realms that became devalued when women entered them (secretarial work, for example, or family medicine), I expect that companies will soon begin dropping the college-degree requirement for applicants.

In fact, it already seems to be happening. Corporations like IBM, Accenture, and Bank of America have begun opting for “skills-based” rather than college-based hiring. According to a CNBC report, a recent Harvard Business School study examined job postings for software quality-assurance engineers and “found that only 26% of Accenture’s postings for the job contained a degree requirement. At IBM, just 29% did.” Even the government is dropping some college-degree requirements. According to the same report, in January 2021, the White House issued an executive order on “Limiting [the] Use of Educational Requirements in Federal Service Contracts.” When hiring for IT positions, the order says, considering only those with college degrees “excludes capable candidates and undermines labor market efficiencies.” And recently, Maryland announced that it’s dropping the college graduation requirement for thousands of state positions.

Of course, this entire economic argument assumes that the value of a college education is purely extrinsic and can be fully measured in dollars. As a long-time college teacher, I still believe that education has an intrinsic value, beyond preparing “job-ready” workers or increasing their earning potential. At its best, college offers a unique opportunity to encounter new ideas in expansive ways, learn how to weigh evidence and arguments, and contemplate what it means to be a human being and a citizen of the world. It can make democracy possible in a time of creeping authoritarianism.

What kind of future do we face in a world where such an experience could be reduced, like knitting (which was once an honorable way for both sexes to earn a living), to a mere hobby for women?

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture, 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 ©2022 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 June 2022
Word Count: 2,638
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Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is a scholar of surpassing brilliance. His 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin chronicles in harrowing detail the de facto collaboration of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union that resulted in the murder of millions of innocents. On any bookshelf reserved for accounts that reveal essential truths of our past, Bloodlands deserves a place of honor. It’s a towering achievement.

I just wish Professor Snyder would stick to history.

According to an old chestnut, the past is a foreign country. Even so, similarities between then and now frequently interest historians more than differences. Few, it seems, can resist the temptation to press their particular piece of the past into service as a vehicle for interpreting the here-and-now, even when doing so means oversimplifying and distorting the present. Historians of twentieth-century Europe, Snyder among them, seem particularly susceptible to this temptation. Synder’s mid-May op-ed in the New York Times offers a case in point. “We Should Say It,” the title advises. “Russia Is Fascist.”

Introducing the F-word into any conversation is intended to connote moral seriousness. Yet all too often, as with its first cousin “genocide,” it serves less to enlighten than to convey a sense of repugnance combined with condemnation. Such is the case here.

Depicting Vladimir Putin as a fascist all but explicitly puts today’s Russia in the same category as the murderous totalitarian regimes that Snyder indicts in Bloodlands. Doing so, in effect, summons the United States and its NATO allies to wage something akin to total war in Europe. After all, this country should no more compromise with the evil of present-day Russia than it did with the evil of Hitler’s Germany during World War II or Stalin’s Soviet Union during the Cold War.

For Snyder, therefore, the job immediately at hand is not just the honorable one of assisting the Ukrainians in defending themselves. The real task — the obligation, even — is to decisively defeat Russia, ensuring nothing less than democracy’s very survival. “As in the 1930s,” he writes, “democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors.”

As a consequence, “if Russia wins in Ukraine,” he insists, the result won’t simply be the brutal destruction of one imperfect democracy, but “a demoralization for democracies everywhere.” A Kremlin victory would affirm “that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.” If Russia prevails, in other words, “fascists around the world will be comforted.” And “if Ukraine does not win” — and winning, Snyder implies, will require regime change in Moscow — then “we can expect decades of darkness.”

So once again, as in the 1930s, it’s time to choose sides. To paraphrase a recent American president, you are either with us or you’re with the fascists.

Who are you calling fascist?

Allow me to confess that I was once susceptible to this sort of either/or binary thinking as an organizing principle of global politics. I grew up during the Cold War, when bipolarity — a U.S.-led Free World pitted against a Soviet-controlled communist bloc — offered a conceptual framework that any patriotic adolescent could grasp. Emphasizing clarity at the expense of empirical precision, such an us-against-them approach allowed little room for nuance. And as it happened, Americans paid dearly for the misjudgments that ensued thanks to just such thinking, the disastrous war in Vietnam being an especially vivid example. Ultimately, of course, our country did indeed “win” the Cold War, even if we have yet to tally up the cumulative costs of victory.

With an ample display of moral outrage, Professor Snyder appears intent on resurrecting that framework. By greenlighting this piece for their op-ed pages, the editors of the New York Times implicitly endowed it with establishment-approved respectability. In this way, the remembered politics of Europe in the 1930s finds renewed relevance as a source of instruction for the present moment.

How Americans responded then offers a model for how the United States should respond today, albeit with a sense of urgency rather than the foot-dragging that characterized U.S. policy prior to Pearl Harbor. Put simply, stopping fascism has once again emerged as an imperative surpassing all others in importance. The climate crisis? That can surely wait. Problems on the border with Mexico? Talk to me later. A never-ending pandemic? Just roll up your sleeve and follow Dr. Fauci’s orders. Recurring school massacres? Blame the Second Amendment.

“Russia Is Fascist” offers a definitive rebuttal to the Trump-promoted revival of “America First.” It’s a call to action, with a prospective anti-fascist crusade serving as an antidote to the setbacks, disappointments, and sense of decline that have haunted Washington’s foreign-policy establishment since the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.

In a broader sense, targeting fascism may fill a vacuum that dates from the very end of the Cold War, one that the subsequent Global War on Terror never adequately addressed. Finally, America again has an Enemy Worthy of the Name. Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression in Ukraine seemingly validates the idea that “great-power competition” defines the emerging world order, even if including Putin’s Russia in the ranks of legitimate great powers requires a distinctly elastic definition of that term. Nonetheless, given the complications that the United States encountered when taking on Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and sundry other villains, a rivalry with Russia appears not only familiar and straightforward, but almost welcome.

On that score, the issue immediately at hand is as much psychological as geopolitical. After all, if the course of the war in Ukraine has made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that Russia’s heavily armed but strikingly inept armed forces pose no more than a negligible conventional threat to the rest of Europe. Military effectiveness requires more than a capacity to reduce cities to rubble. So if Putin represents the latest reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, he’s a Hitler saddled with Benito Mussolini’s maladroit legions.

Yet declaring Russia to be the embodiment of fascism revises the stakes. For Professor Snyder, Russia’s lack of military prowess matters less than Vladimir Putin’s twisted worldview. Centered on a “cult of the dead,” a “myth of a past golden age,” and a belief in the “healing violence” of war, Putin’s outlook expresses the essence of Russian-style fascism. Exposing that outlook as false is a precondition for destroying the Putin mystique. Only then, Snyder writes, will the myths he has perpetrated “come crashing down.”

This, for Professor Snyder and for many Washington insiders, describes the actual stakes in Ukraine. Rather than merely regional, they are nothing short of cosmic. Defeating Putin will enable the United States to refurbish its own tarnished myths, while safely tucking away our own sanctification of violence as an instrument of liberation. It will restore America to the pinnacle of global power.

There are, however, at least two problems with this optimistic scenario. The first relates to our own ostensible susceptibility to a homegrown variant of fascism, the second to tagging Putinism as an existential threat. Both divert attention from more pressing issues that ought to command the attention of the American people.

To the barricades?

Is Donald Trump a fascist? My own inclination is to see him as a narcissistic fraud and swindler. That said, from the very moment he emerged as a major political figure, critics cited the f-word to describe him. Let the testimony of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stand in for similar commentary offered by so many others. Donald Trump “is indeed a fascist,” Krugman wrote in January 2021, “an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals.” It was obviously incumbent upon Americans to resist him as “appeasement is what got us to where we are. It has to stop, now.”

While Krugman’s counsel is crystal clear, let us consider the possibility that it may already be too late. That Trump or some Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024 looms as a real, if depressing, prospect. Indeed, his supporters may well gain control of Congress (and several statehouses) in this year’s elections as well.

Should that occur, will Krugman (and Snyder) find that the United States has followed Russia in succumbing to 1930s-style fascism? If so, with what implications for the legitimacy of the existing political order? Will resistance to Trumpism then become a civic obligation for righteous citizens intent on exercising their own right to bear arms? Paul Krugman’s reference to the dangers of further appeasement would suggest that the answer to that question must be yes. After all, in the American political lexicon few sins are more heinous than appeasement.

Yet down that road lies revolution, counterrevolution, and the end of the American republic. Recklessly unleashing charges of fascism could inadvertently pave the way for just such an outcome.

As an epithet, fascism retains considerable emotional appeal. As a term of analysis applied to contemporary American politics, however, it possesses limited utility. Talk may be cheap, but baseless talk can also be dangerously subversive — a concern equally applicable to those who level preposterous charges about communists and socialists overrunning the halls of government in Washington.

The truth is that we don’t live in the 1930s. Our world is not that world. Whether for good or ill, the United States of that era has long since vanished.

Professor Snyder’s assertion that “democracy is in retreat around the world” posits a model of history that has two gears: forward and reverse. In fact, history has multiple gears and moves in various directions, many of them unanticipated and unrelated to the prospects of democracy. So far at least, no algorithm exists to forecast where it will head next.

What threatens the United States today is not fascism but the continuing erosion of a domestic political consensus without which democratic governance becomes difficult, if not impossible. Surprisingly few politicians appear willing to acknowledge the extent of that danger. Instead, passions unleashed by issues like critical race theory or guaranteed access to assault rifles take over center stage, shrinking the space left for mutual understanding and accommodation.

Considered in this light, embarking on an anti-fascist crusade on the eastern fringes of Europe is unlikely to restore a sense of the common good at home. Waging war on behalf of Ukrainian democracy is more likely to serve as a diversion, an excuse to avoid matters of more immediate relevance to the waning health of our democracy. On that score, the tens of billions of dollars that an otherwise gridlocked Congress has appropriated to arm Ukraine speak volumes about the nation’s actual political priorities.

Ukrainians need, want, and deserve U.S. support in ejecting the Russian invader. But the fate of the American experiment will not be determined in Kyiv. It will be decided right here in the United States of America. When Joe Biden first announced his intention to oust Donald Trump from office, he seemed to understand that. He presented himself as someone voters could count on to bring Americans together and reverse our all-too-obvious decline. With this country having arrived at an “inflection point,” he vowed to guide it along “a path of hope and light” enabling it “to heal, to be reborn, and to unite.”

At some level, Biden surely meant those words, which implied that repairing the domestic disarray Trump had fostered should receive priority attention. But the Biden presidency has not yielded healing, rebirth, and unity – far from it. Now facing the prospect of major losses in this year’s congressional elections and long odds in the 2024 presidential contest, Biden appears intent on employing a familiar tactic in a desperate effort to salvage his political fortunes: using problems abroad to distract attention from challenges at home.

Russia poses one such problem, even if one that policymakers and pundits join in exaggerating, as if criminal misconduct automatically connotes existential threat. Hovering in the background is a much larger problem: China. Given a sufficiently loose definition, it, too, can be described as fascist. So the Biden administration’s confrontational attitude regarding Russia finds its counterpart in an equally hard-nosed policy toward China.

Downplaying the realities of Sino-American mutual interdependence and the imperative of cooperation on issues of common concern such as climate change, the administration appears hellbent on conjuring up yet another axis of evil as a rationale for a fresh round of U.S. muscle-flexing. Once again, as when 9/11 provided a spurious rationale for concocting the previous axis (not to speak of invading Afghanistan and then Iraq), the urge to ignore complexity and downplay risk is sadly apparent.

In Washington, the conviction that military might adroitly applied will restore the United States to a position of global primacy has tacitly found renewed favor. The ostensible lessons of an ongoing conflict in which U.S. forces are participating on a proxy basis superseded any lessons of the recently concluded Afghan War where the United States failed outright. Rarely has the selective memory of the national security apparatus been so vividly on display. Much the same can be said about the Congress, where a no-questions-asked enthusiasm for underwriting the Ukraine War has provided a handy excuse for simply writing off the entire 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan.

The truth is that neither Russian “fascism” nor its Chinese variant poses a significant danger to American democracy, which is actually threatened from within. Joe Biden once appeared to grasp this reality, even if he now finds it politically expedient to pretend otherwise.

Our salvation lies not in flinging around the f-word to justify more wars, but in rediscovering a different lexicon. To start with, consider this precept to which Americans were once devoted: Charity begins at home. Charity, as in tolerance, compassion, generosity, and understanding: that’s where the preservation of our democracy ought to begin.

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

Copyright ©2022 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 June 2022
Word Count: 2,298
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Once upon a time, long, long ago — actually, it was early in the year 2000 — I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It had been written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself “a spear-carrier for empire.” And he described the origins of his book’s title this way:

Ominously enough, he added, “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.” On page 10, he brought up — and remember he was writing this as the previous century ended — the name of “a former protégé of the United States,” one Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s, that rich young Saudi had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group to battle the Russians that he called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army. By the time Chalmers wrote his book, the Russian war there was long over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and bin Laden had turned against Washington. He was then believed responsible for the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On page 11, Chalmers added that such “retaliation” for American acts was “undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden.”

He summed things up this way:

Sadly, that remains even truer today and, if Chalmers could return from the dead, I have no doubt that he would have much to say about how we now find ourselves on the ultimate blowback planet.

Blowback in a Sole-Superpower World

To use an all-too-appropriate word, given what he was writing about, his book bombed. Boy, did it! The reviewer at the New York Times dismissed it as “marred by an overriding, sweeping, and cranky one-sidedness.” And it sold next to no copies. It was dead in the water, until, 18 months later… yes, I’m sure you’ve already guessed what I’m about to write next… on September 11, 2001, those towers in New York City came down and the Pentagon was clobbered.

Suddenly, Blowback was on every bookstore bestseller table in America. As Chalmers would mention in his new introduction to the 2003 paperback, Metropolitan Books had to reprint it eight times in less than two months to keep up with demand.

In that volume, he had done something deeply unpopular at the time of publication (except among fringe groups on the left). He had called our country an empire — an imperial power intent on maintaining a staggering military presence globally in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and before the rise of China. A common term used in Washington at the time was the “sole superpower” on planet Earth. And he pointed out, ominously enough, that even without official enemies of any significance, thanks in part to its global imperial presence, Washington had “hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control.” He added tellingly that it “always demands more” and was “becoming an autonomous system.” In addition, the post-Vietnam, post-draft, “all volunteer” military was, he pointed out, increasingly “an entirely mercenary force.” Worse yet, he saw the growth of American militarism at home as another form of blowback from this country’s overextension abroad. (Sound familiar in 2022?)

He warned that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the wake of the war in Afghanistan should have been a warning to Washington. Even more ominously, at a moment when this country’s foreign-policy establishment considered us the “indispensable nation” (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s phrase), he suggested that we were already experiencing “imperial overextension” and on the long downward slope that all empires experience sooner or later.

And keep in mind that all of this was written before 9/11; before President George W. Bush and crew launched devastatingly ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; before this country’s civilian population became — as the nightmare at Uvalde reminded us recently — armed to the teeth with military-style weaponry. It was long before Donald Trump and before the Republican Party was transformed into something unrecognizable. It was well before Congress became essentially incapable of passing anything of significance for most Americans, even as it was instantly capable of providing $54 billion in aid and arms for the Ukrainians and endless funds for the Pentagon.

President blowback

Just last month, 22 years later, I reread Blowback. Chalmers is, of course, long gone. (He died in November 2010.) But with the news of these last years and what may be on the horizon in mind, I couldn’t help thinking about how he would have updated the book, were he still here.

As a start, I doubt he would have been particularly surprised by Donald Trump. In June 2005, reintroducing a piece he had done for TomDispatch in 2003 on the scourge of militarism, he was already writing:

And as I added in that same 2005 introduction, reflecting Chalmers:

Yes, the possibility of our system spinning downward toward some version of tyranny wouldn’t, I suspect, have surprised him. Of course, he didn’t predict Donald Trump. (Who did?) But if anyone could have imagined this country “governed” — and I put that in quotes for obvious reasons — by a billionaire grifter and TV impresario who thought not just unbearably well of, but only of himself, it was Chalmers. Had he been here in 2016, when that bizarre figure ran for president, as he’d been dreaming about doing since at least 2011, and won, I’d put my money on his not being even slightly taken aback. Nor, I suspect, would he have been surprised when the economic inequality that helped Trump to victory only grew ever more rampant in his years in office, while billionaires began to multiply like fleas on a rabid dog.

Honestly, if you think about it for a moment, it’s hard not to imagine The Donald’s success as another version of blowback. In fact, he’s almost inconceivable without the sort of imperial mess Chalmers had in mind and that this country did such a splendiferous job of encouraging with its disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its never-ending war on terror. If it weren’t for the mess that our military machine made of the world in this century (and the money it gobbled up in the process), his rise would be hard to imagine. He now seems like the cause of so much, but honestly, as I wrote during the election campaign of 2016 referring to the disease then in the news:

He certainly marked another key moment in what Chalmers would have thought of as the domestic version of imperial decline. In fact, looking back or, given his insistence that the 2020 election was “fake” or “rigged,” looking toward a country in ever-greater crisis, it seems to me that we could redub him Blowback Donald. (Of course, that “B” could also stand for Blowhard.) And given the present Republican Party, as well as the growing evidence that this country’s political system could be coming apart at the seams, it’s hard not to think that Chalmers was onto something big as the last century ended.

Of one thing I’m sure. He wouldn’t have been slightly shocked to discover that, these days, just about the only thing Congress can agree upon across party lines is the annual raising of the Pentagon budget to levels that now match the military budgets of the next 11 countries combined.

Twenty-first-century blowback

In the back of my mind, while rereading his book, I kept wondering how else Chalmers might have updated it in 2022. And what came to mind repeatedly was that potentially ultimate subject, climate change.

Now, Chalmers certainly had a sense of the environmental damage the American empire was already causing, but climate change was not yet on his mind. Recently, to my surprise, I came across a passing reference to it in something I wrote but never published in the 1990s and was surprised I even knew about it then. Still, in this century, as I became ever more aware of it and wrote and published ever more about it at TomDispatch, I came to believe that it would indeed be potentially devastating for humanity. For years, though, I didn’t quite grasp that it would be so in my own lifetime.

Back then, I imagined it as largely a phenomenon of the future, not something for which you could find evidence in the news daily (whether identified as such or not). Yes, at some point I realized, for instance, that South Asia might be more susceptible to climate extremes than many other areas. Still, I hadn’t expected that I would live to see springtime weather with temperatures in the range of 115 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, or that such horrific and, without air conditioning, increasingly deathly warmth would be followed by devastating flooding. Or that such extremes would grow more common so quickly.

Nor, honestly, had I expected a wave of record July temperatures (and humidity) here in the northeast U.S. and across much of my own country this very May (it hit 95 degrees on a recent day in Philadelphia!). Nor did I imagine that the Southwest and West would be embroiled in a megadrought the likes of which hasn’t been seen on this continent in at least 1,200 years, with devastating, often record-setting fires, blazing in New Mexico and elsewhere ever earlier in the year. Or the unprecedented severe drought and record flooding in parts of Brazil and Argentina. Or the staggering burning and flooding in Australia. Or the unparalleled floods in recent years in China, Germany, and other countries.

I hadn’t imagined that every spring I’d see more or less the same spring article predicting another terrible, if not record, Atlantic hurricane season. Or that I’d hear about a May hurricane of record strength hitting the Pacific coast of Mexico.

And of course, that’s just to start down what seems like an increasingly endless list. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned those three rare tornadoes in Germany or the record May heat wave in Spain, or… but why go on? You get the idea. In fact, you or people you know are undoubtedly living that very reality, too, in some daunting fashion — and at this moment, thanks to the war in Ukraine and endless other distractions, the world is only burning yet more fossil-fuels promising so much worse to come.

To return to Chalmers Johnson, if you think about it for even 30 seconds, climate change has obviously become the greatest blowback event in human history — with almost unimaginably greater climate chaos likely to come. As he would undoubtedly have noted, if you’re living in the most significant blowback nation in human history, since no other country has put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than the United States, you’re truly facing — to cite the subtitle of his book — “the costs and consequences of American empire” and, of course, of the imperial oil companies that continue to have such a hand in (mis)shaping our world.

Worse yet, in this century, that newest of imperial powers, China, has already outstripped this country in terms of the fossil-fuelization of this planet’s atmosphere. (Yet another classic case of imperial over-stretch in the offing.)

Talk about decline! These days it almost seems to precede imperial rise. Yikes!

And so many years later, just to out-Chalmers the master himself, let me offer another prediction: if the Republicans sweep into Congress in 2022 and Blowback Donald or one of his act-alikes sweeps (or even creeps) into the White House in 2024, consider that the potential end of the American story, since it would ensure that, for years to come, nothing would be done to stop the ultimate version of blowback.

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 ©2022 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 June 2022
Word Count: 2,232
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Twenty years ago, I left the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs for my next assignment. I haven’t been back since, but today I travel there (if only in my imagination) to give my graduation address to the class of 2022. So, won’t you take a few minutes and join me, as well as the corps of cadets, in Falcon Stadium?

Congratulations to all you newly minted second lieutenants! As a former military professor who, for six years, taught cadets very much like you at the Academy, I salute you and your accomplishments. You’ve weathered a demanding curriculum, far too many room and uniform inspections, parades, restrictions, and everything else associated with a military that thrives on busywork and enforced conformity. You’ve emerged from all of that today as America’s newest officers, part of what recent commanders-in-chief like to call “the finest fighting force” in human history. Merely for the act of donning a uniform and taking the oath of office, many of your fellow Americans already think of you as heroes deserving of a hearty “thank you for your service” and unqualified expressions of “support.”

And I must say you do exude health, youth, and enthusiasm, as well as a feeling that you’re about to graduate to better things, like pilot training or intelligence school, among so many other Air Force specialties. Some of you will even join America’s newest service, the Space Force, which resonates with me, as my first assignment in 1985 was to Air Force Space Command.

In my initial three years in the service, I tested the computer software the Air Force used back then to keep track of all objects in earth orbit, an inglorious but necessary task. I also worked on war games in Cheyenne Mountain, America’s ultimate command center for its nuclear defense. You could say I was paid to think about the unthinkable, the end of civilization as we know it due to nuclear Armageddon. That was near the tail end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. So much has changed since I wore gold bars like you and yet, somehow, we find ourselves once again in another “cold war” with Russia, this time centered on an all-too-hot war in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, instead of, as in 1962, a country in our immediate neighborhood, Cuba. Still, that distant conflict is only raising fresh fears of a nuclear nightmare that could well destroy us all.

What does this old light colonel, who’s been retired for almost as long as he wore the uniform, have to teach you cadets so many years later? What can I tell you that you haven’t heard before in all the classes you’ve attended and all the lectures you’ve endured?

How about this: You’ve been lied to big time while you’ve been here at the Academy.

Ah, I see I have your attention now. More than a few of you are smiling. I used to joke with cadets about how four years at a military school were designed to smother idealism and encourage cynicism, or so it sometimes seemed. Yes, our lead core value may still be “integrity first,” but the brass, the senior leadership, often convinces itself that what really comes first is the Air Force itself, an ideal of “service” that, I think you’ll agree, is far from selfless.

What do I mean when I say you’ve been lied to while being taught the glorious history of the U.S. Air Force? Since World War II began, the air forces of the United States have killed millions of people around the world. And yet here’s the strange thing: we can’t even say that we’ve clearly won a war since the “Greatest Generation” earned its wings in the 1930s and 1940s. In short, boasts to the contrary, airpower has proven to be neither cheap, surgical, nor decisive. You see what I mean about lies now, I hope.

I know, I know. You’re not supposed to think this way. You eat in Mitchell Hall, named after General Billy Mitchell, that airpower martyr who fought so hard after World War I for an independent air service. (His and our collective dream, long delayed, finally came to fruition in 1947.) You celebrate the Doolittle Raiders, those intrepid aviators who flew off an aircraft carrier in 1942, launching a daring and dangerous surprise attack on Tokyo, a raid that helped restore America’s sagging morale after Pearl Harbor. You mark the courage of the Tuskegee Airmen, those African American pilots who broke racial barriers, while proving their mettle in the skies over Nazi Germany. They are indeed worthy heroes to celebrate.

And yet shouldn’t we airmen also reflect on the bombing of Germany during World War II that killed roughly 600,000 civilians but didn’t prove crucial to the defeat of Adolf Hitler? (In fact, Soviet troops deserve the lion’s share of the credit there.) We should reflect on the firebombing of Tokyo that killed more than 100,000 people, among 60 other sites firebombed, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that, both instantly and over time, killed an estimated 220,000 Japanese. During the Korean War, our air forces leveled North Korea and yet that war ended in a stalemate that persists to this day. During Vietnam, our air power pummeled Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, unleashing high explosives, napalm, and poisons like Agent Orange against so many innocent people caught up in American rhetoric that the only good Communist was a dead one. Yet the Vietnamese version of Communism prevailed, even as the peoples of Southeast Asia still suffer and die from the torrent of destruction we rained down on them half a century ago.

Turning to more recent events, the U.S. military enjoyed total air supremacy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other battlefields of the war on terror, yet that supremacy led to little but munitions expended, civilians killed, and wars lost. It led to tens of thousands of deaths by airpower, because, sadly, there are no such things as freedom bombs or liberty missiles.

If you haven’t thought about such matters already (though I’ll bet you have, at least a little), consider this: You are potentially a death-dealer. Indeed, if you become a nuclear launch officer in a silo in Wyoming or North Dakota, you may yet become a death-dealer of an almost unimaginable sort. Even if you “fly” a drone while sitting in a trailer thousands of miles from your target, you remain a death-dealer. Recall that the very last drone attack the U.S. launched in Afghanistan in 2021 killed 10 civilians, including seven children, and that no one in the chain of command was held accountable. There’s a very good reason, after all, why those drones, or, as we prefer to call them, remotely piloted aircraft, have over the years been given names like Predator and Reaper. Consider that a rare but refreshing burst of honesty.

I remember how “doolies,” or new cadets, had to memorize “knowledge” and recite it on command to upper-class cadets. Assuming that’s still a thing, here’s a phrase I’d like you to memorize and recite: Destroying the town is not saving it. The opposite sentiment emerged as an iconic and ironic catchphrase of the Vietnam War, after journalist Peter Arnett reported a U.S. major saying of devastated Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Incredibly, the U.S. military came to believe, or at least to assert, that destroying such a town was a form of salvation from the alleged ideological evil of communism. But whether by bombs or bullets or fire, destruction is destruction. It should never be confused with salvation.

Will you have the moral courage, when it’s not strictly in defense of the U.S. Constitution to which you, once again, swore an oath today, to refuse to become a destroyer?

Two unsung heroes of the U.S. Air Force

In your four years here, you’ve learned a lot about heroes like Billy Mitchell and Lance Sijan, an Academy grad and Medal of Honor recipient who demonstrated enormous toughness and resilience after being shot down and captured in Vietnam. We like to showcase airmen like these, the true believers, the ones prepared to sacrifice everything, even their own lives, to advance what we hold dear. And they are indeed easy to respect.

I have two more courageous and sacrificial role models to introduce to you today. One you may have heard of; one you almost certainly haven’t. Let’s start with the latter. His name was James Robert “Cotton” Hildreth and he rose to the rank of major general in our service. As a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam, Cotton Hildreth and his wingman, flying A-1 Skyraiders, were given an order to drop napalm on a village that allegedly harbored enemy Viet Cong soldiers. Hildreth disobeyed that order, dropping his napalm outside the target area and saving (alas, only temporarily) the lives of 1,200 innocent villagers.

How could Hildreth have possibly disobeyed his “destroy the town” order? The answer: because he and his wingman took the time to look at the villagers they were assigned to kill. In their Skyraiders, they flew low and slow. Seeing nothing but apparently friendly people waving up at them, including children, they sensed that something was amiss. It turns out that they were oh-so-right. The man who wanted the village destroyed was ostensibly an American ally, a high-ranking South Vietnamese official. The village hadn’t paid its taxes to him, so he was using American airpower to exact his revenge and set an example for other villages that dared to deny his demands. By refusing to bomb and kill innocents, Hildreth passed his “gut check,” if you will, and his career doesn’t appear to have suffered for it.

But he himself did suffer. He spoke about his Vietnam experiences in an oral interview after he’d retired, saying they’d left him “really sick” and “very bitter.” In a melancholy, almost haunted, tone, he added, “I don’t talk about this [the war] very much,” and one can understand why.

So, what happened to the village that Hildreth and his wingman had spared from execution by napalm? Several days later, it was obliterated by U.S. pilots flying high and fast in F-105s, rather than low and slow as Hildreth had flown in his A-1. The South Vietnamese provincial official had gotten his way and Hildreth’s chain of command was complicit in the destruction of 1,200 people whose only crime was fighting a tax levy.

My second hero is not a general, not even an officer. He’s a former airman who’s currently behind bars, serving a 45-month sentence because he leaked the so-called drone papers, which revealed that our military’s drone strikes killed far more innocent civilians than enemy combatants in the war on terror. His name is Daniel Hale, and you should all know about him and reflect on his integrity and honorable service to our country.

What was his “crime”? He wanted the American people to know about their military and the innocent people being killed in our name. He felt the burden of the lies he was forced to shoulder, the civilians he watched dying on video monitors due to drone strikes. He wanted us to know, too, because he thought that if enough Americans knew, truly knew, we’d come together and put a stop to such atrocities. That was his crime.

Daniel Hale was an airman of tremendous moral courage. Before he was sentenced to prison, he wrote an eloquent and searing letter about what had moved him to share information that, in my view, was classified mainly to cover up murderous levels of incompetence. I urge you to read Hale’s letter in which he graphically describes the deaths of children and the trauma he experienced in coming to grips with what he termed “the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated” while serving as an Air Force intelligence analyst.

It’s sobering stuff, but we airmen, you graduates in particular, deserve just such sobering information, because you’re going to be potential death-dealers. Yet it’s important that you not become indiscriminate murderers, even if you never see the people being vaporized by the bombs you drop and missiles you’ll launch with such profligacy.

In closing, do me one small favor before you throw your caps in the air, before the Thunderbirds roar overhead, before you clap yourselves on the back, before you head off to graduation parties and the congratulations of your friends and family. Think about a saying I learned from Spider-Man. Yes, I really do mean the comic-book hero. “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Like so many airmen before you, you may soon find yourself in possession of great power over life and death in wars and other conflicts that, at least so far in this century, have been all too grim. Are you really prepared for such a burden? Because power and authority, unchecked by morality and integrity, will lead you and our country down a very dark path indeed.

Always remember your oath, always aim high, the high of Hildreth and Hale, the high of those who remember that they are citizen-airmen in service to a nation founded on lofty ideals. Listen to your conscience, do the right thing, and you may yet earn the right to the thanks that so many Americans will so readily grant you just by virtue of wearing the uniform.

And if you’ll allow this aging airman one final wish: I wish you a world where the bombs stay in their aircraft, the missiles in their silos, the bullets in their guns, a world, dare I say it, where America is finally at peace.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He 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 ©2022 William J. Astore — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 June 2022
Word Count: 2,278
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Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures — those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn’t accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children’s play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as “collateral damage.”

We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? In that era when the only foreign conflict most of us knew about was the 1991 U.S. tromping of Iraq, mainly an air-power war from the American point of view, we certainly didn’t think about what we would now call war crimes. It might have been cause for a therapy referral if one of us had taken a G.I. Joe and pretended to shoot a child, whether armed with a suicide bomb or not.

Having lived through more than a century and a half of relative peace in our homeland while fighting endless conflicts abroad, only in the past 20 years of America’s post-9/11 war on terror, waged by U.S. troops in dozens of countries around the world, have some of our children begun to grapple with what it means to kill civilians.

War in a Trumpian (dis)information age

As a Navy spouse of more than 10 years and a therapist who specializes in treating military families and those fleeing foreign wars, I believe that the post-9/11 wars have finally begun to come home in a variety of ways, including how we think about violence. Conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond have reached U.S. shores in all sorts of strange, if often indirect manners, starting with the surplus small arms and tactical equipment (some of it previously used in distant battle zones) that the Pentagon has passed on to local law enforcement departments nationwide in ever increasing quantities.

Our wars have also come home through the “anti-terror” grants of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), itself a war-on-terror creation, that have funded local law-enforcement purchases of armored vehicles and other gear. Such weaponizing programs have helped embolden police officers to see themselves as warriors and citizens like George Floyd as enemy combatants, which helps explain the increased use of force during police encounters in these years.

Additionally, in the last decade, this country’s wars have come home in the form of more mass shootings by white supremacist and anti-government types targeting minorities and people of color. Meanwhile, the DHS continued to focus disproportionately on the dangers of Islamist extremists, while overlooking the threat posed by far-right groups, despite their easy access to firearms and the reality that many of their members have military backgrounds.

And think of our wars as coming home in one more way: through the January 6th attack on the Capitol by then-President Donald Trump’s small army of coupsters. After all, about 20% of those facing charges in connection with the Capitol riot had served in the military. Consider it a symbol of our embattled moment that the Republican Party leadership would officially sanction that assault as “legitimate political discourse.”

In this age in which armed conflict seems to be everywhere, take my word for it as a therapist and a mother, kids think about violence in a way they once didn’t. After George Floyd’s death by asphyxiation in 2020, caused by pressure from a Minneapolis police officer’s knee, kids in my community have asked me more than once what it feels like to die when someone steps on your neck. Others have asked me what bullets feel like when they enter your body and whether it’s possible to stop the blood when an armed person walks into your school and starts shooting students down.

I was in a military museum on a base where missiles were displayed and overheard a young child ask his parent whether such a weapon would hurt if it landed on you. Some kids, whose fathers or mothers fought in combat zones and returned with injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, can intuit what it means to survive a war after they’ve seen their parent hit the ground upon hearing a child scream on a playground.

The heart of war’s toll: civilian deaths

One imperative has rested at the core of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which I helped found in 2011: to account as accurately as possible for how many people have been killed or injured thanks to the decision of President George W. Bush and crew to respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks with endless military actions across significant parts of this planet. It’s easy to forget how regularly soldiers kill and maim innocent civilians, sometimes deliberately.

According to our count, by 2022, some 387,000 civilians had been killed thanks to war’s violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen. Civilian deaths similarly occurred in countries like Somalia where President Biden just redeployed hundreds of American troops in another round of the military offensive against the Islamic terror group al-Shabab (which has grown stronger in these years of all-American violence).

People living where the U.S. has fought have died in their homes and neighborhoods from bombings, shellings, missile attacks, and shootings. They’ve died while shopping for groceries or walking or driving to school or work. They’ve stepped on mines or cluster bombs while collecting wood or farming their fields. Various parties in our conflicts have kidnapped or assassinated people as they went about their everyday lives. Girls and women have purposely been raped as an attack on their communities. Human Rights Watch has documented how, in Afghanistan, parties on all sides of the war on terror, including troops and police allied with the United States, have raped, kidnapped, shot, or tortured civilians, including children.

The International Committee of the Red Cross defines war crimes as acts that are disproportionate to the military advantage sought, that do not distinguish between military and civilian targets, or that fail to take precautions to minimize injuries and loss of life among civilians. It was symbolically apt that the last U.S. drone strike in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as U.S. troops were withdrawing from our 20 year-old war there, reportedly killed three adults and seven children. And yet most Americans never seemed to take in how much civilians suffered from our war tactics, widely publicized as “surgical” and “precise” in their targeting of Islamic extremists, even as they now take in how the Russians are slaughtering Ukrainian civilians.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that information about the harm to civilians caused by our air wars in particular hasn’t been available for years to those willing to search it out. To take but one example, check out Zeeshan Usmani, Pakistani scholar-activist and founder of Pakistan Body Count. He conducted detailed investigations of the U.S. drone war in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands since 2004. Usmani’s research shows how, in the absence of strong human intelligence on the ground, American drone operators often determined who was a militant based on imprecise and moving targets. For example, some drone strikes were aimed at cell phones that might have changed hands among several people. Such attacks have killed or injured family members and neighbors of the targeted individual, or even first responders rushing to help after an initial attack had taken place. Usmani found that, between 2004 and 2014, 2,604 civilians had died in those borderlands from U.S. drone strikes — or 72% of the victims during that period.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times set of investigations into this country’s air wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria analyzed more than 1,300 military reports of air strikes between 2014 and 2018. Its journalists found that more than half of those strikes, often based on flawed intelligence that caused the Pentagon to target civilians, resulted in thousands of such deaths.

In January 2017, for example, the Air Force bombed three Iraqi families thought to house ISIS fighters. The households targeted included civilians with no known connections to that terrorist group. An Iraqi man lost his mother-in-law and three of his children, one of whom died in his arms as he tried to get her to the hospital. (A nearby house for Islamic State fighters was untouched.) The Pentagon didn’t even acknowledge those civilian deaths until years after those bombings. Nor did surviving families affected by this and similar “incidents” receive restitution or access to the kinds of medical care that many needed to live with their disabilities.

War as terrorism

Honoring troops on national holidays like the Memorial Day just past helps obscure a grim reality of our time — that wars are won (or in the case of this country, it seems, never won) only by making it impossible for the communities we oppose to carry on with their daily lives.

I once helped conduct research compiled by 10 major human rights and humanitarian organizations for the publication Education Under Attack. It showed how armed conflict impacted the lives of students and teachers in more than 93 countries. The most recent 2020 report found that government militaries and sectarian armed groups carried out more than 11,000 attacks globally on schools, school buses, students, and teachers between 2015 and 2019. Fighters and troops bombed and occupied schools, and kidnapped students and teachers, sometimes using them for sex or commandeering them into armies and militias. And many of those attacks were all too deliberate. (For reasons I won’t go into here, unlike the Costs of War Project, Education Under Attack did not specifically investigate war deaths at the hands of the U.S. military, though most of the countries profiled in its report were those our military arms, aids through intelligence, trains, or fights alongside.)

An eight-year-old child in Yemen, a country where an estimated 12,000 civilians have died due to air strikes in a nightmarish ongoing war, survived when her bus was hit. That strike was carried out by Saudi forces to which the U.S. endlessly sells arms. Here’s how she responded to the experience: “My father says he will buy me toys and get me a new school bag. I hate school bags. I don’t want to go anywhere near a bus. I hate school and I can’t sleep. I see my friends in my dreams begging me to rescue them. So from now on, I’m going to stay home.”

This is suffering that numbers can’t capture, but it should remind us that war is a form of terrorism.

Who Is to blame?

Our ignorance of the costs of war is cultural and systemic. The Costs of War Project was started exactly because, as America’s war on terror spread, a few of us became ever more aware of how hard it was to find honest, complete accounts of war and what it does to people and communities. Our military certainly hasn’t proved eager to document civilian casualties in a reliable or consistent way. In fact, what the Pentagon has known about them was often actively suppressed. The New York Times investigations of U.S. air wars in the Middle East, for example, found that only a handful of those hundreds of cases in which civilians were harmed were ever made public.

In fact, members of the U.S. armed forces have been intimidated so that they wouldn’t come forward to talk about what they had seen or done. For example, in 2010 when a group of our infantrymen shot an Afghan teenager working alone and unarmed on his family farm (in addition to killing two other unarmed Afghan civilians), the military barred those who allegedly committed the murders from giving interviews. When those men were indeed brought up on charges (rare in itself), one of them stated during an interrogation that he had been threatened with death if he refused to participate in a murder. The Army then placed him in solitary confinement, supposedly to ensure his safety. (The father of this last soldier had alerted the Army to these murders soon after they took place, but that service didn’t intervene until months later.)

Although impunity and lack of accountability are rampant in war, war-crimes trials like Nuremburg after World War II or Kyiv’s recent first trial of a captured Russian soldier who had committed acts of horror are all too rare. And even when they do condemn specific war criminals, they seldom condemn war itself.

I only hope, as the children in my family and my community grow up, they come to understand that war crimes aren’t just a byproduct of recklessness but of an all-too-human decision to “solve” problems through armed conflict rather than the range of alternatives available to us. I also hope that ever more of us accept how important it is to teach younger generations about the horrific suffering of civilians who live through war.

Here’s the truth of it: if we lack empathy for those who suffer in our wars, we endanger humanity’s future. The kids who ask pointed and graphic questions or wake up from nightmares spurred by playing Call of Duty are saner than parents who thank soldiers for their service or celebrate Ukrainian holidays. Purchasing Ukrainian flags is no substitute for trying to investigate the nightmare really underway in that conflict. We should be supporting organizations that protect local journalists. Instead of buying guns ourselves or voting for lawmakers bent on sending our troops all over the world to fight “terror” (and, of course, cause terror), we should be sending money to organizations that document war’s casualties or the humanitarian agencies that aid refugees, displaced people, and survivors of violence.

And it’s time, above all, to ask ourselves what stories we’ve been missing in all these years that our military has been fighting abroad. In such a world, the true costs of war should be endlessly on our minds.

Andrea Mazzarino writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Copyright ©2022 Andrea Mazzarino — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 May 2022
Word Count: 2,327
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To begin, an anecdote. This past summer, a pigeon walked through my open balcony door while my attention was elsewhere. I shooed it out, but when I turned around two more pigeons walked out of my bedroom. In the 20 years I’ve lived in my apartment, this had never happened to me, though my balcony door was often open. All I could imagine was that those poor birds had gotten as disoriented as the rest of us in these pandemic years when nothing feels faintly normal.

But what is normal, anyway? Decades filled with war, inequity, poverty, and injustice? Really? Is this what we want — a society clearly failing its people?

There are, of course, many groups working in wonderful ways to improve our lives, each of them a harbinger of what’s possible. These would certainly include Black Lives Matter, reproductive-rights organizations, and climate-change groups, as well as newly empowered union organizing, and that’s just to mention a few obvious examples.

But here’s the truly worrisome thing. These days such social-justice groups, inspirational as they may be, can barely be heard above the clamor of right-wing organizing and conspiratorial thinking, which seems to be gathering strength, leading toward an accretion of power across this land of ours. They’re doing so locally by getting onto school boards and city councils; by using social media to spread ever wilder racist, misogynist ideas; by encouraging racial hatred that results in nightmarish murders, most recently in Buffalo, New York, where a young white man slaughtered African-Americans in a supermarket. And by doing all this and more, the right wing has grown into a set of movements that continue to flourish nationwide with far too little forceful opposition.

Right-wing politicians, extremist groups, and their social-media outlets are anything but new. For years, however, they lingered in the shadows. Donald Trump’s presidency gave them permission to emerge all too vocally and capture the fealty of so many Republican lawmakers and voters. The threats to legal abortion, voting rights, marriage equality, and education (via book banning and curriculum reshaping) are just a few obvious aspects of American life now being menaced by a set of authoritarian, nationalist, racist political movements that are unfolding daily. The question, of course, is: What should the rest of us do to counter all of this?

We live on an ever more climate-endangered planet and in a society threatened by growing amounts of disinformation, misinformation, and a tendency toward extreme individualism. Consider just the growing number of anti-vax, anti-masking Republicans who equate their choices with the personification of freedom, which is really a fear of loss of control — white control, rich control, male control.

Sadly enough, progressive ideas aren’t permeating our society anywhere near as quickly or defiantly as right-wing ones. In the increasingly dangerous world we inhabit, it’s not enough to fire up anger by sending people into the streets for a single day of protest, even to shout No!, Stop!, Not in our name!It’s a shame — since they should matter — but such flare-ups don’t engender real change. Only consistent, visible grassroots organizing, local and national, might lead to the kinds of change that could affect political consciousness and alter a country that may be going the way of Trump far too quickly.

History as proof

It’s encouraging to look back and note that, throughout our history, grassroots movements have made a genuine difference. Those who worked at change, day in, day out, year in, year out often succeeded in their struggles. They won child-labor laws and social security, promoted women’s suffrage and civil rights, and remade American society in other equally important ways. Sustained grassroots organizing by laborers, miners, teachers, and so many others created national unions, some of which then fought successfully for legislation of all kinds, not to speak of the creation of the Department of Labor itself in 1913 to give that movement a “voice in the cabinet.” Through determined organizing, unionization reached a high point during the 1940s and 1950s.

Unfortunately, by the early 1980s, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, unions began losing members and clout, a defeat only compounded by their inability to stop a great migration of plants and factories overseas. That phenomenon would, of course, devastate large swaths of the country, especially the industrial Midwest. In its wake, it left blue-collar workers in economic despair and losing confidence in both unions and government. Over time, those feelings would only enhance a rightward political shift.

After so many years, however, a new uptick in unionization seems to be underway. The recent surprise vote in favor of unionizing an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, after two years of organizing efforts, offers a striking example of how a vigorous, progressive, and consistent grassroots movement can achieve change and spur yet more organizing by others.

But what is organizing anyway? Who can do it? How is it done?

Let me try to answer those questions in a personal way. In 1969, in the midst of this country’s war in Vietnam that swept so many of us into the streets, I became a member of a collective that organized an antiwar coffee shop. We opened it close to an Army base and many young soldiers came in. We offered them free coffee and cookies, music popular at the time, and of course ourselves to chat with every day of the week. We even left coins in a jar on the counter that could be used in a pay telephone booth to get in touch with family or friends.

I can remember talking with soldiers, many of them destined for Vietnam. We discussed the state of the country, class, race, and especially, of course, the ongoing war and what to do about it. We listened as well, learning much about those mostly working-class soldiers of all races and creeds: how they grew up, how they felt about basic training, and how they had learned what they knew. We, in turn, began to understand what influenced the thinking of those young men, many from rural areas of the country, including the role of disinformation in their political consciousness. That coffee-shop collective offered soldiers knowledge as power, knowledge to change consciousness.

While antiwar demonstrations spread in those years, often filling the streets, such coffee shops and other antiwar projects spread, too. And of course — though it took far too long and far too many of those young lives — that war did end and we played our small part in that, something I tried to capture in my new novel, Can You See the Wind?.

Movements then and now

That was, of course, so long ago, but in the world of today, perhaps such activities might still have a place. What if, for example, organizers were now to begin setting up social-justice cafes — storefronts offering free coffee, music, talk, and educational materials aimed at informing and affecting political consciousness in this ever more social-mediated moment? Such cafés, or whatever their twenty-first-century equivalents might be, would offer an up-close, face-to-face way of countering rightwing disinformation, conspiracy thinking, and propaganda.

Many social-justice groups now do aim to reach out and educate. There’s a problem, however. Their good work isn’t coalescing into the kind of massive effort that can influence deeply. Much of the protest work of this moment, of course, begins (and ends) online — sometimes followed by sporadic flare-ups of street protests, little of it as effective as it should be when it comes to influencing opinion. Though helpful in spreading the word, social-media platforms are inadequate substitutes for street-by-street, action-by-action grassroots work that anyone can join because it’s visible, out there, and noisy rather than one person alone at her computer.

From the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, street mobilizations and public action were remarkably commonplace. Though initially such movements were anything but well covered by mainstream news outlets, a growing alternative media offered them much-needed attention. Soon enough, though, mainstream newspapers and the TV news had little choice but to report on what was so obviously happening in the streets. How could they not, since the insistent demands for social justice were so noisy, ongoing, and hard to miss — and, in the process, people’s opinions began to change.

During those years, the creative actions taken included civil rights bus boycotts, sit-ins of many kinds, and protest marches of all sorts. There were also public teach-ins, women’s consciousness-raising groups, and storefront child-care centers that allowed parents to attend protests and speak-ins in those pre-Roe v. Wade days to demand the right to abortion. Though that right, won then, is now threatened, there will no doubt be a sustained fight to maintain it. A law may be rescinded but it’s difficult to erase from consciousness something that so many women have benefited from.

The messages of such actions were hard to miss and did indeed change public consciousness, as in the case of the civil rights movement. They not only led to desperately needed voting-rights laws, but also inspired generations of young people to become involved in progressive movements.

Unfortunately, these days, those on social media and in the streets are all too often right-wing organizers doing all they can to eviscerate voting-rights laws, aided and abetted by Republican state legislatures and a Supreme Court essentially taken over by right-wingers.

Another example of a protest movement that worked thanks to an organized grassroots struggle is the anti-Vietnam War movement. At the start of that conflict, most Americans were either supportive of or indifferent to it. After the growth of a massive antiwar movement and waves of protest and education to end that nightmarish conflict, much of it taking place in the streets or on university campuses, public opinion did turn against the war and helped force its end.

A more recent example of progressive action would be Occupy Wall Street in 2011 — essentially a tent city set up in New York’s financial district. Though it didn’t bring concrete change to Wall Street, it did change consciousness in this country about the growing inequality between the rich 1% and the rest of us. Perhaps one day an Occupy successor will develop, a grassroots movement in support of taxing the wealthiest Americans to finance so much of what society still needs.

The Black Lives Matter movement is the most recent example of how a consistent mobilization, not just online but out in the streets of cities across the country, can increase awareness of society’s injustice. Through it, systemic racism was brought to the consciousness of Americans in a new way, even as this country was all too sadly being increasingly barraged from the right by white nationalism and the great replacement theory. Sadly, there can be no real social justice as long as the messages of white nationalists proliferate.

What does change mean now?

In some sense, change is invisible until it succeeds and one thing is guaranteed: it won’t succeed if we wait for it to happen from the top down. History proves that. Though it feels like a nearly impossible task to shake up a nation already thoroughly rattled by Donald Trump and his Republican followers, it can happen. After all, in the end, the real lawmakers are indeed the people.

No doubt the pandemic has created a kind of vacuum in which each of us has been forced to make decisions for her or himself: to take a train, or not; to eat in a restaurant, or not; to meet a friend, or not — decisions that need to be made again and again as the next Covid-19 variant or subvariant hits. No wonder sitting at a computer feels like the least endangering act around, the best way to communicate and relate right now.

We’re born without political consciousness. It’s learned, handed down, exchanged, and absorbed. Think of this essay then as my way of reassuring you that a sense of helplessness has been overcome before and can be again. Each generation learns anew how to cope and bring about change. But history does teach us that sustained grassroots movements have a special impact on political consciousness, even as they influence legislators to meet public demands if they wish to remain in office. In addition, the solidarity of many acting in unison offers a sense of strength and a path out of despair for those involved.

However perilous and unnerving these times may be, they belong to us to either live with or change.

Beverly Gologorsky writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the author of four novels, including the New York Times notable book The Things We Do to Make It Home and Every Body Has a Story. She was an editor of two political journals, Viet-Report and Leviathan.
Her new novel is Can You See the Wind?

Copyright ©2022 Beverly Gologorsky — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 May 2022
Word Count: 2,075
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These are good times to be an arms maker. Not only are tens of billions of dollars in new military spending headed for the coffers of this country’s largest weapons contractors, but they’re being praised as defenders of freedom and democracy, thanks to their role in arming Ukraine to fight the Russians. The last time the industry gained such a sterling reputation was during World War II when it was lauded as the “arsenal of democracy” for fueling the fight against fascism.

Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes recently underscored this point in an interview with the Harvard Business Review. While discussing how he should respond to criticism of his company benefiting from a rise in sales right now, he said:

Indeed, Raytheon will “see some benefit” from the war “over time.” The company produces the Stinger anti-aircraft missile and co-produces (with Lockheed Martin) the Javelin anti-tank missile, both of which Washington has provided to Ukraine by the thousands. Now, the companies will be handsomely reimbursed as the Pentagon moves to replenish its stockpiles of those systems. Those sales, in turn, will bolster Hayes’s annual $23 million compensation package, which grew by 11% in 2021. It will undoubtedly only rise more as the company is showered with new contracts tied to Ukraine and other global conflicts.

Raytheon is, of course, anything but the only major arms manufacturer reaping financial and reputational benefits from the war in Ukraine. Earlier this month, President Biden singled out Lockheed Martin for special praise when he toured the Alabama facility where it produces those Javelin missiles. It was part of his effort to promote tens of billions of dollars in new aid for Ukraine and transform himself into a war president.

These days, even arms industry CEOs are having their moment in the sun as media stars. On Mother’s Day, for instance, Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet was featured on CBS’s Face the Nation. Because of the softball questions served up by interviewer Margaret Brennan, media critic Dan Froomkin at Responsible Statecraft described the segment all too accurately as an “infomercial.” Taiclet used the opportunity to tout the rise of global tensions as a remarkable long-term business opportunity for his company:

The president has just approved a new $40 billion aid package for Ukraine rushed through Congress — an even higher figure, you’ll undoubtedly not be surprised to learn, than he asked for. More than half of that package will go for military purposes, which means the outlook for firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin couldn’t be brighter. Add to that new sales to NATO allies beefing up their military budgets in response to the Russian invasion, as well as the Pentagon’s own astronomical budget — slated to exceed $800 billion for 2023 — and the opportunities for profit seem nothing short of endless.

And it’s true that Ukraine does indeed need weapons to defend itself. In the context of a policy in Washington designed, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently put it all too bluntly, to “weaken Russia” rather than simply end the war, there is, however, a danger in sending too much, too fast. After all, escalating the conflict in this way could possibly lead to a direct confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, two nuclear-armed nations.

Putting that nightmarish possibility aside, there’s another question that comes to mind (mine, anyway): Does arming Ukraine really make Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and their cohorts “defenders of democracy”?

As someone who has followed Washington’s arms production and its global weapons sales for decades now, my answer would be: far from it. At best, those firms are opportunists, selling their wares wherever they’re allowed to, regardless of whether their products will be used to push back a Russian invasion of Ukraine or fuel the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe of this century in Yemen.

If they were truly to become part of an “arsenal of democracy,” those militarized mega-firms would have to trim their client lists considerably. I suspect, in fact, that if we were looking at their global sales in a more clear-eyed way, we would have to come up with a more apt term for them entirely. My own suggestion when it comes to Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and similar firms would be “arsenal of autocracy.” Let me explain why I think that term would be all too apt.

Missing news on the weapons trade

U.S. weapons contractors aren’t exactly fussy about which regimes they send weapons to. Quite the contrary, they seek out as many sales to as many places as the political market will bear. Those companies also devote considerable time, effort, and (of course) money to expanding their potential markets. They do so in particular by lobbying to lower restrictions on where the U.S. government is willing to promote weapons deals.

Nowhere is the “arsenal of autocracy” moniker more apt than in the case of the war in Yemen, where the United States has sold tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for their grim intervention there. The results have been horrific — thousands of civilians killed by indiscriminate air strikes (using weaponry from those very companies) and millions on the brink of famine due to a Saudi-led air and sea blockade that has dramatically reduced Yemeni imports of fuel and other essential commodities. At this moment, a rare two-month, United Nations-negotiated truce between the Saudi-led coalition and the opposition Houthi rebels is about to end. During that truce, air strikes have been limited, but sadly the blockade has largely continued. And there is a real danger that fighting may resume on June 2nd, at which point U.S.-supplied weapons will once again be the backbone of the Saudi war effort.

The impact of American arms in Yemen has been anything but abstract. Groups like the Yemen-based Mwatana for Human Rights, as well as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented the devastating role of bombs produced by Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin in air strikes that hit, among other civilian targets, a marketplace, a wedding, and even a school bus. When Amnesty International surveyed 22 arms makers about their role in enabling these Saudi crimes, many of them refused to answer, and those few that did offered variations on the government-let-me-do-it explanation, seeming to suggest that Washington’s imprimatur absolved them of any responsibility. They also cited customer confidentiality, as if that somehow justified participating in the slaughter of innocents.

The response from Raytheon was a case in point: “Due to legal constraint [and] customer relations issues… Raytheon does not provide information on our products, customers or operational issues.” As Amnesty noted, Raytheon “went on to say that military and security equipment is subject to a government review which includes ‘consideration of international human rights and international law.’”

So much for defending democracy. In recent years, U.S. weapons have flowed to other reckless, repressive regimes like the UAE, a partner-in-crime with Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, as well as a serial violator of the United Nations arms embargo on parties in the civil war in Libya. Other rogue regimes on the receiving end of U.S.-manufactured arms include Egypt, where the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has jailed and tortured human rights and democracy advocates and waged a scorched earth counterinsurgency campaign in the northern Sinai desert, killing civilians and displacing tens of thousands of people; the Philippines, where the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte killed thousands under the guise of an anti-drug campaign, including journalists, labor leaders, and land rights activists; and Nigeria, whose military has become notorious for killing and torturing civilians. And that’s not an exhaustive list either.

In none of those cases have any executives in the American weapons-making firms expressed the slightest qualms about their role in fostering human rights abuses and fueling destabilizing, unnecessary conflicts. And don’t hold your breath waiting for questions about such cases the next time an arms industry official speaks to the media.

The dictators lobby

Even as arms industry executives take cover behind Washington’s decisions to weaponize repressive regimes, their companies are working hard to bend the rules in their favor when it comes to who’s eligible to receive their products. Over the past two decades, military firms have spent $2.5 billion on their lobbying efforts while giving $285 million in campaign contributions to key members of Congress, according to Open Secrets, a group devoted to promoting government transparency. In an average year, the industry employs around 700 lobbyists, or more than one for every congressional representative.

Such industry efforts to influence arms-sales policy are further reinforced by lobbyists for foreign governments that want those weapons. As my Quincy Institute colleague Ben Freeman has noted, Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, the former chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has worked for Saudi Arabia and Lockheed Martin, both of which have a strong interest in pushing such weaponry out the door with as few questions asked as possible. Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), Freedom Forward, and other organizations promoting human rights and democracy in the Middle East have placed operatives like McKeon who advocate for repressive regimes in their “lobbyist hall of shame.”

One well-documented case study of such lobbying from within the government itself offers a glimpse into how the process works. Charles Faulkner, a former Raytheon lobbyist, came to serve as a member of the State Department’s Office of Legal Affairs during the Trump administration. In September 2018, he pressed to give Saudi Arabia a clean bill of health when it came to whether or not it was intentionally targeting civilians in its Yemen air strikes. He won that argument, which laid the groundwork for a sale of Raytheon precision-guided bombs to the Saudis to move forward. Then, in the spring of 2019, Faulkner sparked concern among lawmakers over his apparent role in crafting a plan to use emergency procedures to make an end run around Congress when it came to a package of weaponry destined for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan.

Detailed examples like that are hard to come by because the arms industry does so much behind closed doors. It’s important to note, however, that the weapons makers don’t always win the day. When Raytheon’s then-CEO Thomas Kennedy showed up at the office of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to press him to lift a hold on a Raytheon deal with Saudi Arabia, he was rebuffed. Menendez summarized his response to Kennedy this way to a New York Times reporter:

In short, lobbying doesn’t always work, which is one reason the industry puts so many resources into it.

 Stemming the flow of arms to autocracies

Despite their lobbying power, weapons makers are facing significant resistance to their efforts to keep the weapons flowing to regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. During the Trump years, bipartisan majorities voted to end military support for the Saudi armed forces under the War Powers Act and to block a sale of precision-guided bombs to the Kingdom, only to have those measures vetoed by President Trump.

Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR) will be introducing a new War Powers Resolution in hopes of changing the Biden administration’s policy of continuing to arm Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In doing so, the president and his officials have ignored their earlier criticisms of the Saudi regime and its de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman who launched the war in Yemen in 2015 and was implicated in the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

There are also bills in the works to “flip the script” on arms-sales decision-making. These would require congressional approval for major sales, thereby preempting the ability of the president to veto efforts to block specific deals. Such initiatives represent a high-water mark in Congressional efforts to restrict runaway arms sales since the passage of the Arms Export Control Act in 1976, more than four decades ago. Will they succeed in the Ukraine war moment when the weapons industry is riding so high and proclaiming its good deeds all too loudly?

It’s hard to say since this country has long been working to create and support global arsenals of autocracy. If the arms industry were truly focused on “defending democracy” on this planet, its firms would have already allowed the above-mentioned reforms to go through without objection, or even, heaven forbid, supported them. The fact that they won’t do so tells you all you need to know about their true intentions in what is for them a genuine gold-rush moment.

William D. Hartung writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex.

Copyright ©2022 William D. Hartung — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 May 2022
Word Count: 2,341
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The war in Ukraine has already caused massive death and destruction, with more undoubtedly to come as the fighting intensifies in the country’s east and south. Many thousands of soldiers and civilians have already been killed or wounded, some 13 million Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, and an estimated one-third of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Worse yet, that war’s brutal consequences have in no way been limited to Ukraine and Russia: hunger and food insecurity are increasing across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East as grain deliveries from two of the world’s leading wheat producers have been severed. People are also suffering globally from another harsh consequence of that war: soaring fuel prices. And yet even those manifestations of the war’s “collateral damage” don’t come close to encompassing what could be the greatest casualty of all: planet Earth itself.

Any major war will, of course, inflict immense harm on the environment and Ukraine’s no exception. Although far from over, the fighting there has already resulted in widespread habitat and farmland destruction, while attacks on fuel-storage facilities (crucial targets for both sides) and the wartime consumption of fossil fuels have already released colossal amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But however detrimental they may be, those should be thought of as relatively minor injuries when compared to the long-term catastrophic damage sure to be caused by the collapse of global efforts to slow the pace of global warming.

Mind you, even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the possibility of preventing the world’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above its pre-industrial average seemed to be slipping away. After all, as a recent study by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made clear, without a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, global temperatures are likely to exceed that target long before this century ends — with terrifying consequences. “In concrete terms,” as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out when releasing the report, “this means major cities under water, unprecedented heat waves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages, and the extinction of one million species of plants and animals.”

Nonetheless, before the Russian invasion, environmental policymakers still believed it might be possible to avoid that ghastly fate. Such success, however, would require significant cooperation among the major powers — and now, due to the war in Ukraine, that appears unattainable, possibly for years to come.

Geopolitics leaves climate action in the dust

Sadly, geopolitical rivalry, not cooperation, is now the order of the day. Thanks to Russia’s invasion and the harsh reaction it’s provoked in Washington and other Western capitals, “great-power competition” (as the Pentagon calls it) has overtaken all other considerations. Not only has diplomatic engagement between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing essentially ground to a halt, making international cooperation on climate change (or any other global concern) nearly impossible, but an all-too-militarized competition has been launched that’s unlikely to abate for years to come.

As President Biden declared in Poland on March 26th:

This will not be a short-term struggle, he assured his NATO allies.

Decades to come! And mind you, similar expressions of abiding ideological and geopolitical enmity can be heard from Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China. “We are a different country,” Putin said in his May 9th Victory Day speech. “Russia has a different character. We will never give up our love for our Motherland, our faith, and traditional values.” Similarly, Xi has reaffirmed China’s determination to pursue its own path in world affairs and warned Washington against exploiting the Ukraine conflict for its geopolitical advantage.

If asked, Biden, Putin, Xi, and high-ranking officials everywhere would undoubtedly insist that addressing climate change remains an important concern. But let’s face it, their number-one priority is now to mobilize their societies for a long-term struggle against their geopolitical rivals. And rest assured, that will prove to be an all-consuming endeavor, with digressions for other matters — climate being at the top of any list — postponed for the foreseeable future.

Take, for instance, the $773 billion budget request that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) submitted this April for fiscal year (FY) 2023. Look over its proposed expenditures and you’ll get a pretty good idea of the Pentagon’s priorities and, by extension, those of the Biden administration.

According to the DoD’s budget documents, $56.5 billion is being sought for new combat aircraft, $41 billion for new ships, $34 billion for the “modernization” of America’s nuclear arsenal, $25 billion for missile defense, $20 billion for artillery and armored vehicles, and $135 billion for “combat readiness” and training activities. Oh yes, and $3 billion is being sought to address the effects of climate change on the U.S. military.

Under the circumstances, it’s striking that the Pentagon’s budget request even acknowledges the risk of global warming, given the lack of attention it was accorded in the past. Nonetheless, that paltry financial contribution to climate action — mainly meant to deal with the destructive impact of future severe storms on this country’s military bases — is already being overshadowed by preparations for a possible conflict with China and/or Russia. As the Pentagon put it all too directly: “The President’s Budget request for FY 2023 reflects DoD’s clear focus on deterring and, if necessary, denying potential People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russian aggression against Allies and partners.”

Such language, in fact, is used to justify virtually every item in the budget, including all those planes, ships, guns, bombs, and missiles. Similar terms are also used to describe the missions U.S. forces are being trained to perform. A discussion of Army planning puts it this way, for example:

Such passages reveal the dominant mindset of this moment. From the perspective of American leaders and their military strategists — as well, undoubtedly, as those in Russia and China — meeting the demands of “great power competition and great power conflict” is the defining task of our moment and will remain so, in President Biden’s words, “for the years and decades to come.” In such an environment, climate change, as the key peril of our moment, functionally recedes or simply disappears from all such agendas.

The suspension of international dialogue and cooperation

Slowing the pace of climate change requires action at many levels but can only succeed if all nations agree to work together in reducing carbon emissions. Setting and meeting international targets for such reductions could insure that progress in any one country is matched elsewhere. This was, of course, the guiding principle of the Paris Climate Summit of December 2015, which resulted in a pledge by 196 countries to take concrete steps to limit warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Every year since then, the signers of the Paris Climate Agreement have met to review their (supposed) progress in adopting concrete measures aimed at achieving that objective. The most recent meeting — officially, the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP 26) of the International Framework Convention on Climate Change — was convened last November in Glasgow, Scotland, attracting massive media attention. Although COP 26 achieved no major breakthroughs, its summit declaration did at least call on participating states to “phase down” their use of coal and take other steps aimed at curbing fossil fuels.

Many attendees at the Glasgow event expressed the hope that the next meeting, scheduled for this November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, would codify numerous proposals discussed at COP 26 for reducing fossil-fuel consumption. Sadly, however, it’s no longer conceivable that China, Russia, the U.S., and the countries of the European Union (EU) will be able to work in any faintly harmonious fashion toward that goal. Russia has already demonstrated its disinclination to talk with the West on such vital matters by sabotaging negotiations aimed at restoring the nuclear agreement with Iran. Given increasingly hostile relations between Beijing and Washington, don’t count on those two countries, the world’s leading emitters of carbon, to cooperate on anything significant either.

In short, such international cooperation, never overwhelming to begin with, now appears to have reached a dead end, which means that efforts to keep warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius are almost certain to fail. Indeed, given the current state of great-power relations, the fallback limit of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is likely to be overtaken all too soon with calamitous results when it comes to increasing drought, desertification, intensifying storms, ever-more devastating fires, and other nightmarish outcomes.

Breaking with Russia: fossil fuels forever

As an example of where we’re headed in this Ukraine war moment, consider Europe’s drive to eliminate its reliance on Russian fossil-fuel imports. Although the EU countries have indeed made far more ambitious plans than the other major powers to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels over the coming decades, they remain highly reliant on oil, coal, and natural gas for a large share of their energy needs. Moreover, much of their supply of those fuels is imported, especially from Russia. Astonishingly, in 2020 that country supplied approximately 43% percent of the EU’s natural gas imports, 29% percent of its oil, and 54% of its coal. Now, thanks to the Russian invasion, the EU is seeking to reduce those percentages to zero. “We must become independent from Russian oil, coal, and gas,” declared Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU’s executive arm. “We simply cannot rely on a supplier who explicitly threatens us.”

In consonance with such an approach, the EU announced plans to “make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030.” And those plans do indeed involve increased reliance on renewable sources of energy, especially wind and solar power. Such efforts, however, will take significant time to implement and, until then, Europe is anxiously seeking increased oil and gas deliveries from other countries to offset a severe energy shortage (and soaring fuel prices). That reality, in turn, has prompted potential suppliers to invest yet more funds in increased oil and gas output — moves likely to result in a greater, not lesser, long-term commitment to fossil-fuel production and consumption.

This is especially true in the case of European gas imports. Natural gas, the least carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels, has become popular in Europe as a substitute for coal in electricity generation. Its use, however, does result in significant carbon emissions and its extraction often also leads to substantial releases of methane, another dangerous greenhouse gas. Europe currently relies on natural gas for approximately 25% of its net energy consumption and now, committed as it is to eliminating Russian gas by 2030, its countries are desperate to find alternative suppliers. In practice, this will mean increased imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Because many key gas producers — notably Australia, Nigeria, Qatar, and the United States — lie too far from Europe to deliver it via pipelines, they will have to ship it as LNG. This, in turn, will require the construction of costly new LNG export facilities abroad and import facilities in Europe, committing both sides ever more firmly to a long-term reliance on gas production.

Thanks to a March 25th agreement between the EU and the United States, for example, this country will be supplying 50 billion cubic meters of LNG to Europe annually by 2030 (about double the amount shipped in 2020). To do so, 10 or more new LNG export facilities will have to be constructed in the U.S. and a similar number of import terminals in Europe. Such projects will cumulatively cost hundreds of billions of dollars, while ensuring that natural gas continues to play a prominent role in European energy consumption (and U.S. energy extraction), potentially for decades to come.

Kissing Earth goodbye

All this — and it’s just the tip of the melting iceberg — leads to one conclusion: the world’s ruling elites have chosen to place their geopolitical rivalries above all other critical concerns, including planetary salvation. As a result, global warming is indeed likely to surpass 2 degrees Celsius sometime during this century. It’s a given that almost unimaginable calamities will ensue, including the inundation of major cities, monstrous wildfires, and the collapse of agriculture in many parts of the world.

This means, of course, that those of us who still view global warming as the crucial priority face the most difficult of challenges. Yes, we can continue our protests and lobbying in support of vigorous climate-change action, knowing that our efforts will fall on remarkably deaf ears in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and major European capitals or we can begin to contest the very idea that great-power competition itself should be accorded such a priority on a planet in such mortal danger. Yes, countering Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is important, as is deterring similar moves by China in the Indo-Pacific region or our own country globally. However, if planetary meltdown is to be avoided, such considerations can’t be allowed to overshadow the ultimate danger faced by powers both big and small, as well as the rest of us. To have any chance of success in limiting global warming to tolerable levels, the climate-action movement will somehow have to overturn an elite consensus on the importance of geopolitical competition — or else.

Or else, that is, we can kiss Planet Earth goodbye.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. He is a founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy.

Copyright ©2022 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 May 2022
Word Count: 2,287
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For 50 years now, people have told desperate, heart-breaking stories about what it was like to search for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. These were invariably narratives of women in crisis. They sometimes involved brief discussions about economic inequality, police-state intrigue, and unwanted children, but for the most part men were invisible in them, missing in action. Where were they? And where are they now that a wall of fundamental rights seems to be crumbling away not just for women, but for all of us? This is another example of what I used to call the Bystander Boys.

As a sportswriter, my work over these decades often brought me into a universe of male entitlement and the sort of posturing I thought of as fauxmasculinity. Even in that chest-beating environment, I was struck by the absence in abortion stories of what in another time would have been called manliness. What happened to that mostly storybook ideal of the brave, modest, responsible, big-hearted protector? I figured out early on not to waste time searching for him among football quarterbacks or baseball coaches, or even cops and Army officers. Much, much later, I found more people with the right stuff — that “manly” ideal — among single mothers and feminist lawyers.

As it happened, there weren’t a lot of male heroes during the women’s movement of the 1970s or even the more recent #MeToo upsurge. Most men, except for the power boys who treated everyone else as girls, were too fearful or starstruck to intervene. The most grotesque models were, of course, the athletes who stood by silently while their teammates raped stoned or drunken women.

In the pre-pill early 1960s, when unwanted pregnancy was a constant chilling specter for my pre-Boomer “silent” generation, men usually talked about abortion only if their girlfriends had missed a period — when they were trying to track down that coal-country Pennsylvania doctor who performed illegal abortions with relative impunity. They might even share their fears of what an unwanted kid would do to their careers, but rarely did they bring up the typical back-alley butchery of abortion in those years that came from the hijacking of the most fundamental of rights.

Where are those guys even today, much less their sons and grandsons, presumably still active partners in the reproductive process? Forget about moral responsibility — what about the jeopardy our lives are in as the possibility of a Trumpian-style authoritarian future closes in around us? Sixty years ago, it already seemed remarkably clear to me how crucial it was that men stop leaving women to face this nightmare essentially alone — and it still does.

The Dismissal

With that in mind, let me tell you my own ancient abortion story, though it always felt somewhat pallid compared to others — what my kids would have sneered at as a “first-world story” if I had told them. Still, I think it does capture the fear and helplessness of a time which, sadly enough, just might be coming around again.

The year was 1961, 12 years before Roe v. Wade. I had already been married to my first wife for two years and she was justifiably convinced that we were still too shaky, emotionally and professionally, to have children. We were both 23. She was an undergraduate, working on the side in a doctor’s office. I was an ambitious New York Times reporter, covering sports for that paper and cops for its Sunday magazine. When she discovered that she was pregnant, we briefly argued about what to do. I liked the idea of fatherhood and was convinced that it wouldn’t hamper my career. (No wonder, since in the spirit of the time, I assumed she’d be doing all the work.) But I did at least understand that, in the end, it was her choice, not mine.

Through her medical connections, she found a Fifth Avenue doctor who would perform the then-illegal operation for $500, which we could just barely scrape together. We called that upcoming operation “the dismissal” in what we both understood to be a pathetically smart-assed way of avoiding a confrontation with the actual fears and mixed emotions generated by our choice. At that time, it was, of course, criminal, dangerous, and (in what passed for proper society) largely despised.

I was scared for Maria’s well-being and the possible consequences of acting illegally. I was particularly fearful that the Times might find out and, in some fashion, hold it against me. In a confused and twisted way, I was also disturbed about acting against the moral conventions of my society and time. It made me feel like a bad person and, believe me, those were wrenching feelings that began to bubble back into my memory recently as the most humane of judicial amendments came under assault by truly evil forces.

I was also — however contradictory this might sound — righteously angry on that crisp, clear fall afternoon as Maria and I walked to the doctor’s ground-floor office across from New York’s Central Park. I knew even then that religious bigots and the mercenary politicians backing them stood in the way of our health and freedom. Admittedly, I could never have imagined that, more than half a century later, the same combination of forces would be using abortion as part of an authoritarian plot to seize control of all aspects of our lives. Back then, I probably would have smirked at such seeming paranoia, had I seen it in some sci-fi film.

The doctor’s door opened before I rang the buzzer and the arm of an older woman — the doctor’s wife I later discovered — shot out, grabbed Maria’s sleeve and began pulling her inside. We kissed quickly. I noted how terrified Maria’s eyes were. And then she was gone.

I had been instructed to leave the area and call in two hours (from a pay phone on the street, of course, since no one then had a mobile phone). After wandering in the park for a while, I found myself drifting back toward the doctor’s office. Reporters always have that urge to stay near the action. As dusk was settling, I noticed nondescript black and gray sedans beginning to double-park illegally along Fifth Avenue and in the side streets flanking that office. They disgorged athletic-looking women in non-chic clothes. In that fashionable neighborhood, they were distinctly not local residents.

The Raid

As they clustered on the sidewalk, I remember thinking that they looked like a women’s semi-pro softball team I had once covered, as well as the women cops I had met recently doing a Times magazine piece about a squad of Manhattan detectives.

I realized then that I was watching a raid. I felt ice water in my veins as I hurried to a telephone booth from which I could observe the cops closing in on the doctor’s office. What should I do? Warn the doctor? Less than an hour had passed since Maria had gone inside. If they aborted the abortion now, would that spare them criminal charges? What if she was numbing into the anesthesia? I imagined the doctor, scalpel in hand, panicking and injuring my wife. I couldn’t bring myself to take that chance. So, made powerless by my decision, I simply waited and watched.

Soon enough, the cops swarmed the office door and went inside. I moved closer. Several of them were standing guard there and others were stationed along the block. They briskly collected a middle-aged couple heading toward the office and stuffed them into a parked sedan.

It seemed like a long time before the office door opened and the cops came out with the doctor’s wife, a white-bearded man in a white coat, a teenage girl wrapped in a blanket, and Maria, pale and shaking after the operation. I couldn’t be a bystander for one more second. Nobody stopped me as I ran to her, yelling, “That’s my wife!”

The cops were matter of fact, almost kindly. They assured us that if Maria agreed to accompany them to Bellevue Hospital and submit to an examination to ascertain whether she had an abortion, there would be no charges against her. I felt helpless. I didn’t know what to do or who to call.

Gripped by a certain desperation, I asked whether the medical exam would be the end of it? No, I was told, she would need to appear before a grand jury trying the doctor. I insisted on going to Bellevue with her. The cops conferred. Okay, they said, and took me along.

I sat in the chilly hallway of that hospital for a long, long time. Passing cops chatted with me in a relatively friendly way. Several of them all but apologized. Abortions were against the law, they pointed out, shrugging, as if to say, what can we do? Finally, I took Maria home. She slept for a day. There were visits from a nurse at the doctor’s office where she worked.

Sometime later, she did indeed testify before a grand jury. The doctor’s name eventually appeared in a splashy New York Post story. He was running an abortion “factory,” so the claim went, and the raid on his office was considered a big bust.

The Choice

And that was pretty much the end of it for us, not to speak of our marriage a year later. The only related event: a call from the Police Department’s public information chief, a deputy commissioner, demanding an apology and a retraction of things I had written in my recent magazine article about the squad of women detectives. He said he knew just why I had written so negatively about them and assured me that if I didn’t send him that apology, he would inform key people at the Times about my recent “unlawful activity.” He let that phrase hang in the air.

I felt chills. My career, I feared, was over. At that moment, I remember thinking about how my dad had talked me into getting a junior-high-school English-teaching license as a back-up to my risky journalism career.

Still, I felt I had no choice and told that deputy commissioner to go to hell. He snickered and hung up. I never heard from him again. Sometime later, a magazine editor from the Times discreetly indicated to me that he’d brushed off some complaint from a police flack and told me not to worry.

End of story, although I thought about it again when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land in 1973 and, with Maria’s permission, I wrote about what happened to us as part of a boomlet of pre-Roe horror stories published then. The bloody wire coat hanger that women so notoriously used to try to induce abortions at home, which once seemed all too real to me, was becoming a quaint symbol of another age. We could breathe easy on this, as it was obviously settled law for all time.

In retrospect, I realize that I was surprised by how blithely a new generation took for granted legal access to safe abortions. As a feminist married to a feminist journalist in the 1970s, my nascent thoughts about those Bystander Boys of the pre-Roe era transformed into far better images of “liberated males” I knew, mostly writers and academics, who supported the women’s movement, even if the mainstream media wrote them off as softies.

Everything started coming back to me, though, with Politico‘s scoop on Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that threatens to end Roe v. Wade (and potentially so much more). In that “opinion,” you can see one of the many bullies of this era at work. When it came out, the Republican congressional crew were, of course, already well launched on the tactics they had undoubtedly learned so long ago in some schoolyard, intimidating any onlookers who wanted to stop them from terrorizing the girls.

Meanwhile, the everyday dudes, starting with President Biden, were generally cutting and running from both the reproductive nightmare Alito’s opinion had set loose in our world and its larger social implications, including the Trumpist campaign to control us all.

It’s time, though, for the boys to become men, to step out on the streets, organize, demonstrate, march (maybe wearing knitted penis caps), guard clinics, escort patients, make noise. Older men like me who can evoke the terrible pre-Roe days should tell their stories, at least to their grandsons, especially the ones who claim that their impractical progressive ideals prohibit them from voting in lesser-of-two-evils elections (too common these days, it seems.)

Just hold your nose, sonny, if it means doing the right thing.

And perhaps it’s most important to keep reminding ourselves and everyone we know that abortion isn’t the whole abortion story, that the bullies are preparing to go after the entire schoolyard, not just the girls, and (as has become so common these days) they’re going to stomp into the school-board meeting as well. Sooner or later, they’ll try to take over the school itself and, eventually, the mind and soul of this country thanks to the holes they’re about to tear in the Constitution. There are more of us than them and, if we stand together and fight, we can still win. No place for bystanders now.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is a former sports and city columnist for the New York Times and the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2022 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 May 2022
Word Count: 2,212
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