The Biter Bit! India has the Last Laugh on the New York Times… US Free Market Rocket Blows Up on Launch Pad… but the Affluent Effluent Got their Gelt!

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Read this. India had the last laugh… that’s the best kind. Oh, the rocket that blew up on the launching pad was a commercial “free market” rocket… they’re inferior to NASA rockets, dontcha know… but you can be sure that the Affluent Effluent glommed their cut (you can rest assured that legerdemain added at least 20 percent to the cost… after all, they have wetback nannies and gardeners to pay and their country club dues are in arrears…). One last thing… most American rockets nowadays depend on Russian-made motors… I just thought that you’d like to know that. That’s on top of American cosmonauts having to hitch rides to the ISS on Russian Soyuz craft… the soulless GOP thieves spent all the space research money on torture, the Gitmo Gulag, warmongering in foreign parts, padded expense accounts for congressmen, TSA groping, NSA spying, bloated weapons contracts in Ted Cruz’s district, and excessive imprisonment in the USA. Fancy that…

BMD

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The New York Times Doesn’t Want You to Understand this Vladimir Putin Speech

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Give me a sec to count. In my lifetime, the USSR and latterly the Russian Federation had nine leaders. Stalin’s death elevated Malenkov, and then Khrushchyov, and the banishing of Khrushchyov led to Brezhnev. Then, came a pair of forgettables, then, Gorbachyov, and on to the ever-inebriated Yeltsin (whom one wants dearly to forget). For 15 years, counting the D A Medvedev interval, V V Putin held the wheel of the Russian bus. Of all these figures the West only vilified Stalin, and that only in his post-“Uncle Joe” years, to the extent of the current Russian leader. The question is obvious and I hope not too complicated… why?

There are always plenty of answers floating around. I take almost all of them to lie somewhere between misguided and malevolent by intent, but I’ll get to this in a minute. In as few words as I can manage, here’s my thought… Putin fell drastically afoul of Washington… his war is with Washington more than the Europeans… because those in deep slumber don’t like being awakened. It’s an irresistible time to consider this problem for two reasons. Firstly, in history, two sure signs of imperial decline are deafness and blindness in the imperial capital, and as of the past year or so Washington exhibits seriously deteriorating symptoms. The wilful refusal of our foreign policy cliques to look squarely at our world and listen to those in it is getting dangerous.

Secondly, Putin just delivered a speech every American deserves to hear and consider. Few will have done so for the simple reason that our media declined to tell you about the Russian leader’s presentation to an annual gathering of leaders and thinkers called the Valdai International Discussion Club, a Davos variant. Here’s the Kremlin transcript, and now readers have two things to decide… what they think of the speech and what they think of the American media for not reporting it. The theme at Valdai this year was “The World Order: NewRules, or a Game Without Rules”. With the Ukrainian crisis bumbling along toward a conclusion (or not) and the horrifically pointless mess America made of the Middle East now worsens daily, the either/or title is just about right… we can’t continue on in the post-Cold War era as we have until now.

A Russian commentator named Dmitri Orlov, whom I don’t know of, said of Putin’s contribution, “This is probably the most important political speech since Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of 5 March 1946”. I have no archive of political speeches and can’t cast a vote, but Putin’s remarks certainly have an amplitude that makes ignoring them unforgivable. Paying-attention readers can compare them with the speech that Putin gave as the Crimea rejoined Russia last March. Churchillian or no, this is once again big stuff. Putin began, “Let me say I‘ll speak directly and frankly, some of what I say might seem a bit too harsh, but if we don’t speak directly and honestly about what we really think, then, there’s little point in even meeting in this way. We need to be direct and blunt today not to trade barbs, but to attempt to get to the bottom of what’s actually happening in the world, try to understand why the world is becoming less safe and more unpredictable, and why the risks are increasing everywhere around us”. Right away, clear language, shorn of obfuscation. No wonder no one from Washington of any rank attended this talkfest. Plain speaking is no longer in the American repertoire. Guess what else Putin marshalled… historical reference. Out, out, out of the question for the American policy cliques.

I was tempted to read this speech as a post-mortem of the Ukrainian crisis, a looking back. There’s something to this, but not overmuch. Putin has a point to make about the Ukraine and the Crimea, “We didn’t start this”. In reply to a question from Dominique de Villepin, a former French premier, Putin noted, “I believe Dominique referred to the Ukrainian crisis as the reason for the deterioration in international relations. Naturally, this crisis is a cause, but this isn’t the principal cause. The crisis in the Ukraine is itself a result of an imbalance in international relations”. Not Kosovo, not Iraq, not Libya, not Syria, not the Ukraine… one can best understand them less as causes than as symptoms. These are America’s “follies”, as Putin called them, Washington’s “theory of controlled chaos” at work. In essence… the speech is long, carefully phrased, and difficult to summarise… Putin argues that the New World Order the Bush I administration declared as the USSR collapsed was a fundamental misreading of the moment. It’s now a 20-odd-year failure that hacks such as Tom Friedman compulsively term the successful spread of neoliberalism in the face of abundant evidence otherwise.

Putin asserted, “A unilateral diktat and imposing one’s own models produces the opposite result. Instead of settling conflicts, it leads to their escalation, instead of sovereign and stable states, we see the growing spread of chaos, and instead of democracy, there’s support for a very dubious public ranging from open neo-fascists to Islamic radicals”. Such is Putin’s take on how we got here. His view of where we have to go now is yet more compelling. Our systems of global security are more or less destroyed… in Putin’s words, “weakened, fragmented, and deformed”. In the face of this reality, multipolar coöperation in the service of substantial reconstruction agreements, which honour the interests of all sides, is mandatory. Putin continued, “Given the global situation, it’s time to start agreeing on fundamental things. What could be the legal, political, and economic basis for a new world order that’d allow for stability and security, whilst encouraging healthy competition, not allowing the formation of new monopolies that hinder development? It’s unlikely that someone could provide absolutely exhaustive, ready-made solutions right now. We’d need extensive work with participation by a wdide range of governments, global businesses, civil society, and such expert platforms as ours. However, it’s obvious that success and real results are only possible if key participants in international affairs can agree on harmonising basic interests, on reasonable self-restraint, and set the example of positive and responsible leadership. We must clearly identify where unilateral actions end and we need to apply multilateral mechanisms”.

It‘s essential to read this as an attack on the USA… it is one. However, there’s a follow-on recognition that one shouldn’t miss… this isn’t the speech of some kind of nostalgic empire builder… Putin dismisses the charge persuasively… but of a man genuinely afraid that the planet is close to tipping into some version of primitive disorder. Absent less-adversarial international relations, we reach a moment of immense peril. Before I explain my view of the Putin presentation, I urge readers to try a simple exercise. In your mind’s eye, strip all names and identifiers out of the webpage where you read the speech. Read the words for the words alone. Then, make up your minds as to the wisdom or otherwise of the thinking. OK… now, I feel a little safer relating my perspective.

Putin’s speech is so many magnitudes more sensible and credible than anything that we’ve heard from Washington in who can say how long that one must either laugh or do the other thing. To me, Putin has always seemed to honour history, and here, he speaks with its authority. This is where the world is now, these mistakes made it this way, and this is how we can correct them. Since it‘s “all oars in the water”, wake from your slumber, Americans. This is precisely what Washington can’t bear the thought of. It must ignore or actively extinguish any idea of global history that suggests a diminution of American power and prerogative. As to the man who delivered these remarks, there ought to have been no need for me to propose the above experiment… reading the speech whilst forgetting the speaker. Nevertheless, this is where America’s childish undignified name-calling and demonisation, as awful as anything in The Lord of the Flies, lands us.

“What about Putin’s human rights record? What about the oligarchs? What about the fervent nationalism (Russian nationalism always being fervent when described by American hacks)? What about “autocracy? What about Putin’s Christian fundamentalism? What about the Russian press, and the judges, the well-meaning NGOs taking American funding and …?” These aren’t bad questions. They aren’t simply the germane questions, and Russians could best answer them in any case. The question for us is, “What are dissenters from the orthodoxy to do as they recognise that Putin stands for the right of non-Western nations to be non-Western, to escape imitation, to create and solve their problems themselves?” Putin insists this right must be part of a truly new world order… that is what singles him out in the long list of Russia’s postwar leaders. Don’t ask why a leader as evil as Beelzebub by our reckoning enjoys an approval rating of nearly 90 percent. I just told you why.

Even the Financial Times correspondent in Sochi, where the Valdai gathering was held, acknowledged the significance of Putin’s presentation. Neil Buckley wrote, “The speech was one of Mr Putin’s most important foreign policy statements since he surprised the West in München in 2007 by accusing the USA of ‘overstepping its boundaries in every way’ and creating new dividing lines in Europe”. Well done, Neil Buckley. I’d say that your coverage was standout except that almost no one else covered it, so cheap thrills thus. On our side of the pond, recognition is due Alex Jones, the slightly paranoid conspiracy theorist, who at least put the speech and a commentary across to Americans by reprinting the Dmitri Orlov item cited above. The New York Times coverage was notable, as in being notably bad, even by its poor standards of objectivity. So let’s end noting it, briefly. The news piece was brief, buried, and written by Neil MacFarquhar, a correspondent in the Moscow bureau whose habit of slanting coverage has been a topic in this space previously. MacFarquhar missed the point entirely… he had to, as the Times can hardly be expected to render an account that actually got to what Putin said and meant.

The taker of the cake for me, however, was an opinion piece by Serge Schmemann. For the record, I must state that I was briefly a colleague of Schmemann’s during the International Herald Tribune’s final years. Read it… you’ll see a classic case of Times-style innuendo and the use of language as instruction in what to think. Moreover, you‘ll understand, if you don’t already, why I think American responses to Putin can fairly be called childish. Putin’s appearance at Sochi was “his chance to sound off on a global stage”, we have to know in the first sentence, insinuating him into the tin-pot dictator file. Then, Schmemann inserted a quotation from the speech… “‘It looks like the so-called ‘winners’ of the Cold War are determined to have it all and reshape the world into a place that could better serve their interests alone’”. This wasn’t simply an observation, we must understand… it was “one notable riff”. Does anyone have any idea what a notable riff would be in this case?

Here is Schmemann on the Ukrainian passages of the presentation… “In Mr Putin’s version of the Ukrainian crisis, the USA was the instigator of the protests in Kiev that led to a ‘coup’ against President Viktor Yanukovich and the subsequent fighting. One American participant told Mr Putin she was hard put to recognise her country as the one he was describing”. Well, confused American participant, you make an interesting point. Washington has created a version of events in the Ukraine that amounts to a parallel reality, and people such as Schmemann receive a salary to perpetuate it. If it’s of any help… there was a coup, there were neo-fascists among its leaders, the US State Department backed it, and the evidence of all this is indisputable. Schmemann wrote, “What’s hard to gauge listening to Mr Putin is whether he really means to put the blame for all things wrong on the USA, or whether he’s cynically using the old Soviet gimmick of projecting onto America and the West all the faults of which the USSR itself was accused”. Hmm… the thought never occurred to me. I suppose it’s a strange idea to some of us, but I think that even Russians can mean what they say, I think Putin did, and we’re better off for his having said it.

7 November 2014

Patrick L Smith

Salon

http://www.salon.com/2014/11/07/the_new_york_times_doesnt_want_you_to_understand_this_vladimir_putin_speech/

A Note to Orthodox People:

S A Schmemann, who wrote the mendacious NYT op-ed piece referenced, was the son of the late Fr A D Schmemann (the famous partner-in-crime of the late Fr I F von Meyendorff at SVS in Yonkers). Does it surprise you that Sergei Aleksandrovich eased the way into the IHT for Lyonyo’s daughter, S L Kishkovskaya? I’ll say this… it shows that the SVS/Syosset apparat has thrust a knife full-force into the Motherland’s back. That’s treachery and treason. Remember… the OCA is a dependent client of the Centre (its “autocephaly” is more formal than real, and everyone knows it) and depends upon it for its canonicity, regularity, and legitimacy. This isn’t a wise move on their part. Just sayin’…

BMD

Why I Left the GOP

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Editor:

This is two-years-old, but it still has tread and cred.

I used to be a Republican… not a Rush sort… not a Tea Party sort. However, the increasingly feral nature of its godless Me First-Only Winners Need Apply attitude clashed with my beliefs as a Christian believer. Yet, when I describe myself as a Leftist (and a proud one), I’m in the mould of the true communist (not the rightwing caricature). I AM a patriot, and I won’t allow righties to hijack the term. I AM for the people… not the fatcats, not the bureaucrats, not the Affluent Effluent, not the Vanguard Proletariat. I AM for the little guy over the plutocrat (that’s why I favour laws that would penalise large corporations over mom n’ pop outfits). I AM an economic patriot who opposes globalisation with all my heart.

It’d mean that we’d spend a little more for food, clothing, and other essentials… but it’d provide more employment. It’d mean that we’d all have to “give” a little, that “freedom” wouldn’t be absolute. However, freedom is under assault as it has never been before, all in the name of “freedom”, especially, “economic freedom” (which means that I can fuck you without Vaseline if I’m the more powerful of the two parties). The “freedom” that the GOP espouses includes restrictions on foreign travel like never before (a passport to go to Canada! Ridiculous!) and the right of nutters to flash loaded firearms in public places. Their “freedom” includes torture, perpetual warfare in foreign parts, and a Gestapo-like Department of Homeland (In-)Security.

The Republican Party supports unrequited evil and its “Pro-Life” mewling is disgusting and beyond the pale. The era since Slobberin’ Ronnie has been a slithering slide into inhumanity and heedless hedonism… Rod Dreher and Rush Limbaugh illustrate both sides of this counterfeit coin brilliantly. Both are liars… both are unashamed conspicuous consumers… but Rush is the rude side, whilst Dreher is the polished side. Of the two, Dreher is the worst, as he pretends to be otherwise. Rush is just a contented pig wallowing in his mire, but that means that he’s obvious and no real threat.

No Orthodox Christian can have anything to do with this pack of greedster thieves and hold our Faith… now, the Republican Party and Evangelical heresy are indissoluble and irrevocable partners. You can confess Christ or vote Republican… I say that openly and without rancour. If you dare to try to ally Christ with the Mammon-loving GOP… I will oppose you… and I won’t be alone.

The following is “good shit”… it’s a “read n’ heed”…

BMD

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I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics.  All the same, I’m a Republican no longer. There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this, “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid”. These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. However, I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently.  After all, my real education only began when I was 30-years-old. This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.

I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I was oblivious. Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s “losers” had somehow earned their deserts. As I came to recognise that poverty isn’t earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realised with a shock that I’d effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people. No longer oblivious, I couldn’t remain in today’s Republican Party, not unless I embraced an individualism that was even more heartless than the one I’d previously accepted. The more I learned about reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my values shifted. Had I always known what I know today, it would’ve been clear that there hasn’t been a place for me in the Republican Party since the Free Soil days of Abe Lincoln.

Where I Came From

I grew up in a rich white suburb north of Chicago populated by moderate business-oriented Republicans. Once upon a time, they would’ve called us Rockefeller Republicans. Today, they’d call us “liberal Republicans” or slurred by the Right as “Republicans In Name Only” (RINOs). We believed in competition and the free market, in bootstraps and personal responsibility, in equality of opportunity, not outcomes.  We were financial conservatives who wanted less government. We believed in noblesse oblige, for we saw ourselves as part of a natural aristocracy, even if we hadn’t been born into it. We sided with management over labour and saw unions as a scourge. We hated racism and loved Dr Martin Luther King Jr, particularly his dream that his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. We worried about the rise of the Religious Right and its social-conservative litmus tests. We were tough on crime, tough on national enemies. We believed in business, full stop.

I intended to run for office on just such a platform someday. In the meantime, I founded the Republican club at my high school, knocked on doors and collected signatures with my father, volunteered on campaigns, socialised at fundraisers, and interned for Senator John McCain and Congressman Denny Hastert when he was House Majority Whip Tom DeLay’s chief deputy. We went to mainstream colleges… the more élite the better… but lamented their domination by liberal professors, and I did my best to tune out their liberal views. I joined the Republican clubs and the Federalist Society, and I read the Wall Street Journal and the Economist rather the New York Times. George Will was a voice in the wilderness, Rush Limbaugh an occasional (sometimes guilty) pleasure.

Left Behind By the Party

In January 2001, I was one of thousands of Americans who braved the cold rain to attend and cheer George W Bush’s inauguration. After eight years hating “Slick Willie”, it felt good to have a Republican back in the White House. Nevertheless, I knew that he wasn’t one of our guys. We’d been McCain fans, and even if we liked the compassionate bit of Bush’s conservatism, we didn’t care for his religiosity or his social politics. Bush won a lot of us over with his hawkish response to 9/11, but he lost me with the Iraq War. Weren’t we still busy in Afghanistan? I didn’t see the urgency.

By then, I was at the Justice Department, working in an office that handled litigation related to what they officially called the Global War on Terror (or GWOT). My office opposed petitions for habeas corpus brought by Guantánamo detainees who claimed that they we were holding them indefinitely without charge. The government’s position struck me as an abdication of a core Republican value… protecting the “procedural” rights found in the Bill of Rights. Sure, the USA had waived habeas corpus in wartime before, but it seemed to me that waiving it here reduced us to the terrorists’ level. Besides, since acts of terrorism were crimes, why not prosecute them? I refused to work on those cases. With the Abu Ghraib pictures, my disappointment turned to rage. The America I believed in didn’t torture people. I couldn’t avoid GWOT work. I had to read reams of allegations of torture, sexual abuse, and cover-ups in our war zones to give the White House a heads-up in case any of made it into the news cycle. I was so mad that I voted for Kerry out of spite.

How I Learned to Start Worrying

I might still have stuck it out as a frustrated liberal Republican, knowing that the wealthy business core of the party still pulled a few strings and people like Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe remained in the Senate… if only because the idea of voting for Democrats by choice made me feel uncomfortable (it would’ve been so… gauche).  Then, came Hurricane Katrina.  In New Orleans, I learned that it wasn’t just the Bush administration that was flawed, but my worldview itself. I had fallen in love with New Orleans during a post-law-school year spent in Louisiana clerking for a federal judge, and the Bush administration’s callous (non-)response to the storm broke my heart. I wanted to help out, but I didn’t fly helicopters or know how to do anything useful in a disaster, so just I sat glued to the coverage and fumed… until FEMA asked federal employees to volunteer to help. I jumped at the chance. Soon, I was involved with a task force trying to rebuild (and reform) the city’s criminal justice system. Growing up hating racism, I was appalled but not very surprised to find overt racism and the obvious use of racist code words by officials in the Deep South.

Then, something tiny happened that pried open my eyes to the less obvious forms of racism and the hurdles the poor face when they try to climb the economic ladder. It happened on an official visit to a school in a suburb of New Orleans that served kids who‘d been kicked out of every other school around. I was investigating what types of services were available to the young people who were showing up in juvenile hall and seemed to be headed toward the proverbial life of crime. My tour guide mentioned that parents were required to take part in some school programmes. One of these was a field trip to a sit-down restaurant. This stopped me in my tracks. I thought, What kind of a lame field trip is that? It turned out that none of the families had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before. The teachers had to instruct parents and students alike how to order off a menu, how to calculate the tip. It stunned me.

Starting To See

That night, I told my roommates about the crazy thing I had heard that day. Apparently, there were people out there who had never been to something as basic as a real restaurant. Who knew? One of my roommates wasn’t surprised. He worked at a local bank branch that required two forms of ID to open an account. Lots of people came in who had only one or none at all. I was flooded with questions… There are adults who have no ID and no bank accounts? Who are these people? How do they vote? How do they live? Is there an entire off-the-grid alternate universe out there?

From then on, I started to notice a lot more reality.  I noticed that the criminal justice system treats minorities differently in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, and that many of the people swept up by the system came from this underclass that I knew so little about. Lingering for months in lock-up for misdemeanours, being pressed against the hood and frisked during routine traffic stops, being pulled over in white neighbourhoods for “driving while black”… these are things that never happen to people in my world. Not having experienced it, I‘d always assumed that government force was only used against guilty people (maybe, that’s why we middle-class white people collectively freak out at TSA airport pat-downs).

I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on.  It turned out that everything I “discovered” had been hiding in plain sight and had names… aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighbourhood redlining, the “trial tax”, the “poverty tax”, and on and on. Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why I‘d never heard of any of these concepts. Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual responsibility?” That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes” make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed. However, my assumption was that bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself promoted from junior varsity to varsity. It turns out that it’s more like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series. Sure, some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the Olympians.

The enormity of the advantages I’d always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs and not making omelettes. Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, and hurting people. My values shifted… from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.

How I Learned to Stop Loving the Bombs

In order to learn more… and to secure my membership in what Karl Rove sneeringly called the “reality-based community”… I joined a social science research institute. There I saw layer after layer of myth and received wisdom slowly brought down to earth, and it hurt. Perhaps, nothing hurt more than to see just how far my patriotic, Republican conception of American military power… what it’s for, how it’s used … diverged from the reality of our wars. Lots of Republicans grow up hawks. I certainly did. My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, whilst dispensing a tough and precise global justice.

To me, military service represented the perfect combination of public service, honour, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of the military… toys and models, movies and cartoons, fat books with technical pictures of manly fighter planes and ships and submarines. We went to air shows when we could, and with the advent of cable, I begged my parents to sign up so that the Discovery Channel could bring those shows right into our den. Just after we got it, the first Gulf War kicked off, and CNN provided my afterschool entertainment for weeks. As I got older, I studied Civil War military history and memory (eventually, I’d edit a book of letters by Union General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain). I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was right that “war is hell”, it was often necessary, we did it well, and… whatever those misinformed peaceniks said… we made the world a better place.

Then, I went to a war zone. I went to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation researchers to help the detainee operations command figure out several thorny policy issues. My task was to figure out why we were sort-of-protecting and sort-of-detaining an Iranian dissident group on Washington’s terrorist list. It got ugly fast. Just after my first meal on base, there was a rumble of explosions, and an alarm started screaming INCOMING! INCOMING! INCOMING! Two people died and dozens injured, right outside the chow hall where I had stood minutes earlier. This was the “surge” period in 2007… they told me that insurgent attacks came less often than before, but the sounds of war seemed constant to me. The rat-tat-tat of small arms fire just across the “wire”… controlled detonations of insurgent duds… dual patrolling Blackhawks overhead… every few mornings, a fresh rain of insurgent rockets and mortars. Always alert, always nervous, I was only in Iraq for three-and-a-half weeks, and never close to actual combat; yet, the experience gave me many of the symptoms of PTSD. It turns out that it doesn’t take much.

That made me wonder how the Iraqis took it. From overhead, I saw that the once-teeming city of Baghdad was now a desert of desolate neighbourhoods and empty shopping streets, bomb craters in the middle of soccer fields and in the roofs of schools. Millions displaced. Our nation-building efforts reeked of post-Katrina organisational incompetence. We assigned people the wrong roles… “Why am I building a radio station? This isn’t what I do. I blow things up”… and gave them no advance training or guidance. Outgoing leaders didn’t overlap with their successors, so what they learned would be lost, leaving each wheel to be partly reinvented again. Precious few contracts went to Iraqis. It drove people out of our military.

This incompetence had profound human costs. Of the 26,000 people we were detaining in Iraq, as many as two-thirds were innocent… wrong place, wrong time… or, poor and desperate, had worked with insurgent groups for cash, not out of an ideological commitment. Aware of this, the military wanted to release thousands of them, but they didn’t know who was who; they only knew that being detained and interrogated made even the innocents dangerously angry. That anger trickled down to family, friends, neighbours, and acquaintances. It was about as good an in-kind donation as the USA could’ve made to insurgent recruitment… aside from invading in the first place. So much for surgical precision and winning hearts and minds. I’d grown up believing that we were more careful in our use of force, that we only punished those who deserved punishment. However, in just a few weeks in Iraq, it became apparent that what we were doing to the Iraqis, as well as to our own people, was inexcusable.

Today, I wonder if Mitt Romney drones on about not apologising for America because he, like the former version of me, simply isn’t aware of the USA ever doing anything that might demand an apology. Then again, no one wants to feel like a bad person, and there’s no need to apologise if you are oblivious to the harms done in your name… calling the occasional ones you notice collateral damage (“stuff happens”)… or, if you believe that American force is always applied righteously in a world that is justly divided into winners and losers.

A Painful Transition

An old saw has it that no one profits from talking about politics or religion. I think I finally understand what it means. We see different realities, different worlds. If you and I take in different slices of reality, chances are that we aren’t talking about the same things. I think this explains much of modern American political dialogue. My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way. I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creat[ing] our own reality”, into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “be dictated by fact-checkers” (as a Romney pollster put it). It explains why study after study shows… examples here, here, and here… that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all.

Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and painful. I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of what I had learned. I came to understand why we Republicans thought people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer (because those weren’t mentioned in the media we read or watched). My transition has significantly strained my relationships with family, friends, and former colleagues.  It’s deeply upsetting to walk on thin ice where there used to be solid, common ground. I wish they, too, would come to see a fuller spectrum of reality, but I know from experience how hard that can be when your worldview won’t let you. No one wants to feel like a dupe. It’s embarrassing to come out in public and admit that I was so miseducated when so much reality is out there in plain sight in neighbourhoods I avoided, in journals I hadn’t heard of, in books by authors I had refused to read  (I took courage from people who had done so before me like Andrew Bacevich).

Many people see the wider spectrum of reality because they grew up on the receiving end. As a retired African-American general in the Marine Corps said to me after I told him my story, “No one has to explain institutional racism to a black man”. Others do because they grew up in families that simply got it. I married a woman who grew up in such a family, for whom all of my hard-earned, painful “discoveries” are old news. Each time I pull another layer of wool off my eyes and feel another surge of anger, she gives me a predictable series of looks. The first one more or less says, “Duh, obviously”. The second is sympathetic, a recognition of the pain that comes with dismantling my flawed worldview. The third is concerned, “Do people actually think that?” … Yes, they do.

10 September 2012

Jeremiah Goulka

Salon

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/10/why_i_left_the_gop/

23 August 2014. The NY Times Blubbers About the “Russia Left Behind”… Hell, What About the “America Left Behind?”

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Late last year, the NY Times wrote up a glossy report about The Russia Left Behind… it was the usual self-congratulatory neoliberal rot. It was well-produced and full of accusatory images. Click here to read it. Please, do so… it’s important for you to know what sort of rot the clerisy is churning out (and do reflect on the fact that Serge Schmemann and Sophia Kishkovsky are willing house niggers of this organisation). I’d say that the NYT would’ve done better by driving from New York City to Albany to Buffalo to Cleveland! They would’ve seen a landscape worse than that pictured in their article on Russia! If they wanted to see decline, why, go to Amsterdam NY… Carbondale PA… Scranton PA… Gary IN… Detroit MI… all products of the rape of America by the banksters let loose after the time of Slobberin’ Ronnie. However, if any writer on the NYT were to criticise the neoliberalism regnant in the West, why they’d be out of a job! Poor babies! In short, most of the rot issued by the Western media has an underlying assumption… that the suffering let loose by unbridled crapitalism is good and that its victims deserve no compassion… except where it suits the cause of the neocons and “humanitarian interventionists”. The Russia Left Behind… what self-absorbed rot… if the NYT doesn’t address The America Left Behind it’s a pack of liars, and I say so openly. Reflect on this… the Republican Party APPROVES of destroying communities for profit’s sake. I call that EVIL… what about you?

BMD