(...) The attitude of the corporate media, Congress, and the White House has traditionally been and continues to be that the U.S. stance in the world can be: do as we say, not as we do. So, the USA is good at pointing fingers at Russia or countries that invade some other nation, but when the U.S. does it, itâs another thing entirely. Such dynamics, while pernicious, especially among a nuclear-armed set of nations, are reflexes people in power have had for a long time.
More than a century ago, William Dean Howells wrote a short story called âEditha.â Keep in mind that this was after the United States had been slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. In it, a character says, âWhat a thing it is to have a country that canât be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!â
Now, here we are in 2023 and itâs not that different, except when it comes to the scale of communications, of a media thatâs so much more pervasive. If you read the op-ed pages and editorial sections of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of the liberal media, youâll find such doublethink well in place. Vladimir Putin, of course, is a war criminal. Well, I happen to think he is a war criminal. I also happen to think that George W. Bush is a war criminal, and we could go on to all too many other examples of high U.S. government officials where that description applies no less than to Vladimir Putin.
Can you find a single major newspaper thatâs been willing to editorialize that George W. Bush â having ordered the invasion of Iraq, costing hundreds of thousands of lives based on a set of lies â was a war criminal? It just ainât gonna happen. In fact, one of the things I was particularly pleased (in a grim sort of way) to explore in my book was the rehabilitation of that war criminal, providing a paradigm for the presidents who followed him and letting them off the hook, too.
I quote, for instance, President Obama speaking to troops in Afghanistan. You could take one sentence after another from his speeches there and find almost identical ones that President Lyndon Johnson used in speaking to American troops in Vietnam in 1966. They both talked about how U.S. soldiers were so compassionate, cared so much about human life, and were trying to help the suffering people of Vietnam or Afghanistan. That pernicious theme seems to accompany almost any U.S. war: that, with the best of intentions, the U.S. is seeking to help those in other countries. Itâs a way of making the victims at the other end of U.S. firepower â to use a word from my book title â invisible.
This is something I was able to do some thinking and writing about in my book. There are two tiers of grief in our media and our politics from Congress to the White House â ours and theirs. Our grief (including that of honorary semi-Americans like the Ukrainians) is focused on those who are killed by official enemy governments of the United States. Thatâs the real tier of grief and so when the media covers, as it should, the suffering of people in Ukraine thanks to Russiaâs war of aggression, their suffering is made as real as can be. And yet, when itâs the U.S. slaughtering people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, thatâs something else entirely. When it comes to the people at the other end of U.S. weaponry, the civilians, hundreds of thousands of them directly slaughtered, and millions indirectly killed by U.S. warfare, their tier of grief isnât, with rare exceptions, on the media map. Those human beings just donât matter.
Here in the USA, people find this unpleasant to hear or even think about. (...)
I certainly would not want to justify or provide an economic and strategic rationale for US military interventions and atrocities in Vietnam and neighbouring countries but for perspective, the majority of the carnage was committed by non-Americans. On top of that, the USA had the cover of the Cold War meaning that the communist threat was, correctly or incorrectly, perceived as an existential threat.
The Killing Fields (Khmer: áá¶ááá·áá¶á, Khmer pronunciation: <ÊiÉl pikÊ°iÉt>) are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than one million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime (the Communist Party of Kampuchea) during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970â1975). The mass killings were part of a broad state-sponsored genocide (the Cambodian genocide).
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The term genocide is usually misapplied when ethnic cleansing or extirpation would be far more accurate. This might be one of those rare exceptions where the term 'genocide' truly does apply.
Kissingerâs Killing Fields Interviews with more than 75 witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks and an exclusive archive of documents show that Henry Kissinger is responsible for even more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known.
The Demonization of Homeless People Is Killing Homeless People Homeless people in the United States are far more likely to be victims of gruesome violence than to be perpetrators. Yet the widespread demonization of the homeless would lead you to believe the exact opposite.
To any normal human being, the whole incident was a sad and wretched microcosm of everything thatâs gone wrong in modern American life: from the callous failures of political leadership and the rippling tragedies of endemic poverty, to the deep-seated need among lost young American men to find meaning in violent heroics.
Nearly two years after the U.S. killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, in a drone strike that prompted a rare apology from the Pentagon, the U.S. government has yet to make good on a pledge to compensate surviving relatives.
Sorry, there are other countries that need "saving."
Yeah. I love all the lose talk about getting the Russians to pay compensation or reparations for Ukraine....
Nearly two years after the U.S. killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, in a drone strike that prompted a rare apology from the Pentagon, the U.S. government has yet to make good on a pledge to compensate surviving relatives.
Sorry, there are other countries that need "saving."
US military officials are walking back claims that a drone strike Central Command (CENTCOM) launched on May 3 in northwest Syria killed a senior al-Qaeda leader after evidence emerged that a civilian was killed.
When the strike was first launched in Syriaâs northwest Idlib province, reports immediately emerged that the strike killed a sheep herder with no ties to any militant groups. The Associated Pressspoke with family members and neighbors of the victim, Lotfi Hassan Misto, who insisted he was innocent.
According to The Washington Post, Misto was a 56-year-old father of 10, and the paper spoke with terrorism experts who said it was unlikely he was affiliated with al-Qaeda.
âWe are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,â an unnamed military official told the Post. Another official claimed the person they killed was al-Qaeda but offered no evidence. âThough we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda,â the official said.
CENTCOMâs initial press release on the strike did not name the person they killed. Since then, the command has refused to share any details of the operation or say why they could have targeted the wrong person.
The US military is notorious for undercounting civilian casualties or lying about them. The Pentagon is also known for investigating itself and finding no wrongdoing, even in instances of significant civilian deaths, such as the August 2021 Kabul drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children.
Yes, we must see things from the Russian perspective. We must be sympathetic to their fear of being surrounded by hostile countries.
But we absolutely must not see things from the perspectives of those countries—from the Polish, Baltic, Czech, German, Swedish, Finnish perspective. We must not examine why they are hostile to an aggressive imperialist neighbor who openly threatens to invade and re-subjugate them.
Iâm sure many of you recall that earlier this year there was a showdown over the House Speakership of Rep. Kevin McCarthy.
Matt Gaetz: Because we do not trust Mr. McCarthy with power, because we know who he will use it for, and we are concerned it will not be for the American people. We trust Jim Jordan; I nominate him and Iâm going to vote for him.
Those events highlighted one of the more impressive grifter trains thatâs now docked in the U.S. capitol, the idea that you have this new generation of anti-imperialist lawmakers, many of whom just happen to be loyal to Donald Trump and his movement. While some members of the Freedom Caucus do consistently take on serious issues that should be confronted â including on war, civil liberties and the increasing power of tech companies â the newly launched select subcommittee to investigate the quote, âweaponization of the federal government,â itâs not being established to engage in the kind of rigorous investigation embodied by the House Committee on Assassinations, or by the Church Committee in 1975.
This new committee, itâs clear, is going to largely be a partisan lollapalooza of wacky theories and totally hypocritical attacks. Whatâs notable, however, is that by taking on issues that have long been associated with the political left in the United States, these Republicans, who have been banging the drums about the deep state, have unmasked just how much the established power within the current Democratic Party actually reveres the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the broader national security state. (...)
0:00 Johnâs upcoming book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy
2:51 Is the US to blame for Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine?
10:00 Is Putin less rational than John assumes?
22:20 Why John is a Russia dove and a China hawk
29:50 Does China pose a threat to freedom around the world?
36:57 Why John thinks Chinaâs rise threatens American security
47:58 Has globalization made great-power peace possible?
56:14 Should the US defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion?
The United States has dispelled any doubts about its intentions to squeeze Chinaâs rise as a technology superpower. Starting with a mid-September 2022 speech by National Security Director Jake Sullivan that laid out the broad parameters of the case against China, the Biden Administration and the US Congress have taken a series of actions in the Sino-American tech war that go well beyond the early skirmishes sparked by the Trump Administration.
America is taking dead aim at the most advanced segments of Chinaâs tech aspirations, like artificial intelligence and quantum computing, that, in turn, are essential to the nationâs push for indigenous innovation and productivity enhancement. That is even more important in the face of Chinaâs stiff demographic headwinds that leave China with no choice other than to lever innovation for productivity enhancement.
Yet China has managed to cope with all this reasonably well. As was the case during the initial phase of the trade war dominated by Trumpâs tariffs, there has been some tit-for-tat retaliation. China has signaled its intention of restricting Micron Technologyâs operations in the mainland; Micron is Americaâs largest memory chip producer, and the Chinese market currently accounts for about 11% of Micronâs global sales. While Chinaâs action is hardly inconsequential, it pales in comparison to the measures the US has imposed on China in the past six months. I have been surprised at the limited scope of Chinese retaliation and suspect that there is more to come.
Chinaâs counter-offensive focuses on homegrown tech optionality. Huawei, Chinaâs leading technology company and first to get hit by tough US sanctions in 2019, is a case in point. Denied access to the US chips it required for its once globally dominant mobile phone business, Huawei moved aggressivity to develop an in-house work-around. It not only redirected its supply chain away from the US toward Taiwan and Japan, but it turned to its domestic semiconductor subsidiary, Hi-Silicon, to produce a new smartphone, the Mate 3.0, made without any US components.
Contrary to the profusion of Americaâs false narratives about Huaweiâs predatory thievery of US technology, the companyâs success has long been driven by its focus on research and development. While there has been an accelerated injection of government subsidies in recent years, Huaweiâs massive R&D efforts are largely self-funded, hitting approximately $25 billion (USD) in 2021, more than double the combined budgets of Alibaba and Tencent, which have the second and third largest R&D programs among Chinese tech companies. Reflecting its R&D-intensive strategy, Huawei has been especially effective in developing domestic alternatives to US sourcing of both software and hardware, with notable breakthroughs in electronic design automation and lithographic chip-making tools.
Chinese tech companies also appear to be benefitting from a second-best approach to chip processing speed. While denied access to the fastest processors of Nvidia and AMD, both Silicon Valley suppliers still offer lower-speed alternatives to a Chinese market that is very important to their businesses. Significantly, this option does not appear to compromise AI-related taskingâat least, not yet. That day will comeâpossibly ten years from now. But by then, Chinese and Western chip-making prowess could well be near parity.
