Military/Militarism

“The Russians are coming … again … and they’re still ten feet tall!”

Just before Israel’s 66th Independence Day, the country acquired a new national hero.
If it is true that every nation gets the national heroes it deserves, it was a rather worrying spectacle.
The video clip that turned David Adamov from an anonymous soldier into a national figure was taken with a Palestinian camera in Hebron.
Such video cameras have become the bane of the Israeli army. They have been widely distributed to young Palestinians throughout the occupied territories by Israeli peace organizations, especially B’Tselem.

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell1

Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
—George Orwell

Mission Accomplished.
— George W. Bush, May 1, 2003

Now come on Wall Street don’t be slow, why man this war is a-go-go. There’s plenty good money to be made, supplying the army with the tools of the trade. Now come on generals let’s move fast, your big chance is here at last. Time you got out and get those Reds, because the only good commie is one that’s dead. You know that peace can only be won, when you blow ‘em all to kingdom come.
— Vietnam Song, Country Joe and the Fish, 1969

Not since the US and EU took over Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries, East Germany, Poland, and the Balkans and converted them into military outposts of NATO and economic vassals, have the Western powers moved so aggressively to seize a strategic country, such as the Ukraine, posing an existential threat to Russia.

Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved. Having failed to seize the country and evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Washington sees new opportunities in the crisis.

We read a lot about a new Cold War, and I think there is truth in the words. Obama’s so-called “pivot” towards Asia is clearly directed at China’s emergence as a great power, at the notion of containing China, to use the very word, coined by the American State Department’s George F. Kennan and used for many years to characterize America’s policy towards the Soviet Union.

Imagine if China were stationing large numbers of troops in the United States.  Imagine that most of them were based in a small rural county in Mississippi.  Imagine — this shouldn’t be hard — that their presence was problematic, that nations they threatened in Latin America resented the United States’ hospitality, and that the communities around the bases resented the noise and pollution and drinking and raping of local girls.