It is getting ugly, extremely ugly.
It is increasingly looking like a war – at least a new ‘cold’, ideological war.
But in the shadow of COVID-19, it goes almost unnoticed.
The blind horseman, who hates China intuitively, without knowing hardly anything about it, is leading the pack, pushing his president into a confrontation with the most populous country on Earth. His name is Peter Navarro.
Like most everyone else, I don’t get out much lately due to shelter-in-place. But when I walk around my community, I am heartened by neighbors asking if there is anything we might need. I suspect this scenario is taking place everywhere.
Once I realized to my dismay that I couldn’t believe a word of what our media and political leaders said about major events in the here and now, their credibility on controversial happenings so long ago and far away entirely disappeared.”
— Ron Unz, 2018
There is a vast literature on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who died on a November 22nd Friday like this in 1963. I have contributed my small share to such writing in an effort to tell the truth, honor him, and emphasize its profound importance in understanding the history of the last fifty-six years, but more importantly, what is happening in the U.S.A. today.
As an American, one can reasonably ask: “What’s happened during the last hundred years, or 36,500 days?”
Presidentially speaking, America’s gone from a pedantic, virulently anti-Communist Woodrow Wilson to a bombastic, virulently anti-Islamic Donald Trump. Coincidentally, Wilson was the most recent U.S. president to authorize an invasion of Mexico (March 15,1916), while Trump’s obsession with “our Southern border” has been more than well-documented.
Summary: Encouraging elementary school children to honor and glorify the military without a deeper understanding of militarism and war is simply indoctrination.
There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media’s framing of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.
Ruinous and deadly wars throughout history should have given people everywhere down through the ages cause and pause for thinking about what has happened and why it has happened. While many people presumably have and continue to do just that, what they know and understand is usually controlled by their nation’s power elite. That is never more the case than in America from its beginning and continuing.
This article was first published on February 21, 2017, one month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, more than two-and-a half years ago. What was true then is even truer now, and so I am reprinting it with this brief introduction since I think it describes what is happening in plain sight today.
Catastrophic events that send the world into turmoil happen on ‘just another day’. The atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima took place while thousands of ordinary folk were just going about their everyday business on ‘just another day’. A missile attack on a neighbourhood in Gaza or a drone attack on unsuspecting civilians in Afghanistan: death and destruction come like a bolt from the blue as people shop at the local market or take their kids to school on ‘just another day’.
