Tag: American Empire

Israel’s Two Day Old Government Breaks Cease Fire, Bombs Gaza, Again

The neighbor kids threw some firecrackers over the fence yesterday into my backyard. My dog was freaked out.

I had to teach them a lesson.

So, I fired up my oversized Hummer, with the extra-wide, off road, knobby

Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett

tires. I put it into overdrive and crashed through the side of their house at high speed. In the process I ran over their cat, clipped the mother making coffee, and popped out the sliding glass doors into their backyard.

That’ll learn ’em.

——————

It only took Israel’s new government two days to rain more terror down on the people of Gaza.

Jake Johnson has an article at CommonDreams updating us on Israel’s latest aggression against the people of Gaza. His piece in entitled, “After Far-Right Marchers Chant ‘Death to Arabs,’ New Israeli Government Bombs Gaza“:

“The problem is bigger than Netanyahu—it’s apartheid.”

Just hours after far-right marchers chanted “Death to Arabs!” during a demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem, Israeli war planes bombarded the occupied Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning in the first series of airstrikes launched by the new government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former IDF officer who once boasted that he has “killed a lot of Arabs.”

While initial reports indicated that no Palestinians were killed in the new

The Israeli military said it launched airstrikes against Hamas forces in Gaza early Wednesday. Credit…Mahmud Hams Agence France-Presse. Getty Images

bombing campaign, the air raid intensified fears of a fresh wave of violence by the Israeli government just weeks after a tenuous cease-fire agreement paused Israel’s deadly 11-day assault on Gaza last month, which killed more than 240 people.

The Israeli military characterized the latest airstrikes as retaliation for “incendiary balloons” released into Israel from the Gaza Strip. The balloons reportedly caused at least ten fires in Israel.

“Homemade fire balloons versus U.S. bombs. Is there a better example of the disproportionate use of force?” asked Ariel Gold, national co-director of the anti-war organization CodePink.

Abu Malek, whom the Associated Press identified as “one of the young men launching the balloons,” said the incendiary objects were released into Israel in response to a far-right, government-sanctioned march through Jerusalem, where demonstrators rallied alongside several members of the Israeli Knesset and chanted “Death to Arabs!”

Israeli police fired rubber bullets at Palestinians who tried to disrupt the march, which reached the main entrance to the Old City’s Muslim quarter.

“This is a genocidal chant. Let’s call it what it is,” tweeted U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). “I represent many within the Jewish community who disavow and condemn this hateful language. So why does only a small portion of our Congress?”

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the first Palestinian-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress, said that “after racist and violent ‘death to Arabs’ marches earlier today in Jerusalem, children in Gaza are being woken by bombs in the middle of the night.”

“Israel’s government doesn’t value Palestinian lives,” Tlaib added. “It has managed a decades-long ethnic cleansing project, funded by the U.S.”

The Israeli airstrikes came just over 48 hours after the country’s parliament narrowly voted to replace former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Bennett, a change that defenders of Palestinian rights did not applaud given the latter’s record and policy stances, which include support for annexing the occupied West Bank in violation of international law.

“While being hailed by many as the opportunity for a fresh start, Naftali Bennett is at best a continuation of Netanyahu’s policies and at worst an ideologue whose positions are to the right of Netanyahu’s,” Gold of CodePink wrote for Common Dreams on Monday.

 

Stephen Wertheim: “Sorry Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.”

The one time I have been arrested for peacefully protesting was at an Anti-War/Anti-NATO demonstration in Chicago. I include a brief account of that arrest in my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans, 2018).

I participated in that march, with tens of thousands of others, because I have long believed that NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) should have been disbanded at the end of Cold War.

It was and remains a Western military alliance that was created to “protect Western democracy” against the alleged threats of world communism advanced by the Soviet Union. But once the USSR ceased to exist, why shouldn’t the largest bloc of military forces in the Western world also disband?

Since then, the USA has easily twisted NATO into an ostensibly “independent” European arm of its own nationalistic, military objectives.

Quite predictably, NATO’s continued existence, and the omnivorous hegemony that inevitably characterizes every multi-national military machine, has been a key player in instigating many of the regional conflicts playing themselves out in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East today.

The dissolution of the USSR meant the demise of NATO’s communist equivalent: the Warsaw Pact. So we can forgive Russia’s well-founded nervousness when NATO announced that it would not similarly disband.

To assuage Russia’s fears, the US pledged that if NATO expanded, it would never included nations that had once been a part of the Warsaw Pact.

NATO quickly broke that promise and now includes member states sitting cheek to jowl with the Russian border. And we wonder why Russia has become antagonist and suspicious of US foreign policy?

NOW who is the colossus seeking world domination? I’ll give you a hint: it sure ain’t Russia.

Dr. Stephen Wertheim is an historian of U.S. foreign policy, the director of

Stephen Wertheim

grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a visiting faculty fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School.

His recent book is entitled, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. I have it now on my reading list.

He also recently wrote an important editorial for the New York Times criticizing President Biden’s reaffirmations of the US commitment to NATO.

The article is called “Sorry, Liberals. But You Really Shouldn’t Love NATO.” It is important reading. Since it is behind a paywall, I have reproduced it in full. (All emphases are mine):

Even before today’s NATO summit, President Biden settled the most important question: He affirmed America’s commitment to defend the alliance’s 30 members by force. And despite divisions on many other foreign policy issues, his party stands in lock step behind him. To most Democrats, alliances symbolize international cooperation. Proof positive is that Donald Trump supposedly sought to tear them down.

Yet current progressive enthusiasm for NATO is anomalous. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its original reason for being, skeptics of the alliance included liberals as much as conservatives. In 1998, 10 Democratic Senators joined nine Republicans in opposing the first, fateful round of NATO enlargement, which would soon extend the alliance to Russia’s border.

Among the dissenters was Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. In between voting against the first Iraq war in 1991 and the second after Sept. 11, Mr. Wellstone warned that expanding NATO would jeopardize Europe’s hard-won gains. “There is peace between states in Europe, between nations in Europe, for the first time in centuries,” he said. “We do not have a divided Europe, and I worry about a NATO expansion which could redivide Europe and again poison relations with Russia.”

Events have proved him wiser than his party seems to think. The left has ceded criticism of NATO to the right, mistaking armed alliances for friendly partnerships and fixating on Mr. Trump’s rhetoric instead of his actions. (In the end, he reaffirmed every U.S. alliance commitment, embraced NATO’s expansion to Montenegro and North Macedonia, and beefed up U.S. forces in Eastern Europe.) It’s time for Americans to recover their critical faculties when they hear “NATO,” a military alliance that cements European division, bombs the Middle East, burdens the United States and risks great-power war — of which Americans should want no part.

At first, the United States figured it could enlarge its defense obligations under NATO because doing so seemed cost-free. Throughout the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia lay prostrate. The United States, by contrast, could trim its military spending only to enjoy greater pre-eminence than ever. If the Soviet collapse made NATO seem less necessary, it also made NATO seem less risky. Warnings like Mr. Wellstone’s, voiced by many analysts at the time, sounded hypothetical and distant.

But they have gained credence as Russia objected, first with words, eventually with arms, to the expansion of an alliance whose guns had always pointed at Moscow. By 2008, NATO declared its intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine. Each had been a founding republic of the Soviet Union and had territorial disputes with Russia. For each, Russia was willing to fight. It swiftly occupied parts of Georgia. Once Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was overthrown in 2014, Russia seized Crimea, home to its Black Sea naval base, and backed separatists in the Donbas region.

The conflict in Ukraine continues, with no resolution near. Rather than use diplomacy to back an internationally negotiated settlement, the United States has preferred to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. After decades of overreach, the Biden administration now faces a stark choice: commit to fight for Ukraine, creating a serious risk of war with Russia, or admit that NATO expansion has come to an overdue end.

Lacking an adversary of Soviet proportions, NATO has also found new foes “out of area” — its euphemism for waging wars in the greater Middle East. The bombing of Libya in 2011 was a NATO operation, signaling to war-weary Americans that this time the United States had real partners and multilateral legitimacy. The war proved disastrous anyway.

NATO helped fight the forever war in Afghanistan, too. Seeking to support U.S. aims after Sept. 11, it undertook “our biggest military operation ever,” Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg boasted in March. Two decades later, European soldiers are leaving, having failed to remake Afghanistan but perversely succeeded in making NATO seem relevant. Absent the Soviet threat, as Secretary General Stoltenberg admitted, the alliance has had to go “out of area or out of business.”

At least the Middle East contains the real, if receding, threat of terrorism, against which minimal military action can be warranted. But Europe is stable and affluent, far removed from its warring past. America’s European allies provide their people with world-leading living standards. They can also perform the most basic task of government: self-defense. In any case, Russia, with an economy the size of Italy’s, lacks the capability to overrun Europe, supposing it had any reason to try. If American leaders cannot countenance pulling U.S. forces back from Europe, then from where would they be willing to pull back, ever?

The danger of permanent subordination to America has started to register in European capitals, long solicitous of American commitment. President Emmanuel Macron of France has accused NATO of experiencing “brain death” and proposed creating an independent European army, an idea rhetorically welcomed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. The watchword in Brussels these days is “strategic autonomy,” meaning autonomy from the United States. Europeans scarcely seek to disinvite American forces from their continent. Still, they are finding that cheap security from Washington carries mounting costs: dependence on an erratic superpower, pressure to restrict business with China and Russia, and division in Europe itself.

The real question is what Americans want. They could continue to fetishize military alliances as a “sacred obligation,” as President Biden characterized NATO on Wednesday. Or they could treat them as means to ends — and coercive means that often corrupt worthy ends.

For progressives who seek to end endless wars and prevent new ones, the matter of Europe can no longer be skirted. The United States can trust Europeans to defend Europe. Otherwise, it would seem that America truly intends to dominate the world in perpetuity, or until the day a war so great puts dreams of dominance to rest.

The Bombing May Be Over, But the Devastation Remains

Israel and Hamas may have reached a “ceasefire,” but Palestinian suffering continues unabated.

While Israel violated the ceasefire almost immediately, the western press says nothing about it. [I will be posting about this common scenario very soon.]

The recent missile exchange killed 12 Israelis and at least 288 Palestinians, including 69 children and 40 women. More than 8,900 others were injured in Gaza, many with life-threatening wounds.

Israeli bombing damaged or destroyed 187 Gazan schools, including 55 kindergartens and 132 elementary schools.

This man lost 14 family members in a single strike. Of course, all human lives are sacred. We are all created as the Image of God. But this one man lost more family members than were killed in the entire state of Israel.

Watch below to learn about his story:

Repost: Dispelling a Memorial Day Myth

[This Memorial Day weekend, I am reposting an article I shared several years ago. After listening yesterday to several speakers on Christian radio — neither of whom had served in the military or ever been to war — advertise the beauties of “Americanism” while defending Christian Nationalism and glorifying our military; hearing them disparage people like me who warn against the dangers of Christian Nationalism, I decided to resurrect this article.]

I wrote this article in 2006. It was originally published in Perspectives Journal  (August 1 issue).  It is as relevant today as it was then.

The only difference for me is that my father died several weeks ago of war related health problems.

“I’m an Army brat, the proud son of a proud veteran who completed four tours of duty in two separate conflicts. I am immensely grateful that my father always returned home, at least physically. My mother was never forced to grieve at her husband’s graveside, but there is more than one way for a soldier to die. Often the man who comes home is not the same man who left for war.

“I remember my mother’s stories of how his hands would encircle her throat at night as she crept into his nightmares, the sleeping wife lying next to him fused with the Chinese enemy crawling under his tent flap. I vividly recall the continual depression, the emotional detachment, the explosions of anger. Our family eroded (internally, if not externally) and gradually fell apart like a sand castle trying to withstand an oncoming tide.

“There is more than one way for a soldier to die. Sometimes the family that waits behind gets back only a shell of the man they once knew. Somewhere overseas the soldier’s insides are emptied onto a battlefield, scooped out by bombs and artillery, sleepless nights and ‘collateral damage.’ The father I once knew had been replaced by someone new, a stranger haunted by guilt and riddled with sickness.

“What do my mother and siblings have to celebrate on Memorial Day?

“Please, don’t urge me to remember the veterans who gave their lives so that we could be free. It’s cold comfort because it’s not true. Aside from the clearly religious overtones of those words, something my Christianity finds deeply offensive, my father’s life was not ruined while defending American freedom. Were that the case, I might be able to celebrate. But with the possible exception of World War II, what modern war has this nation fought for such noble purposes? None. My father’s life was hollowed out for a discredited domino theory that preserved American freedom by only the most strained exercise in mental gymnastics. (If Southeast Asia falls, we’re next!) In the end, half the Korean peninsula and the whole of Vietnam were ‘lost.’ Yet, our freedoms were not diminished one iota.

“Let’s be honest in our celebrations. My father’s comrades-in-arms died believing that they were defending American freedom. They died because this nation’s political leaders had convinced themselves that the borders of American national interests extended into Southeast Asia. But the verdict is now inescapable. American freedom was never at risk in any of those conflicts.

“Soldiers gladly give their lives defending the buddies huddled beside them.

Wounded U.S. paratroopers are helped by fellow soldiers to a medical evacuation helicopter on Oct. 5, 1965 during the Vietnam War. Paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s First Battalion suffered many casualties in the clash with Viet Cong guerrillas in the jungle of South Vietnam’s “D” Zone, 25 miles Northeast of Saigon. (AP Photo)

Soldiers die because they obey their orders, no matter how dangerous. Many die because they are patriots. Sometimes they die in the conviction that they are defending someone else’s freedom. More die because they didn’t know what else to do after high school graduation. Soldiers die because they trust their leaders and believe the rallying cries of the commander-in-chief. But none of this necessarily has anything to do with the defense of American freedom. History demonstrates that our soldiers most often die as instruments of the ambition, naivete, stubbornness, ignorance, arrogance, and miscalculations of our nation’s leaders.

Washington DC, USA – June 18, 2016: The Memorial Wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC at dawn.

“It is far more accurate to say that Memorial Day commemorates those men and women who unwittingly gave their lives for the extension of America foreign, political, and economic interests. But that’s neither catchy nor comfortable to repeat.

“In 1775 Samuel Johnson characterized patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel. It is also the first refuge of the masses unwilling to face hard political realities. I’ll stand to memorialize the patriot soldiers who gave their lives protecting a buddy while carrying out dangerous commands. But don’t ask me to memorialize a lie. My family has suffered enough for patriotic delusions.”

Alas. The US War in Afghanistan Will Not End on 9/11/21

I will keep my fingers crossed and hope that  president Biden follows through on his promise to withdraw all US ground forces from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021.

But even if he does resist the pressure of DC warmongers now mounted against him, the senseless 20 year war in Afghanistan is bound to continue.

Investigative journalist, Norman Solomon

Journalist Norman Solomon’s article at SheerPost reminds us that we always have to read the fine print in any presidential statement.

There we will see that the air war will continue. US drones will not stop murdering anonymous Afghan civilians, including women and children.

The CIA and various special ops units will continue their clandestine operations.

The insanity of American foreign policy, which appears intent upon dominating the entire globe, has not changed. President Biden remains a neo-liberal, American imperialist.

The publication of the Afghanistan Papers by the Washington Post — this generation’s equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, revealing the truth about the horrid, unwinnable war in Vietnam — has been ignored by the public and Congress, meaning that there is little public pressure to TRULY bring this war to an end.

Solomon’s piece is entitled, “The Fine Print on Biden’s Afghanistan Announcement.”

Here it is:

Contrary to what Joe Biden has said and corporate media has parroted, U.S. warfare in Afghanistan is set to continue well beyond September 11, 2021.

When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept

Guljumma, 7, and her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 31, 2009. [Photo by Reese Erlich]
at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.

There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when — according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday — all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.

What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that “U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan” before Sept. 11. And “we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”

But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that “we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to “stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”

And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.

The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: “Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War.” But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed “Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11,” the Times reported: “Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said.”

Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S. government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred.

“We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to,” diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. “From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.”

The U.S. war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and U.S. news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare.

No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy.

Patrick Lawrence Explains Biden’s Inhumanity in Syria

Yesterday’s Consortium News had an illuminating article by Patrick Lawrence warning about the danger signs embedded in president Biden’s recent actions in Syria.

The US began to destroy Syria during the Obama administration as yet

Syrian school children meeting in front of their bombed out school building

another Democratic president initiated another attempted coup followed by incessant “regime change” operations in the Middle East.

It didn’t take long for American forces to ally themselves with al-Qaeda troops (yes, THAT al-Qaeda) in our imperial attempts to “rebuild” a “democratic” Syria. (You can’t make this stuff up…)

Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad is no saint. But America’s reckless,

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad

shortsighted, selfish interference makes Assad’s authoritarian nationalism look like an oasis of tranquility in the midst of Dante’s inferno.

Things have only gotten worse for the Syrian people since US interference in the country’s internal affairs. The Biden administration shows no sign of working to repair the damage we have done.

Below is an excerpt of this article. Read it and weep, oh ye citizens. For these are your tax dollars at work:

For a time after Joe Biden took office not quite three months ago, among the questions raised was how the new administration would address the Syria question.

I do not think we will have to wonder about this much longer. It is early days yet, but one now detects the Biden’s administration’s Syria policy in faint outline. From what one can make out, it is bleak, it is vicious, it is unconscionably cruel to the Syrian people. 

And it may prove yet worse than anything the Trump administration came up with, the Bible-banging Mike Pompeo in the lead as secretary of state.

Will Biden’s national security people drop the covert coup operation Barack Obama set it in motion nine years ago, its failure long evident? Or will they reinvigorate American support for savage jihadists in the name of “regime changing” the secular government in Damascus? What about the American troops still operating illegally on Syrian soil? What about the oilfields the Trump administration took to “protecting” from the nation that owns them? What about the brazen theft of crude from those fields?

And what, of course, about the murderous sanctions that various executive orders have escalated on numerous occasions since the Bush II administration imposed the first of them 17 long years ago?  

Christian Nationalism and Political Conformity

Condemning Christian nationalism has become all the rage among certain members of the evangelical punditry. Even a few evangelical Republicans felt uncomfortable at the sight of Jesus flags and Christian paraphernalia on prominent display among the rioters who stormed Congress on January 6th.

In the immediate aftermath of those events, I saw a number of editorial condemnations on television and in print chastising any Christian’s involvement in violence or sedition. Each of them raised the same questions in my mind, for they all were morally tepid and intellectually shallow, ignoring the role those very media outlets had played in promoting president Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election.

I wholeheartedly agree with the reminder that Christians should not commit acts of violence, especially when those actions lead to others being

FILE – In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, Trump supporters participate in a rally in Washington. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

killed and injured. However, I also found it very strange for right-wing, Christian, patriotic pundits, people who swear allegiance to a nation founded upon revolution, violence, and bloodshed, to suddenly clutch their pearls and faint at the sight of modern “patriots” doing what they believed needed to be done in order to save their nation and democracy.

I won’t even begin to address the hypocrisy on display when Religious-Right folks self-righteously condemn insurrection at home while heartily endorsing America’s many military coups and wars of aggression around the world! Apparently, Christians are only supposed to shun violence when the their fellow Americans become the enemy. Black and brown-skinned people around the world are always fair game.

All of this is very strange indeed unless we understand two crucial points:

First, these suddenly pacifistic, evangelical commentators were demonstrating how deeply embedded they are in the American, corporate establishment.

For all of their complaints about suffering as marginalized, Christian outsiders, none of them were willing to follow the logic of their messianic Trump-devotion to its logical conclusion. Why? Because they all had network executives telling them to toe a more establishment line or they would need to empty their desks and head for the unemployment line.

None of them were condemning police violence when BLM protesters were being assaulted by lines of militarized patrolmen wielding plexiglass shields and billy clubs.

Second, their exclusive focus on an anti-violence message exposed the consistent lack of self-awareness and intellectual rigor that characterizes so much of American evangelicalism today.

Of course, superficial critiques may be better than no critique at all, but if we only ever scratch the surface of a problem, then the underlying disease is allowed to deepen and spread. (On a side note, this was also my response to Mark Galli’s tepid critique of president Trump in his editorial at Christianity Today.” Only fellow evangelicals would interpret his words as shocking.)

Linking the errors of Christian nationalism to the dangers of patriotic violence (at home, mind you; violence abroad is always permissible for Christian America) is only the tip of the iceberg.

I recently began reading a book by the US historian, John W. Compton, entitled, The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors (Oxford, 2020). Compton first tells the story of how white Protestantism once led the way in condemning, addressing, and working to transform the many social, cultural, and political evils in this country.

Child labor laws, worker safety regulations, the 6-day work week, the 8-hour work day, a living wage, plus much more were policies all implemented in response to massive Christian political pressure during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But all of that changed in late 1970s-early 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the rise of his neo-liberal economic agenda. Nowadays, Christians concerned with things like social justice are regularly condemned for compromising the gospel. What happened?

I won’t answer that question here, but I will share a few thoughts from Compton’s introductory chapter where he begins to lay out his argument about the transformation that led to the wholesale conformity of American Christianity to the social/political/cultural status quo.

Concerning Christian political involvement:

Religious believers are on average much like similarly situated secular citizens when it comes to their behavior in the political realm. Like their secular neighbors, believers routinely base their political decisions on self-interest or ingrained prejudice rather than careful and disinterested study of sacred texts or deliberation about the will of a higher power. (4-5)

On the Christian vision for the church’s role in transforming society:

…from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, most non-Southern Protestants not only professed to believe that Christian principles, properly understood, favored government efforts to aid the downtrodden; they were also embedded in religious networks that were capable…of focusing attention on specific social problems and incentivizing the faithful to take responsibility for correcting them.

On the current state of American evangelicalism:

In the new age of personal autonomy, the leaders of the Religious Right flourished by reshaping the Christian message to comport with the prejudices and material self-interest of their target demographic.

I will probably review this book here when I have finished digesting all that it has to say.

But in short, nowadays the average Christian doesn’t work at thinking, and thus acting, differently in the light of God’s word. We conform to the ways of those around us, ignore the illuminating study of the holy scriptures, and are afraid to stand alone on behalf of those less fortunate than ourselves.

For now, I will only note a deeper description of the dangers that accompany Christian nationalism. The heart of that danger is cooption, conformity to the national status quo — which explains a lot about American evangelicalism and the Religious-Right in this country.

Once Christians begin to imagine that their country is God’s country; that its national history is a story written by and for Christians like themselves, then it is a very tiny step to confuse national interests with Christian interests. National norms become Christian norms (think of laisse faire capitalism) and Christian norms become national norms (think of the fight over equal rights for gay citizens).

Granted, this confusion may require a reimagined past that describes our current state of affairs as a gross deviation from historic norms (think of  David Barton and Wallbuilders promoting a fictitious story of our “Christian” founding fathers and the Constitution’s adherence to the Bible). But modern diversions into sin cannot change America’s basic orientation as a “Christian nation” – at least, to the minds of Christian nationalists.

The identity between the one and the other is very simple for Christian nationalism and it goes far beyond a problem with violence. Christian values become America’s true, historic values. Thus, American true values are Christian values. This is where Christian nationalism becomes heretical.

Yet, this false identity between nation and church is ignored by pundits on the Religious-Right who now chastise Christian insurrectionists for colluding with violence.

The genuine danger for the church in this country is not that it would collude with violence but that it would continue to collude with American exceptionalism.

The greatest political danger facing evangelicalism today is our willingness to roll over and accept the economic and political status quo, embracing corporate, crony capitalism, labor exploitation, systemic racism, militarized policing, social Darwinism, and American exceptionalism as God’s preferred methods of directing a nation.

Where is the Christian voice of dissent to all these sins?

Where are the people who will not conform to their political surroundings and vote and think and act like their neighbors?

Where are the Christian activists willing to break away from the way things today are in order to pursue God’s vision of the way things ought to be tomorrow?

Chris Hedges on The Evil Within Us

Smart people listen to their critics. Wise people take notes when their fiercest critics speak.

Chris Hedges, a former Presbyterian minister and graduate of Harvard Divinity School, is a particularly fierce critic of the evangelical-fundamentalist church in America today.

That is one of the reasons that I follow his work. The other is that his perspective on this world and the ways in which truly moral people — whether religious or not — are to navigate their way through life’s journey is far more Christian than most of what I see and hear from “Christian” media nowadays.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hedges fails to grasp the full measure of Jesus’ teaching, and he does not begin to understand the apostle Paul and his message of

Adam and Eve eat the apple in the Garden of Eden

grace, but then I also find both these deficiencies within large swaths of American Christianity, evangelicals included.

In his most recent essay, “The Evil Within Us,” Hedges offers a secular perspective on the Christian doctrine of Total Depravity. He discusses the recent mass shooting in Atlanta as an example of human sinfulness run riot.

In this instance, the murderous expression of Robert Aaron Long’s sinful nature had been nurtured rather than suppressed, he suggests, by the same  conservative religion that taught him to condemn sexual temptation.

Whether or not you agree with his views on sexual temptation, Hedges’ explanation of human depravity’s larger social and cultural expressions through American imperialism, American exceptionalism, and American racism is spot on.

Below is an excerpt. All emphases are mine:

. . . The externalization of evil, however, is not limited to the Christian Right. It lies at the core of American imperialism, American exceptionalism and American racism. White supremacy, which dehumanizes the other at home and abroad, is also fueled by the fantasy that there are superior human beings who are white and lesser human beings who are not. Long did not need the Christian fascism of his church to justify to himself the killings; the racial hierarchies within American society had already dehumanized his victims. His church simply cloaked it in religious language. The jargon varies. The dark sentiments are the same.

The ideology of the Christian right, like all totalitarian creeds, is, at its core, an ideology of hatred. It rejects what Augustine calls the grace of love, or volo ut sis(I want you to be). It replaces it with an ideology that condemns all those outside the magic circle. There is, in relationships based on love, an affirmation of the mystery of the other, an affirmation of unexplained and unfathomable differences. These relationships not only recognize that others have a right to be, as Augustine wrote, but the sacredness of difference.

This sacredness of difference is an anathema to Christian fundamentalists, as it is to imperialists, to all racists. It is dangerous to the hegemony of the triumphalist ideology. It calls into question the infallibility of the doctrine, the essential appeal of all ideologies. It suggests that there are alternative ways to live and believe. The moment there is a hint of uncertainty the ideological edifice crumbles. The truth is irrelevant as long as the ideology is consistent, doubt is heretical and the vision of the world, however absurd, absolute and unassailable. These ideologies are not meant to be rational. They are meant to fill emotional voids.

Evil for the Christian fundamentalists is not something within them. It is an external force to be destroyed. It may require indiscriminate acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world this violence is morally justified. Those who advance the holy crusade alone know the truth. They alone have been anointed by God or, in the language of American imperialism, western civilization, to do battle with evil. They alone have the right to impose their “values” on others by force. Once evil is external, once the human race is divided into the righteous and the damned, repression and even murder become a sacred duty.

Immanuel Kant defined “radical evil” as the drive, often carried out under a righteous façade, to surrender to absolute self-love. Those gripped by radical evil always externalize evil. They lose touch with their own humanity. They are blind to their own innate depravity. In the name of western civilization and high ideals, in the name of reason and science, in the name of America, in the name of the free market, in the name of Jesus, they seek the subjugation and annihilation of others. Radical evil, Hannah Arendt wrote, makes whole groups of human beings superfluous. They become, rhetorically, living corpses before often becoming actual corpses.

This binary world view is anti-thought. That is part of its attraction. It gives to those who are alienated and lost emotional certitude. It is buttressed by hollow cliches, patriotic slogans and Bible passages, what psychologists call symbol agnostics. True believers are capable only of imitation. They shut down, by choice, critical reflection and genuine understanding. They surrender all moral autonomy. The impoverished language is regurgitated not because it makes sense, but because it justifies the messianic and intoxicating right to lead humankind to paradise. These pseudo-heroes, however, know only one form of sacrifice, the sacrifice of others.

Human evil is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery. It is a bitter, constant paradox. We carry the capacity for evil within us. I learned this unsettling truth as a war correspondent. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. Evil is also seductive. It offers us unlimited often lethal power to turn those around us into objects to destroy or debase to gratify our most perverted desires or both. This evil waits to consume us. All it requires to flourish is for us to turn away, to pretend it is not there, to do nothing.

Those who blind themselves to their capacity for evil commit evil not for evil’s sake, but to make a better world. This collective self-delusion is the story of America, from its foundation on the twin evils of slavery and genocide to its inherent racism, predatory capitalism and savage wars of conquest. The more we ignore this evil, the worse it gets.

The awareness of human corruptibility and human limitations, as understood by Augustine, Kant, Sigmund Freud and Primo Levi, has been humankind’s most potent check on evil. Levi wrote that “compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all logic.” This self-knowledge forces us to accept that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is ever free from the taint of self-interest. It reminds us that we are condemned to always battle our baser instincts. It recognizes that compassion, as Rousseau wrote, is alone the quality from which “all the social virtues flow.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “some are guilty, but all are responsible.” We may not be guilty of the murders in Atlanta, but we are responsible. We must answer for them. We must accept the truth about ourselves, however unpleasant. We must unmask the lie of our pretended innocence.

Long’s murderous spree was quintessentially American. That is what makes it, along with all other hate crimes, along with our endless imperial wars, police terror, callous abandonment of the poor and the vulnerable, so frightening. This evil will not be tamed until it is named and confronted.

Business as Usual: Israeli Soldiers Arrest Palestinian Children for Picking Wild Vegetables on Their Own Land

Below is a video of Israeli soldiers arresting 5 Palestinian children, ages 8 through 13. Their “crime” was picking wild herbs and vegetables near an illegal Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank.

It is another example of the way Israel criminalizes Palestinians for merely existing in their own land.

The video was released by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Below is an excerpt from Aljazeera describing the arrest.

Israeli forces detained five Palestinian children for several hours after they were confronted by Jewish settlers while gathering wild vegetables near a settlement outpost in the occupied West Bank, an Israeli human rights group said on Thursday.

B’Tselem released video of the arrest in the southern Hebron Hills, in which heavily armed Israeli soldiers can be seen dragging the children away.

Footage shot earlier shows the children gathering akoub, a plant similar to artichoke, when two masked settlers emerge from a grove of trees near the illegal settler outpost of Havat Maon.

The outpost is located near Masafer Yatta, a collection of about 19 Palestinian hamlets. The area is a frequent target of assaults by the Israeli military and settlers.

“This is another example of the absolute disregard on the part of Israeli authorities and forces on the ground to the wellbeing and rights of Palestinians, no matter how young or vulnerable,” B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz said.

“The youngest boy from yesterday’s incident is eight years old,” he added.

The children, whose ages range from eight to 13, were held for about five hours

An Israeli soldier detains a Palestinian boy during a protest against Jewish settlements in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah August 28, 2015. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

at a police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, according to Gaby Lasky, a human rights lawyer who is representing them. The two eldest, who are 12 and 13, were ordered to return next week for more questioning as, under Israeli military law, they are deemed old enough to face charges. . . 

. . . According to Defense for Children International, Israel prosecutes between 500 and 700 Palestinian children in military courts each year. Prisoners’ rights group Addameer has said 140 Palestinian children are currently imprisoned by Israel.

Click here to read the entire article.

 

 

Biden Continues US Imperialism in the Middle East

A few days ago I wrote here about the hypocrisy of US (and Israeli) military exploits in the Middle East. It was titled “A Tale of Two Missile Attacks.”

Today we learned that president Biden approved several new attacks in Syria. The ABC news headline reads, “US carries out airstrike against Iranian-backed militia in Syria.”

As I was preparing another post on this unfolding situation, I discovered Caitlin Johnstone’s article covering the same ground, in fine form. Her piece is titled “US Bombs Syria and Ridiculously Claims Self Defense.”

I remain ashamed to be an American today.

I have excerpted her article below, or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:

On orders of President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.

Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases. . . 

So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the US invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force (emphasis mine). And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.

This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.

The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.

 

It’s illegitimate for the US to be in the Middle East at all. It’s illegitimate for the US to claim to be acting defensively in nations it invaded. It’s illegitimate for the US to act like Iranian-backed fighters aren’t allowed to be in Syria, where they are fighting alongside the Syrian government against ISIS and other extremist militias with the permission of Damascus. It is illegitimate for the US to claim the fighters attacking US personnel in Iraq are controlled by Iran when Iraqis have every reason to want the US out of their country themselves.

Even the official narrative reveals itself as illegitimate from within its own worldview. CNN reports that the site of the airstrike “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” in Iraq, and a Reuters/AP report says “Biden administration officials condemned the February 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out.”

This is all so very typical of the American supremacist worldview that is being aggressively shoved down our throats by all western mainstream news media. The US can bomb who it likes, whenever it likes, and when it does it is only ever doing so in self defense, because the entire planet is the property of Washington, DC. It can seize control of entire clusters of nations, and if any of those nations resist in any way they are invading America’s sovereignty. . . 

. . . This sort of nonsense is why it’s so important to prioritize opposition to western imperialism. World warmongering and domination is the front upon which all the most egregious evils inflicted by the powerful take place, and it plays such a crucial role in upholding the power structures we are up against. Without endless war, the oligarchic empire which is the cause of so much of our suffering cannot function, and must give way to something else. If you’re looking to throw sand in the gears of the machine, anti-imperialism is your most efficacious path toward that end, and should therefore be your priority.