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Guinness Book of Warmongering
My son left a 2015 Guinness Book of World Records lying around. It's largely a mix of athletic feats, extravagant spending, freakish body conditions and diseases, and people who do dumb stuff in order to get into the book. It also features two sections focused on mass-murder. One celebrates the technology used to kill people. In that section, the United States is featured almost exclusively. The other section looks more at the wars, killing, and dying. In that section, the United States could not be avoided, but every effort was made.
Starting with the celebration of the tools of death, Guinness chooses to include these awards for the United States of America:
Most sea craft.
Most aircraft.
Most total firepower.
Most expensive super carrier.
Longest range stealth mini-sub.
Most expensive drone.
Most expensive military aircraft program.
Largest air force.
Most common fighter aircraft.
Longest "serving" bomber.
Largest anti-mine naval exercise.
Largest aerial assault using poisoned mice.
First successful combat submarine.
First air-to-air refueling.
First pilotless aircraft to cross the Pacific.
First drone launched from a submerged submarine.
Highest number of firearms per person.
First 3-D printed pistol.
Wow! Cool! Exciting! Go, Science!
Now, flip to the pages with wars, and the U.S. role seems to shrink a bit. Lots of other nations emerge from the shadows. The United States is listed as spending the most money on militarism and launching the most drone strikes. And if you're paying attention, you'll notice that the "least peaceful" nations (Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria) are all nations that the United States is bombing, and that the nation from which the most refugees have fled (Afghanistan) has seen that happen during a U.S. "liberation" or occupation. But every effort is made to depict war as emerging from somewhere other than the Pentagon.
The deadliest conflict for children is supposedly in Syria, with no mention of Iraq. The list of wars with the highest death tolls since 1955 includes the war on Vietnam, but no mention of Iraq at all. The highest number of civilian deaths in an undeclared war is supposedly Syria, perhaps because somebody is thinking that somebody else "declared" "War!" before destroying Iraq. The "least secure" nukes are supposedly in North Korea. Etc.
A serious look at world records would be a little different. It might look something like this:
Nation fighting greatest number of simultaneous wars: United States.
Nation with greatest number of troops stationed abroad: United States.
Nation with greatest number of foreign bases: United States.
Nation with troops in greatest number of nations: United States.
Nation with greatest number of troops at sea: United States.
Nation with greatest military use of outerspace: United States.
Nation selling the greatest quantity of weaponry to the world: United States.
Nation selling the greatest quantity of weaponry to the Middle East: United States.
Nation selling the greatest quantity of weaponry to poor nations: United States.
Nation giving the greatest quantity of weaponry to other nations: United States.
Nation giving the greatest quantity of weaponry to proxy fighters abroad: United States.
Nation whose weaponry is used on both sides of the greatest number of wars: United States.
Nation whose military most often trains two sets of troops to fight against each other: United States.
Nation holding out on ratifying the greatest number of treaties restricting weaponry and war-making: United States.
Only nation that has dropped nuclear bombs on cities: United States.
Nation using and selling the most cluster bombs, depleted uranium weapons, white phosphorus, and napalm: United States.
Nation whose military consumes the most petroleum: United States.
Nation that has overthrown the most other governments: United States.
Nation that has participated in the most wars since World War II: United States.
Nation that has dropped the most bombs since World War II: United States.
Nation that has killed the most people since World War II: United States.
Only nation in which a presidential candidate has been asked in a televised debate if he will be willing to kill thousands of innocent children as part of his basic duties if elected: United States.
Denying discrimination: Clintonian Political Calculus and the Culture of Hooey
By Linn Washington, Jr.
Hooey –- silly talk/nonsense –- frequently has slimy characteristics and slime is slippery.
Former President Bill Clinton recently slipped on some silly talk when trying to dance around a slime trail oozing from his presidency during the 1990s.
Clinton has a delegate lead thanks to 6 Deep South states: The Democratic Convention Pledged Delegates Story Nobody Talks About
By Dave Lindorff
Bernie Sanders is behind Hillary Clinton in the number of pledged delegates he has amassed over the course of just under two and a half weeks of primaries and caucuses. Her advantage in pledged delegates has fallen over the last month and a half from a high point of just over 300 to a current 213.
The problem’s that Clinton IS qualified for president: Is Bernie’s ‘Political Revolution’ the Real Thing or a Pathetic Joke?
By Dave Lindorff
Bernie Sanders had a shining moment last week at a massive rally in Philadelphia at the Temple University Liacouras Sports Center. The high point came when he mentioned that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had implied that he was “not qualified” to be president -- a charge that she has continued to make in a tense campaign for the April 19 Democratic primary in New York state.
Something’s happening in the presidential race: Clinton’s Crumbling, Bernie’s Surging ‘Political Revolution’ is in the Air
By Dave Lindorff
Philadelphia -- Something “YUGE” is happening in the Democratic presidential campaign, and perhaps in the broader American body politic. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but like that feeling of your neck hairs rising off your skin as a big thunderstorm approaches, you know it’s big and it’s coming.
Heartfelt message or political gamesmanship?: WTF! John McCain Saluting an American Communist?
By John Grant
CIA ‘K-9 test’ gone wrong or something else?: Plastic Explosives Found in School Bus Engine Compartment by school's mechanic
By Dave Lindorff
What on earth was the CIA doing putting plastic high explosive charges on school buses and in hidden places in a Virginia public school in a “test” of K-9 dogs reportedly belonging to the Agency itself?
The Boys Who Said NO! A Documentary on the Nonviolent Draft Resistance Movement during the Vietnam War
Over the past 200 years, there have been a series of dynamic and successful nonviolent direct action movements in the U.S. stretching from abolishing slavery and winning women’s rights to advancing wider civil rights, equality, disarmament, and peace. Influential Americans including William Penn, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all opposed war and defended human rights, and countless numbers of others have followed their example throughout the country and around the world.
In that tradition, tens of thousands of young people followed their consciences and actively refused to cooperate with the draft and the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 70s because of the injustice and violence they represented. Featuring recently filmed interviews with the men and women involved, The Boys Who Said NO! explores the important but little known story of young people who organized resistance to the draft and chose prison instead of war.
Nationally, over half a million young men evaded or resisted the draft during these years, and tens of thousands risked substantial fines and prison sentences of up to five years for publicly taking a stand. In the end, the government convicted 3,250 draft resisters and sentenced them to between one and five years in federal prison.
These young men became part of the largest mass incarceration of war resisters in U.S. history. Ultimately, they inspired and influenced countless others to question the war, oppose conscription, and end the conflict in Vietnam. United States history shows that activists like these, who have developed effective conflict resolution strategies using nonviolence, have moved critical national issues forwards without violence.
Our director is Judith Ehrlich, who won an Academy Award nomination for codirecting The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Her earlier films include The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, about conscientious objectors in WWII. Our producer Christopher C. Jones was inspired to make this film by a reunion of seventy nonviolent activists in 2013. He is a former draft resister as are our other Advisory Team members Robert Cooney, Steve Ladd and Lee Swenson. Bill Prince, MD is our co-producer.
How do the lessons of the nonviolent draft resistance movement relate to social conflicts we have today and in the future? What impacts did the imprisonment of these young Americans have on their lives, on society and on stopping the war? These are some of the questions the film explores. Please visit our website and see some early edited draft film segments: www.boyswhosaidno.com
Hillary Clinton backed the coup: Shine the Light of Truth on Poor Honduras
By John Grant
Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places in the world.
Secession, Trump, and the Avoidability of Civil War
The Governor of California has joked about building a wall all the way around his state if Donald Trump becomes president of the other 49. Secession would not be a joke had it not been given an undeserved bad name. It would not have that bad name but for our universal acceptance of imperialism and of an overly simplistic history of the U.S. Civil War.
Slavery in the U.S. South was widespread through World War II, Jim Crow through the 1960s, mass incarceration through the current day, and bitterness over the Civil War for the foreseeable future. Had the U.S. avoided civil war through a compromise that restricted slavery to existing slave states, or even through a compromise that allowed its possible expansion, or through simply allowing states to secede without war, the net result might have been good or bad. A few things are certain. The bitterness over the war would not exist, the 700,000 killed and many more injured and the incredible destruction of burned cities and fields would not have happened, and war would not have been glorified during the childhoods of the generation that would launch global U.S. imperialism at the dawn of the 20th century.
Very likely, in addition, slavery would have ended more quickly and more thoroughly than it did. Of course, that cannot be stated with certainty. But a nation half-slave, half-free that sought to work through problems without war would have very likely ended slavery through some form of compensated emancipation fairly quickly, bringing up the rear in a global process of liberation. Two or more smaller nations that sought to avoid war would have very likely also put an end to slavery in the one or more nations maintaining it, in part because of international and economic forces and the absence of a fugitive slave law, but also because smaller nations, all else equal, have an easier time achieving democracy. If we had smaller nations on this continent now, or if we were to choose to in the future, we would see the ability of people to bring popular pressure to bear on the governments soar.
Of course, it's anything but an easy moral question whether 4 million people should be left enslaved another moment, or whether a nation should launch a war that might benefit them, though in the end it actually brought very limited and short-lived gains along with 700,000 killed and numerous disastrous results for decades to come. Not only are the results known only after the war, but the moral question has been invented after the war. Many in the North did not want a war to free slaves. A draft had to finally be created, as in the South as well, to compel people to kill and die. And those in power in Washington, including President-elect Lincoln, did not want war to free the slaves, only to prevent the expansion of slavery westward. When the South would not agree to restricting slavery to its current boundaries, Northern decision makers chose to launch a war over "union" -- preferring slaughter to permitting the South, or some part of it, to leave.
Mark Tooley has published a book called The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War. It may remain a forgotten story for at least four reasons that leap out at me. First, Tooley adds in so much gossip-column fluff on clothes and parties and families and churches that it's almost physically impossible to make it through his book if you're looking only for what happened at the conference; this is truly a shame in a culture that already considers peace boring and war exciting. Second, Tooley concludes that the war was "inevitable" anyway, so why should you care? (And why did he give his book the title he did?) Third, Tooley almost completely overlooks the possibility that was most open to the North, namely allowing the South to leave in peace. Fourth, if you look into the details and consider how easily peace might have been chosen instead of war, you may feel a bit of discomfort in your mind. You may come up against the fact that many nations did end slavery without a civil war, and then have to start questioning whether in fact lots of other wars have also been "inevitable."
A strong case could be made that the peace conference was begun too late. Seven states had already seceded. A conference on peaceful secession before secession, or a conference on a slavery compromise before secession, would have been easier. Oh and, by the way, the entire topic of the conference was slavery, not some other vague cause of "states rights" or anything of the sort. Nonetheless, the conference had numerous chances to reach an agreement, and in the end did reach an agreement -- which Congress tossed aside in favor of war, and which Congress was assisted in tossing aside by some members of the peace conference who quickly badmouthed what they had done and opted for war. Among the latter was former U.S. President John Tyler who had chaired the peace conference before returning to Virginia and denouncing it.
Under consideration at the conference was not primarily slavery in the slave states, and certainly not ending it through compensated emancipation, as would be done in Washington, D.C., and numerous foreign countries. At issue was principally the expansion of slavery into the expanding western empire. Both sides insisted on imperial expansion to such an extent that it was truly beyond debate. If they'd been somehow made content with the current size of the country, that too could have resolved the dispute and averted war. So, in that peculiar sense, the Civil War was a war of empire. Delegates from both Northern and Southern states (quite a crowd of former senators and justices and the like) tended also to assume that their choices were either union or war, not peaceful division. A greater willingness to accept peaceful separation could also have averted war.
Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin sent no delegates. William Lloyd Garrison urged the desirability of war. Peace conference delegate Roger Baldwin of Connecticut advocated no compromise with slavery. Some Southern delegates urged no compromise with freedom, even while whining about threats to their own rights and comforts without a thought for those of the people enslaved in their states. The peace conference dragged on unpeacefully for 19 days, with Congress and the states holding their breath and holding off on actions.
Delegate Reverdy Johnson of Maryland made a case for compromise to both sides, urging the North to accept the deal of the old Missouri Compromise as preferable to the Dred Scott decision's ruling that slavery could spread north of latitude 36°30'. Southern delegates were intent on not just preserving slavery but expanding it westward. President-elect Lincoln met with the peace conference and made clear that he would never stand for that and would prefer war; he would leave slavery alone where it existed but never allow it to expand.
After all variety of proposals were heard and rejected, ultimately a compromise was reached by the peace conference that reinstated the Missouri Compromise, required a majority of slave-state senators to approve of new territory, prohibited Congressional interference with slavery, banned the importation of enslaved people from abroad, and affirmed fugitive slave laws but also allowed for compensation paid to an owner to make an escaped slave free. Arguably this final agreement and other proposals that were rejected all propped up slavery more than simply allowing secession would have. The Senate and House quickly took up the peace conference agreement and rejected it. This was a Congress now missing any representatives from eight states, another reason why acting sooner might have succeeded.
During the course of the conference, some hints at another possible course were heard. General Winfield Scott said that dividing the country into four countries would be a "lesser evil" than war. Senator Salmon Chase of Ohio said, "The thing to be done is to let the South go." Former Massachusetts Governor George Boutwell said that the union should be kept free of slavery or not kept. (But he warned ominously that the South could try to annex Mexico and other land, and block the North's expansion to the Pacific. Again, it was all about empire.) Former New York Congressman Francis Granger raised the example of letting the South go as an act too cruel to be considered (so beneficial, apparently, was union with the North). George Summers of Virginia proposed a new nation of the border states, letting the Deep South and New England do their own things.
Victory, and thereby top praise in the history books, went to those who wanted war, including those who opposed slavery, those who demanded "union," and those who insisted on expanding slavery far and wide.
But when secession is proposed in the future, we should not be rash in rejecting it. If the North had let the South go way back when, both countries might be much better off today. If, after the Civil War, someone had been able to turn the clock back four years, the North might have been very willing to let the South go. The South might also have been very willing to give up slavery, or at least its expansion westward, without the insanity and horror of a war. Secession may be an improvement on what we've got now. There are only so many immigrants Canada is going to take.
Ticking time bomb: Youth Violence Solution? Authorities Should Stop Ignoring Local Activists
By Linn Washington, Jr.
London and Philadelphia -- Over three thousands miles and more than forty years in age separate anti-violence activists Bilal Qayyum and Noel Williams, yet each advocates a similar solution to ‘the problem’ they seek to solve in their respective cities located on separate sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
The War Monument to End All War Monuments
“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” –Orwell
The U.S. government has reached the bottom of the barrel. Having packed every square inch of the National Mall with monuments to every war they wanted to admit to, including the wars on Vietnam and Korea, and including the two world wars, our dear leaders have decided that another World War I monument is needed, and that it will be built in Pershing Park (named in 1981 for a World War I general by then already sufficiently forgotten).
That’s presumably not a reincarnated WWI vet on the bench above, but a young soldier inhaling the glory of past noble slaughters.
This new glorification of mass killing is supposed to be finished by Armistice Day 2018, or what we now know as the opposite of Armistice Day, namely Veterans Day. The symbolism is stark. At the century mark of the conclusion of the war to end all wars, a peace holiday that was transformed into a war holiday during the war on Korea will be celebrated by an empire intent on glorifying all past wars in order to keep having new ones.
A WWI memorial is the reductio ad absurdum of the argument for glorifying all wars. When Victor Berger pointed out that all WWI gave the United States was the flu and prohibition, it was too early to add WWII and the military industrial complex and the oppression of the Middle East that would be resented to this day to that list. But the U.S. public resoundingly agreed with him. Public disgust created the most peaceful period in U.S. history following the armistice. The U.S. government was compelled by popular action to take the lead in legally banning all war with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which is still on the books. Public demand also almost created a requirement for a public referendum before the United States could (illegally) launch a war — a step that might have radically changed the past 100 years.
Where’s a memorial to those who went to prison for speaking against the madness of the “Great War”? Where’s even the most basic information on how the war was sold, and how it was understood once it ended? Nothing of the sort is to be found on the website of the monument makers. Woodrow Wilson’s lies about the Lusitania and German atrocities in Belgium created the modern field of war propaganda and led to widespread doubt, misplaced as it turned out, of later tales of Nazi atrocities. But the people intent on memorializing wars once the wars are old enough to not mean anything mention none of that. In fact, they simply quote Wilson’s malarkey without comment, as if it bore some relationship to what actually happened. This would be like carving Colin Powell’s U.N. Speech onto an Iraq War memorial in 2103, which I’m sure has already been planned. Quoth Wilson:
“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them…. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”
This was just after Wilson had won an election falsely promising peace, and immediately after the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page, sent a cable to Wilson on March 5, 1917, reading in part:
“The pressure of this approaching crisis, I am certain, has gone beyond the ability of the Morgan financial agency for the British and French governments. The financial necessities of the Allies are too great and urgent for any private agency to handle, for every such agency has to encounter business rivalries and sectional antagonism. It is not improbable that the only way of maintaining our present preeminent trade position and averting a panic is by declaring war on Germany.”
When peace had been made with Germany ending World War I, President Wilson and his allies punished the entire population of Germany, leading numerous wise observers to accurately predict World War II. Jane Addams, E.D. Morel, John Maynard Keynes, and others predicted that the harsh vindictiveness of the treaty would lead to a new war. They seem to have been right. Combined with other factors, including Western preference for Nazism over Communism, and a growing arms race, bitter resentment in Germany did lead to a new war. Ferdinand Foch claimed the treaty was too lenient on Germany and would therefore create a new war, which is of course also true if one considers the possibility of having completely destroyed Germany or something close to that. Woodrow Wilson predicted that failure of the United States to join the League of Nations would lead to a new war, but it is far from clear that joining the League would have prevented the war.
Oblivious, and honoring Wilson as the Obama of his day, our monument makers just quote what Wilson said rather than what he did: “It must be a peace without victory…Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.” As devotees of our current president would say: at least he knew what he should have done, and that’s what matters.
When peace came, Wilson kept U.S. troops in Russia to fight the Soviets, despite earlier claims that U.S. troops were in Russia in order to defeat Germany and intercept supplies bound for Germany. Senator Hiram Johnson (P-CA) had famously said of the launching of the war: “The first casualty when war comes, is truth.” He now had something to say about the failure to end the war when the peace treaty had been signed. Johnson denounced the ongoing fighting in Russia and quoted from the Chicago Tribune when it claimed that the goal was to help Europe collect Russia’s debt.
The monument website displays a tasteful selection of WWI posters. No “mad brute” depiction of Germans as apes. No Jesus siting down his rifle for God. And the role of WWI in generating the permanent propaganda of patriotic war normalization is thoughtlessly hyped: The “Star Spangled Banner” became a national song to be played at sporting events during World War I, thus reviving, a century after the War of 1812, another pointless war that got the United States nothing but death, disease, and a burned capital.
I need to thank Sam Husseini to alerting me to the fact that the WWI monument people held a press conference, which he attended, at the National Press Club on Wednesday. Here’s audio of what they told him when he raised concerns. Rather than discuss what in the world the point of the war could have been, it seems that the monument makers predictably enough talked about the “brotherhood” of the troops. But when Sam asked whether that brotherhood extended across nationalities, as it did during the Christmas Truce, they responded by talking about the greatness of the United States. Here’s an excerpt:
“And looking at photographs from Vietnam and there’s themes that you see … from WWI of the way people support each other and the way conflict changes everybody. But this is a really interesting opportunity because it is that starting point for the United States. . . .
“Does that sense of brotherhood transcend nationality?”
“Well, yeah, I mean you ask me what’s the factor here . It’s not a glorification of war that we’re dealing with here, it’s ultimately a glorification of humanity and the coming together of all these different races for the United States. So, in the compositions there’s not a single figure that’s alienated, every single figure is interconnected with the rest. These are touching the other figures or they’re looking at each other. There’s no sense of isolationism or aloneness. That’s much more of a modern concept. So going back to the idea that there’s this sense of unity in the universe, this sense of order. And that’s what the relief was about….”
“My question was is this brotherhood constrained by nationality and you seem to be saying that it is.”
“No, I’m not saying that.”
So, apparently in the new version of World War I the military and the nation had already been integrated, and the civil rights movement wouldn’t be needed, and nobody was being lynched? I actually wouldn’t object to a historically accurate monument to racial harmony and diversity. If that’s what these guys think they’re building, I say: build it! Just leave out World War I, OK?
The winning monument design was apparently called “The Weight of Sacrifice.” It’s a temple to human sacrifice. The trick will be to get people in the 21st century to believe that the human sacrifice was for some good purpose — and that it could be again. Never underestimate the power of propaganda.
A Big Lie: Hollywood Producers’ Failure to Fulfill 1942 Pledge Perpetuated Prejudice
By Linn Washington, Jr.
Hollywood honchos told a big lie 74-years ago.
That lie told in 1942 is a link in the sordid chain of perceptions and practices that have produced the present brouhaha surrounding the 2016 Oscar awards featuring an all-white bevy of acting category nominations.
Duplicitous diplomacy: Ambassador Reflects on American Respect for Real Democracy
By Linn Washington, Jr.
Mohamed Yeslem Beisat, an ambassador for the Western Sahara, knew he faced a serious uphill struggle when began his position in Washington, D.C. years ago as the representative for his country that is located on the northwest coast of Africa.
Army of Lobbyists Push LNG Exports, Methane Hydrates, Coal in Senate Energy Bill
Cros-Posted from DeSmogBlog
Trying to make art support the Zionist cause: Israel Moves to Check Its Artists
By John Grant
“A new thought occurred to Rami. It soothed him like a gentle caress. Not all men are born to be heroes. Maybe I wasn’t born to be a hero. But in every man there’s something special, something that isn’t in other men. In my nature, for instance, there’s a certain sensitivity. A capacity to suffer and feel pain. Perhaps I was born to be an artist.”
Banana Republic: U.S. Fracking Pioneer Aubrey McClendon Bringing Practice to Argentina
Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog
Aubrey McClendon, the embattled former CEO and co-founder of Chesapeake Energy, has announced his entrance into Argentina to begin hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") in the country's Vaca Muerta Shale basin.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Rethinking Bernie Sanders: Attacking Wall Street and the Corrupt US Political System Makes Sanders a Genuine Revolutionary
By Dave Lindorff
I admit I’ve been slow to warm up to the idea of supporting Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s because I publicly backed Barack Obama in 2008 and quickly came to rue that decision after he took office.
My 2016 New Years Day: The Good, the Sad and the Ugly
By John Grant
Philadelphia -- A number of things converged to make my New Years special this year. Three of them were good, one was not so good -- in fact, it had the sense of a nasty omen for the future.
Mumia Abu-Jamal Battles for His Life...Again
By Linn Washington, Jr.
The big courthouse news in Pennsylvania this week does not involve yet another sordid revelation in the sleazy racist-pornographic email scandal now soiling top justice system officials in the Keystone State that include a state supreme court justice and ranking prosecutors.
A Quiz to See if U.S. Schools Taught You State Propaganda
U.S. schools provide a great deal of useful information, but also leave out a great deal. Please see whether you can answer the following questions before scrolling down and clicking a link at the bottom for the answers. How many can your kids answer? Can your kids' teachers answer them? Can your parents answer them? Can your uncle who tells you whom to vote for and what to think answer them?
These questions are not intended to comprise an ideal comprehensive course in U.S. or world history. They are intended as a quick sampling of the sort of material that would be included, along with other material, in a basic education that wasn't twisted by the interests of the U.S. government. There might be many questions I would have chosen to include in the place of some of these if I knew more. I was educated in public schools in Fairfax Country, Va., where the schools were ranked among the best in the country. I have a Master's in philosophy from the University of Virginia. I didn't learn the answer to a single one of these questions in any school.
If you can give a generally accurate response to most of these questions, you have almost certainly gone out of your way to learn things not taught in U.S. schools. If you find most of them difficult to answer, I would urge you not to quickly conclude that this is because the topics asked about are of minor importance. Please consider with an open mind whether these questions are not in fact central and vital to the education of a citizen of the United States. And please consider how they relate to what you would expect people in other countries to learn about their own histories.
1. Should German schools teach how many people Germany killed in World War II?
2. How many was it?
3. Should U.S. schools teach how many people the United States killed in wars on Native Americans, in the Philippines, in Vietnam, or in Iraq?
4. How many was it?
5. How many Africans were put on ships to the United States in chains?
6. How many made it there alive?
7. How many people lived enslaved in the United States before slavery was officially ended?
8. How many after that?
9. Who was Olaudah Equiano?
10.What percentage of deaths in wars of the past half-century have been civilian?
11.How many people has the United States killed in wars, large and small, since 1950?
12.How many democratic governments has the U.S. government overthrown?
13.If you persistently asked for money for a trip, finally got some, went on the trip to a foreign country, and then murdered anyone you met there who failed to give you lots of gold, would a good teacher praise your persistence in asking for the money for the trip?
14.Would they praise Christopher Columbus' persistence?
15.Can you name some Virginians who chose to free everyone they had enslaved while Thomas Jefferson was enslaving more people?
16.What is the appropriate justification for Jefferson enslaving people?
17.What percentage of people in the world are in the United States?
18.What percentage of prisoners in the world are in the United States?
19.What percentage of military spending in the world is by the U.S. government?
20.What percentage is by the U.S. government and its close allies?
21.What percentage of foreign military troops stationed in nations around the world are U.S. troops?
22.What percentage of the world's nations have U.S. troops in them?
23.In what nations of the world do people have the longest life expectancy? Name 3 of the top 10.
24.What nations of the world poll highest for happiness? Name 3 of the top 10.
25.What nations of the world have the highest inequality of wealth? Name 3 of the top 10.
26.What nations of the world have the greatest economic opportunity and mobility? Name 3 of the top 10.
27.What nations' students score highest in academic tests? Name 3 of the top 10.
28.How many of the world's 50 wealthiest nations provide free and universal health coverage?
29.Which countries provide the best retirement security? Name 3 of the top 10.
30.How much does it cost to attend college in Brazil, Germany, Finland, France, Norway, Slovenia, and Sweden?
31.In which nations do people average the shortest working hours? Name 3 of the top 10.
32.How many wealthy nations guarantee no paid parental leave?
33.Which nations have the highest labor union representation? Name 3 of the top 10.
34.In which nations of the world does one face the lowest risk of violent crime? Name 3 of the top 10.
35.Approximately how much money does the U.S. government spend every year?
36.Where does that money come from?
37.How much of that money is in dedicated permanent funds separate from the rest of the budget or otherwise mandatory, and how much is subject to the discretion of the Congress?
38.What percentage of discretionary spending is for war preparations?
39.What percentage is for foreign aid, education, or environmental protection?
40.What is the correlation between Congress members' actions and their sources of funding?
41.What is the correlation between greatest campaign funding and electoral victory?
42.What is the success rate in Congressional reelection campaigns by incumbents?
43.Does the U.S. government subsidize fossil fuels?
44.Does the U.S. government subsidize nuclear energy?
45.How many private insurance companies insure nuclear power plants?
46.Is the United States a democracy, republic, communist collective, dictatorship, or oligarchy?
47.Which nations are the world's top weapons exporters?
48.Name at least three recent wars in which weapons from the same nation were used on both sides.
49.Explain, by comparison to Canada, how the United States benefitted from its revolution against England.
50.How did the U.S. revolution benefit Native Americans, farmers, enslaved people, and women?
51.Were there more or fewer popular rebellions in the United States after the revolution?
52.What nation did Congress members predict would welcome invaders as liberators in 1812?
53.Did it?
54.What nation did the United States steal the northern half of in the 1840s through a bloody war despite that nation's willingness to negotiate a nonviolent sale of the land?
55.What was the one condition the United States insisted on in acquiring that land?
56.What President lied to start that war?
57.What Congressman denounced his lies?
58.What hero of that war and future president denounced the war as an immoral outrage?
59.What percentage of nations that abolished slavery fought civil wars before doing so?
60.Why did Mississippi say it was seceding from the United States?
61.How was slavery ended in Washington DC?
62.How many years since 1776 has the United States gone without any wars?
63.What evidence was there that Spain blew up theMaine?
64.What did Spain propose instead of the Spanish-American war?
65.Name three reasons President McKinley gave for occupying the Philippines.
66.Name three good reasons for World War I.
67.What was the general theme of the most common lies of the Four-Minute Men?
68.What was the Lusitania carrying on its fateful voyage, and what advertisement had Germany placed in U.S. newspapers prior to its sailing?
69.What U.S. Secretary of State resigned over President Woodrow Wilson's position regarding the Lusitania?
70.What were the Greer and the Kerney and which U.S. President lied about them?
71.Is the Monroe Doctrine popular in Latin America?
72.What U.S. President encouraged Japanese imperialism, promising them a Monroe Doctrine for Asia?
73.Name one or more observers who predicted at the time of the Treaty of Versailles that it would lead to World War II. Why did they say that?
74.Would a stalemate in World War I, rather than a lopsided victory, have led to the same future?
75.How many right-wing coups were seriously planned against President Franklin Roosevelt?
76.Who was Smedley Butler and what did he conclude about the institution of war?
77.Why was Butler locked up in Quantico?
78.What U.S. whistleblower was later locked up in Quantico and kept naked in a tiny cell?
79.What had she exposed?
80.During the 1930s and early 1940s U.S. peace activists held demonstrations against growing U.S. hostility and war preparations against what nation?
81.Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, what did Winston Churchill tell his cabinet that President Franklin Roosevelt had promised to do in order to bring the United States into the war in Europe?
82.What did FDR use a forged Nazi map to lie to the U.S. public about, and who forged the map?
83.What was the Ludlow Amendment?
84.Prior to Pearl Harbor, in the diary of the U.S. Secretary of War, when did he say FDR expected a Japanese attack?
85.Did the United States begin supporting China in its war against Japanese aggression before or after Pearl Harbor?
86.What was President Roosevelt's approach to Jewish refugees?
87.What percentage of World War II propaganda posters in the United States included mention of the need to rescue Jews?
88.Why did the New York Times downplay the story of the holocaust?
89.Why did Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin say she voted against U.S. entry into World War II?
90.During the rise of Nazism, did Wall Street investment in Germany decrease, stay the same, or increase?
91.How many people died in World War II?
92.What percentage of them died in German concentration camps?
93.Who said "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word"?
94.What future director of the CIA rescued numerous top Nazis from prosecution and employed some of them for the United States?
95.How many former Nazis were employed by the U.S. military in Operation Paperclip?
96.What U.S. space agency's first director was a former Nazi who had employed slave labor?
97.Who remarked in 1937, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place"?
98.Within hours of Germany's surrender in World War II, Winston Churchill proposed a new war using what troops against what nation?
99.When did Japan first express willingness to surrender on the terms that actually ended World War II, before or after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
100. When President Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima what did he lie that Hiroshima was?
101. What nations of the world have nuclear weapons, and how many do they have?
102. What nations have official policies of potentially using nuclear weapons first?
103. What does the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty require nations with nuclear weapons to do?
104. How has Iran violated that treaty?
105. What do the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and a virgin birth have in common?
106. What was Operation Northwoods?
107. Who was Mohammad Mossadegh?
108. What nation proposed to abandon its nuclear energy program in 2003 until the U.S. dismissed the proposal?
109. What nation proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War?
110. What nation tried to spread bubonic plague in North Korea?
111. What U.S. presidential candidate secretly sabotaged peace talks for Vietnam?
112. Did the United States begin arming Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, who would develop into al Qaeda, before or after the Soviet invasion?
113. During the U.S.-led war on Afghanistan that began in 2001, what were the primary sources of funding for the other, or Taliban, side of the war?
114. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, whom did the Taliban offer to turn over to a neutral country to have put on trial?
115. How large has the al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan been during the war that began in 2001?
116. How large was the al Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion?
117. Has international terrorism decreased, stayed the same, or increased during the Global War on Terrorism?
118. The U.S. government originally announced that a mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden had succeeded despite his armed resistance. What did numerous people involved in that mission later change about that story?
119. When Germany reunited and the Cold War ended, what promise did the United States make to Russia regarding NATO expansion?
120. Was the promise kept?
121. What nation's army in 1990 took babies out of incubators and left them on the floor to die?
122. Prior to the Persian Gulf War, what nation offered to peacefully withdraw from Kuwait?
123. Prior to September 11, 2001, what did a CIA memo warn President George W. Bush might happen?
124. What nation was behind anthrax attacks in 2001 in the United States?
125. Who in January 2003 proposed that a means of starting a war on Iraq would be to paint an airplane with United Nations colors and fly it low over Iraq until it was shot at?
126. What portion of the nation of Iraq did the Iraqi government offer to let U.S. troops search prior to the 2003 U.S. attack?
127. In 2003, how quickly did Iraq promise to hold internationally monitored elections if it were not attacked?
128. Who offered to leave Iraq in 2003 if he could keep $1 billion and if Iraq would not be attacked?
129. Whose 2003 testimony at the United Nations in favor of attacking Iraq included fabricated dialogue from supposedly wiretapped conversations and numerous claims that his own staff had warned him would not even seem plausible?
130. What war's aftermath gave birth to a new al Qaeda spin-off called ISIS or ISIL or Islamic State or Daesh?
131. Where did ISIS get most of its weapons?
132. What have been top sources of ISIS funding?
133. What did ISIS ask the U.S. to do in order to boost its recruiting?
134. Did the U.S. do it?
135. Did it boost ISIS recruiting?
136. Did the U.S. drone war on Yemen replace a worse form of war or help create one?
137. Who supplied Saudi Arabia with its weapons for its 2015 war on Yemen?
138. Does the U.S. know the names of most of the people it targets with missiles from drones?
139. Does the U.S. target with drones only people it cannot arrest and put on trial?
140. Name three former top U.S. officials who have warned that drone wars produce more enemies than they kill.
141. Name three current or former top U.S. officials who maintain that every nation must have equal and identical rights in the use of drones.
142. Which nations did former NATO commander Wesley Clark say the Pentagon wanted to overthrow in 2003, and which nations did former Prime Minister of the U.K. Tony Blair say that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney wanted to overthrow at the same time? What has happened to those nations?
143. In which nations of the world do the highest percentages of people say they would go to war for their nation?
144. In which nations of the world are the highest percentages of the people religious?
145. What percentage of human beings who have ever lived, and of human societies that have ever existed, have experienced or participated in war?
146. In which nations of the world are children regularly told to pledge allegiance to a flag?
147. If you read that peace activists many years before your birth helped to end a war or halt the production of a weapon, would a good teacher expect you to write about that activism in the first person, using the word "we"?
148. If you read about the United States invading a Central American nation before your birth, would a good teacher allow you to write about it in the first person, using the word "we"?
149. Which nations of the world have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child? Why haven't they?
150. Which major military nations have not joined the International Criminal Court, or the treaties banning land mines, cluster bombs, racial discrimination, discrimination against women, or weapons in space, or those establishing rights of migrant workers, regulating the arms trade, providing protection from disappearances, defending the rights of people with disabilities, or the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights?
151. Which nation has used the power of its veto at the United Nations most frequently and for what purpose?
152. How many people were killed or driven out of their homes during the 1948 creation of Israel?
153. Who was the last president to propose abolishing the CIA?
154. What president created the CIA and came to regret it?
155. What was the Safari Club?
156. Which article of the U.S. Constitution sanctions secret agencies?
157. How does war preparation and weapons testing benefit human and environmental health?
158. Have more U.S. citizens been killed by working on nuclear weapons, fighting in wars, being victimized by foreign terrorists, or by domestic gun violence, or smoking cigarettes? What are the numbers?
159. How many U.S. wars has the U.S. Institute for Peace opposed since its creation?
160. What do the people of Diego Garcia, Koho'alawe, the Aleutian Islands, Bikini Atoll, Kwajalein Atoll, Culebra, Vieques, Okinawa, Thule, the Aetas, the Cherokee, and most native peoples of the United States have in common?
161. What percentage of U.S. wars are marketed as promoting freedom?
162. During what percentage of U.S. wars are civil liberties in the United States curtailed?
163. How many average Europeans, Asians, Africans, or Latin Americans would it take to damage the natural environment as much as the average person in the United States?
164. What single institution creates the most environmental destruction?
165. How did women in the United States and around the world vote themselves the right to vote?
166. What did it take to win children's rights in the United States?
167. What is the Vietnam Syndrome?
168. What were the most successful tactics of the Civil Rights movement?
169. How many corporations control most major U.S. media outlets?
170. How was Apartheid officially ended in South Africa?
171. What happened on Rosenstrasse?
172. Which have succeeded more often and with longer lasting successes in struggles against tyranny during the past 100 years, violent or nonviolent revolutions?
173. Who were the Wobblies?
174. What was the Prague Spring?
175. Who was A.J. Muste?
176. What percentage of prisoners ever kept in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo had been convicted of terrorism?
177. What three interlocking evils did Martin Luther King Jr. say needed to be ended?
178. When did the people of Hawaii vote to join the United States?
179. Why did the United States bomb West Virginia?
180. Why did the United States drop nuclear bombs on North Carolina?
181. Why did the British end the occupation of India?
182. Who was Abdul Ghaffar Khan?
183. When was the damage from Agent Orange finally cleaned up in Vietnam?
184. How did Norwegian teachers have to teach under Nazi occupation?
185. Which nations resisted Nazi orders to kill Jews most successfully?
186. Why did duelling end?
187. Why did Marcos' rule of the Philippines end?
188. Who kidnapped the President of Haiti in 2004?
189. Who was Claudette Colvin?
190. What was the income tax created to pay for?
191. How did the United States prevent the Three Mile Island accident from killing anyone?
192. Did more U.S. troops die in Vietnam or from suicide after returning home?
193. What is the leading cause of death for U.S. troops sent to U.S. wars in recent years?
194. Why did Congresswoman Barbara Lee say she was voting against the Global War on Terrorism in 2001?
195. Who did the U.S. attack with chemical weapons in 1932?
196. How did a ban on war get into the Japanese Constitution and who has been trying to remove it ever since?
197. Who assassinated the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in 1994?
198. Who killed Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, and John Wayne?
199. How do U.S. gun laws reduce gun violence better than Australia's?
200. Who overthrew the government of Honduras in 2009?
201. How many people were killed in the recent Russian military invasion of Ukraine?
202. Why do the people of Okinawa so strongly support the presence of U.S. military bases on their island?
203. What was the anti-imperialist league?
204. What was the outlawry movement?
205. What law was General Custer enforcing when he died?
206. Who urged all scientists to refuse any military work in 1931?
207. Who was Garry Davis?
208. Who was Jane Addams?
209. What was the New England Non-Resistance Society?
210. What ended friendly relations between Eisenhower and Khrushchev?
211. When did Armistice Day become Veterans Day and why?
212. What was the Iran-Contra scandal?
213. What is the Kellogg-Briand Pact?
214. Which recent wars have complied with the Kellogg-Briand Pact?
215. Which recent wars have complied with the United Nations Charter?
216. Which recent wars have complied with the separation of powers stipulated in the U.S. Constitution?
217. If the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the state of Florida to count all its votes in 2000, who would have become president of the United States in 2001?
218. What thwarted efforts by the African Union to negotiate peace in Libya in 2011?
219. Who proposed a peace process for Syria in 2012 that would have included a change of government?
220. Who dismissed it out of hand?
221. What did the U.S. military / White House plan for Syria in 2013 before being blocked by public, international, and Congressional pressure?
222. When the CIA produced a report in 2013 on past successes of arming local proxy armies, what was missing from the report?
223. Which nations still use the death penalty?
224. In how many nations in history have the majority of rape victims been male?
225. How many unarmed people do U.S. police kill each year?
226. Which stages of the criminal justice process in the United States are racially biased?
227. How much wealth do the average white, black, and Latino households have in the U.S.?
228. What percentage of U.S. military spending could end starvation on earth?
229. What percentage could provide the world with clean drinking water?
230. What percentage could double U.S. investment in clean energy?
231. Is clean coal clean?
232. Is natural gas natural?
233. Is safe nuclear power safe?
234. Which nations are getting the highest percentage of their energy from sustainable sources?
235. Which nation did people in the most countries around the world view as the greatest threat to peace on earth in a 2013 Gallup poll?
236. Is terrorism among the top 100 causes of death in the United States?
237. What are 10 of them?
238. Does domestic terrorism in the United States kill more or fewer people than foreign terrorism?
239. What percentage of foreign terrorists in the United States provide a clear explanation of their motives?
240. What do they say?
Click here for the answers only after trying to answer the questions to the best of your ability.
What will it take to close it?: Indian Point Nuke Plant Emergency Shutdown Follows Power Loss
By Paul DeRienzo
The latest in a series of troubling mishaps at the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant a week ago Saturday prompted a shutdown or “trip” of one of the two operating reactor units on the site and the dispatch of inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Pearl Harbor Day and the Fantasy of US Victimhood
By David Swanson, for teleSUR
http://www.telesurtv.net/
David Swanson unmasks the propaganda logic behind Amazon.com's "Man in the High Castle" and U.S. celebrations of failure
The United States is indisputably the world's most frequent and extensive wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from under the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an innocent victim. It has no holiday to keep any victorious battle in everyone's mind. It has a holiday to remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- and now also one, perhaps holier still, to recall, not the "shock and awe" destruction of Baghdad, but the crimes of September 11, 2001, the "new Pearl Harbor."
Similar to Israel, but with a variation, the United States is deeply obsessed with World War II, overlaid of course on a Southern obsession with the U.S. Civil War. The Southern U.S. love for the Civil War is love for a war lost, but also for victimhood and the righteousness of the vengeance wreaked on the world year after year by the U.S. military.
The U.S. love for World War II is also, fundamentally, love for a war lost. That may seem odd to say, because it is simultaneously very much love for a war won. World War II remains the U.S. model for potentially some day winning a war again, as it's been losing them all over the world for the 70 years since World War II. But the U.S. view of WWII is also strangely similar to the Russian view. Russia was brutally attacked by the Nazis, but persevered and won the war. The United States believes itself to have been "imminently" attacked by the Nazis. That, after all, was the propaganda that took the United States to war. There was not one word about rescuing Jews or anything half that noble. Rather, President Franklin Roosevelt claimed to have a map of the Nazis' plans for carving up the Americas, a map that was an amateurish forgery provided by British "intelligence."
Hollywood has made very few movies and television shows about all other wars combined, in comparison with dramas about World War II, which may in fact be its most popular topic ever. We're really not drowning in movies glorifying the theft or northern Mexico or the occupation of the Philippines. The Korean War gets little play. Even the Vietnam War and all the more recent wars fail to inspire U.S. storytellers like World War II, and some 90% of those stories relate to the war in Europe, not Asia.
The European story is much preferred because of the particular evils of the German enemy. That the U.S. prevented a peace without victor in World War I by crushing Germany, and then punished it viciously, and then aided the Nazis -- all of that is far more easily forgotten than the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Japan. But it is the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, together with the fantasized Nazi invasion, that persuades the U.S. public that waging war in Europe was defensive. So the history of the United States training Japan in imperialism and then antagonizing and provoking Japan must be forgotten as well.
Amazon.com, a corporation with a huge CIA contract, and whose owner also owns the Washington Post, has launched a television series called the Man in the High Castle. The story is set in the 1960s with the Nazis occupying three-quarters of the United States and the Japanese the rest. In this alternative universe, the ultimate redemption is found in Germany being the nation to have dropped nuclear bombs. The Axis victors, and their aging leaders, have created and maintained an old-fashioned empire -- not like U.S. bases in proxy states, but a full-blown occupation, like the United States in Iraq. It doesn't really matter how implausible this sounds. It is the most plausible scenario that can embody the U.S. fantasy of someone else doing to it what it does to others. Thus U.S. crimes here in the real 2015 become "defensive," as it is doing unto others before they can do unto it.
Nonviolent resistance does not exist in Season One Episode One of this soothing victim adventure, and apparently hasn't for years at that point in the tale. But how could it? A force stoppable through nonviolence -- even an imaginary one -- cannot serve to justify the violence of the actual U.S. military. The German and Japanese occupiers have to be confrontable only through violence, even anachronistically in an age in which nonviolent techniques were known, in which the civil rights movement was resisting U.S. fascism to great effect.
"Before the war ... every man was free," says one of the attractive young white people who constitute all the heroes and some of the villains in this drama. Instead of race riots, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the sterilizing and experimenting on the powerless that actually happened, this alternative United States includes the burning of Jews, the disabled, and the terminally ill. The contrast to the imagined pre-Nazi past in which "every man [but not woman?] was free" is stark.
Amazon also shows us Nazis behaving much like the actual United States behaves: torturing and murdering enemies. Rikers Island is a brutal prison in this TV show and in reality. In this fantasy, the symbols of U.S. and Nazi patriotism have been merged seamlessly. In reality, the U.S. military incorporated much Nazi thinking along with the many Nazis it recruited through Operation Paperclip -- another way in which the U.S. actually lost WWII if we imagine victory as democracy defeating the sort of society in which someone like Donald Trump could thrive.
The United States today manages to view refugees from the wars it wages in distant lands as dangerous enemies, as new Nazis, just as leading U.S. politicians refer to foreign leaders as new Hitlers. With U.S. citizens shooting up public places on an almost daily basis, when one such killing is alleged to have been done by a Muslim, especially a Muslim with any sympathy for foreign fighters, well, then that's not just a shooting. That means that the United States has been invaded. And that means that anything it does is "defensive."
Does Venezuela elect leaders the U.S. disapproves of? That's a threat to "national security" -- a somewhat magical threat to invade and occupy the United States and compel it to torture and kill wearing a different flag. This paranoia doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from programs like The Man from the High Castle, which -- the world should be warned -- is only at Season 1, Episode 1 so far.
A half century of US hospital bombings: Gen. John Campbell, Commander in Afghanistan and Serial Liar
By Dave Lindorff
“US forces would never intentionally strike a hospital.”
-- US Commander of NATO Forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Campbell
An invisible US hand leading to war?: Turkey’s Downing of a Russian Jet at the Turkish/Syrian Border was an Act of Madness
By Dave Lindorff
In considering the terrifying but also sadly predictable news of a Russian fighter jet being downed by two Turkish fighters, let’s start with one almost certain assumption -- an assumption that no doubt is also being made by the Russian government: Turkey’s action, using US-supplied F-16 planes, was taken with the full knowledge and advance support of the US. In fact, given Turkey’s vassal status as a member of US-dominated NATO, it could well be that Ankara was put up to this act of brinksmanship by the US.
Where’s the truth, and how can you find it?: The US Corporate Media are Essentially Propaganda Organs of the US Government
Are the American corporate media largely propaganda organs, or news organizations?
Warmongers & Peacemongers: Learning How Not to Rule the World
By John Grant
[Al Qaeda’s] strategic objective has always been ... the overthrow of the House of Saud. In pursuing that regional goal, however, it has been drawn into a worldwide conflict with American power.
Obama Administration Approves Pipeline Expansion Set to Feed First Ever Fracked Gas Export Terminal
Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog
The Obama Administration has quietly approved expansion of a major pipeline carrying fracked gas destined for the global export market.
