1 – Introduction
2 – Symbolism: Whoremonger and Warmonger
3 – Startling Vision Confronts the Apostle (17:1-6)
4A – Angel Explains the Mystery (17:7-11)
4B – Angel Explains the Mystery (17:12-18)
Appendix 1 – Ancient Babylon, Forerunner to Modern Babylon
Appendix 2 – Harlot/Beast History
Appendix 3 – Shattering Delusions: News Excerpts
Appendix 3: Shattering Delusions – News excerpts
A big question that may come to mind: “Sure, we know America’s been guilty of some injustices and needless wars. But is it really all that bad? Has America really turned into that awful Harlot of Revelation 17-18? Is she really the one who is in line to receive such dreadful punishment?”
The problem here stems from a lack of being informed as to what is really going on. That is to say, the media-information climate in America has led its populace into delusion, a virtual fantasy world. (This problem was vividly portrayed, by the way, in a recent popular movie Don’t Look Up.)
Following are some thoughtful comments on this state of affairs, explaining how this cultural “blind spot” has affected American policy-making and general public opinion.
American Dystopia – The Propaganda Mask and the Utopia Syndrome by Larry Romanoff, 24 January 2021
…Americans are guilty of what I call “the Utopia Syndrome”, comparing themselves not with the real world of their actions but with some utopian standard that exists only in their own imaginations, a world of fancy and illusion where they meet the standards but all others do not…
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… it is the ideal rather than the act against which America judges itself, the fictitious utopian ideal providing the real measure of American moral supremacy… It is from precisely this propaganda that Americans today can commit multiple horrendous atrocities, violate every measure of human rights, yet claim the high moral ground and see no inconsistency or conflict. The propagandised utopian ideal of creating peace and stability in the world will supersede America’s actions of creating only war and instability. The propagandised ideal of fostering and protecting democracy will overwhelm and mask the reality that the US has never anywhere installed a democracy, has never supported democracy, and has instead almost exclusively installed and supported brutal Right-Wing dictatorships…
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So we have Americans preaching democracy while their government installs brutal dictatorships everywhere, and they see no disconnect. We have Americans preaching human rights while kidnapping people in other countries and “rendering” them to be mostly tortured to death, and see no disconnect. We have Americans fervently preaching and defending free-market capitalism while that same animal relieved about 30% of them of their homes and jobs, yet they see no disconnect.
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The following news excerpts from experienced journalists offer some well informed assessment of the present world situation. They explore different facets of American history about which many of us are only dimly aware and should provide the reader with a better grasp of what has transpired in the past… and where America’s future trajectory is headed.
1 – Parasite on Global Economy
2 – America Takes Advantage of Russia
3 – America Squanders the Opportunity and Offers Betrayal
4 – America’s War Industry
5 – Connection between the U.S. economy and its wars
6 – Where are the Truth-Tellers?
7 – Catalogue of America’s Crimes
8 – U.S. Refusal to Knuckle Under, Slide towards Catastrophe
1 – Parasite on Gobal Economy
The Quiet Imperialism by Francis Lee, 5 September 2020 for the Saker Blog
‘‘The US economy lives as a parasite off its partners in the global system, with virtually no national savings of its own. The world produces while North America consumes… The fact is that the bulk of the American deficit (on Federal and Current Account) is covered by capital inputs from Europe and Japan, China and the South, rich oil-producing and comprador classes from all regions in the Third World – to which should be added the debt service levy that is imposed on nearly every country in the periphery of the global system. The American superpower depends day to day on the flow of capital that sustains the parasitism of its economy and society.’’ (Beyond US Hegemony – Samir Amin – 2006)
This was written by Amin back in 2006, but the US’s drive has not really altered that much in the interim. If anything it has become even more bellicose in pursuit of its quest for world hegemony…
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…The ability to palm off its trading partners with green paper meant that the US has been able to buy stuff from the western world without actually paying for any of it. It gets better. The US has been able to buy foreign made goods with monies loaned to them by foreign governments! The ultimate free lunch! …
Against this backdrop the foreign policy of the US becomes clear. Its purpose is loot pure and simple. The south must continue to be plundered for cheap inputs and raw materials and in order to do this comprador elites must be promoted who are friendly to US interests. Economic development of course cannot take place in this context… Markets must be opened up to the rapacious incursions of US and other western capitals. Possible rivals – Russia, China – must be regarded as long-term enemies and will be divided and marginalised…
Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire: Interview with Michael Hudson, 21 October 2021, The Grayzone
…the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created as a means of imposing a neoliberal, anti-government structure on the world to prevent other countries from regulating their industry or from regulating their agriculture.
The function of the World Bank basically was to make Third World countries, the Global South, dependent on the United States for their food supply, by only funding export agriculture, export plantation crops, not growing their own food.
The function of the IMF was to use debt leverage to force other countries to impose austerity on their populations, and to essentially say we will control what government you have, because if your government does something that the United States officials don’t like, we’re just going to raid your currency, force of austerity on you, and you’ll be voted out of power.
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…Super Imperialism is about how America is different from European colonialism by controlling the world financially and covertly, politically, not by military force.
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So basically, America wants the ability to say we have one power, we can wreck your economy. If you don’t do it, we say, we can make you look like Libya… Iraq… Afghanistan.
… We don’t have productivity…. competitive power. But we can destroy you, and we’re willing to destroy you, because otherwise we’re going under.
And we’re not going to feel safe unless we have the power to destroy you and prevent you from having the power to fight back and protect yourself.
So it can only do this if it can control the financial system that recycles all of this military spending abroad in the United States…
So America essentially has painted itself into a corner as a result of its military spending. It has lost its industrial advantage. It has lost its international competitiveness. And the only thing that it has left to do is the power to destroy, if other countries don’t essentially surrender their economies to control by the US, pretending to be objective and non-nationalistic by saying, we’re not controlling you, the World Bank… IMF… international organizations are controlling you.
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That’s the kind of food strangulation that the United States has sought through every country. And it has used the World Bank and the IMF and the international banking system to impose sanctions, and to only make loans for industries and agriculture and sectors that do not compete with the United States, but actually end up serving the U.S. economy as inputs.
So other countries are turned into economic and trade satellites of the United States. That’s the aim of the U.S. control of the World Bank, the IMF.
And that’s why the United States will not join any organization in which it does not have veto power. It insists on being able to veto any policy of other countries acting in their own interests independently of the United States, or in ways that do not actually enable the United States to be the main beneficiaries of foreign countries’ growth.
The algebra of infinite justice by Arundhati Roy, 29 September 2001, The Guardian
Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America’s new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.
Is the US a Global Leader Anymore? August 13, 2020 by Zamir Awan for the Saker Blog
…during the last couple of decades, the US policies witnessed a deviation from Global responsibilities.
The US was leaving International organizations and treaties, one after another, ignoring its global obligations and escaping from global responsibilities gradually.
The article goes on to list the various organizations from which the U.S. has withdrawn:
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
United Nations International Court of Justice
United Nations Industrial Development Organization
Kyoto Protocol
United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
Trans-Pacific Partnership
Paris Agreement
United Nations Global impact on Migration
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
UN Human Rights Council
Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Concerning the Compulsory Settlement of Disputes
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
Open Skies Treaty
World Health Organization
2 – America Takes Advantage of Russia
The American Empire: A Finale by Justin Raimondo, 23 March 2009, Antiwar.com
…the entire ring of former Soviet states bordering the battlefield will take on new strategic significance as the central arena in America’s endless war on terrorism shifts eastward.
This means an all-out confrontation with Russia, and the groundwork has already been laid for that…
With NATO troops stationed practically at the gates of Moscow, and NATO’s massed armies protected by a missile shield, Putin is staring down a gun barrel… Yet Putin is unlikely to cooperate in isolating Iran, abandoning Syria, and allowing Georgia to invade its neighbors and kill UN-sanctioned Russian peacekeepers at will. The price of dropping that gun to his head is that he must forget about forging an independent foreign policy in a multi-polar world, because that is what represents a real threat to the imperial restoration project undertaken by the present American administration.
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There can be no doubt that the U.S. has been engaged in a long-term project to encircle the former Soviet Union and make inroads where opportunity presents itself–or can be created. That’s what the so-called color revolutions were all about. Funded and supported politically by U.S. government agencies, and given plenty of cover in the international media, these supposedly “spontaneous” rebellions that installed pro-U.S. governments from in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, were and are a direct threat aimed at Moscow, with the ultimate color revolution meant to take place in Russia itself…
Western Hypocrisy and the Russian Election by Justin Raimondo, 6 March 2012, Antiwar.com
The last thing Western NGOs—and their governmental paymasters—want is a strong, united, and relatively free Russia. They much prefer the corruption and chaos of the Yeltsin years, when a perpetually intoxicated “leader” and his… cronies helped the West and the former communist elite seize the country’s “privatized” assets, and let the nation crumble around them. Putin saved Russia from dissolution, and those who were hoping to pick up the pieces were not at all pleased. This is the reason for years of relentless anti-Russian cold war era propaganda, the charges of “authoritarianism” leveled against a nation emerging from a 70-year-long nightmare, and the revived hype about a Russian “threat.”
What if Putin is Telling the Truth? by F. William Engdahl, 17 May 2015, New Eastern Outlook
Putin stated bluntly that in his view the West would only be content in having a Russia weak, suffering and begging from the West, something clearly the Russian character is not disposed to. Then a short way into his remarks, the Russian President stated for the first time publicly something that Russian intelligence has known for almost two decades but kept silent until now, most probably in hopes of an era of better normalized Russia-US relations.
Putin stated that the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the early 1990’s was actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence services to deliberately weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had documentation of the US covert role without giving details.
What Putin, an intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted at in his remarks, I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The report has enormous implications to reveal to the world the long-standing hidden agenda of influential circles in Washington to destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign state, an agenda which includes the coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe financial sanctions against Moscow.
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With the former Soviet Union in total chaos and disarray, George H.W. Bush’s Administration decided to “kick ‘em when they’re down,” a sad error. Washington redeployed their Afghan veteran terrorists to bring chaos and destabilize all of Central Asia, even into the Russian Federation itself, then in a deep and traumatic crisis during the economic collapse of the Yeltsin era.
Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy, 29 September 2001, The Guardian
The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America…
Enemy of the Year: Why Russia? by Justin Raimondo, 1 March 2017, Antiwar.com
When Putin came to power one of the first things he did was go after the infamous oligarchs who had backed–and manipulated–his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Under the drunken Yeltsin, these “entrepreneurs” had used the State apparatus to “privatize” (i.e. loot) what had previously been the State-owned economy, gobbling up entire sectors at unbelievably cheap prices. Putin moved to disassemble what was a competing power center, and the result was the flight of the oligarchs to the West. Having put their ill-gotten gains in Western banks and holding companies, they shacked up in London, New York, Switzerland, and the French Riviera, where they plotted Putin’s overthrow and their triumphant return.
… Newspapers, think tanks, and various other vehicles for the molding of public opinion are financed by this Russian Diaspora… They act as a lobby on behalf of the arms industry, and the political forces that stand to gain from the anti-Russian campaign…
We’ve met the ‘enemy within’ – and he’s us by Francis Lee for The Saker Blog, 17 September 2020
But the cherry on the neoliberal/globalist cake was the fall of the Soviet system and seemingly the triumph of the west. US meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state – Russia – were manifest. Particularly during the Yeltsin period ‘reforms’ were overseen in Russia by a group of senior state officials headed by Yegor Gaidar, advised supported and encouraged by senior figures from the US administration, as well as by senior American ‘experts’. Moreover, according to the American scholar Janine Wedel the Russian reforms were worked out in exhaustive detail by a handful of specialists from Harvard University, with close ties with the American government and were implemented in Russia through the politically dominant ‘ Analtoliy Chubais clan’. Mr Chubais is having recorded as having officially engaged foreign consultants, including officers from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fulfil leading posts in the State Property Committee.
(Neo)Liberalism and its Discontents by Francis Lee for the Saker Blog, 17 September 2021
These events [collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 and the fall of the Berlin wall in the same year] led to a complete destabilization of the Soviet/American geopolitical deadlock. The US unipolar moment had arrived complete with the neo-liberal baggage with which we are now familiar.
… The US’s hegemonic ambitions were unleashed on a global scale: first target, Russia, which was on its knees, and would be kept on its knees with the US puppet – Yeltsin – at the helm. Second target, the global south and its aspirations and struggle for freedom. This was to be stopped, by all-means possible, including assassinations (Allende, Lamumba, Arbenz, Qaddafi, Hussein) and removals (Sukarno, Nyrere, Manley, Milosevic) to name a few…
Ten Ways to Create a People’s Military by William Astore, 29 July 2021, TomDispatch
During the Cold War, I took it for granted that this country needed a sprawling network of military bases… to “contain” the communist pathogen…
And then the Soviet Union collapsed — and nothing changed in the U.S. military’s global posture.
Or, put differently, everything changed. For with the implosion of the USSR, what turned out to remain truly uncontained was our military, along with the dreams of neoconservatives who sought to remake the world in America’s image. But which image? That of a republic empowering its citizens in a participatory democracy or of an expansionist capitalist empire, driven by the ambition and greed of a set of oligarchs?
A few people spoke then of a “peace dividend.” They were, however, quickly drowned out by the military-industrial complex… [which] eagerly moved into the void created by the Soviet collapse and that of the Warsaw Pact. It quickly came to dominate the world’s trade in arms, for instance, even as Washington sought to expand NATO, an alliance created to contain a Soviet threat that no longer existed. Such an expansion made no sense, defensively speaking, but it did serve to facilitate further arms sales and bring U.S. imperial hegemony to the very borders of Russia.
… After 1991, however, the main foreign enemy had disappeared and… our new enemy would prove to be domestic, not foreign. It consisted of those who embraced as a positive good what I’ve come to think of as greed-war, while making no apologies for American leadership, no matter how violent, destructive, or self-centered it might prove to be.
In short, the arsenal of democracy of World War II fame had, by the 1960s, become the very complex of imperialism, militarism, and industrialism that Eisenhower warned Americans about first in his 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech and then in his more famous farewell address of 1961… The complex would then only serve to facilitate the war crimes of Vietnam and of subsequent disasters like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, among so many others.
… War is what empires do and it’s what America has become: a machine for war.
3 – America Squanders the Opportunity and Offers Betrayal Instead
“Sorry Chump. You Didn’t Have It In Writing” by Eric Margolis, 16 December 2017
… a trove of recently declassified Cold War documents reveals the astounding extent of the lies, duplicity and double-dealing engaged in by the western powers with the collapsing Soviet Union in 1990.
…the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, were shamelessly lied to and deceived by the United States, Britain, and their appendage, NATO.
All the western powers promised Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that NATO would not expand eastward by ‘one inch’ if Moscow would pull the Red Army out of East Germany and allow it to peacefully reunify with West Germany. This was a titanic concession by Gorbachev: it led to a failed coup against him in 1991 by Communist hardliners.
The documents released by George Washington University in Washington DC, make sickening reading. All western powers and statesmen assured the Russians that NATO would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat and that a new era of amity and cooperation would dawn in post-Cold War Europe. US Secretary of State Jim Baker offered ‘ironclad guarantees’ there would be no NATO expansion. Lies, all lies.
Gorbachev was a humanist, a very decent, intelligent man who believed he could end the Cold War and nuclear arms race. He ordered the Red Army back from Eastern Europe…
Western promises made to Soviet leaders by President George W. H. Bush and Jim Baker quickly proved to be empty. They were honorable men but their successors were not. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush quickly began moving NATO into Eastern Europe, violating all the pledges made to Moscow.
The Poles, Hungarians and Czechs were brought into NATO, then Romania and Bulgaria, the Baltic States, Albania, and Montenegro. Washington tried to get the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The Moscow-aligned government of Ukraine was overthrown in a US-engineered coup. The road to Moscow was open.
All the bankrupt, confused Russians could do was denounce these eastward moves by the US and NATO. The best response NATO and Washington could come up with was, ‘well, there was no official written promise.’ This is worthy of a street peddler selling counterfeit watches…
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Today, US military aircraft based on the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria, former Warsaw Pact members, probe Russian airspace over the Black Sea and the vital strategic port of Sevastopol. Washington talks about arming chaotic Ukraine. US and NATO troops are in the Baltic, on Russia’s northwestern borders. Polish right-wingers are beating the war drums against Russia.
… He [Gorbachev] thought he was dealing with honest, honorable men, like himself.
Is it any wonder after this bait and switch diplomacy that Russia has no trust in the Western powers?
Today, Russia’s leaders firmly believe Washington’s ultimate plan is to tear apart Russia and reduce it to an impotent, pauper nation. Two former Western leaders, Napoleon and Hitler, had similar plans.
Hagel Didn’t Start the Fire by Patrick J. Buchanan, 24 November 2014, Creators Syndicate
The great triumphs of Reagan and Bush 41 [41st President] were converting Russia into a partner, and presiding over the liberation of Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the old Soviet Union into 15 independent nations.
Unfulfilled by such a victory for peace and freedom, unwilling to go home when our war, the Cold War, was over, Bush 43 [43rd President] decided to bring the entire Warsaw Pact, three Baltic states, and Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. For this project, Bush had the enthusiastic support of McCain, the neocons and the liberal interventionists.
Since 1991, we sought to cut the Russians out of the oil and gas of the Caspian basin with a pipeline through the Caucasus to Turkey, bombed Serbia to tear off its cradle province of Kosovo, and engineered color-coded revolutions in Belgrade, Tbilisi and other capitals to pull these new nations out of Russia’s sphere of influence.
4 – America’s War Industry
The American predilection for violence raised its ugly head in World War 2. Even though the war against Nazi oppression had its justification, nevertheless, a hidden agenda was at work among those who were doing their best to profit from the War:
(From Descent into Slavery by Des Griffin, 1980, pg. 180)
Who was responsible for the barbaric Dresden Massacre which took place when Germany was clearly beaten and when no strategic purpose could be served by such wanton destruction and loss of life? “I can only say,” states Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the top man in the British Air Force, “that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself” (Bomber Offensive, 1947, P, 242).
Those “much more important people” were obviously the men who were running the European “theater of war” for their own profit and for their own ends. They were clearly looking beyond the end of the war, to the vast fortunes that could be picked up in “redevelopment projects” in such cities as Dresden. The fact that millions of “peasants” were incinerated in such “urban renewal” projects was of no import to them.
The destruction of human life is of little importance to those who would rule the world!
Similar bombing campaigns were carried out in Japan. Aside from the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Americans fire-bombed 100 Japanese cities, including Tokyo (outlined further ahead in the article “Propaganda and the Media”). Yes, these are awful things to have come to grips with. But it is needed if we are to understand why judgment on America is coming, and why it is going to be drastic (as these Revelation chapters 17-18 are foretelling).
The Revelation 18 passage states explicitly that ultra-rich power-brokers would, through deception, carry out their nefarious activities (under the cover of seemingly just causes): “Your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived. And in her [the Harlot] was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who were slain on the earth.”
After the War, President Eisenhower, a former general, delivered a famous speech, in which he warned the nation of the “military-industrial complex” that he foresaw was taking over the reins of power in America. And as the following articles will show, what started in World War 2 (or even before) has not come to a halt but has continued into our present day.
The Riptide of American Militarism – Lessons from the Natural World on Washington’s Unnatural Wars by William J. Astore, 9 July 2019, Tomdispatch
…over the last 50 years, the most fundamental things have remained remarkably consistent: militarism, violence, the endless feeding of the military-industrial complex, the growth of the national security state, and wars, ever more wars, always purportedly waged in the name of peace.
Ten Ways to Create a People’s Military by William Astore, 29 July 2021, Tomdispatch
I know what it wouldn’t look like. It wouldn’t look like today’s grossly inflated military. A true Department of Defense wouldn’t need 800 foreign military bases, nor would the national security state need a budget that routinely exceeds a trillion dollars annually. We wouldn’t need a huge, mechanized army, a navy built around aircraft carriers, or an air force that boasts of its global reach and global power, all of it created not for defense but for offense — for destruction, anytime, anywhere.
Why is the United States always fighting a war somewhere? by Ed Finn, 1 June 2018, The Independent
…The only way to find the answer to this question is to pose the ancient Roman question: Qui bono? Who benefits from perpetual warfare?
The answer — although never acknowledged by U.S. political leaders, and seldom by even the U.S. media – is the country’s military industrial complex. The big arms manufacturers profit enormously from wars and other armed conflicts. In fact, without continuous and prolonged warfare that requires the deployment of their guns, bombs, tanks, warships and submarines, they would go out of business.
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These corporations depend on the United States being continually at war against some country somewhere – and now against terrorists everywhere. The weapons of war they produce are made to be used, not stockpiled. If world peace were ever actually to be achieved, they would be bankrupted, unless they could switch to manufacturing things that aren’t designed to kill people.
So it’s not surprising that these corporations keep beating the war drums, keep donating millions of dollars to the election campaigns of warmongering politicians – or even politicians who fear the economic collapse that could result from the closure of the country’s war plants and the consequent loss of a million or more jobs.
Defense Contractors are Tightening their Grip on Our Government by William D. Hartung, 16 July 2019, The Nation
When pressed, Raytheon officials argue that, in enabling mass slaughter, they are simply following US government policy. This ignores the fact that Raytheon and other weapons contractors spend tens of millions of dollars a year on lobbyists, political contributions, and other forms of influence peddling trying to shape US policies on arms exports and weapons procurement. They are, in other words, anything but passive recipients of edicts handed down from Washington.
The U.S. of A(rms), The Art of the Weapons Deal in the Age of Trump by William D. Hartung, 13 October 2020
None of the key players in today’s most devastating wars in the Middle East produce their own weaponry, which means that imports from the U.S. and other suppliers are the true fuel sustaining those conflicts. Advocates of arms transfers to the MENA region often describe them as a force for “stability,” a way to cement alliances, counter Iran, or more generally a tool for creating a balance of power that makes armed engagement less likely.
In a number of key conflicts in the region, this is nothing more than a convenient fantasy for arms suppliers (and the U.S. government), as the flow of ever more advanced weaponry has only exacerbated conflicts, aggravated human rights abuses, and caused countless civilian deaths and injuries, while provoking widespread destruction. And keep in mind that, while not solely responsible, Washington is the chief culprit when it comes to the weaponry that’s fueling a number of the area’s most violent wars.
America’s Merchants of Death: Then and Now by Sam Pizzigati, 24 August 2021, Counterpunch
…Many of America’s moguls, they [peace-keepers] soon realized, were getting ever richer off prepping for war. These “merchants of death” — the era’s strikingly vivid label for war profiteers — had a vested interest in perpetuating the sorts of arms races that make wars more likely…
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On Capitol Hill, the Democratic Senate majority set up a special committee to investigate the munitions industry and named a progressive Republican, North Dakota’s Gerald Nye, to chair it. “War and preparation for war,” Nye noted at the panel’s founding in 1934, had precious little to do with either “national honor” or “national defense.” War had become “a matter of profit for the few.”
The tag “merchants of death” has long since disappeared from our American political lexicon. But the problem Nye named remains. Our contemporary corporate moguls are continuing to get rich off the preparations that make wars more likely and massively multiply death counts when the actual shooting starts. America’s longest war — the war in Afghanistan — offers but the latest example.
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Munitions companies, that committee found, have exploited “opportunities to intensify the fears of people for their neighbors and have used them to their own profit.” They have ignited and exacerbated arms races by constantly striving to “scare nations into a continued frantic expenditure for the latest improvements in devices of warfare.”
“Wars,” the Senate panel summed up, “rarely have one single cause,” but it runs “against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity.”
Do these conclusions still hold water for us today, a new special committee could ask, and, if they do, what can we do to remedy the situation?
Some members of the original Senate panel apparently wanted to nationalize what we now call the “defense industry.” That didn’t happen, and today’s complex of military contractors dwarfs the size of the merchants-of-death network that Americans faced back in the 1930s.
Our Pentagon and military, Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project points out, currently “take up more than half of the discretionary federal budget each year,” and over half that spending goes to military contractors. Most of these contractors, adds Heidi Peltier, the director of the “20 Years of War” initiative at Boston University’s Pardee Center, essentially operate as monopolies. The excessive profits that status helps them grab are widening America’s core inequality…
Too Frail to Even Cry: The War in Yemen and Its Bounty of Suffering by George Capaccio, 3 Sept 2019, Antiwar.com]
US support for the Saudi-led intervention in the war [with Yemen] has only exacerbated the suffering of the Yemeni people while serving the interests of military contractors. Under the rubric of helping Saudi Arabia in its fight against Iran’s alleged influence, the Trump administration is putting profits from the sale of armaments ahead of reducing the threat of imminent starvation, the spread of disease and poverty, and the growing number of civilian deaths.
Is the US Monopolizing War? – Military operations and arms sales are what America knows best by Tom Engelhardt, 13 September 2012
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… from Washington’s perspective, the world is primarily a landscape for arming for, garrisoning for, training for, planning for and making war. War is what we invest our time, energy, and treasure in on a scale that is, in its own way, remarkable, even if it seldom registers in this country.
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Think of it this way: the United States is alone on the planet, not just in its ability, but in its willingness to use military force in drug wars, religious wars, political wars, conflicts of almost any sort, constantly and on a global scale. No other group of powers collectively even comes close. It also stands alone as a purveyor of major weapons systems and so as a generator of war. It is, in a sense, a massive machine for the promotion of war on a global scale.
We have, in other words, what increasingly looks like a monopoly on war. There have, of course, been warrior societies in the past that committed themselves to a mobilized life of war-making above all else. What’s unique about the United States is that it isn’t a warrior society. Quite the opposite.
… The American people, however, are demobilized and detached from the wars, interventions, operations and other military activities done in their name.
The Military Industrial Complex Strikes Again: War Spending Will Bankrupt America by John W. Whitehead, 13 February 2018)
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
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It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government–i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers [“your merchants“]–and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.
America’s Disastrous 60-Year War – Three Generations of Conspicuous Destruction by the Military-Industrial Complex by William Astore,15 February 2022, TomDispatch]
… the American dream was being betrayed… by corporate elites increasingly consumed by an ever more destructive form of greed… America has come to be defined by a greed-war for which no armistice, let alone an end, is promised. In twenty-first-century America, war and the endless preparations for it simply go on and on. Consider it beyond irony that, as this country’s corporate, political, and military champions claim they wage war to spread democracy, it withers at home.
5 – Connection between the U.S. economy and its wars
Has the Petrodollar Had its Day? (Abstract) by Mamdouh G. Salameh, 22 June 2015
The petrodollar came into existence in 1973 in the wake of the collapse of the international gold standard which was created in the aftermath of World War II under the Bretton Woods agreements. These agreements also established the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world. The Nixon Administration understood that the collapse of the gold standard system would cause a decline in the global demand for the US dollar. Maintaining demand for the US dollar was vital for the United States’ economy. So the United States under Nixon struck a deal in 1973 with Saudi Arabia.
Under the terms of the deal, the Saudis would agree to price all of their oil exports in US dollars exclusively and be open to investing their surplus oil proceeds in US debt securities. In return, the United States offered weapons and protection of Saudi oilfields from neighbouring countries including Israel. For the Americans, the petrodollar increases demand for the dollar and also for US debt securities and allows the US to buy oil with a currency it can print at will. In 1975, all of the OPEC nations agreed to follow suit. Maintaining the petrodollar is America’s primary goal.
Everything else is secondary…
America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia by Michael Hudson, 7 February 2022, The Saker
For the past half-century, foreign countries have kept their international monetary reserves in U.S. dollars – mainly in U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank accounts and other financial investments in the U.S. economy. The Treasury-bill standard obliges foreign central banks to finance America’s military-based balance-of-payments deficit – and in the process, the domestic government budget deficit.
The United States does not need this recycling to create money. The government can simply print money, as MMT [modern monetary theory] has demonstrated. But the United States does need this foreign central bank dollar recycling to balance its international payments and support the dollar’s exchange rate.
IMF who? Lagarde shows ECB is the top dollar job in the QE age by Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog, 17 July 2019
The dollar’s dominance is what allows Washington to impose murderous, illegal sanctions on countries like Iran, Cuba, Korea and elsewhere, which is why many are so keen to end it.
The dollar’s imposition began after World War II, when the war-ravaged powers were forced to accept equating US paper with (but actually above) gold, a move which Charles de Gaulle bitterly referred to as the “exorbitant privilege” of the United States. The logic is simple: a $100 dollar bill cost Washington only the price of a piece of paper, whereas everyone else still had to mine, barter, earn or steal $100 worth of gold (or its equivalent in goods) to acquire that banknote.
The expensive US failure in Vietnam caused Richard Nixon to end this policy in 1971, but QE [quantitative easing] – printing money out of thin air – was opposed back then, so a replacement tool had to be quickly found in order to maintain US empire. The solution to effectively maintain the Bretton Woods system was found with the “petrodollar” agreement of 1973: every barrel of Saudi oil sold to anyone had to be purchased in dollars, and surplus Saudi profit would be invested in US banks and in US debt securities (“petrodollar recycling”, per Henry Kissinger).
Washington had no qualms about propping up the ruthless, reactionary House of Saud to maintain US economic hegemony. The system expanded to other oil producers to the point where no dollars? No oil.
The petrodollar keeps money flowing into the US and allows the US to “print gold” – it finances their huge budget deficits, high demand for the dollar fights off their inflation, it gives their banks a source of income for which they do zero genuine work, and the US themselves [sic] can buy “as much oil as they can print” from the Saudis. This is obviously a tremendous bargain for the US – the only reason the Saudis accept it is because they know they have absolutely zero legitimacy and would be deposed instantly without US arms and military support.
But the great deal is only for some in the US… from 1980 onwards the US elite funneled these huge monies into Wall Street and other asset classes which only their fellow elite can touch, as opposed to intelligently and patriotically using the income to improve the overall conditions of their own nation, or even just raising wages…
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Once again, only the wealthy are profiting from shady capitalist practices… paid for by the… policy of QE which has failed the average Western citizen and continued the economic misery of the developing world…
Bernays and Propaganda by Larry Romanoff, 6 February 2021, Saker Blog
…America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that we’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let them run everything. Then Americans will lend them the money or buy them out and thus control them financially. China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. The fury in the West is that the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources and foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them, as you are seeing in the Near East, and you’re seeing in Ukraine right now.
…As one author noted, “The wealthy in America have created an inherently imbalanced system that is exploitable by the wealthy and they are working through the use of propaganda and misinformation to convince Americans that the system is just, or, if anything, unfairly biased toward the poor.” And again, “The economic system that America has developed is dependent on the exploitation of foreign countries and the acquisition of foreign resources, which is why (the US) pursues a strategy of global preeminence.” He went on to state that the foreign policy of the American Right-Wing has been developed through extensive propaganda and exaggeration of foreign threats in order to maintain the conditions for public support and to justify the suppression of dissent.
The Quiet Imperialism by Francis Lee, 5 September 2020, Saker Blog
…The TOTAL DEBT [is coming to] 2000% [of GDP] in the not too distant future. This according to a CNBC report by Jeff Cox, September 09, 2019. This whole process [of transferring dollar purchases into U.S. debt] has more or less been on track since the demise of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. The date was significant since this was when the US defaulted on its gold IOUs handing its trading partners paper dollars, or near dollars such as US Treasuries (Bonds) which it insisted were as good as gold. As a result the holders of this US government paper have been subsidizing the US and its economy ever since. The ability to palm off its trading partners with green paper meant that the US has been able to buy stuff from the western world without actually paying for any of it. It gets better. The US has been able to buy foreign made goods with monies loaned to them by foreign governments! The ultimate free lunch!…
Against this backdrop the foreign policy of the US becomes clear. Its purpose is loot pure and simple. The south must continue to be plundered for cheap inputs and raw materials and in order to do this comprador elites must be promoted who are friendly to US interests. Economic development of course cannot take place in this context as there will be an outflow of capital from South to North. Markets must be opened up to the rapacious incursions of US and other western capitals. Possible rivals – Russia, China – must be regarded as long-term enemies and will be divided and marginalised or possibly in 1970s geopolitical jargon ‘Finlandised’. And uppity allies in Europe – like France – must be slapped down and brought to heel.
6 – Where are the Truth-Tellers?
Good-bye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult By Mike Lofgren, Truthout, 3 September 2011, Truthout
The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter, and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults?—we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.
I left Capitol Hill because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.
Christians, Stop Supporting Wars That Harm Your Christian Brethren by Joshua Mawhorter, 2 September 202, Antiwar.com
Washington has long engaged in a strategy of allying with radical Islamists and local criminal elements to the detriment of Christians in the region. Washington has supported radical Islamic jihadists and local criminal elements at the expense of Christians in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East for several years.
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The US invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a boon to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and would later help facilitate the rise of the Islamic State or ISIS in the region in general and in Iraq in particular…
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Conservative evangelicals were some of the most vocal proponents in support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, not knowing the disaster this would unleash on Iraq, the region, and their fellow Christians. American Christians had no way of knowing the extent of the consequences and cannot be blamed for being misled by the propaganda of the government and their allies in the media…
The US government allied with, funded, and armed radical Islamicists in Syria in order to overthrow the Assad regime. Not only did this lead to destabilization that contributed to the rise of groups like ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Not only is this a fact, but a declassified report confirmed it and, in fact, the Pentagon predicted this might be the outcome. This was so prevalent that Tulsi Gabbard sponsored a bill entitled the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” in 2017.
Nevertheless, the settled policy goal was to remove Assad who is still in power today and was one of the major bulwarks against ISIS in the region. Whatever may legitimately be said about the Assad regime in Syria, it served as a block against the rise of radical Islamicists rather than giving them money and weapons. In the Syrian civil war, the policy of the US government was to support the “rebels” (often radical Islamic terrorist groups) against the forces of the Assad regime. Needless to say, this had a devastating impact on the Christians in the region…
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The bombing of Libya, the funding of “moderate rebels [radical jihadists],” and the encouragement of the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime led to disaster in Libya and in the region, for everybody in general and for the Christians in particular. These arguably illegal actions (extension of military action past the provisions of the War Powers Resolution Act) furthered sectarian civil war in Libya, served to further destabilize the region and allowed for the rise of forces like the Islamic State, led to the reopening to the slave trade, and condemned many of the Christians there to persecution and death.
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Traditionally, a foreign intervention directed by Washington in other countries have led to adverse outcomes for Christians, yet American Christians have been unaware, remained silent, or supported the intervention…
Christ Almighty! US Foreign Policy vs. Middle Eastern Christianity – American tax dollars fund anti-Christian pogrom by Justin Raimondo, 8 August 2012, Antiwar.com
Persecution of Libya’s Christians has remained the one constant since the fall of Gadhafi, and vigilante violence is on the uptick.
In Syria, the anti-Christian jihad is well underway, churches are being occupied and ransacked by the rebels and Christian communities targeted in a sectarian “cleansing” campaign:
“Asked whether it was the Free Syrian Army that was telling Christians to get out, Agnes Miriam, Mother Superior of the Monastery of St. James at Qara in the Diocese of Homs, said, ‘Yes … it was the commander on the ground, Abdel Salam Harba, who decided that there was to be no more negotiations with Christians.’
“She said Christians refused to back the rebels, so the rebels used them as human shields.”
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Washington’s playing the Sunni card condemns the peoples of the Middle East to the tyranny of sharia law: it means the utter destruction of ancient Christian communities from Tripoli to Chaldea. This has been a consistent pattern of US foreign policy since the Bush administration, which, after all, launched our disastrous invasion of Iraq and thus condemned its heretofore safe and relatively free Christian community to death.
… it is fair to say that one of the main consequences of our “successful” policy has been and will continue to be a regional Christian pogrom…
So where are the much-vaunted and politically powerful “Christian” groups in the US, who are supposed to exert so much influence over the Republican party and its candidates? While the Christians of the Middle East are sinking beneath an Islamist wave, as Washington cheers (and funds the jihadists), such Christian “leaders” as the Rev. John Hagee are too busy anticipating World War III and supporting Israel to notice.
As this administration pursues a policy that puts the Christians of the Middle East and North Africa in mortal danger, where oh where is the so-called Religious Right? They’re [encouraging]… the US to openly arm the Syrian rebels…
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… Have we completely lost our moral compass, or is the triumph of militant secularism so complete that we can comfortably ignore our own government’s war on Christianity in the Middle East?
The Moral Implications of Bloodlust, White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism by Wendell Griffen, 25 August 2021, Counterpunch
History will not be kind to the political and military leaders who counseled the nation to commit itself to that misadventure [the Afghan War]. And history will not be kind to religious leaders in the United States who cheered and counseled the nation to go along with it.
Religious leaders did not warn the nation about the moral and mortal dangers of bloodlust. Some religious leaders even blessed the bloodlust even as they offered pastoral support to grieving families and to people maimed and scarred by the physical, emotional, social and spiritual wounds of warfare.
Religious leaders cannot blame the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, Pentagon and political parties for failure to discern and denounce the patriarchy, misogyny and militarism that drove so-called Christian evangelical conservatives to champion war in Afghanistan a decade after Bin Laden was killed. Meanwhile, the same Christian evangelical conservatives railed against the Taliban and other Muslim extremists. Prophetic discernment should have led more clergy in the United States to know and declare that these forces are merely different sides of the same hateful faith coin.
The failure of prophetic discernment and activity concerning the war in Afghanistan did not honor the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic men and women who condemned bloodlust in later centuries. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic people who challenged the imperialist aims of the Crusades.
That failure also disregarded the example of clergy who challenged the war in Vietnam three decades before 2001…
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Somehow, religious leaders lost the moral, spiritual and ethical ability to understand that times of societal turmoil — such as during a war — demand that we not only function as pastors and priests, but that we also discharge the duties of prophets.
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More religious leaders prefer pietistic popularity and abhor prophetic perseverance than we dare admit.
Too many religious leaders — clergy and laity — are more committed to being comfortable than conscientious about love, justice and peace.
Too many religious leaders equate love of empire with love for God.
Too many religious leaders love empire more than God.
The Sacralization of War, American-Style – Reaping What We Sow by Kelly Denton-Borhaug, 22 February 2022
…Where has the anti-war movement and a movement against that military-industrial-congressional complex been all these years?…
Worse yet, in our culture, the military budget is widely viewed as a social, even global good… The hum of the continuing violence embedded in and eternally reinforced by this country’s war-making structure is so constant that most of us don’t even notice or question it.
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…Christianity has been weaponized and manipulated to support our society’s malignant normality. It’s time, for instance, to call out the dishonesty of using certain verses from the New Testament to sacralize war.
For example, not just chaplains and religious leaders but military commanders, military families, and everyday citizens regularly valorize what soldiers do by referring to the Gospel of John: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
…Exploiting citizens’ honest desire to care for veterans, the militarized use of such words hides the truth about how our soldiers have labored at the forefront of this murderous society.
…war is covered with a sacred sheen, while its seeds of violence are normalized and slip ever further from our consciousness…
Despite the regular hijacking of that verse from John to soften and conceal the ugly violence of American-style war, those words are part of Jesus’s teaching about nonviolent service to others. In fact, biblical scholars agree that the historical Jesus rejected militarized violence…
…such super-valorization and sacralization [act of making sacred] of war silences any honesty about the reality they [war veterans] experienced…
…this country… is visibly in trouble and still focused on future wars as the best way to address our fears about the threats that face us. We seem to be unable to think any differently, despite evidence that more war will only make matters worse for the world, as well as for the United States.
Maybe, if we stopped making war and militarism into a sacred enterprise, we’d be more successful in demanding that our political leaders cease their thoughtless approval, year after year, of destructive, ever more gigantic Pentagon budgets.
The Deadly Consequences of Making War ‘Sacred’ – How can the nonviolent Messiah be conflated so easily with the violence of war? by Kelly Denton-Borhaug, February 2022
What role do Christians play in this destructive reality [referring to the Secretary of Defense’s statement that the $750 billion request for the 2022 military budget aligned with “the will of the American people]?
Here is the problem: Religion and violence intertwine to fuel our ubiquitous war-culture. And in making war “sacred,” the death-dealing consequences are concealed from our consciousness.
Consider a common vehicle decal. A U.S. soldier stands silhouetted before an American flag shaped as angelic wings. The text reads: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13, ESV). Another popular meme says, “Remember that only two forces ever agreed to die for you—Jesus Christ and the American soldier.”
The decal verse is ripped out of context. Jesus’ soliloquy is on servant leadership, characterized by the loving washing of one another’s feet—not killing. Religious frameworks are hijacked to place a “sacred canopy” of meaning over the use of deadly force. For Christians, cognitive dissonance should abound. However, using the Bible to bless war is so common we hardly question it.
[RETURN to Index]
7 – Catalogue of America’s Crimes
From The All-American Bombardier by Charles Maurer
Here is a list* of the countries bombed and/or invaded by the United States since the end of the Second World War:
| Afghanistan 1998, 2001- Bosnia 1994, 1995 Cambodia 1969-70 China 1945-46 Congo 1964 Cuba 1959-1961 El Salvador 1980s Korea 1950-53 Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69 Indonesia 1958 | Laos 1964-73 Grenada 1983 Iraq 1991-2000s, 2015- Iran 1987 Korea 1950-53 Kuwait 1991 Lebanon 1983, 1984 Libya 1986, 2011- Nicaragua 1980s Pakistan 2003, 2006- | Palestine 2010 Panama 1989 Peru 1965 Somalia 1993, 2007-08, 2010- Sudan 1998 Syria 2014- Vietnam 1961-73 Yemen 2002, 2009- Yugoslavia 1999 |
Note that these countries represent roughly one-third of the people on earth.
*Dates through 2000 from Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum
Propaganda and the Media — Censorship, or Burning the History Books — Part 6 by Larry Romanoff for The Saker Blog, 18 June 2021
…Few people are aware today, even in Japan, that the Americans fire-bombed Japanese cities incessantly after an offer to surrender and prior to dropping the atomic bombs. For an entire year, the Americans waged a fire-bombing campaign that eventually included nearly 100 Japanese cities, devastating Japan’s fragile wood-and-paper-constructed communities. This campaign killed exponentially more civilians than we are told about for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the same Curtis LeMay who would boast only a few years later that he had carpet-bombed and killed as much as 40% of the civilian population of North Korea – for no reason whatever.
In the most celebrated case, “Operation Meetinghouse”, US bombers conducted a night raid on Tokyo that destroyed 50 square Kms of the city. The downtown Tokyo suburb of Shitamachi had been targeted as the center of this raid because the area contained the highest civilian population density of any city in the world at the time, with some 750,000 people living in the easily-flammable wood-frame buildings in that district. Just after midnight, 334 massive B-29 Superfortress bombers flying at an altitude of only 150 meters, carried out an intense three-hour raid that dropped a half-million M-69 incendiary bombs. These incendiary devices, as with Dresden, created an immense firestorm fanned by winds of 50 Kms per hour that totally razed the Shitamachi district and spread flames throughout the remainder of the city, incinerating at least 750,000 people and quite possibly more than 1 million – regardless of what the NYT tells you.
The bombers carried incendiary explosives that included napalm infused with white phosphorus, perhaps the most vicious and immoral of all weapons ever used on civilian populations, this contribution to humanity having been created and developed by Harvard University. The incendiaries produced firestorms similar to those in Hamburg, Germany, two years prior, and in Dresden only a month earlier.
[The article also recounts the 1965-66 slaughter in Indonesia, encouraged by the U.S. government to oust Sukarno, a communist sympathizer.]
American Dystopia – The Propaganda Mask and the Utopia Syndrome by Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog, 24 January 2021
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, needing a way to punish Saddam Hussein for not wanting to become a US colony, personally arranged the targeted destruction of Iraq’s drinking water purification facilities and enacted worldwide sanctions to prevent Iraq from obtaining replacement supplies or repairs. According to the United Nations, Albright’s actions directly resulted in the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi infants from contaminated drinking water, with the full knowledge of the US government. Then in a TV interview on the program 60 Minutes where she was confronted with evidence of these acts by Leslie Stahl, Albright famously proclaimed, “Yes, it was worth it.”
Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy, 29 September 2001, The Guardian
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The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel – backed by the US – invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list. [Add to this all who’ve died in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Yemen since 2001]
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…a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think…
Are America’s Wars Just and Moral? By Patrick J. Buchanan, 26 July 2017, Creators Syndicate
“One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies,” writes columnist David Ignatius.
Given that Syria’s prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America’s participation in this slaughter?
Columnist Eric Margolis summarizes the successes of the six-year civil war to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
“The result of the western-engendered carnage in Syria was horrendous: at least 475,000 dead, 5 million Syrian refugees driven into exile in neighboring states (Turkey alone hosts three million), and another 6 million internally displaced. … 11 million Syrians … driven from their homes into wretched living conditions and near famine.
“Two of Syria’s greatest and oldest cities, Damascus and Aleppo, have been pounded into ruins. Jihadist massacres and Russian and American air strikes have ravaged once beautiful, relatively prosperous Syria. Its ancient Christian peoples are fleeing for their lives before US and Saudi takfiri religious fanatics.”
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We overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Moammar Gadhafi in 2012. Yet, the fighting, killing and dying in both countries have not ceased. Estimates of the Iraq civilian and military dead run into the hundreds of thousands.
Still, the worst humanitarian disaster may be unfolding in Yemen.
After the Houthis overthrew the Saudi-backed regime and took over the country, the Saudis in 2015 persuaded the United States to support its air strikes, invasion and blockade.
By January 2016, the U.N. estimated a Yemeni civilian death toll of 10,000, with 40,000 wounded. However, the blockade of Yemen, which imports 90 percent of its food, has caused a crisis of malnutrition and impending famine that threatens millions of the poorest people in the Arab world with starvation.
No matter how objectionable we found these dictators, what vital interests of ours were so imperiled by the continued rule of Saddam, Assad, Gadhafi and the Houthis that they would justify what we have done to the peoples of those countries?
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In which of the countries we have attacked or invaded in this century–Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen–are the people better off than they were before we came?
And we wonder why they hate us.
The Collapse of Western Morality By Paul Craig Roberts, 27 September 2010, Global Research
The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if they were in Iraq.
The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-Semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared Goldstone to be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.
Slaughter Central – The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine By Tom Engelhardt, 13 April 2021, TomDispatch
On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You’ll undoubtedly be shocked, shocked to learn that the top five arms makers on the planet — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — are all located in the United States.
Put another way, we’re a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as we’ve known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse to come…
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After all, this country has a historic 800 or so military bases around the world and nearly 200,000 military personnel stationed abroad (about 60,000 in the Middle East alone). It has a drone-assassination program that extends from Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East to Africa, a series of “forever wars” and associated conflicts fought over that same expanse, and a Navy with major aircraft carrier task forces patrolling the high seas. In other words, in this century, it’s been responsible for largely uncounted but remarkable numbers of dead and wounded human beings. Or put another way, it’s been a mass-shooting machine abroad.
Unlike in the United States, however, there’s little way to offer figures on those dead. To take one example, Brown University’s invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated that, from the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to late 2019, 801,000 people, perhaps 40% of them civilians, were killed in Washington’s war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere…
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…its [U.S military’s] forces and those allied to it (and often supplied with American arms) have certainly killed staggering numbers of people in conflicts that have devastated communities across a significant part of the planet, while displacing an estimated 37 million people.
8 – U.S. Refusal to Knuckle Under, Slide Towards Catastrophe
Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhati Roy, 29 September 2001, The Guardian
Operation Enduring Freedom [name for the Global War on Terrorism] is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It’ll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world…
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The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry…
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…The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.
An Inauguration Day Surprise? by Justin Raimondo, , 15 January 2017, Antiwar.com
[Regarding America’s foolish provocations on Russia’s border:] This decoupling of policymaking from the facts of reality not only increases the danger of war–it makes conflict virtually inevitable. By either failing to see or deliberately ignoring what is actually occurring, rather than what their propagandists would like us to believe is happening, the warlords of Washington run the risk of accidentally sparking World War III.
Beyond the Dollar by Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson, 7 July 2021, Valdai Papers
The US will not join any system that it cannot dominate and veto, and refuses to submit to decisions reached by what may be thought of as a democracy of nations. If it persists in this mode, it can only watch the demise of its contradictory dollar creditocracy and the rise of alternative systems fostering productive expansion elsewhere.
What Tulsi Gabbard’s Caving in Really Shows by The Saker, 24 July 2019
…the US political system is completely unreformable. And, furthermore, any political system which cannot adapt to new realities and reform itself is simply condemned to a sudden, catastrophic (and often violent) end.
Infinite QE: Can The Eurozone Always Roll Debt Over? by Gary Littlejohn for the Saker Blog, 13 May 2020
…which countries are pursuing an independent path… a re-orientation towards a China-focussed set of arrangements. To me that focus includes the convergence of the Russian-inspired EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union] with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]. Implicitly that amounts to understanding that Russian military strength underpins the Eurasian economies even though China is rapidly building up its own military capabilities. It may be a cliché to repeat that trade wars often lead to real wars, but it is clear that the military threat from the West is real, even though its conventional forces are weakening – but current US military doctrine implies moving rapidly to the use of nuclear weapons…
The Russian website GEOFOR interviews the Saker, 18 December 2021
…In my opinion – and I know this country quite well – it is absolutely impossible to rebuild it. Reforms are impossible here, because this country is based on imperialism, on the ideology of world domination, and it is simply impossible for it to abandon this… to recognize, for example, just the possibility that the United States is “one of the countries of the world”, but not “the leader of all mankind”, is something that is literally unthinkable for most Americans, and certainly for American politicians. For them, this is simply unacceptable.
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…all politicians, in order to show that they are patriots, must be supporters of the “War Party,” supporters of wars… alas! – this is interpreted not as a sign of insanity or irresponsibility, but as a sign of “coolness”. And if the president demonstrates these qualities, then he is a strong and serious president.
How to reform such a country and give it the opportunity to become just a normal country, and not an Empire, I can’t imagine. I don’t see how this system can be reformed. The only way out, which I unfortunately see, is that it should collapse. Collapse either quickly during a military confrontation – God forbid! – or through some kind of agreement to “hit the brakes.” This is the best we can all hope for.
