The United States of Atrocity

voice of the damned wrote:

So, if other countries are all helpless to resist American extraterritorial application of its laws, how come the French, the Swiss, and now the Poles have all successfully declined to send Roman Polanski back to LA for sentencing? 

C'mon. My claims are about the US, not about other countries. I don't presume that the juggernaut is unstoppable, or that others are helpless before it.  Why else is the US conducting interminable propaganda wars against Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, etc, etc, etc.?  Because ideological warfare is still important - and, truth be told, their getting their asses kicked.

lol. Is that you imitating an obtuse person, votd?

Do I really need to point out the barbaric Yanqui OCCUPATION of free Cuba in Guantanamo for how many years? Or the zillion other examples which you, like anyone else, can look up?

When the US exports those fantasies around the globe, they make a killing ...in at least two senses of that word.

Henry Giroux on State Terrorism and the Ideological Weapons of Neoliberalism

A good article that I can't seem to post excerpts from. Odd.

quotes from the Giroux piece.

Quote:

The "war on terror" morphed into a war on democracy and civil liberties - functioning largely as an act of domestic terrorism. Under such circumstances, not only has the notion of the future been canceled out, but the very idea of democracy has been fractured. At the same time, the "war on terror" has been used to mobilize a culture of fear in order to accelerate both the militarization of everyday life and further concentrate economic and political power in the hands of the financial elite....
 
The United States is now addicted to violence because the "war on terror" relies on an extreme fear and hatred of those considered enemies. As a result, it feeds the machinery of permanent warfare by constantly inventing a demonized Other. I think basically that terror is now such a central part of the political nervous system in the United States that it's become the major organizing principle of society....
 
The "war on terror" not only transforms politics into a pathology to paraphrase Susan Sontag, but it also serves to up the collective pleasure quotient by making extreme violence enjoyable to watch. Americans appear to indulge obsessively in watching violence. Violence is now the essence of how we solve our problems and how we enjoy our pleasure in the absence of genuine and more ethical pleasures - solidarity, community, compassion - that we'd find in an actual democracy.

 
The United States is a fake democracy. Democracy is the "brand" used to market this repulsive and monstrous regime. It is the facade over the policeman's baton, over the laughing face of the sociopathic 1% who are truly indifferent to the rest of the population. 
 
Says Giroux: "The era of mass distortion seems to have taken a backseat to the notion that all the United States has to do is to proclaim itself as a democracy and that empty expression of pseudo patriotism eliminates the need for any kind of reflection regarding its domestic and foreign policies. Democracy has been emptied out of any viable meaning and its ritualized invocation allows the US to be proud of what it should be ashamed of."
 
Americans, literally, gorge themselves on violence and death.
 

Quote:

Violence becomes a kind of depoliticizing drug for the larger public - those who are the victims of a savage neoliberal economic order. And you have to remember: Addiction often takes place behind our backs. We often don't realize that it's happened. It often seems to operate seamlessly and powerfully through forms of affective and ideological management that mirror a cruel and normalized market-based society that divorces actions from social costs, elevates self-interests over social needs, sells off public goods, produces a massive and death-dealing machinery of social inequality and kills the imagination, if not the spirit itself, by erasing the conditions that promote dialogue and thoughtfulness.

 
And what about the elites and their responsibility for society? The zombies are not only the view of this 1% towards the rest of us. They are the zombies as well.
 

Quote:

A growing body of social science research suggests that among the ultra-rich, there are widespread signs of sociopathic traits - a lack of empathy, suffocating narcissism, an inclination to cheat, a willingness to disconnect actions from any sense of ethical consideration and a propensity to engage in lawlessness. We've returned to the ancient philosophy of fixed social hierarchies without the religion....
 
I mentioned previously, grossly unequal societies appear to create ruling elites that border on or fully embrace sociopathic behavior. They live in an insular world with no sense of reality and no social consciousness, and they are excessively narcissistic. They do not view social responsibility as a condition of agency and find it extremely difficult to understand the plight of people who do not live in their insular cultures and gated communities. They've been educated to be zombies. They do not produce institutions that address and alleviate social problems - they create such problems. The degree to which that kind of pathology becomes sedimented in our society, buttressed by gaping inequalities in wealth, income and power, means that the ultra-rich will become a more concentrated and powerful group and that the damage to both human beings and the planet will escalate.

 
Other ideological aspects are addressed here. Giroux identifies the two elements of manufactured ignorance - consumerism and celebrity culture that, together, serve to distract, amuse to death, and undermine modes of solidarity beyond shared breakfast cereal or check marks on our sneakers. 
 
Moreover,  
 
"We see a total break from any sense of compromise, dialogue or compassion. We see an ideology that no longer needs to apologize, no longer cares - an ideology that exercises ruthless violence. It's a lawlessness that laughs at people."
 
Further:

Quote:

Under such conditions, the United States has become a country soaked in violence, indifferent to its expanding culture of cruelty and unapologetic about its racist, militant and hate-filled discourses. This is a form of terrorism without apologies. The US has degenerated into a state of political and ethical recklessness.

 
This is one step up from Orwell's boot in the face of humanity.  America is a boot in the face of humanity ... but the wearer of the boot is laughing uproarously at the pain and horror they're inflicting on the rest of us. Washington has become Barad-dûr. 
 
And the remedy?
 

Quote:

There are three pre-requirements for being able to think in utopian terms - that is, in terms that are capable of producing a militant form of hope that not only imagines a better society but also inspires collective action based on such desires. First, a utopian imaginary must embrace history as a resource, willing to engage its "dangerous" memories and to use it as a resource for challenging those discourses that have frozen the present. Second, educators, artists, intellectuals, workers, young people and others must find a way to construct not only a discourse of merciless critique but also a discourse of possibility. Thirdly, politics has to be reinvented so as to recognize that power is now global and that politics is still tied to nation-states.

Of course. Conscious, genuine solidarity. Revolution. And soon, by the looks of it.

The grim future of the US Empire is seen in...

Chris Hedges: the wages of sin.

Or, given the Empire, we're all going to Hell...

Quote:

...as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy....

As the Athenian general Thucydides noted, the tyranny that Athens imposed on the outer reaches of empire, it eventually imposed on itself. Athens, like the United States centuries later, was hollowed out from the inside by the corrosive force of empire. The brutal tools of control used initially in distant parts of the empire—in our case militarized police, drones, suspension of civil liberties, wholesale surveillance and mass incarceration—migrated back to the homeland. This is how most empires die. They commit suicide.

The loss of civic virtue, Plato wrote, left a population hypnotized by the illusions flickering on the wall of a cave.

Sound familliar?

The Empire Doesn't Care Who You Vote For.

Arlo Guthrie: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, KILL!

Time Magazine: President Obama’s Legacy Is Endless War

Quote:

In 2011, what officials called “kinetic military action” in Libya completed the evisceration of the War Powers Resolution by successfully advancing the theory that if the U.S. bombs a country that can’t hit back, we’re not engaged in “hostilities” against them. In the drone campaign and the current war with ISIS, Obama has turned a 14-year-old congressional resolution targeting al-Qaeda and the Taliban into a blank check for endless war, anywhere in the world. Last year, the army chief of staff affirmed that finishing the fight against ISIS will take another “10 to 20 years.”

 

... if the U.S. bombs a country that can’t hit back, we’re not engaged in “hostilities” against them.

... if the U.S. bombs a country that can’t hit back, we’re not engaged in “hostilities” against them.

... if the U.S. bombs a country that can’t hit back, we’re not engaged in “hostilities” against them.

... if the U.S. bombs a country that can’t hit back, we’re not engaged in “hostilities” against them.

... if the U.S. bombs a country that can’t hit back, we’re not engaged in “hostilities” against them.

Soldiers who killed pregnant Afghan women followed Rules of Engagement - Pentagon

Quote:

Members of US Special Forces who killed two pregnant women and three other civilians during a 2010 night raid in Afghanistan used an “appropriate level of force,” according to an internal Pentagon investigation.

In February 2010, a force of US Army Rangers had entered a compound in the village of Khataba in Afghanistan’s Paktia province. Though the site had been confirmed to house “militant activity,” according to NATO, the raid resulted in the death of five civilians, two of whom were pregnant women.

Uncle Sam: "Kill 'em all and let God sort them out."

Quote:

The documents’ release comes only a month after a final US report was made on the October 2015 airstrike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) humanitarian hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan that resulted in the death of at least 42 people. While MSF said that the strike constituted a war crime because the hospital’s location was known beforehand, the US military said that incident did not amount to a war crime because the hospital was not attacked deliberately.

Uncle Sam: Blam blam blam! "Sorry!" blam blam! "Sorry again!" Blam blam blam! "Sorry! Really!" Blam blam blam!!!!!!

Afghan child: "I'm still alive!"

<<Blam blam>>.

Special Forces soldier: "No, you're not."

Awash in Death ...

Worst Hate Crime in US History: 50 Murdered at Gay Latino Club

Quote:

At least 50 people have been killed after a shooting early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando, according to the city's mayor. Police confirm the gunman was killed after taking more than 30 people hostage. At least 53 people were injured.

USA! USA! We're number one!

US "diplomats" call for the bombing of Syria.

Quote:

In a move that the New York Times reports is nearly unprecedented, some 51 mid-level State Department employees have signed a letter calling for the Obama Administration to begin bombing the Assad government in Syria immediately.

A similar "rebellion" by State Department diplomats took place under the Clinton regime. They wanted to bomb Yugoslavia. We all know how that turned out, eh?

"What does it mean when a country's diplomatic apparatus demands that it engage in aggressive war even to the risk of a nuclear conflict with Russia? Something is deeply rotten in the empire. The rot goes deep. And it threatens all of us."

____________________________________________________________

USA! USA! We're number one!

 

 

The lidless eye of Barad-dûr, the hegemon, never apologizes for past atrocities.

Quote:

From our three episodes, it appears that various factors are responsible for the unwillingness of the US leadership to say sorry to a nation or a people for past wrongdoings. Hubris arising from its hegemonic power is undoubtedly a significant factor. This is why hegemonic power at the global level has to end if that five letter word is to come out of the lips of the hegemon.

Yes, it's true that "apologies" , e.g., from the likes of former PM Stephen Harper over the cultural genocide of the Native Residential Schools - are mostly worthless public relations exercises with little, if any, changes in public policy. Nevertheless, the symbolism with the ruthless juggernaut to the south shouldn't be discounted. Any such apology would carry a kind of duty to turn over other rocks, covering the endless trail of violence and cruelty, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cuba: A Hegemonic Power Never Says Sorry…