To Feed the Beast

I have a brother. My brother is a conservative. Contrary to the dominant paradigm, however, my brother is a conservative that actually believes in conservative principles. My brother, in other words, is a great believer in liberty.

Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who are still the two greatest personal influences on the nature of the federal government, did not believe in liberty so much as they did “justice”, which is in quotes for a reason.

“Justice” doesn’t exist. It is, rather, something humans are predisposed to strive for, even if it proves perpetually unattainable. Liberty, on the other hand, is easy for the government to provide; it simply does nothing. When the government does nothing, every citizen enjoys perfect liberty, and all of the opportunities and perils inherent in the same.

Even the most libertarian of us, however, understand that we need some measure of government, up to and including the federal level. My brother, the nearly bulletproof conservative intellectual, could write sonnets about the inherent danger of federal authority.

My brother’s favorite example of the issue at hand is the federal Deparment of Education, instituted during the Carter administration. He points out that the country got along just fine without a DOE for two centuries, and that the quality and efficiency of education has suffered since centralization.

And my brother, of course, is right. The logic of any federal agency is, first and foremost, to perpetuate its own existence. Its second priority is to grow. It is the same for any individual human being; First food, then sex. Survival, then pro-creation. All else is secondary.

We should not be shocked that faceless bureaucracies act the same as cornered humans. Would a bureaucrat ever tell his boss that his job was done, or unnecessary?

With this insight on the nature of bureaucracy in mind, here is the leap that my brother and those aligned with him need to make: the Pentagon falls into the very same fold. The Pentagon is the Department of Education on crack.

The United States did not have a standing peacetime army until 1947. It got along for nearly two centuries without one. When the United States first adopted a standing peacetime army, it accounted for fully fifty percent of the world’s wealth, implying that the lack of a security state has thus far been friendly to America’s fortunes.

As soon as this insidious bureaucracy, this Pentagon, which must be explicitly distinguished from the military, came into existence, it had a vested interest in perpetuating the its own existence as an end in and of itself. And therein lies the flaw; you cannot deputize a war machine during peacetime, because that war machine will, by definition, seek to justify its existence via…guess what? Guerra.

In August of 1945 the United States was more powerful than any other country had ever been or realistically dreamed of being. The military, however, did not de-mobalize. This is the turning point.

The newly standing military, born of the 1947 National Security Act which created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA, had to justify its existence. The logic became the Soviet Union.

No nation, in the far-too-extensive history of war, had ever bled in the quantities that the USSR did at the hands of Hitler. This was an incinerated, brutalized, and paranoid society. This was a society, which, hardened as it was, was in no condition to wage war.

The Pentagon, however, needed an enemy. This enemy was not invented, it was not unfairly criticized, but it was inflated to an absurd extent. This inflation was inevitable, given the logic of centralized bureaucracy and its single-minded focus on the budgets and power that only perpetual paranoia could secure.

This is the understanding we must come to: we are not surrounded by enemies. We are surrounded by 200 countries, every single one of which is poorer and weaker than us. We hold 20,000 metropolis-melting nuclear weapons. Why are we afraid? Why do we feel constantly under siege? Why were we afraid of Iraq in 2003, the country that met our cripping bombardment with precisely zero airplanes of their own? Is this constant fear based on reality? Or is it based on bureaucratic inertia?

Does it Even Matter Anymore?

Sapere Aude -- Have the Courage to Use Your Own Reason

We all know that George W. Bush did all he could to avoid war, right? War was obviously his last resort. It wasn't like he wanted to invade Iraq, right? It wasn't as if he would stop at nothing to do so. It wasn't as if he was supressing a grin and probably an erection when he announce that the war had started. So, keeping in mind that our fearless leader wanted nothing so much as peace, lets review the finding that he sent to Congress before the invasion.

(I) Whereas, U.S. reliance on further diplomatic and peaceful means alone would not

(a) adequately protect U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, nor

(b) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant U.N. resolutions regarding Iraq, and

(II) Whereas, acting pursuant to the Authorization to Use Military Force was consistent with continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations including those nations, organizations, and persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Is any part of this, any part of this, true? No. The default (apologist) position then becomes that the president acted in good faith and was simply mistaken or misled, presumably by a renegade CIA that was itching to invade Iraq.

What we must come to grips with is this: this was no honest mistake. The president himself has denied that he ever explicitly linked Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, due to a total lack of evidence. Really? Did you read your fucking execution order? The one that to date has resulted in scores of thousands of deaths? Does it not explicitly say that attacking Iraq is consistent with attacking the 9/11 planners, aiders, etc.?

Maybe he was focusing on the "persons who committed the attacks"; maybe they had been reincarnated and moved to Baghdad. The world is very complicated. Iraq is very complicated. But some things are simple. Simply put, the President willfully lied to the world and to his countrymen. Period.

Mixed metaphor time: If the head of the snake is that rotten, is it realistic to hope to find salvation or victory somewhere towards the tail? This is not the case of a few, or a bunch of, bad apples; this is the case of a rotten and leak-ridden barrell.

You know we're in trouble when even the goats hate us

Who Won?

Who won World War II? The short-term answer, obviously, is the United States. Even among the victorious allies, America benefitted immeasurably more than the others. The Soviet Union had lost 22 million citizens and seen the western quarter of its country incinerated. Great Britain had barely held out and, newly bankrupt, was about to lose its entire global empire. France had given in to collaboration and was now to give in to the inevitable loss of its own empire in North Africa and Indochina.

Among the victors, only America had not paid a crippling price. The American mainland was untouched. American civilians had slept safely in their beds throughout the carnage. And the American economy accounted for fully half of the entire planet's wealth. Never before had any country, in either a quantitative or a qualitative sense, been so powerful.

Our enemies, on the other hand, were decimated as no societies had ever been. More than half of the largest cities in Germany and Japan were utterly destroyed by American bombs. Millions of civilians were killed, most of them in the last year of the war. These societies were brutalized in a way that it is useless to write about; if it's impossible to imagine, it's impossible for me to write about.

By demanding uncondional surrender, the United States lengthened the war. Many elements of the German and Japanese establishment would have negotiated a peace with the United States if this demand had not been made. After this demand was made, the German and Japanese moderates were made irrelevant. After the United States made it perfectly clear that it would use massive and indiscriminate terrorism to compel this surrender, that it would destroy entire metropolises, that it would incinerate 100,000 civilians, intentionally, in a single night, the moderates looked downright suicidal.

For what nation in its right mind would surrender to an army that was willing to destroy on the scale that America was? Many Germans and Japanese felt that surrendering to an enemy willing to employ that level of violence meant surrendering the very country; there was no guarantee of post-war American magnanimity and, quite frankly, there was no reason for the Germans or the Japanese to expect it.

However, once unconditional surrender was achieved, the Americans conducted themselves in a way that we should be proud of. The devastated nations were rebuilt, governed in a more democratic way than ever before, and brought back into the community of nations.

And the most staggering thing, which really borders on the unbelievable, is that despite the fact that there was hardly a single person in Japan and Germany that had not lost a loved one to American bombs, there was no insurgency. Not only was there no organized insurrection, there was not even an isolated incidenct of a widowed husband taking a shot at an American. None. Not 10, not 2. None. Zero Americans were killed in the occupations of Japan and Germany.

Sixty years later, Japan and Germany are the second and third richest countries on Earth. Their physical security is guaranteed in perpetuity by the only country that is richer than them, the United States. Germany and Japan were made to give up their empires, which they never could have maintained anyway. They were subjected to a level of violence that had never been employed before armies before, never mind civilians. But in the end, they are the second and third richest countries on Earth and they pay absolutely nothing for their own defense. So, who won?

Wake Up

Only a few guessed that the retreat of darkness

presaged the emergence of an entirely new

and less tangible terror

It's over. It's been over for years. We lost. Friend and enemy alike warned us not to do it. But we did it. The disgustingly proto-fascist attitude that held sway before the war is something that brings a still-visceral disgust to me. Too many Americans were pro-war pre-war, weren't they? Too many Americans were unforgivably negligent in their duty to be informed citizens.

When the bombing of Baghdad began, I was genuinely ashamed of my country for the first time in my adult life. Disgusted. Fucking disgusted. Prime time television we made it, this storm of metal rained upon a nation of children and paupers. Did anyone shoot back? Did any Iraqi planes challenge ours? No. This was not war; this was murder. We will not have victory in Iraq because we don't deserve it.

We were cowards then, bombing at will while our "enemy" could only hope that their children would not be decapitated by flying glass and metal while they slept. What part of this do we fail to acknowledge? We chose to do this. The president of the United States chose to start a war. Chose to invade a country that had not attacked or threatened to attack ours. We have sinned, and our rewards thus far have been predictable.

Enough about "liberation". Enough about "misleading" intelligence. Enough about "9/11 changed everything". George W. Bush is a war criminal. He knowingly and willfully commited an act of aggression against a nation that could never have directly attacked his. George W. Bush is not a visionary. He did not make a gamble. He did not act on the best available intelligence. He did not go to war as a last resort. He is simply a murderer with a bigger microphone than most.

The way to get out of situations like this is to acknowledge that we have a problem. The problem is that we were wrong. More that wrong, this was a criminal enterprise. George W. Bush is a murderer. Period. He ordered the mightiest military in history to launch a full-scale attack on a country that posed no threat to us. Murder. Ask yourself this: if the leader of any other country had done this, what would we call him? Did Hitler not do this to Poland? Did Hussein not do this to Kuwait?

George W. Bush deserves the deference and respect accorded to the office of the presidency. He has disgraced that office to the point where any such deference has long been expended. If law meant anything, George W. Bush would be on trial for his life as the head of a criminal conspiracy that has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of innocents.

From Adam to the Atom

The explosive force of suns,

once safely locked in nature

now lies in the hand that long ago

dropped from a tree limb

into the upland grass...

Both the light we seek

and the shadows we fear

are projected from within

Science, for all its wonders, is a human undertaking. This is why science has not prevented war, but rather perfected it. Why are we dependent on the Middle East? Because we are dependent on oil. And why are we dependent on oil? Because we refuse to use nuclear energy. And why do we refuse to use nuclear energy? Because it is dangerous. True enough. But is it more dangerous than building 50,000 nuclear weapons and rattling them in vain in a doomed effort to shape the world to our will? How is it acceptable to weaponize this beast yet too dangerous to tame it in the interest of clean and independent energy?

Our identity is a dream.

We are process, not reality,

for reality is an illusion of the light--

the light of our particular day

We risk becoming the tools of our tools, which may include ideas, before we have managed to make those tools work productively rather than destructively. The manipulation of the atom is the purest example of this danger.

There is strong archaeological evidence to show that

with the birth of human consciousness there was born,

like a twin,

the impulse to transcend it

On Bullshit, Briefly

Who had more face to face meetings with Saddam Hussein: Osama bin Laden or Donald Rumsfeld?