29. WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, JULY 7, 2021
Andrew Bacevich. After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed.
The premise of this book is quite simple: Regardless of whether our self-inflicted contemporary apocalypse leads to renewal or further decline, the United States will find itself obliged to revise the premises informing America’s role in the world. Put simply, basic U.S. policy must change.
“Even before COVID-19 swept the nation, taking hundreds of thousands of American lives, cumulative policy failures ought to have made it clear that a national security paradigm centered on military supremacy, global power projection, decades-old formal alliances, and wars that never seemed to end was at best obsolete, if not itself a principal source of self-inflicted wounds. The costs, approximating a trillion dollars annually, were too high.7 The outcomes, ranging from disappointing to abysmal, have come nowhere near to making good on promises issued from the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon and repeated in the echo chamber of the establishment media. . . .
However belatedly, the Apocalypse of 2020 demands that Americans finally take stock of what post–Cold War national security policies have produced and at what cost. Nearly two decades after 9/11, we can no longer afford to postpone acknowledging our own folly. It’s time to remove the blinders. This, too, describes my book’s purpose: to identify the connecting tissue between the delusions of the recent past and the traumas that are their progeny.”
Raoul Peck. Exterminate All the Brutes.
Rev. by Ed Morales. “The Past Has a Future: Raoul Peck’s World.” The Nation (6-28/7-5, 2021).
A documentary series of four hour-long episodes on racism, extractive imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, slavery, extermination, genocide, and endless worldwide WAR. Traces classification of Black and Indigenous people as “other” starting with medieval Spanish empire. Explains how “the West” distinguished itself from those others through weapons development, from cannons to automatic rifles and machine guns, to carpet bombing. Explores the genealogy of the US arms industry beginning with the Springfield, Mass., Armory, into the military-industrial complex of 1950s: Lockheed, Raytheon, VP Dick Cheney. The crux of the history is the progress exhibited by “killing at a distance” from the Dutch and British victories against the Spanish Armada to the 19thcentury subjugation of Sudan in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, climaxing in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Peck offers three authors as his chief guides: Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment; and Michel-Rolph Trouillot,Silencing the Past.
The key to a different future is that first we must know the truth about the past and then we must refuse to forget it. Throughout the film, Peck allows us to hear the corpses speaking. –Dick
“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. ” ― Arundhati Roy
from Tarak Kauff, NYC Veterans For Peace
For Your Peace Calendar
May 31,1902,the Treaty of Vereeniging ended the Boer War and earned US President Theodore Roosevelt a Nobel Prize.
June 1, 1990, Pres. George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed agreement to end the production of chemical weapons and to destroy arsenals. In 1993 more than 150 nations signed on to the Chemical Weapons Convention banning chemical weapons worldwide, ratified by US Senate in 1997. By 2015 about 90% of the world’s stockpile of chemical weapons had been destroyed. We can do it.
June 4 established by UN in 1982 as International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression. UN Children Victims Day is only one of more than 150 annually observed UN International Days. The Days are part of a broader UN educational project to build public awareness of the events and issues.
June 5, 1962, the Port Huron Statement expressed an urgent plea to US to end racial bigotry, the Cold War and the Bomb, and imperialism if hope for the future is to be achieved. This manifesto was produced by Students for a Democratic Society, and chiefly authored by Tom Hayden.
From Peace Almanac by World Beyond War.