Global

Remarks in Burlington, Vermont, April 22, 2017
http://worldbeyondwar.org/f-35-incinerating-ski-slope/

Thank you all for inviting me. There is no place I’d rather be on earth day. And that includes marching for science at the March for Science in Washington. Although I certainly support marching for honesty, and I’d even march for the cause of getting more scientists to march — and any other group that hasn’t yet found the time to bother.

Unless resisting madness becomes mainstream, the madmen will decide our fate.

James Q. Whitman's new book is called Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. It is understated and overdocumented, difficult to argue with. No doubt some will try.

In cartoonish U.S. historical understanding, the United States is, was, and ever shall be a force for good, whereas Nazism arose in a distant, isolated land that lacked any connection to other societies. In a cartoonish reversal of that understanding that would make a good strawman for critics of this book, U.S. policies have been identical to Nazism which simply copied them. Obviously this is not the case.

While much of the world is engulfed in violence of one sort or another (whether violence in the home or on the street, exploitation, ecological destruction or war), a global network of individuals and organizations is committed to ending this violence in all of its manifestations.

With individual signatories in 100 countries and organizational endorsements in 35 countries, each of these individuals and organizations works on one or more manifestations of violence in their locality and some of the organizations and networks have considerable national or even international reach.

However, as you might understand, there is a great deal to be done and the Charter network continues to expand as more people and organizations are motivated to join this shared effort.

Sometimes our tame and compliant media upchucks a piece of truth. For instance:

“American officials had predicted that the missile strike would result in a major shift in Assad’s calculus, but the U.S. attack appeared to be symbolic in reality. Within 24 hours of the strike, monitoring groups reported that warplanes were again taking off from the bombed Shayrat air base, this time to attack Islamic State positions.”

Fifty-nine cruise missiles. When Donald Trump ordered the attack on Syria, he made an impetuous decision, turning his previous commitment to stay out of the Syrian civil war and focus on ISIS on its head. He ordered the attack on a sovereign nation without seeking sanction from the United Nations or the U.S. Congress. For this, he received lavish praise from the media and bipartisan congressional support. He’ll undoubtedly enjoy a boost in the polls.

Military force is called “strong power.” Ordering an attack turns the president into the commander in chief and gives him an image of decisiveness and power. Yet the unleashing of cruise missiles against Syria is both dangerous and deceptive.

If Trump has decided to commit to regime change in Syria, it is dangerous. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is backed by both Russia and Iran, and Assad’s forces are the leading opposition to ISIS, the terrorist gang that Trump is already committed to destroying.

I recently attended a Pro Bono Research Groupsponsored presentation on “Criminal Justice Reform.” The meeting opened after a brief introduction by Mike Brickner, ACLU Senior Director, who then joined a panel along with Douglas A. Berman, Professor of Law with the OSU Moritz College of Law, and Brian Howe with the "Ohio Innocence Project."

The overall tenor of the discussion addressed the “disconnect” unanimously viewed as problematic to the local Justice System, concerning what were termed “disastrous social policies” – such as the so-called “War on Drugs” – wherein unrealistic decision-making with regards to sentencing law(s) and policies in actuality results in exacerbating the very problems the institution is supposed to be minimizing.

There’s a predictable cycle to pop culture phenomenons: hyper popularity for a few years, followed by dismissal as something that’s “over,” followed eventually by nostalgia. World of Warcraft, once the online game everyone was playing, weathered that slump and is now well aware that the surge of players returning to the game with last summer’s Legion expansion are here for the nostalgia.

To be fair, WoW was never exactly dead – when Activision Blizzard stopped publicly reporting at the end of 2015, it only had half the subscribers it had at its peak, but that still left it with 5.5 million players. Much of that was thanks to the game finally catching on in China, where distribution and then censorship problems bogged it down until it was cooling off in the US and Europe. (This also helps explain why last year’s Warcraft movie was a blockbuster in China despite being a failure in North America.)

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) concluded its annual conference late last month, triggering the usual debate in various alternative media outlets. Why does so much U.S. taxpayer money go to a small and not particularly useful client state that has a vibrant European-level economy and is already a regional military colossus?

Those who support the cash flow argue that Israel is threatened, most notably by Iran; they claim the assistance, which has been largely but not completely used to buy American-made weapons, is required to maintain a qualitative edge over the country’s potential enemies. Those who oppose the aid would counter that the Iranian threat is largely an Israeli and Saudi Arabian invention, used to justify continued American support for the national-security policies of both countries. And they would add that Tel Aviv is more than able to defend itself and pay for its own military establishment.

A Morning Consult poll winks at me from my inbox: 57 percent of Americans support more airstrikes in Syria.

My eyeballs roll. Hopelessness permeates me, especially because I’m hardly surprised, but still . . . come on. This is nuts. The poll could be about the next move in a Call of Duty video game: 57 percent of Americans say destroy the zombies.

This is American exceptionalism in action. We have the right to be perpetual spectators. We have the right to “have an opinion” about whom the military should bomb next. It means nothing, except to those on the far end of the Great American Video Game, where the results are real.