Lendman: The Prospect of America Attacking North Korea

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For North Americans and the world at large, dealing with North Korea requires understanding, respect and compassion.

Trump threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen” sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. Possible nuclear war on the Korean peninsula would assure losers, not winners - for sure the DPRK destroyed, much of the country turned to rubble, along with likely millions of casualties, devastating to South Korea as well, a catastrophe vital to avoid. Under international law, no nation may attack another except in self-defense, even then only if authorized by the Security Council - not by heads of state, legislatures or courts.

Few if any Americans understand the feelings of most North Koreans toward the United States, a nation that cowardly butchered their country in the 1950s, which killed 1/3 of their population (as well as millions in the South, too), and has continued to provoke them in the intervening years. How would Americans feel about a nation that murdered via overwhelming war technology the equivalent of 50 million of their compatriots, destroyed their life supports, and flattened all their cities? The American media, not to mention US politicians, do not care to make this historical context clear. Considering how traumatised we are over 9/11, which involved fewer than 3,000 victims, it's obviously impossible for Americans to compute the psychic scars of a people who have lost millions—most of them close relatives.

The UN Charter explains under what conditions use of force by one state against another is justified.

Article 2(3) and Article 33(1) require peaceful settlement of international disputes. Article 2(4) prohibits force or its threatened use.

Article 51 allows the “right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member...until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security.”

Justifiable self-defense is permissible. The Security Council has final say.

Charter Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 absolutely prohibit any unilateral threat or use of force not specifically allowed under Article 51 or authorized by the Security Council.

Three General Assembly resolutions are seminal, prohibiting “non-consensual” military intervention:

the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty;

the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations; and

the 1974 Definition of Aggression.

Despite international law (and constitutional law under the Supremacy Clause - Article VI, Clause 2), America wages war on one nation after another, clear acts of aggression, the highest of high crimes.

Apocalyptic military aggression is possible if Washington attacks North Korea, threatening the entire region.

Peace and stability depend on strict observance of international, constitutional and US statute laws, prohibiting preemptive attacks on other nations.

None since WW II threatened America, none now, not North Korea or any other country. Preemptively attacking its territory would be clear naked aggression.

A first strike is only permissible in self-defense if facing a virtually certain imminent attack.

No nation threatens America this way, not North Korea or any others, despite bluster by DPRK officials or others elsewhere.

Weapons kill and destroy, not words. No right of self-defense exists against non-imminent threats, no legal justification for current US wars and likely others planned.

Bluster aside, nothing suggests a preemptive DPRK attack on America or any other country. Yet Trump could order a strike on its country anyway, an act of madness if occurs.

II / North Korea Responds to Trump’s Fire and Fury Threat

Heated rhetoric risks something much more serious. The problem lies in Washington, not Pyongyang. Throughout its post-WW II history, the DPRK never attacked another country. In June 1950, it responded to repeated South Korean cross-border provocations. Harry Truman’s devastating war followed - why Pyongyang genuinely fears US aggression now, doing what it thinks best to avoid it, the reason for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Without them, it would be defenseless. With them, it’s a regional power to be reckoned with.

Pulling back from reckless brinksmanship on the Korean peninsula is as simple America extending an olive branch, halting provocative area military exercises Pyongyang believes are preparations for war, choosing diplomacy over saber rattling - an alternative approach it rejects.

Trump’s bombast via Twitter and other rhetoric shows profound recklessness, likely along with ignorance about the horrors of aggressive wars, especially if nuclear weapons are used.

Via Twitter he boasted “(m)y first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal.”

“It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before…(T)here will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world.”

“(B)eing unpredictable is a big asset,” he said. “North Korea knew exactly what President Obama was going to do.”

He backs up his bombast with naked aggression in multiple theaters, threatening North Korea and Iran with more, maybe Russia and China to follow.

Pyongyang didn’t ease things by threatening to attack Guam this month - even though 2,131 miles between them likely likely puts the island beyond the reach of the DPRK’s ability to strike it, let alone accurately.

Of greater consequence would be devastating war on its territory in response, turning large parts of the country to rubble, causing millions of casualties, South Korea as well caught in the firestorm, hammered by the DPRK’s military capability until it was destroyed.

Defense Secretary “mad dog” Mattis warned Kim Jong-un of “the end of (his) regime and the destruction of its people” if DPRK threats continue, adding:

He “should take heed of the United Nations Security Council’s unified voice, and statements from governments the world over, who agree the DPRK poses a threat to global security and stability.”

The only Korean peninsula threat comes from Washington, not Pyongyang. Combatively Mattis blustered that “the combined allied militaries now possess the most precise, rehearsed and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on earth” - America perhaps willing to destroy the planet to own it.

DPRK heated rhetoric included the official KCNA news agency quoting General Kim Rak-gyom blasting Trump, saying:

“Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work on him,” adding:

Hwasong-12 ballistic missiles can “be launched (by mid-August to) hit the waters 30 to 40 km away from Guam” - sounding more like a shot across the bow threat than an attempted attack on its territory, which may not be possible anyway.

A separate Pyongyang statement said “(i)f the US fails to act with discretion, persisting in its reckless attempts to stifle the DPRK, we will not waver or hesitate to use any form of ultimate means.”

Heated rhetoric on both sides risks “miscalculation and inadvertent war, particularly if North Korea feels that it must act before an imminent US attack,” according to Professor of Government Jessica Chen Weiss.

“From the standpoint of avoiding war, one hopes that Trump’s improvised threat is correctly interpreted as bluster,” she added.

Given its nonbelligerent history, the DPRK is unlikely to attack America or any other country except in self-defense.

China and Russia continue doing all they can to prevent unthinkable war on the Korean peninsula from erupting.

On Wednesday, Moscow’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya stressed the importance of Washington remaining “calm and refrain(ing) from any moves that would provoke another party into actions that might be dangerous” - responding to heated rhetoric on both sides, adding:

“As we said, we want the tensions to ease, and we have to start seriously about devising and inventing ways for a political dialogue on this issue.”

At best, it’ll take a concerted effort by both sides to step back from the brink. The alternative is potentially catastrophic nuclear war, affecting far more than the Korean peninsula if launched.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN LENDMAN was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.

Trump threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen” sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. Possible nuclear war on the Korean peninsula would assure losers, not winners – for sure the DPRK destroyed, much of the country turned to rubble, along with likely millions of casualties, devastating to South Korea as well, a catastrophe vital to avoid. Under international law, no nation may attack another except in self-defense, even then only if authorized by the Security Council – not by heads of state, legislatures or courts.

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Democratic Demagogues and ‘The Better Deal’

Introduction

After 6 months of blaming Russia for the Democratic Party’s Presidential election debacle, the Party stalwarts have finally realized that the American electorate is not listening.

Democratic Party investigators in Washington still hold hearings and the mass media are still scandal mongering, but the public is not rallying to their cause.

Trump’s demagogy may have lost its appeal, while the Republican Administration purges and internecine squabbles have been met with a huge collective yawn by the public. The Democratic Party proves itself to be a weird sideshow for the vast majority of American voters…and for good reason.

The consummate demagog Chuck Schumer —aptly rebaptised the “Senator from Israel”—never misses and opportunity to appear to be on the side of the people while betraying them in all major areas that really matter. Par for the course for Democratic party big wigs.

Their perpetual (corrupt and senile) leaders are unwavering supporters of every indignity and economic hardship that the majority of worker families have suffered for the last three decades.

Democratic Party Senator Chuck ‘the Schmuck’ Schumer and Congresswomen Nancy ‘The Loser’ Pelosi have spent a collective sixty-five years in Congress. Their joint tenure marks a period of long decline in working class living standards and even worker life expectancy, while they have made possible the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1% plutocrats.

The Democratic Party’s ‘Better Deal’ – But for Whom?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n July 2017, nearly a dozen of the top Democratic Party honchos and Congress people met to spin out a new electoral manifesto for American workers which they are marketing as ‘A Better Deal’.

They issued prophetic press releases claiming to have received (presumably from the Holy Mountain) ‘a new vision of the party’. They claimed ‘the vision’ was also the result of their humble ‘listening to the American people’. They confessed that ‘the American people deserve better’. But their sweetly harmonized collective ‘Mea Culpa’ omitted any mention of the four previous Democratic Party Presidential terms, under Bill ‘The Shill’ Clinton and Barak ‘The Con” Obama, which ushered in this deplorable state of affairs for the American working class.

The Democratic Party’s ‘new vision’ wallows in the muddy demagogic footsteps of ‘The Donald’ Trump: Their new ‘product’ is just ‘demagogy lite’.

Tossing electoral fodder to the multitude, they have trotted out three ‘new promises’: 1. cheaper drug prices, 2. the regulation of ‘monopolies’ and 3. more funds to retrain workers. Their new marketing campaign does not include even a tiny whisper about a single payer national health system (favored by the majority of the public and by tens of thousands of doctors and nurses). Their cheap shots on ‘drug prices’ does not mention how Obama and Clinton facilitated the Big Pharma’s pillage of the public for decades. They mention ‘monopolies’ but made no attack on Wall Street billionaires. Their ‘job re-training’ promises have no provision for any national public employment program. The ‘Better Dealers’ with their ‘New Vision’ have banished all mention of ‘trade unions’.

The minimalist program of these old hack Democrats, re-packaged as the ‘Better Deal’, will not attract American workers for several clear reasons:

Reason #1: The Democrats Have a Rotten Record

For the majority of the American electorate there is no reason to believe or trust the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate. The leading Senate Democrat is New York’s ‘Chuck, the Schmuck’ Schumer, best known for his three decade residence in the pockets of Wall Street, his open loyalty to the dictates of Tel Aviv and his cozy relationship with the Brighton Beach mafia.

Schumer promoted the ‘trillion-dollar tax-payer bailout’ of Wall Street while foreclosing on 2 million household mortgages. He consistently defended AIPAC officials caught spying for Israel and has led the Zionist attack against the UN whenever questions of Israel’s war crimes and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people arise. He led the Senatorial Pack of wolves into destroying Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011. He has now turned his tribal ire against his ‘fellow’ American citizens, leading the Senate campaign to make criticism of Israel by boycotting Israeli products punishable by a fine of $1 million dollars and 20 years in Federal Prison. Huge numbers of law-abiding Americans who support the BDS movement for justice and international law will now be targeted with felony convictions and loss of their civil rights by the Israel Anti-Boycott Law (S720). That Senator Schumer would condemn thousands of his own compatriots to virtual life imprisonment for the ‘crime’ of exercising their First Amendment Right of Free Speech speaks volumes about his respect for the Constitution. This thug has brow-beaten scores of his fellow representatives in Washington to support this tyrannical legislation by threatening them with the career-ending accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ if they waver in their fealty to the war criminals in Israel.

Throughout his political career, Senator Schumer consistently supported Federal Reserve free marketer Alan Greenspan, whose wholesale deregulation of the banks and finance sector led directly to the financial crash of 2008.

Geographically closer to Senator Chuck than Tel Aviv are the factory towns, green hills and valleys of Upstate New York where his forgotten constituents have suffered from decades of de-industrialization, 30% de-population and a raging socio-economic crisis of which the opioid epidemic is only part. Meanwhile, the warmonger Schumer prefers to rant for war against North Korea demanding Trump impose trade sanctions on China. If Beijing finally decides to tell Netanyahu how ‘the Shumck’s’ sanction bombast would harm Israel’s lucrative trade with China, a gentle whisper from Tel Aviv would silence Schumer’s bluster.

Peering over his bifocals, ‘Commandante Schumer’ now claims to lead the “The People’s Resistance against Trump”. While his party activists vent against the ‘Trump and the deplorables’ over the internet, Chuck will be attending the Bar Mitzvahs of Brighten Beach mobsters at the Waldorf Astoria and soirees with his Wall Street billionaire backers, consulting over strategy with his real constituents. Under Schumer, New York City has become the most socially and economically polarized and unequal city in the US.

Most voters know that Schumer’s ‘reincarnation’ as a ‘resistance politico’ is laughable and that the Senator’s re-election rests comfortably with the multi-million dollar contributions from his brothers on Wall Street.

Across the nation, most working class voters have dismissed the antics of the Democratic Party’s ‘Maestro of Demagogy’, Bernie Sanders – who spoke pious piffle to the workers while running errands for the ‘Queen of Chaos’, Hilary Clinton, would-be President and life-long Wall Street warmonger.

The citizens rightly reject the Presidential and Senatorial demagogues, Trump and ‘The Schmuck’. According to a recent Bloomberg Poll, 58% of Americans disapprove of the Democrats, a few points lower than the Republicans level of disapproval. An ABC /Washington Post poll revealed that only 37% of Americans believe that the Democratic Party stands for something!

Nine months after the Clinton debacle, the Democrats remain at or below their dismal voter-approval. Trump his skillfully managed to sink a few points below the Democrats.

In other words, nearly 60% of the voters disapprove of leaders from both parties.

The ‘anti-Trump circus and road show’ increasingly takes place to an empty audience. Their “fight” for ‘transgender rights’ attracts the 1% while studiously ignoring the basic life supporting interests of the seventy million Americans (including both transgendered and straight) who work at lousy part-time contingent and minimum wage jobs and desperately need full-time employment at living wages.

In multiple national polls, one hundred and fifty million Americans have registered their support for a national, single payer health system to insure fairness and access to competent medical care. Instead the ‘newly visioned’ Democrats are merely offering cheaper opioids for their social pain. The people want billions of dollars in public investment for deteriorating schools and infrastructures, not bi-partisan (sic) expansion in military spending for seven ongoing wars and new wars in the making.

Warmongers are not Vote-getters

The high level of voter disapproval against the Democrats results from ultra- militarism, as well as their demands for provocative economic sanctions against Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine and China – exceeding Trump and his warmongers.

The voters know that the Democrats ‘new vision’ is a thinly veiled recipe for costly new wars and economic sanctions that will spill their children’s blood, cripple their families futures and reduce job opportunities everywhere for everyone.

New Candidates, Grass-roots Movements and the Democratic Party

Kamala Harris: new and certifiably demagogic face being media primed by the Democrats.As phony as a $3 dollar bill.

The Democratic Party’s fiasco and their election losses, as well as the growing realization that the socio-economic demands of the American people are never going to be addressed by the ‘old-new visionaries’, have led to a new ‘crop’ of candidates for the 2018 elections.

Over 200 Democratic Party candidates have registered to run in 2018 elections, hoping that ‘new faces’ and a new style of demagogy will bring back the disenchanted voters. These much-ballyhooed ‘upstarts’ toss out empty promises to the victims of the dying economy, industrial towns in ruins, villages with social and health crises, big cities with skyrocketing rents and stagnant wages. They offer nothing that can bring workers back to a Democratic Party still tightly controlled by the Tel Aviv-Wall Street shilling, war-mongering Pelosis and Schumers.

The Democratic Party ‘insurgents’ try to imitate the ‘Bernie’ Sanders double- speak, attacking the billionaires while shilling for the oligarchs’ stable of loyal Democratic Party hacks. The ‘new vision’ Democrats have moats in both eyes and a long road to regaining the votes of the disillusioned ‘deplorables’!

Media-sponsored trips to Rust Belt States to bad-mouth ‘The Donald’ and his anti-health agenda provides no alternative to the decades of Democratic Party betrayal on health care, especially during the last Democrat Presidents whose policies facilitated the rise Big Pharma’s prescription opioid epidemic which has killed over 500,000 overworked and underpaid workers since 1999. Their continued refusal to hold these policies and their authors to account does not reflect any vision of a viable solution to the crisis.

Conclusion

In place of the discredited bipartisan electoral system, numerous grass roots groups are emerging: Some are operating parallel to the flurry of new Demo- demagogues while many are working against it.

Many community-based groups have taken radical positions, which demand vast new job programs and public finance for a national, accountable, high quality health care system.

They demand prosecution and long prison sentences for Wall Street swindlers, money launderers, tax evaders and corporate drug pushers.

They demand a 90% tax rate ‘adjustment’ on the trillion dollar corporations- Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google etc.

The grass roots movements are more than just an ‘anti-Trump’ bandwagon (secretly driven by the old pols of the Democratic Party): They are against both parties and all demagogues. They are especially opposed to any phony ‘Better Deals’ coming out of the backsides of the billionaire-backed ‘shilling and dealing’ Democrats!

James Petras is a world-renowned public intellectual. He is a retired Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published extensively on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues.

The Democrats new marketing campaign does not include even a tiny whisper about a single payer national health system (favored by the majority of the public and by tens of thousands of doctors and nurses). Their cheap shots on ‘drug prices’ does not mention how Obama and Clinton facilitated the Big Pharma’s pillage of the public for decades.

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Trump’s nuclear war threat against North Korea

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By Bill Van Auken

US President Donald Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against the impoverished and oppressed nation of North Korea has sent shockwaves of dread and anxiety around the world. The very week that survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were marking the 72nd anniversary of the US atomic bombings that killed nearly a quarter million Japanese men, women and children, the American president interrupted his golf vacation to threaten a nuclear war in Asia with incalculable consequences for all of humanity.

A senior White House aide tried to play down the chilling implications of Trump’s statement, telling the media that the president’s comment had been “unplanned and spontaneous,” while US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Americans they “should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days.”

Yet even as these less than convincing reassurances were being uttered, Trump’s defense secretary, the former Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, routinely referred to by the media as the “adult in the room” and a force for moderation, echoed the president’s threat. He demanded Wednesday that North Korea “cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.” The meaning is unmistakable: bow to Washington’s demands or face nuclear annihilation.

Trump himself followed up his earlier threat with a tweet Wednesday boasting of Washington’s ability to prosecute a nuclear war. “My first order as president was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal,” he declared. “It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before. Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”

The recklessness of such threats and bullying rhetoric is staggering. What are the leaders of the North Korean government supposed to think when the most powerful nuclear power in the world repeatedly threatens to attack them with “fire and fury” and wipe out their entire population?

These threats are made under conditions where the US has positioned a battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson off Korean shores and sent B-1 Lancer bombers flying menacing sorties near the North Korean border.

North Korea has responded to the US war threats with its own threat to launch a missile attack on the US Pacific territory of Guam, home to bases for American nuclear submarines and strategic bombers. While the threat could be brushed off as mere rhetoric from Pyongyang, that is by no means certain. What if the North Koreans calculate that the American threats are real and war is imminent? They could well decide that rather than lose their military to US bombs and missiles they should carry out their own preemptive strike and show Washington that they are not bluffing.

While the World Socialist Web Site holds no brief for the reactionary hereditary regime in North Korea and its own provocative actions, there is nothing irrational about such calculations.

There is an immense weight of history underlying North Korea’s position. The US war against Korea 65 years ago killed at least three million people, two million of them in the north. According to the US Air Force’s own assessment, “Eighteen of twenty-two major cities in North Korea had been at least half obliterated.” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay later recalled, “We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both.”

So to North Korea, US talk of “fire and fury” and threats to exterminate the entire population are anything but inflated rhetoric.

The entire basis of the current conflict is Washington’s demand that North Korea stop its tests of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and surrender its entire nuclear capacity. But the government of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is well aware of the fate of other regimes that bowed to such demands.

Iraq, which like North Korea was proclaimed part of an “axis of evil” by George W. Bush, agreed to give up its weapons programs and was invaded anyway in 2003 on the lying pretext that it retained “weapons of mass destruction.” The US war took some one million Iraqi lives and ended with the lynching of the country’s head of state, Saddam Hussein. Similarly, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi agreed to give up his weapons program after the Iraq invasion, only to see the US and NATO launch a war against his country in 2011 that killed tens of thousands of Libyans, left the society in ruins and ended with his own lynch-mob murder.

North Korea’s nuclear program is the only thing that has kept the country and its government from suffering a similar fate.

Trump’s seemingly mad threats are a signal that US imperialism is no longer willing to accept the risk of a nuclear confrontation as an insurmountable barrier to its plans for aggressive war.

The US administration is attempting to prepare the public for what almost certainly would become a world catastrophic war, with devastating consequences for the economic conditions, democratic rights and very lives of working people in the US and every other part of the planet. The White House, the Pentagon and the various think tanks that elaborate US imperialist policy all claim that Pyongyang has crossed the threshold of becoming a nuclear power, having allegedly developed miniaturized warheads and the intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering them against a US city.

There is no more reason to take these assertions for good coin than there was to swallow the Bush administration’s lies about Iraqi WMDs. And while Washington proclaims North Korean nukes to be an existential threat, it has assisted equally unstable and aggressive regimes in Israel, India and Pakistan to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

The calculations of the capitalist ruling class in preparing for war against North Korea are spelled out in horrifying terms in the latest issue of the Economistmagazine, which elaborates a hypothetical scenario for the outbreak of a war that ends in a swift victory for the US. It estimates the initial civilian death toll at 300,000, with many more to die from radiation poisoning. It concludes with a hypothetical tweet from Trump: “Nuke attack on Seoul by evil Kim was BAD! Had no choice but to nuke him back. But thanks to my actions, America is safe again!”

This ghastly prospect is something of a best case scenario, as such a war would potentially impact not only the entire population of North Korea, but also 10 million people in Seoul and 38 million in greater Tokyo, not to mention tens of thousands of US troops stationed in South Korea. Moreover, a US attack on North Korea could, as it did 65 years ago, draw in China, now a major nuclear power.

The escalating war danger and the seemingly insane threats of nuclear extermination are not merely a matter of the criminal and fascistic mindset of Donald Trump. It is the entire US government that has begun to speak in the language of Adolf Hitler.

This is the end product of a political culture that has been developed over the course of 25 years of unrelenting wars of aggression, threats and bullying by a capitalist oligarchy in the US that embraced militarism and aggressive war as a means of offsetting its eroding economic dominance.

War abroad has been accompanied by ever widening social inequality and ceaseless attacks on the living conditions and basic rights of the working class at home. Social opposition is growing under conditions where Trump is the most unpopular president in American history. The political establishment is internally divided and the Trump administration is at war with itself. There is a real danger that the White House will seize upon a war with North Korea to project internal social and political tensions outward against a foreign “enemy.”

No one should doubt the far-reaching consequences of such a policy. The launching of a war that means mass slaughter, including the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, will be used as the pretext for violent political repression within the US itself.

The efforts of Google to blacklist the World Socialist Web Site is a warning of the dictatorial methods being prepared for the working class as a whole.

Driving the threat of a nuclear world war is the deepening crisis of US and world capitalism, at the center of which is the insoluble contradiction between global economy and the division of the world into rival nation states. The same crisis of the profit system, however, creates both the objective conditions for and the political necessity of the working class fighting for its own revolutionary solution, through the building of an international movement against war based on a socialist perspective to put an end to capitalism before it plunges humanity into barbarism.

About the Author

Bill Van Auken is a senior editorial analyst with wsws.org

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Sweet Irony...
Amazon will donate a commission for every purchase you make using this app

We all know that Amazon is an uber-capitalist octopus swallowing ever more industries and openly collaborating with the CIA. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, probably the #2 richest man on earth, is no friend of radicals, or socialist revolution, that's for sure. But this app, ironically, promises to donate some money to whoever uses it to search and make a purchase on Amazon. Since many people will go on using Amazon due to habit or convenience, make it kick back a few dollars our way to continue our pro-peace and anti-imperialist work. Our financial situation leaves us no choice at this point. So consider it. A boycott of Amazon by lefties at this point is hardly going to register on their radar. But any funding we get, at our puny level, will keep us going. Simple as that.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

Why There’s No Reason to Worry About War With North Korea

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by GARY LEUPP

[dropcap]I [/dropcap]
Tillerson: "We seek no regime change." Who the hell do you believe? His boss keeps shooting his mouth off and painting himself into a corner.

But now the State Department is denying that it seeks regime change, and that it is willing to talk with Pyongyang—meaning it’s willing to return to a practice abandoned fifteen years ago, with the repercussions we’ve seen. Trump even made that unusual statement in May that, “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with [Kim Jong Un] I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it, if it’s under the, again, under the right circumstances. But I would do that.” It will be necessary for somebody to do that, the alternative being a military strike condemned by China, Russia, and the world in general, followed immediately by the destruction of Seoul. (Pyongyang has threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire.”)

Logic would suggest ruling out a military response to North Korean nuclear tests and missile launches. But Sen. Lindsey Graham has told NBC that Trump has “told me to my face” that reports that “there is no military option” are “just false.”

“There is a military option: to destroy North Korea’s nuclear program and North Korea itself. He’s not going to allow — President Trump — the ability of this madman [Kim Jong Un] to have a missile that could hit America. If there’s going to be a war to stop him, it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die over here — and he’s told me that to my face.”

He doesn’t mention how many thousands. But North Korea has a (conventional weapons) arsenal on its side of the DMZ that could rain 300,000 rounds on the south during the first hour of a counterattack. We’re talking tens of thousands of Korean civilians, dying over there, supposedly to protect America.

Nah. Won’t happen. Can’t happen.

China’s Xi will use his friendship with Trump to dissuade him from any rash move. (Oh, but you say, Trump has given up on China, either because he’s realized China doesn’t own Korea, or because he’s decided its unwilling to bully its neighbor to Washington’s satisfaction. So he will have to—how did he put it?—“handle North Korea” himself.)

What did he say last month? “We’ll handle North Korea. We’ll be able to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything,”

A recent Zogby poll found that 52% of Americans—who can for a time be persuaded of anything—would support a “preemptive strike” on North Korean nuclear facilities. It would surely boost Trump’s approval ratings (now at around 35%) for a few days….until China angrily sells off its U.S. Treasury bonds and destroys the U.S. economy. And until the images appear on people’s laptops, if they still function, of a once-city of ten million as moonscape. Again, to protect America.

It is so trying and stressful to live in a country that extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, protected by oceans and non-threatening neighbors, with the most destructive military arsenal any nation has ever possessed, and troops stationed abroad in over 100 countries, accustomed to random military interventions anywhere anytime—–and yet, so threatened by North Korea and the prospect of a nuclear attack on Honolulu or Denver that it may have to—for “existential” reasons or whatever—cause Seoul to become a sea of fire. And maybe unless heads cooler than his prevail initiate World War III.

What did Trump ask a foreign policy adviser three times during a briefing, in connection with nuclear weapons?

“If we have them, why can’t we use them?” (Why not just one of those small tactical nukes, on the Yongbyon Research Center? To show we mean business?)

Won’t happen, though, no way. Just too irrational to imagine.

The new South Korean leader Moon Jae-in with U.S. support will engage in a renewed “sunshine policy.” He will visit Pyongyang and share toasts with Outstanding Leader Kim Jong Un. The Chinese proposal supported by Russia to trade Pyongyang’s suspension of its nuclear program in exchange for reasonable U.S. concessions will win Sen. Graham’s enthusiastic support. Everything will he happy.

It will be handled. So relax.

***

1:00 Tuesday. Wolf Blitzer: “The nuclear stakes just got higher!”

Oh gosh. Pentagon correspondent (and de facto spokesperson and apologist) Barbara Starr on CNN now saying “It’s hard to know where President Trump can go” now that the Washington Post reports, and CNN broadcasts as “breaking news,” that the U.S. intelligence community (which enjoys such global repute) says North Korea is making miniaturized missile-ready nuclear weapons.

So Trump has no alternative but to do something, urgently, to show he’s strong… didn’t Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev just call him “impotent”? What makes a 71-year-old malignant narcissist with deep apparent sexual insecurities and size anxiety issues feel more potent than dropping bombs and launching missiles?

Blitzer on the North Korean nuke problem: “It seems to be moving very quickly.” More than anyone hitherto knew. “Now things have changed so dramatically,” says his learned expert guest—-who just stated that all historians outside of North Korea agree that the U.S. was not responsible for the Korean war. I guess that means it will not be responsible for the next one.

Everybody just stay calm.

About the Author

Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu

Oh gosh. Pentagon correspondent (and de facto spokesperson and apologist) Barbara Starr on CNN now saying “It’s hard to know where President Trump can go” now that the Washington Post reports, and CNN broadcasts as “breaking news,” that the U.S. intelligence community (which enjoys such global repute) says North Korea is making miniaturized missile-ready nuclear weapons.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

The End of the CIA’s Dirty War in Syria

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by JOHN WIGHT

When the definitive history of the conflict in Syria is written, the role of the United States in funding, training, and arming rebel groups will by necessity comprise a major chapter.

Washington’s announcement that the CIA has cancelled its program to support ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria – estimated to have cost the US taxpayer over $1billion and which has helped perpetuate a conflict in which up to 400,000 people have died, many in the most heinous way – was made recently in the manner of a multinational corporation wrapping up a failed business venture overseas.

There was no mention made that the program had been undertaken in violation of international law. No mention either of the fact it was in support of an insurgency largely been made up of non-Syrians, who over the past six years have descended on the country driven not by the desire to establish a democracy in the country but rather to impose religious and cultural tyranny.

Imagine, for a moment, if the shoe was on the other foot. Imagine if Russia’s FSB had set up and run such a program, one in support of an armed insurgency dominated by religious extremists with a penchant for torture, enslaving women, and chopping off people’s heads – whose objective was the overthrow of the secular government of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic state – imagine what the reaction would be in Western capitals. The outrage would be stratospheric – and justifiably so.

As for those who argue that the West has only ever supported moderate head-chopping fanatics in Syria, never the extreme kind, this is a preposterous distinction that the Syrian people have never had the luxury of embracing.

Beheading prisoners is routine and celebrated by ISIS...and Saudi Arabia. The company Washington and the whore media keep—horrendous to say the least. And all this savagery and unspeakable criminality just to further enrich those who are already filthy rich: the US elites and their equally rapacious buddies across the globe.

In a New York Times article on this story we are informed how “once C.I.A.-trained fighters crossed into Syria, C.I.A. officers had difficulty controlling them. The fact that some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters — and that some of the rebels joined the group — confirmed the fears of many in the Obama administration when the program began. Although the Nusra Front was widely seen as an effective fighting force against Mr. Assad’s troops, its Qaeda affiliation made it impossible for the Obama administration to provide direct support for the group.”

The sheer unadulterated stupidity of US policy in Syria over the past few years is enshrined in this passage. What did they think was going to happen? Did the CIA really believe their nice moderate rebels with their shiny new US-supplied weapons and equipment would slot into the conflict and remain inoculated from the attentions of the bad extremist rebels? Are they really so incredibly inept and disastrously ill informed about a region they have expended so much effort in trying to dominate over the past 70 years?

From the very beginning, Washington and its allies have completely and woefully misread events not only in Syria but also throughout the region. The so-called Arab Spring caught the US by surprise both in terms of its size and the speed with which it spread in 2011. The result was panic in Washington over what it portended for US influence in the Middle East, producing a monumental collapse in analysis responsible for the catastrophic military intervention in Libya under the rubric of NATO.

Driving the Libyan misadventure was not pure ideals of helping to overthrow a cruel dictator and establish a Jeffersonian democracy in his place, as claimed. Indeed, how could it be considering that while Gaddafi was in power the US, UK, and France – the main participants in the NATO intervention – enjoyed buoyant economic relations with Libya, along with near normal diplomatic relations? No, NATO’s intervention in Libya was fueled by the desire of the US and its European allies to place themselves at the head of an Arab Spring which by then had run out of steam.

Yet, regardless, the West staged a crude and wrongheaded intervention, one that only helped to fan the flames of a counterrevolutionary reflex that saw not democracy but Salafi-jihadism prosper. Informing this strategy was an Orientalist and reductive treatment of the region as an undifferentiated collection of Arab and Muslim states which are near identical in their complexion, social breakdown and dynamic, not to mention national character. Thus Tunisia is the same as Egypt is the same as Libya is the same as Syria, and so on.

There was no popular revolution in Libya, an assertion borne out by the fact that even though Gaddafi had no air force to speak of, and despite his air defense capability being weak and neutralized by NATO early on in the conflict, it still took eight months for the Libyan leader to be overthrown and butchered from the day NATO aircraft began flying sorties in the country in March 2011.

Similarly, in Syria, by the time the CIA program began in 2013, the country was being ravaged by a latter day Khmer Rouge intent on implementing its very own Year Zero, involving the wholesale massacre and extirpation of minority communities that can trace their presence in the Levant back a millennia and more.

This is not to say that every militant fighting the government in Syria was and is both non-Syrian and an Islamist extremist. It is to say, though, that non-Syrians and Islamist extremists were and remain in the driving seat in forging the sectarian character of the conflict. Confirmation of this was provided by a 2012 declassified intelligence report produced by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

Yet, regardless, the CIA still embarked on its failed program to locate and cultivate a third force in a country the US has never had any legal or moral right to operate in. Not that legality and morality have ever been constraints on an organization whose deeds, throughout its history, have regularly conformed to those commonly associated with a terrorist organization.

Fortunately, in Syria, those deeds have come to naught.

About the Author

John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1

—PG

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found