FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—The arms dealing trip by Pentagon boss James Mattis to the Neo-Nazis in Ukraine this week is the reality check on what the Washington establishment and the American military-industrial complex really think about Nazism and extremists. We could also add to the list the American arms dealing to fundamentalist regimes like Saudi Arabia and the covert arming of head-chopping Wahhabi terrorists. All of them are welcome clients for American militarism, in the service of US hegemonic world dominance. Official US condemnation of Nazis, fascists and extremists is just American public relations rhetoric. Evidently, the condemnation has no credibility in terms of objective reality.
WESTERN EXCEPTIONALISM
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DMITRY ORLOV—Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Ghouta in Syria, where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.
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DAVID SWANSON—In recent U.S. culture, or part of it anyway, it has become common to investigate one’s own unknown depths of racism, sexism, and other prejudices — a trend that for the most part I consider very positive. But going beyond that to examine nationalism, patriotism, exceptionalism, militarism, and the embarrassing and horrifying assumptions on which these isms rest is generally off limits. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is to be credited for having been willing to publish Hansen’s book. Millions of liberals intent on breaking down prejudice and stirring up hatred of Russians while justifying a trillion-dollar-a-year military empire should consider reading it.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Although the truth about this matter might not be of much interest to voters in any country, it will matter a great deal to the ruling aristocracies in any countries, such as Turkey, which are now making decisions between buying weapons made by the U.S. side, or else buying weapons made by the Russian side. And those decisions, in turn, will factor heavily into the choosing-up-of-sides in WW III, if neither the U.S nor Russia backs down so that a full-fledged hot war between U.S. and Russia results.
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The New Yorker’s Days as Something to Look Up to Are Over
5 minutes readP. GREANVILLE—By running imperial shill Joshua Yaffa’s insidious screed, Russia’s “Madman” Routine in Syria May Have Averted Direct Confrontation with the U.S., For Now, and similar pieces, at a moment when humanity stands on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, or at least an unthinkably devastating Word War 3, not to mention endorse the further sociopathic mutilation of a nation brutally attacked and already devastated by a conglomeration of powerful bullies, the New Yorker editors relinquished their enviable place in journalism’s high brow precincts and toppled their own publication off of the pedestal it sat, virtually unchallenged, for many years.