Murderers in High Places

Walter Clemens

Any politician who votes against gun control is complicit in murder—this includes President Trump and the many Senators and Representatives who have accepted millions of dollars from the National Rifle Association and who fear that a bad grade from the NRA could cost them an election.

While NRA-backed politicians do their thing in Washington, more Americans die from gun violence in the US than from terrorist acts or fighting overseas. More than 36,000  Americans are shot to death each year—more than those killed by alcohol (over 31,000) and almost as many as those who die in automobile accidents (38,000), though well below the roughly 60,000 who die from opioids and other drugs and the half million who die from smoking tobacco.

How to reduce gun violence? President Trump and the NRA are correct: Many if not most mass shooters have mental and emotional problems such as those that apparently drove Nikolas Cruz to shoot and kill at least seventeen pupils and teachers at his former high school. But authorities cannot lock up every person with mental or emotional problems. It would be far more useful and feasible to register every gun, large and small, and to require that every gun holder be licensed to use and/or own a firearm. A national registration and licensing system could be mandated under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.

Guns should be regulated like automobiles—both can be valuable but also dangerous. Every vehicle must be registered and, in most states, checked for safety and emissions. Every would-be driver must pass a test to demonstrate knowledge of the rules and his/her physical and mental ability to drive safely. There is no reason to pussyfoot with half-way measures such as limiting assault rifles or the gadgets that turn a rifle into a rapid-fire machine gun.

Guns can be turned against leaders as well as school children and concert goers.  Four US presidents have been assassinated while in office. Two others were wounded. There have been at least 20 attempts to assassinate sitting and former presidents. Republicans as well Democrats can be shot.

Possessing a gun does not necessarily improve one’s chances of survival. Residents of states with higher levels of gun ownership suffer higher rates of gun-related deaths. Many gun owners purchase weapons for self-defense, but they are dreaming. As the Washington Post reported on June 14, 2016,  for every person who uses a gun in self-defense, nearly six persons employ a gun to commit a crime.

Universal gun registration and licensing may appear utopian. But this approach offers a clear and relatively simple response to a severe challenge to public health. Defenders of gun rights will say that such measures would violate the Second Amendment. But such obligations would be no more onerous than the requirement to register every motorized vehicle and license every driver. Members of the Senate and House of Representatives could back gun registration as a way to improve the safety of legitimate gun owners as well as other Americans.

As for the Second Amendment, while the Supreme Court ruled that individuals have a right to arms, the court also left the door open to gun regulation. A requirement to register arms and license ownership would not jeopardize Second Amendment guarantees.   Nor would such rules stop  hunters, sport shooters, or those who feel safer with their own weapons from owning guns. To obtain a license, however, an applicant would have to maintain a clean record and demonstrate an ability to maintain and use a weapon to prevent injury to themselves and others .

Yes, bad guys would be reluctant to register their weapons and seek a license. In time, however, the law would catch up with many of them. Given his medical record  and school expulsions, an individual such as Nikolas Cruz could not have obtained or retained a gun license under a national system to register guns and license gun owners. Nor could he have purchased a gun.

Every weapon registered should have a safety device to prevent firing by children or other unlicensed persons. Registration of large-bore and rapid-fire weapons that are more powerful than what can be useful for hunters should probably be limited to collectors who exhibit them or keep them under lock and key.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life comes first. Without it, there can be neither liberty nor happiness. If we demand international curbs on weapons of mass destruction, should we not also expect and demand regulation of weapons that kill thousands of innocents every year in America?

The Question of Sanctions: South Africa and Palestine

David Swanson

Sanctions against apartheid South Africa are, in the opinion of the writer, the only instance when sanctions have achieved their objective. They were also driven by civil society rather than by governments.

By contrast, US sanctions since the 1950s against Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea and numerous other countries have proved dismal failures. Even worse, they have inflicted unjustifiable misery upon the very people they were purportedly intended to assist.

The former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright remains infamous for her notorious comment on television that the deaths of five hundred thousand Iraqi children was a price worth paying in pursuit of US sanctions against the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein. The cost of reconstruction for the devastation inflicted on Iraq since 2003 is estimated at US$100 billion.

At question is whether US government sanctions are actually intended to achieve any objective, or are merely “feel-good” gestures intended to satisfy a domestic political audience? So-called “smart sanctions” — freezing assets and imposing travel bans on foreign government officials — have also proved completely ineffective.

South Africa’s Experience: Sports boycotts and fruit boycotts against apartheid South Africa over a twenty-five year period from 1960 until 1985 raised awareness about human rights abuses in South Africa, but most certainly did not bring down the apartheid government. Trade boycotts are inevitably riddled through with loopholes. There are invariably businessmen who, for a discount or premium, are prepared to take the risks of flouting trade boycotts, including mandatory arms embargoes.

The consequences however, for ordinary people in the boycotted country are that wages for workers are cut (or jobs lost) to reflect the discount on exported goods or, alternatively, that prices for imported goods are inflated by the premium paid to a foreign exporter prepared to break the boycott.

In the “national interest,” banks and/or chambers of commerce are always prepared to issue fraudulent letters of credit or certificates of origin to thwart the intentions of trade sanctions. As an example, Nedbank during the Rhodesian UDI days from 1965 until 1990 provided dummy accounts and front companies for its Rhodesian subsidiary, Rhobank.

Similarly, end user certificates in respect of the arms trade are not worth-the-paper- they-are-written-on because corrupt politicians are handsomely recompensed for flouting arms embargoes. As another example, the Togolese dictator, Gnassingbe Eyadema (1967-2005) profited immensely from the “blood diamonds” for weapons trade, and his son Faure has continued in power since his father died in 2005.

The United Nations Security Council in November 1977 determined that human rights abuses in South Africa posed a threat to international peace and security, and imposed a mandatory arms embargo. At the time, the decision was hailed as a major advance in 20th century diplomacy.

Yet as an article in the Daily Maverick on apartheid profits (including the linked 19 previous installments) published on December 15, 2017 highlights, the US, British, Chinese, Israeli, French and other governments, combined with a variety of rogues, were willing to flout international law to support the apartheid government and/or to profit from illegal transactions.

Massive expenditures on armaments, including nuclear weapons — plus a premium of more than US$25 billion spent to bypass oil sanctions — by 1985 led to a financial crisis, and South Africa defaulted on its relatively low foreign debt of US$25 billion in September that year. South Africa was self-sufficient except for oil, and assumed that, as the world’s main gold producer, it was impregnable. The country was however, also on a fast track to civil war and a prospective racial bloodbath.

Television coverage around the world of civil unrest stirred international revulsion with the system of apartheid, and amongst Americans resonated with the civil rights campaign. More than two-thirds of South Africa’s debt was short-term and thus repayable within one year, hence the foreign debt crisis was a cash-flow problem rather than actual bankruptcy.

All the military equipment, including those nuclear weapons, proved useless in defending the apartheid system

In response to public pressure, Chase Manhattan Bank in July precipitated the “debt standstill” by announcing that it would not renew the US$500 million in loans that it had outstanding to South Africa. Other US banks followed, but their combined loans amounting to just over US$2 billion were alone exceeded by that of Barclays Bank, the largest creditor. A rescheduling committee, chaired by Dr Fritz Leutwiler of Switzerland, was established to reschedule the debts.

Divestment is a peculiarly American response given the role of pension funds on the New York Stock Exchange, and shareholder activism. For instance, Mobil Oil, General Motors and IBM withdrew from South Africa under pressure from American shareholders, but sold their South African subsidiaries at “fire sale prices” to Anglo-American Corporation and other companies that were prime beneficiaries of the apartheid system.

The “debt standstill” provided the South African Council of Churches and other civil society activists with an opportunity to launch the international banking sanctions campaign at the United Nations in October 1985. It was an appeal to international bankers by [then] Bishop Desmond Tutu and Dr Beyers Naude to request the banks participating in the rescheduling process that:-

“rescheduling of South Africa’s debt should be made conditional upon the resignation of the present regime, and its replacement by a government responsive to the needs of all South Africa’s people.”

As a last nonviolent initiative to avert a civil war, the appeal, was circulated through the US Congress, and became incorporated into the terms of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill, but his veto was then overturned by the US Senate in October 1986.

Rescheduling of South Africa debt became the conduit to access to the New York inter-bank payment system, a much more critical matter because of the role of the US dollar as settlement currency in foreign exchange transactions. Without access to the seven major New York banks, South Africa would have been unable to make payment for imports or receive payment for exports.

Given Archbishop Tutu’s influence, US churches pressured New York banks to choose between the banking business of apartheid South Africa or the pension fund business of their respective denominations. When David Dinkins became Mayor of New York City, the municipality added a choice between South Africa or the City’s payroll accounts.

The objective of the international banking sanctions campaign was repeatedly declared:

The end of the state of emergency
Release of political prisoners
Unbanning of political organizations
Repeal of apartheid legislation, and
Constitutional negotiations towards a non-racial, democratic and united South Africa.

There was therefore a measurable end game, and an exit strategy. The timing was fortuitous. The Cold War was coming to a close, and the apartheid government could no longer claim the “communist threat” in its appeals to the US government. President George Bush senior succeeded Reagan in 1989 and met the church leaders in May that year, during which he declared that he was appalled by what was happening in South Africa and offered his support.

Congressional leaders were already considering legislation during 1990 to close loopholes in the C-AAA and to prohibit all South African financial transactions in the US. Because of the role of the US dollar, this would have also impacted on third-country trade with countries such as Germany or Japan. In addition, the United Nations set June 1990 as the deadline to abolish the apartheid system.

The British government under Mrs Margaret Thatcher attempted – unsuccessfully — to thwart these initiatives by announcing in October 1989 that she in conjunction with the South African Reserve Bank had extended South Africa’s foreign debt until 1993.

Following the Cape Town March for Peace in September 1989 led by Archbishop Tutu, the US Under-Secretary of State for African Affairs, Henk Cohen issued an ultimatum demanding compliance by the South African government of the first three conditions of the banking sanctions campaign by February 1990.

Despite apartheid government protestations, that was the background to President FW de Klerk’s announcement on 2 February 1990, the release of Nelson Mandela nine days later, and the commencement of constitutional negotiations to end the apartheid system. Mandela himself acknowledged that the most effective boycott of apartheid came from American bankers, saying:

“they had previously helped to finance South Africa’s highly militarised state, but now abruptly withdrew their loans and investments.”

Mandela did not appreciate the distinction between loans and the New York inter-bank payment system, but the South African minister of finance acknowledged that “South Africa could not manufacture dollars.” Without access to the New York inter-bank payment system, the economy would have collapsed.

Following the apartheid government’s announcements on 2 February 1990, it was then not necessary for the US Congress to pursue the intended complete severance of South African access to the American financial system. That option remained open however, should negotiations between the apartheid government and the African National Congress fail.

The “writing was on the wall.” Rather than risk destruction of the economy and its infrastructure and a racial bloodbath, the apartheid government opted to negotiate a settlement and to move towards a constitutional democracy. This is expressed in the preamble to the Constitution that declares:

We, the people of South Africa.

Recognise the injustices of our past,

Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land,

Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country, and

Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.”

With banking sanctions having “balanced the scales” between the two parties, constitutional negotiations proceeded between the apartheid government, the ANC and other political representatives. There were many setbacks, and it was only in late 1993 that Mandela decided that the transition to democracy was finally irreversible, and that financial sanctions could be revoked.

Given the success of sanctions in ending apartheid, there was considerable interest for some years in sanctions as a means of resolving other long-standing international conflicts. There has been blatant misuse, and consequent discrediting, of sanctions by US as an instrument to assert American military and financial hegemony in the world.

This is illustrated by US sanctions against Iraq, Venezuela, Libya and Iran, which sought payment for oil exports in other currencies and/or gold instead of US dollars, and then followed by “regime change.”

Banking technology has of course advanced dramatically in the subsequent three decades since the South African banking sanctions campaign. The place of leverage is no longer in New York, but in Brussels where Society for Worldwide Inter-bank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) is headquartered.

SWIFT is essentially a giant computer which authenticates the payment instructions of more than 11 000 banks in over 200 countries. Every bank has a SWIFT code, the fifth and sixth letters of which identify the country of domicile.

Palestine: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement was established in 2005, and is modeled after South Africa’s experience. Whilst it took more than 25 years for sanctions against apartheid South Africa to make significant impact, the Israeli government is increasingly frantic about BDS which, inter alia, has been nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

It is noteworthy that the award of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize to Desmond Tutu gave huge momentum to international solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement. The Norwegian Pension Fund, which administers funds of over US$1 trillion, has blacklisted the major Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems.

Other Scandinavian and Dutch institutions have followed suit. Church pension funds in the US are also becoming engaged. Younger and progressive Jewish Americans increasingly distancing themselves from the right-wing Israeli government, and even sympathizing with Palestinians. European governments in 2014 warned their citizens of the reputational and financial risks of business transactions with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The UN Human Rights Council in January 2018 has collated a list of over 200 Israeli and American companies that are actively involved in facilitating and funding the Occupation of Palestinian Territories in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and other instruments of international law.

In response, the Israeli government has allocated substantial financial and other resources in legislative initiatives – both within Israel and internationally — to criminalise the BDS momentum, and to smear the movement as anti-Semitic. This is however, already proving counter-productive, as illustrated by controversies and court cases in the US.

The American Civil Liberties Union has successfully challenged such attempts, eg in Kansas, citing violations of the First Amendment dealing with free speech, as combined with long traditions in the US — including even the Boston Tea Party and the civil rights campaign — of boycotts to advance political developments.

The letters IL in the SWIFT code identify Israeli banks. Programmatically, it would be a simple matter to suspend transactions to and from IL accounts. This would block payment for imports and receipt of proceeds for Israeli exports. The difficulty is political will, and the influence of the Israeli lobby.

The precedent and efficacy of SWIFT sanctions has however, already been established in the case of Iran. Under pressure from the US and Israel, the European Union instructed to SWIFT to suspend transactions with Iranian banks in order to pressure the Iranian government to negotiate the 2015 Iranian nuclear weapons agreement.

It is now acknowledged that the so-called “peace process” mediated by the US government was simply a cover to extend the Occupation and further Israeli settlements “beyond the green line.” The prospect now of new negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations between Palestine and Israel challenges the international community to assist in ensuring that such negotiations are successful.

To the objective of assisting such negotiations by balancing the scales, it is suggested that SWIFT sanctions against Israeli banks would strike at the Israeli financial and political elites, who have the clout to influence the Israeli government to comply with four stipulated conditions, namely:

To release immediately all Palestinian political prisoners,

To end its occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, and that it will dismantle the “apartheid wall,”

To recognize the fundamental rights of Arab-Palestinians to full equality in Israel-Palestine, and

To acknowledge the right of return of Palestinians.

Paying the Price: the TUC and Brexit

Will Podmore

The Trade Unions Congress (TUC) is campaigning for Britain to stay in the single market for as long as possible, under a transitional agreement, to “keep workers’ rights safe”. The call came in a press release on 6 July from the TUC supporting the line being taken by the employers’ organisation, the CBI.

Nowhere do these EU fans talk about the cost of staying in the European Union. In particular, they see the European Court of Justice as the guardian of workers’ rights. Yet it is anything but that.

Successive ECJ judgements have made it perfectly clear that the rights to free movement – of goods, labour, services and capital – come first. The right to strike in pursuance of what it calls social policy (jobs, pay, conditions, pensions) cannot, according to the Viking judgement*, “automatically override” these fundamental rights.

More fundamentally, said ECJ Advocate General Poiares Maduro on 23 May 2007, “the possibility for a company to relocate to a Member State where its operating costs will be lower is pivotal to the pursuit of effective intra Community trade”. There’s the EU, in a nutshell: it’s a fundamental right for a company to move from country to country in search of lower and lower labour costs.

The EU’s fundamental rights are all about the market. It’s a far cry from “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”. In effect, the EU acts as a superstate whose constitution embodies the freedom of capital and capitalists in a way unheard of in any other.

The first price that workers pay is that they must allow outsourcing and privatisation of national industries and services. The second is that they cannot strike to stop work being outsourced to a cheaper country. The ECJ made the reasons for that very clear: “Without the rules on freedom of movement and competition it would be impossible to achieve the Community’s fundamental aim of having a functioning common market.”

And of course there is the cost of the free movement of labour. It’s beyond doubt that it has hit unskilled workers in Britain particularly hard. It has lowered pay rates, and according even to the official Migration Advisory Committee, damaged the job prospects of lower skilled natives when the labour market is slack.

It’s not just the unskilled. Without free movement how could the government have erected the massive tuition fees barrier to the training of nurses, midwives and other health professionals while understaffing runs through hospitals like a plague? And the laws of supply and demand are clearly operating in other areas too, such as academic pay.

The TUC not only backs this free movement but, astonishingly, thinks that Britain’s migration policy should be handled on our behalf by Brussels. “It is … more effective for migration flows to be managed through EU legislation rather than member states creating patch-work laws to deal with the issue,” it told a government inquiry into EU powers in 2013.

The odd thing about the TUC’s blather on “workers’ rights” is that you might expect trade unions, of all bodies, to understand that it is first and foremost through the existence and activity of unions that workers establish and defend any rights that they have.

There is nothing – not a single sentence – in the government’s draconian new Trade Union Act that runs counter to EU law. Nor in the even worse bits that the government was forced to drop as the bill made its way through parliament.

When collective action fails or is absent, the only recourse is often to an employment tribunal. Yet when the government introduced huge fees for employment tribunals in 2013, and Unison brought a legal challenge, it was primarily to English law based on Magna Carta and enshrined in 1297 that the Supreme Court turned on 26 July this year to rule the fees unlawful.

Back in 2015, Unite published a particularly biased leaflet called ‘What has Europe ever done for us?‘(This incorrectly equated Europe, a geographical fact, with the EU, a political construction.) Among its outrageous claims was the oft-repeated notion that the EU “is also responsible for 3.5 million jobs in the UK.” The implication is that we would lose these jobs with Brexit. This is complete nonsense, although a number of politicians have said the same thing, and keep on saying it.

Claims that three million or more jobs depend on Britain being part of the EU first appeared following the publication of a report by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research in 2000. But the report did not say that these jobs would be lost if we left the EU. Far from it. It suggested that withdrawal may actually be beneficial. It is the fault of politicians like Nick Clegg, John Prescott and Stephen Byers that the findings of this academic report have been twisted.

Martin Weale, director of the institute when the report was published, was furious at this distortion, describing it as “pure Goebbels” (a reference to Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda) and saying, “in many years of academic research I cannot recall such a wilful distortion of the facts”.

What, then, does the EU offer workers in the way of rights? Its defenders talk admiringly about working hours legislation – but what’s to admire?

It is true that the EU brought in its Working Time Directive in the 1990s, incorporated into British law in 1998. But look closer. Brussels mandated a minimum holiday of 20 days – including public holidays. British law states that the minimum is 20 days excluding public holidays, making our minimum 28 days.

So any government could cut statutory holidays by a full eight days without contravening any EU law. Not that you would hear this from the TUC, which continues to push out stories talking about, for example, 7 million people’s holiday pay being at risk. “There is no guarantee that [the government after Brexit] would keep paid holiday entitlements at their current level, or at all,” claimed the TUC in a typical act of gratuitous scaremongering.

British maternity leave is another area where TUC alarmists have been trying to sow suspicion. Yet British law mandates up to 52 weeks of maternity leave, with Statutory Maternity Pay for up to 39 weeks. EU law? Pay and leave of up to 14 weeks.

And then there is health and safety. The TUC acknowledges that the government says it will transfer all existing health and safety protections from EU law to British law. But it adds, “there are no guarantees for what happens afterwards” – as if permanent future guarantees were possible.

“It should be written into the [Brexit] deal that the UK and EU will meet the same standards, for both existing rights and future improvements,” said Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary. This really is fatuous. It would leave Britain unable to improve its health and safety legislation unless the EU agreed to do the same, necessitating a negotiation with 27 member states. It would give Brussels sovereignty over workplace legislation in Britain, which is no kind of Brexit at all.

Back in 1988 the TUC waved the white flag and assumed that the only improvements in legislative protection for workers would come from Brussels. It’s still waving that flag, even though the EU itself acknowledges on europa.eu that “Responsibility for employment and social policy lies primarily with national governments.”

The truth is that our rights as workers have always existed only so far as workers have been prepared to fight for them and defend them. As long as we tolerate the employing class and the capitalist system, any rights we have will always be “at risk”.

But for now the urgent risk is that we fail to finish the job of the 2016 referendum. Nothing is so imminently threatening to the wellbeing of workers in Britain than allowing the independence process to be derailed.

America’s Cult of Violence Turns Deadly

John W. Whitehead

“Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.”

—Professor Henry A. Giroux

We are caught in a vicious cycle.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s fragile ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Take the school shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine’s Day: 17 people, students and teachers alike, were killed by Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student armed with a gas mask, smoke grenades, magazines of ammunition, and an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle.

This shooting, which is being chalked up to mental illness by the 19-year-old assassin, came months after a series of mass shootings in late 2017, one at a church in Texas and the other at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas. In both the Texas and Las Vegas attacks, the shooters were dressed like a soldier or militarized police officer and armed with military-style weapons.

As usual following one of these shootings, there is a vocal outcry for enacting more strident gun control measures, more mental health checks, and heightened school security measures.

Also as usual, in the midst of the finger-pointing, no one is pointing a finger at the American police state or the war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex, both of which have made violence America’s calling card.

Ask yourself: Why do these mass shootings keep happening? Who are these shooters modelling themselves after? Where are they finding the inspiration for their weaponry and tactics? Whose stance and techniques are they mirroring?

Mass shootings have taken place at churches, in nightclubs, on college campuses, on military bases, in elementary schools, in government offices, and at concerts. In almost every instance, you can connect the dots back to the military-industrial complex, which continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare.

We have been a nation at war for most of our existence.

We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

We are being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics.

All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots.

Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda in the X-Men movies. Same goes for The Avengers and Superman and the Transformers. (Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers.)

Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office influencing “American Idol,” “The X-Factor,” “Masterchef,” “Cupcake Wars,” numerous Oprah Winfrey shows, “Ice Road Truckers,” “Battlefield Priests,” “America’s Got Talent,” “Hawaii Five-O,” lots of BBC, History Channel and National Geographic documentaries, “War Dogs,” and “Big Kitchens.” And that’s just a sampling.

It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

This is how you acclimate a population to war.

This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon, “[C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts – is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”

Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—“a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers….At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war”: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

“‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.”

This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

“This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

“Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.

No wonder entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office. As professor Henry Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.”

No wonder the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire.

No wonder Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military). Explorer scouts, for example, are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

Writing for The Atlantic, a former Explorer scout described the highlight of the program: monthly weekend maneuvers with the National Guard where scouts “got to fire live rounds from M16s, M60 machine guns, and M203 grenade launchers… we would have urban firefights (shooting blanks, of course) in Combat Town, a warren of concrete buildings designed for just that purpose. The exercise always devolved into a free-for-all, with all of us weekend warriors emptying clip after clip of blanks until we couldn’t see past the end of our rifles for all the smoke in the air.”

No wonder the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world. Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

So when you talk about the Florida shooting, keep in mind that you’re not dealing with a single shooter scenario. Rather, you’re dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

You want to stop the gun violence?

Stop the worship of violence that permeates our culture.

Stop glorifying the military industrial complex with flyovers and salutes during sports spectacles.

Stop acting as if there is anything patriotic about military exercises and occupations that bomb hospitals and schools.

Stop treating guns and war as entertainment fodder in movies, music, video games, toys, amusement parks, reality TV and more.

Stop distributing weapons of war to the local police and turning them into extensions of the military—weapons that have no business being anywhere but on a battlefield.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

Stop falling for the military industrial complex’s psychological war games.

Niklas Cruz may have pulled the trigger that resulted in the mayhem in Parkland, Fla., but something else is driving the madness.

As Stahl concludes, “War has come to look very much like a video game. As viewers of the TV war, we are treated to endless flyovers. We are immersed in a general spirit of play. We are shown countless computer animations that contribute a sense of virtuality. We play alongside news anchors who watch on their monitors. We sit in front of the crosshairs directing missiles with a sense of interactivity. The destruction, if shown at all, seems unreal, distant. These repeated images foster habitual fantasies of crossing over.”

We’ve got to do more than react in a knee-jerk fashion.

Those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that has no basis in the truth.

What we need is a thoughtful, measured, apolitical response to these shootings and the violence that is plaguing our nation.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the solution to most problems must start locally, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities. We’ve got to de-militarize our police and lower the levels of violence here and abroad, whether it’s violence we export to other countries, violence we glorify in entertainment, or violence we revel in when it’s leveled at our so-called enemies, politically or otherwise.

Our prolonged exposure to the toxic culture of the American police state is deadly.

Why Washington Struck Russian Contractors In Syria?

Nauman Sadiq

On February 7, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor that reportedly killed and wounded dozens of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner group.

In order to understand the reason why the US brazenly attacked the Russian contractors, we need to keep the backdrop of seven-year-long Syrian conflict in mind. Washington has failed to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

After the Russian intervention in Syria in September 2015, the momentum of battle has shifted in favor of Syrian government and Washington’s proxies are on the receiving end in the conflict. Washington’s policy of nurturing militants against the Syrian government has given birth to the Islamic State and myriads of jihadist groups that have carried out audacious terror attacks in Europe during the last couple of years.

Out of necessity, Washington had to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria. But on January 20, its NATO-ally Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch against the Kurds in the northwestern Syrian canton of Afrin. In order to save its reputation as a global power, Washington could have confronted Turkey and pressured it to desist from invading Afrin. But it chose the easier path and vented its frustration on the Syrian government forces in Deir al-Zor which led to the casualties of scores of Russian military contractors hired by the Syrian government.

Another reason why Washington struck Russian contractors working in Syria is that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – have reportedly handed over the control of some areas west of Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military Council (DMC), which is the Arab-led component of SDF, and have relocated several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the onslaught of Turkish armed forces and allied Free Syria Army (FSA) militias.

More significantly, an understanding between the Syrian government and the Kurdish leadership has recently been reached, according to which the government will deploy Syrian troops in the northwestern Kurdish enclave of Afrin in order to augment the defenses of the canton against the Turkish-led offensive.

One of the main reasons why Washington bombed the pro-government forces, which included the Russian military contractors, on February 7 in Deir al-Zor was to preempt the likelihood of such an accord between the US-backed Kurdish forces and the Russia-backed Syrian government from materializing in the wake of Turkish-led Operation Olive Branch in Afrin on January 20.

It’s worth noting here that the ethnic and sectarian conflict in Syria and Iraq is actually a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arabs, the Shi’a Arabs and the Kurds. Although after the declaration of war against a faction of Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, the US has also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of Washington because they are under the influence of Iran.

Therefore, Washington was left with no other choice but to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists overstepped their mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014, from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

The so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are nothing more than Kurdish militias with a token presence of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook.

Regarding the Kurdish factor in the Syrian civil war, it would be pertinent to mention here that unlike the pro-US Iraqi Kurds led by the Barzani family, the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds as well as the Syrian government have been ideologically aligned because both are socialists and have traditionally been in the Russian sphere of influence.

Moreover, as I have already described that the Syrian civil war is a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a-led government and the Syrian Kurds, and the net beneficiaries of this conflict have been the Syrian Kurds who have expanded their areas of control by aligning themselves first with the Syrian government against the Sunni Arab militants since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to August 2014, when the US policy in Syria was “regime change” and the CIA was indiscriminately training and arming the Sunni Arab militants against the Shi’a-led government in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan with the help of Washington’s regional allies: Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, all of which belong to the Sunni denomination.

In August 2014, however, the US declared a war against one faction of the Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, when the latter overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014, and Washington made a volte-face on its previous “regime change” policy and started conducting air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Thus, shifting the goalposts in Syria from the impossible objective of “regime change” to the realizable goal of defeating the Islamic State.

After that reversal of policy by Washington, the Syrian Kurds took advantage of the opportunity and struck an alliance with the US against the Islamic State at Masoud Barzani’s bidding, thus further buttressing their position against the Sunni Arab militants as well as the Syrian government.

More to the point, for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from August 2011 to August 2014, an informal pact existed between the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds against the onslaught of the Sunni Arab militants until the Kurds broke off that arrangement to become the centerpiece of Washington’s policy in the region.

In accordance with the aforementioned pact, the Syrian government informally acknowledged Kurdish autonomy; and in return, the Kurdish militias jointly defended the areas in northeastern Syria, specifically al-Hasakah, alongside the Syrian government troops against the advancing Sunni Arab militant groups, particularly the Islamic State.

Finally, in order to understand Washington’s objective that why it dared to bomb pro-government forces in Deir al-Zor on February 7 that included private Russian military contractors, bear in mind that it would be a nightmare scenario for Washington in Syria if its only trust-worthy allies, the Syrian Kurds, broke off their arrangement with Washington and once again entered a mutually beneficial alliance with Russia-backed Syrian government – a scenario which is quite likely after Washington’s NATO-ally Turkey’s repeated invasions of Kurdish-held areas in Syria, first the invasion of Jarabulus and Azaz in northern Syria during the Operation Euphrates Shield that lasted from August 2016 to last March, and now the military intervention in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin on January 20.

Washington’s primary objective of bombing the pro-government troops on February 7 that led to dozens of Russian casualties was to create divisions between the US-backed Kurds and Russia-backed Syrian government. Clearly, one can’t negotiate and reach a defensive accord with a party whose backers are bombing you at the same time. But Russia has sagaciously downplayed the brazen atrocity and moved on with its efforts to reconcile the divergent interests of competing forces in the Syrian proxy war.