Pugilist Nation: Jimmy Carter told a church service that in its “242-year existence as a nation”, the United States was NOT at war for only 16 years. A 2013 Gallup poll found that 24% of the world’s population considered “the US to be the greatest threat to world peace.” Arnold Toynbee said back in 1971, “I think to most Europeans, America currently appears to be the most dangerous country in the world.” “Since 1945, no other country has waged as many covert wars as the US and no other nation in the world maintains military bases in so many countries often despite the disapproval of local citizens.”
Here’s an incomplete list of countries where the US has illegally used force: Greece 1946, Korea 1950, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1961, Cuba 1961, Vietnam 1964, Indonesia 1965, Cambodia 1969, Laos 1970, Chile 1973, Nicaragua 1981, Grenada 1983, Libya 1986, Panama 1989, Kuwait 1991, Sudan 1998, Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Pakistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Serbia 2014, and Ukraine 2014.
Weapons R Us: When Eisenhower was President, the Pentagon budget was $50 billion, by the end of the Vietnam War it was $100 billion, under Reagan it became $200 billion. By 1986 it was $300 billion, by 2003, it reached $400 billion, by 2007 it reached $600 billion. Trump increased it to $716 billion which now makes it almost $2 billion per day to make the US less safe. Fear mongering is good business. Each US state gets a $ piece of the violence pie, “members of Congress only vote for new defense programs if their constituency receives orders.” The largest arms manufacturer is Lockheed Martin which sold $45 billion in 2017.
Dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was intentionally dropping bombs on civilians. “There are currently about 14,000 nuclear bombs in the world” – Russia and the US have more than 6,000 each while Israel has plenty but must deny it in order to get US funds. Pentagon data shows the US has more than 4,000 military bases just in the US and 194 just in Germany, and 4,500 worldwide. A century ago, you measured imperialism by counting colonies – now you count US military bases. “The United States has more than 200,000 US soldiers stationed at various military bases all over the world.” The fall of the Soviet Union changed nothing with US bases, we just said we needed them to fight terrorism. This is permanent because “in principle, terrorists can be anywhere and strike anywhere, at any time.” Note that “none of the 4,000 military bases in the US did anything at all to prevent the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.” German taxpayers have to cough up $1 billion per year to pay for US bases in Germany. Explain that one. US has Japanese bases first and foremost to be able to threaten China.
The superrich in the US amounts to about 300,000 people who basically “rule the nation”. Their wealth is used to control politics and the media. The superrich invest in whatever generates the most profit like farmland, oil, real estate, information technology, genetic engineering, war industries and tobacco. Meanwhile, a much larger group, 12% of the US population, receives food stamps while one third of the US population has “little to no savings.” “These people would not be able to pay for emergency costs of $400.” This is why the superrich hated/hate the New Deal – because it dared help the little guy and the superrich want “human beings, social institutions, even nature itself …to be cannibalized for personal gain.” If you are born poor – expect to die poor “social mobility in the US is far lower than it is in Europe.” Jimmy Carter calls the US an oligarchy and said, “political bribery decides who is nominated as a presidential candidate and who is elected president.” A 2014 Princeton University study also called the US an oligarchy. Others call the US a plutocracy – it is ruled by the rich. This is all why US politics ignores the wishes of the lower and middle classes – thus it ignores the majority of Americans.
History: Portugal and Spain sign the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 to divide up the world and its inhabitants between them. The Portuguese took Brazil in the Americas, Goa in Western India, Malacca (south of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and north of Singapore). The British conquer New Amsterdam in 1664 and change the name to New York. John Calvin preached to Calvinists that one could (through ignoring the teachings of Christ) achieve divine grace through economic success. By 1760, the British colonies here had over 2,000,000 people, including 400,000 black slaves. Travelling from Europe to New York then (only option was sailing) “could take up to twelve weeks if the wind was not optimal, while even in ideal conditions it took seven weeks at sea.” Bear in mind that those that fought the British in our Revolutionary War, “the patriots could be called ‘terrorists’ because they were violent, did not shy away from murder, and were (like the Palestinians today) pursuing a political objective, namely the withdrawal of British soldiers from the thirteen colonies.” Today they are called freedom fighters. If you really are a freedom fighter but not paying the US or Israel enough in bribes to earn that appellation, you are a terrorist. Those whose necks lie pinned under your (or an ally’s) boots are all terrorists. What won our Revolutionary War was the French finally taking our side. Think of the Louisiana Purchase as “the largest land deal in history.” We bought Alaska for $7 million. After the Wounded Knee Massacre, where the US gunned down 150 to 350 Sioux in cold blood, the officer in charge was promoted to major general. That ended the American Indian Wars and armed resistance. As with the Palestinians today, it was easy to kill Native Americans back then “because they were not considered part of the human family.” As the South Pacific song goes, “You Have to be Carefully Taught”. Yes, Native tribes fought each other sometimes, but NEVER to extinction – there was always a wise old native leader saying, “But, we are all part of the human family.”
Tobacco plantations in the South would not have been profitable w/o slave labor – the motivation was “the selfish pursuit of profit without regard for the lives of others” and “the labor of many to make a few rich and powerful.” A self-appointed job of the US (think Philippines, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam) has been “occupying countries and telling the people there how to live.” The battleship USS Maine blew up internally – Spain wasn’t involved in the explosion, yet that became the fake reason for the Spanish-American War. In a rare moment where a US president felt shame, President Grover Cleveland said the overthrow of Hawaii was wrong and a disgrace saying, “a substantial wrong has been committed.” Hawaii’s queen was tried for treason and imprisoned by the coup’s plotters.
World War One: After WWI, Britain owed the US $4.7 billion – during the same period the US loaned Germany $27 million – which country do you think the US wanted to win? Senator Nye simply called WWI a war for “profit for the few.” DuPont profit during WWI alone rose to ten times normal. Bethlehem Steel went from $6 million to $49 million per year. JP Morgan alone lent Britain over $4 billion. All these loans were loans to be repaid with interest. A German victory would have meant the “implosion of Wall Street.” The US bitched about the sinking of the Lusitania by the Germans, but the truth was that the US actually was using it to transport war supplies to Britain – disguised as hunting ammo was over a thousand grenades, almost 5,000 boxes of rifle cartridges, etc… And Wilson, with foreknowledge refused to tell the American public after being alerted to the disguised munitions carrier by his Secretary of State. The US, to defend war profiteers, had to deploy two million US soldiers. All journalists critical of the war were defamed and labeled a traitor. The Espionage Act of 1917 intentionally targeted pacifists – a good thing Jesus wasn’t still alive making speeches about non-violence at the time, he would have been bending over for someone named Bubba nightly in jail. WWI favored the Germans until the US joined. At WWI’s end, Germany had to give up its colonies and ten percent of its national territory. A German general said, if the US didn’t enter WWI, Hitler couldn’t have come to power because no onerous Treaty of Versailles – therefore no WWII. Interesting thought, right? Also interesting is that in 2010, Germany paid its last installment of its WWI debt. That payment was 200 million Euros.
World War Two: Poland lost 6,000,000. Historians believe the Reichstag fire was a Nazi false flag operation that allowed Hitler’s abolishment of free speech, free press, and right to assembly in Germany. Before Pearl Harbor, the US was supplying Hitler and Mussolini with crude oil. So much for the US war against fascism. IG Farben otherwise had to get oil through a process turning each five tons of coal into one ton of gasoline. The US provided 12% of Hitler’s oil needs. “Those who fought against the USA did not have enough oil and lost.” “Freeburg and Goralski proved that the USA was Adolf Hitler’s most important oil supplier.” Even after Germany’s attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, starting WWII, FDR kept supplying Germany with oil. This then allowed the Nazi occupation of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France. Imagine learning any of this on TV or at school. In 1931, the Japanese blew up their own railroad in Manchuria and blamed it on the Chinese “to sell the Japanese public on expanding their military into mainland China.”
Pearl Harbor: the US (FDR and his closest associates) knew the attack was going to happen and “deliberately provoked it by halting all oil deliveries to Japan” four months before Pearl Harbor. In August 1941 there were two Japanese oil tankers docked at Los Angeles waiting for oil that would never come – they left in November. A Japanese admiral said, “If there is no oil supply, battleships and other warships are nothing but scarecrows.” In 1940, there was an “Eight Action memo” by Arthur McCollum saying exactly how to “provoke Japan into attacking the United States.” It was known that the American people and Congress had to be shocked to mobilize for the war. FDR actually violated international law by sending naval task forces into Japanese territorial waters twice in 1941 to provoke the Japanese. The Japanese diplomatically protested. In July 1941, JP Morgan and other US banks froze all Japanese assets, cutting off their money, fuel and trade. FDR insisted on moving the Pacific fleet from the West Coast to Hawaii even though the men wanted to be near their families. When Admiral Richardson refused to lie and say the move was his idea, he was stripped of command. Churchill needed the US in the pacific war to protect British imperial assets like Singapore. In October 1941, General Tojo takes over in Japan and plans to attack the US Pacific Fleet before Japan ran out of oil, and to get oil from seizing it in the Dutch East Indies. The US cracked the Japanese codes and all radio operators and cryptanalysts were sworn to secrecy.
In 1941, Japan had ten aircraft carriers while the US only had seven. The US removed all its best ships from Pearl Harbor on November 28th and December 5th, 1941 leaving only “old warships that were left over from WWI.” On December 7th, the Japanese attack both the Philippines and Pearl Harbor. No one had bombed the US before. FDR in his post-Pearl Harbor address didn’t mention the attack on the Philippines because that would remind the American people that the US was also an invader and colonizer. The address also was important because many Americans had to then rush to their dictionaries to find out what “infamy” meant. Congress was kept in the dark about the US decrypting Japanese radio transmissions and Congresswoman Rankin who voted against going to war was called a “whore”, an “aide to Hitler”, an “old hag” and a “traitor.” She told her supporters, “I have nothing left but my integrity.” She knew FDR had given Japan no alternative and had deliberately blocked their oil supply. Even the New York Times recognized later (p. 129) how the US had shamelessly kept decoded radio transmissions from reaching commanders in Hawaii.
War Criminals R Us: Did you know that the US dropped napalm on Tokyo and other Japanese cities? Burning Tokyo killed 80,000 to 120,000 people in one night, which Daniel Ellsberg called “the largest one-day act of terrorism in human history.” Because killing civilians is a war crime, General Curtis LeMay said, “If we lost the war, we would have all been tried as war criminals.” McNamara added, “he acted like a war criminal – just like I did.” Author John Steinbeck later wrote, “We were a propaganda arm of our governments.” After WWII, Admiral Leahy said, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” No single person in history killed more civilians so quickly in history than Truman, not even Hitler.
Rommel was stopped in North Africa by cutting off his oil supplies. Rommel later said, “The British struck the part of our mechanism on which the functioning of everything else depended.” One mystery is why Churchill and FDR didn’t do the obvious, and then cut off the Nazi’s Eastern Front oil supply. That would have shortened WWII dramatically, but the US and Britain preferred to betray the Soviet Union. Note that three quarters of Germany’s entire losses died on the Eastern Front, so it is fantasyland that the US alone won WWII. The US intervened only when Hitler was in retreat (p.136).
Fun Facts: If the US hated Hitler so much, why was the US supplying Germany with 12,000 barrels of oil daily in 1944? WWII only began its end when the Germans lost the Battle of Stalingrad and Churchill and FDR quickly realized if Stalin reached Germany first, it would be under the control of Moscow. This is the reason why the US finally got off its ass and opened the Second Front and landed in Normandy, France. After WWII, the UN [Article 2(4) in the UN Charter] banned the use of force and so the US switched over to covert warfare (Italy, Greece, Iran, Guatemala, etc…). The US President’s job became to lie to the American people, by denying any involvement. Ralph McGehee who worked for the CIA said, “The CIA conducts covert operations on behalf of the President.” Italy was the CIA’s first victim in 1948 thanks to a hack pianist named Harry Truman. But Truman also did a good thing – he didn’t want an illegal coup in Iran against Mossadegh, whereas Eisenhower gave Allen Dulles orders to carry it out. Eisenhower wrote in his diary, “The things we did were covert. If they were made public, we would not only have been embarrassed…but our chances of doing anything similar in the future would almost have vanished into thin air.” Then the CIA takes out Guatemala’s democratically elected leader in 1954 for daring to parcel out uncultivated land (owned by United Fruit) to peasants. He paid United Fruit the exact amount they had declared the land was worth for tax purposes. The CIA director was a shareholder in United Fruit as was his brother (who was Secretary of State) and the CIA kicked out Arbenz and returned all the land and killed off land reform – Gee, I wonder if that was a conflict of interest for the Dulles brothers? On a covert roll, Eisenhower then wanted Lumumba of the Congo gone – caring more for his own people than US investors? That act of fairness had to end! Under CIA coordination, “Lumumba’s body was dissolved in battery acid” and he was replaced by the Mobutu dictatorship under the name of Zaire which lasted more than thirty years. Pause to wave the American flag.
In 1975, the US Senate released the 350-page Church report exposing “the CIA’s assassination efforts.” Church dared to say, “democracy depends on a well-informed electorate”. For those who still care, supporting coups is illegal. LBJ in 1967 gave the order to kill Che Guevara; the Green berets teamed up with Bolivian soldiers and captured Che, interrogated him and shot him. “The CIA cut off Guevara’s hands from his lifeless body and sent them to Washington to verify the revolutionary’s identity.” I’m surprised those hands aren’t in a Smithsonian exhibit today. In 1961 the CIA set up “an assassination division” comically called “Executive Action” - and I thought Executive Action meant when Monica blew Bill at the White House. “The CIA also asked the Mafia to kill Castro.” “Later, the CIA prepared a diving suit that they laced with a drug that would produce a chronic skin disease and a breathing apparatus poisoned with tubercle bacilli to be given to Castro as a gift.” How dare Castro remove the Mafia from Cuba when he took power – thank God the CIA was clearly in bed with the Mafia – what could go wrong with that? James Angleton who worked for the CIA said, “You know the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed” – which makes the CIA indistinguishable from a terrorist organization.
JFK Assassination: JFK had the power to stop the Bay of Pigs but he didn’t (p.155). The author (and journalist David Talbot) believes that after JFK fired Dulles, Dulles had JFK assassinated because JFK had thus turned on the CIA and Dulles was “ruthless” and knew a long list of hitmen. The Secret Service did a shoddy job protecting JFK on his final day and did not secure the route (roofs and windows) and in fact changed the route so that the motorcade was going under 10 miles per hour, thus making him an easy target. There was no careful autopsy done, and his body was “forcibly taken away.” Instead, “high-ranking military officials” directed the autopsy. “The power elite knew that imperial policies were much more implementable with Johnson, and he did not disappoint the power elite.” Only if one person killed JFK was it NOT a conspiracy because one person cannot conspire with himself. Funny how the Dallas police questioned Oswald “for twelve hours without running a tape or having a stenographer present.” The author calls this not sloppiness but a “deliberate covering up of the defendant’s statements.” Oswald’s nitrate test showed he had NOT fired a gun in the past 24 hours. “Therefore, Oswald could not be the killer.” The negative nitrate test stayed secret from the media for ten months. Review continues in comment section...