Tomgram

The New York Times headline said it all: “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales.” The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world’s arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.” Now, however, is distinctly not that time, given the treatment of the industry by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment, as well as the nature of current conflicts. Mind you, the American arms industry already dominates the international market in a staggering fashion, controlling 45% of all such sales globally, a gap only likely to grow... Read more

On September 23rd, at about 2:30 a.m., a Border Patrol surveillance camera captured two people crossing the international boundary between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. A Border Patrol vehicle arrived quickly, but not before one of them had fled back into Mexico. When an armed agent stepped out, dressed in a forest-green uniform, he found a 16-year-old girl from Mexico softly crying, while holding her month-old baby swaddled in a blanket. The agent commanded her to get in the vehicle. As they then drove to the Nogales Border Patrol station, the girl, he later reported, tried to speak to him in Spanish through the security partition that separated them. Her tiny daughter, she was... Read more

Source: Biden’s Border appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said. Rare public opponents of the drive to war at the time, they wrote with level-headed clarity: Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror that left an entire region of the planet immiserated. It contributed to the direct and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people,... Read more

Source: Roses Dressed in Black appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel’s only possible decision was whether or not to launch a war against Gaza. In the country that waged a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” in response to the 9/11 attacks, it seems strange that there’s been so little discussion about what such a decision might mean in the long term. Going to war is just that — one decision among many possibilities, including taking steps to strengthen and democratize the states where such armed militias may otherwise flourish.... Read more

Source: What’s Not Being Said appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

This month’s catastrophic violence in Israel and Gaza — specifically, the contradictory statements from each side on the other’s war crimes — has taken me back to a revealing personal moment almost exactly 18 years ago, recalling a different war in a different part of the world. That day in the fall of 2005 I was in Yerevan, Armenia, where I was teaching a post-graduate journalism course at the state university. In class that morning, my six students, all of them young women (as was not unusual in that time and place), began discussing the terrible treatment of young recruits in the Armenian army, where the vicious hazing that had been notorious in the Soviet armed forces was still common... Read more

Source: War, Crimes, Truth, and Denial appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities. On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her home in Hiroshima, Japan, burning her mother into an unrecognizable block of ash. Afterward, the only feature that could identify her was a single gold tooth. Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where... Read more

Source: The Dehumanization of War appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

If he becomes the official nominee of the Republican Party in next year’s presidential race, Donald Trump will receive tens of millions of votes in the general election. He may get less than the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. He may get more. Regardless, tens of millions of GOP, conservative, and extremist voters will cast their ballots for him. In 2016, despite his history of elitist, racist, and sexist behavior, failed businesses, lack of governing experience, and no demonstrated past of caring for anyone but himself, he won nearly 63 million votes. While still almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton got, it was not just enough for a victory in the Electoral College but a clear warning of... Read more

Source: What A Second Trumpocracy Would Mean appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Sometimes the right wing in this country seems like a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a conundrum. Do they want to strengthen the government in line with the once-fringe doctrine of the “unitary executive,” concentrating most official power in the hands of a president who would then rule more or less by fiat? That’s the fascist position.  Or would they prefer to destroy the government, to “starve the beast,” something anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to call for decades ago? “I don’t want to abolish government,” he declared. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That’s the anti-government nihilist position. You might... Read more

Source: Republican Contradictions appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Let’s admit it: We are indeed mad creatures. This should truly have been the time of our discontent. The northern hemisphere just experienced the hottest summer in recorded history, including month by month the warmest June, July, August, and (by a country mile) September ever. Staggering heat records were set in place after place globally. Fires from Canada to Hawaii to Europe broke all records. (In fact, those Canadian summer fires are now threatening to burn straight into the winter months for the first time — and I fear this phrase is going to be become all-too-boringly repetitive — in history.) The southern hemisphere had a “winter” from — yes! — hell. In Europe, which was burning up, Greece experienced... Read more

One of modern history’s major empires is falling apart right now, right before our eyes. Yet precious few in the media have reported on this extraordinary event, much less offered any analysis of its implications for the fast-changing shape of global power. Over the past 60 years, France has used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate some 14 African nations into a neocolonial imperium called “Françafrique” — a vast region covering a quarter of Africa and stretching for nearly 3,000 miles from Senegal on the Atlantic coast to Chad in the continent’s center. While the rest of that continent frequently suffered from wars, coups, and chronic instability, Françafrique long enjoyed comparative peace. By dispatching... Read more