Category Archives: Foreign Policy

UPDATE II (6/22): THE WAR ON TRUMP: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals

Bush, Business, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Russia

“THE WAR ON TRUMP: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals” is the current column, now on Daily Caller. It connects the atavistic dynamic undergirding two wars waged by the American establishment. An excerpt:

Periodically, America experiences episodes of mass, hysterical contagion.

What is “hysterical contagion”? A sociologist explains it as the spread of symptoms of an illness among a group, absent any physiological disease. It provides a way of coping with a situation that cannot be handled with the usual coping mechanism.

For example, in 1983, girls in the West Bank fell ill, one after the other. Soon, all the schools and finally the entire community was engulfed, affected with the same symptoms. Arab doctors implicated the Israelis. But of course. The Israeli Occupation had poisoned the girls by gas to reduce their fertility. When real doctors arrived on the scene to examine the neurotics; the girls were pronounced physically healthy.

The frenzied behavior known as mass hysteria or hysterical contagion is well documented. The Trump-Russia “collusion,” “obstruction of justice” probe qualifies, with an exception: This particular form of mass madness involves a meme, a story-line, rather than the physical symptoms observed in the West Bank.

Rumor recounted as fact for which no evidence can possibly be adduced: Indeed, the Establishment and opposition elites have poisoned the country’s collective consciousness. However, it’s the emotional pitch with which the Trump-Russia collusion group-think is delivered, day in and day out, that has gripped and inflamed irrational, febrile minds.

What sociology terms “a collective preoccupation” is fueled by organizational- and communication networks. Friendship networks (the liberal kind) and work organizations (government departments infested with like-minded individuals) serve as nodes in a system that transmits faulty signals across the synapses of this collective, damaged brain.

The storyline du jour is manufactured by America’s gilded elites. During the era of Bush II, DC operative Karl Rove put it plainly: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

When you’re the most powerful entity in the world, as the US government certainly is—the only government to have dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations (“good” bombs, because dropped by the US)—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What’s more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into “sharing” your alternate reality. Or else.

The manufacturing of Fake News by the Deep State, circa 2017, is of a piece with the anatomy of the ramp-up to war in Iraq, in 2003. (Chronicled in achingly painful detail in Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture.) Except that back then, Republicans, joined by diabolical Democrats like Hillary Clinton, were the ones dreaming up Homer Simpson’s Third Dimension.

Conscripted into America’s reality, Iraqis paid the price of this terrible American concoction. Hundreds of thousands of them were displaced and killed due to “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Because of Fake News generated so effectively by the likes of Judith Chalabi Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter at the time, American soldiers paid dearly, as well. Miller shilled for that war over the pages of the New York Times like there was no tomorrow. She’s now a Fox News “specialist.”

To manufacture consent, elements in the intelligence community worked with neoconservative counterparts in Bush 43’s administration, in particularity with “the Office of Special Plans.” And while Fake News babes did wonders to sex up the cause of senseless killing—the dissemination of Fake News, vis-a-vis Iraq, was hardly the exclusive province of Fox News. With some laudable exceptions, Big Media all was tuned-out, turned-on and hot for war.

Now, it’s all-out war on Trump. Then it was war on Iraq. …

… READ THE REST. “THE WAR ON TRUMP: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals” is now on Daily Caller.

UPDATE (6/20/017): I’ll be on:  The Bill Meyer Show (southern Oregon’s AM-1440 KMED). Day:  June 21, 2017. Time: 8:10 AM PST. Topic: “The War On Trump: The Big Picture for Conservatives, Libertarians & Liberals.”

UPDATE II (6/22): Neocons, statists and party loyalists (categories not mutually exclusive) will reject the thesis is this column. It’s to be expected. (I still thank them for reading.) The column, after all, touches on a deeper truth.

The column was titled more accurately on a libertarian site thus:

“Beware The Atavistic Dynamics Undergirding Two American Wars.”

Open yourself up to seeing the way our mindless establishment—media-military-government, cheering only for itself—stumbles about the world, on “our behalf”; and you’ll come closer to freedom.

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UPDATE II (9/26/017): Destination North Korea? I Don’t Think So

Family, Foreign Policy, Kids, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism

Liberal parents are a liability. One way to avoid brain damage is to refrain from touring North Korea while American. The other is having parents who tell you not to tour North Korea while American. Poor Otto Warmbier. Someone let him down.

I mean, who financed or encouraged his trip to North Korea? Sheer madness. Even if parents have no control over kids, they still have an obligation to give kids “The Talk.” Did these parents even tell this poor lad, now dead after his ordeal in North Korea (6/19/017), anything but to follow his heart? I’m curious. I may be wrong and Otto Warmbier would not listen to reason, but I’ve seen enough of American liberal naivete.

June 19, 2017: RIP, Poor Otto:

Finally, an answer to nagging questions: “While researching his studies in China, Mr Warmbier found out about Chinese companies that offer trips to North Korea. His parents were okay with his decision to go [to North Korea].”

UPDATED (9/26/017): Horrific. But no reason to go to war. Poor Otto Warmbier’s parents encouraged his ‘explorations’ in North Korea. Now they (kinda) want war on his killers?

Dennis Rodman Infinitely Better Qualified To Negotiate With North Korea Than Neocons In Trump Admin

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, libertarianism, Sport

A few days back, I updated an old post from 09.09.13, about Dennis Rodman’s goodwill trips to North Korea. It didn’t occur to me that the update, secreted in the post, “Dennis Rodman (& Russia) Promoting Global Peace,” would become relevant anytime soon, given Trump’s abysmally disappointing foreign policy direction. “Update (6/7/2017)” was just another thought to file away.

UPDATE (6/7/2017): President Trump will get more from North Korea and its patriotic people, who prefer their own dictator to American-imposed democracy, if he sends as an emissary a man who endeavored to open up that closed and cloistered society to outside influence through positive, voluntary exchanges and interactions, not threats; a man who opted for slow, laborious efforts that preclude lobbing bombs at North Korea or depriving its poor, long-suffering people of contact with the world. That man is Dennis Rodman.

We libertarians are not being cynical when we advocate peaceful diplomacy with nations rather than intervening in conflicts we don’t grasp and dropping Daisy Cutters on them because we can.

Well, “Rodman is making a return trip to North Korea,” reports Fox News. While Trump is not quite confessing to initiating the move, “a senior Trump administration official seems to know about the trip and has confirmed [the story] to Fox News.”

Maybe the penny has dropped and Trump has begun to understand that if he takes this country to war, he’s toast.

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NEW COLUMN (Updated 10/23): The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Policy, History, libertarianism, South-Africa

“The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe” can be read in full on the Mises Institute’s Wire. An excerpt:

…  Yes, it has happened. A mere 23 years after the 1994 transition, in South Africa, to raw ripe democracy, six years following the publication of a wide-ranging analysis of that catastrophe, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, a Beltway libertarian think tank has convened to address the problem that is South Africa.

The reference is to an upcoming CATO “Policy Forum,” euphemized as “South Africa at a Crossroad.” One of the individuals to headline the “Forum” is Princeton Lyman, described in a CATO email tease as having “served as the U.S. Ambassador to South Africa at the time of the transfer of power from white minority to black majority.” At the “Forum,” former ambassador Lyman will be discussing “America’s original hopes for a new South Africa and the extent to which America’s expectations have been left unfulfilled.” (Italics added.)

The chutzpah!

The CATO Institute’s disappointment in the South Africa the United States helped bring about is nothing compared to the depredations suffered by South Africans, due to America’s insistence that their country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed.

Aborted Attempts at South African Decentralization

This audacity of empire is covered in a self-explanatory chapter of Into the Cannibal’s Pot, titled “The Anglo-American Axis of Evil,” in which Lyman makes a cameo. (It’s not flattering.) From the comfort of the CATO headquarters, in 2017, the former ambassador will also be pondering whether “growing opposition will remove the African National Congress [ANC] from power.” The mindset of the DC establishment, CATO libertarians included, has it that changing the guard  —replacing one strongman with another — will fix South Africa, or any other of the sites of American foreign-policy interventions.

So, what exactly did Princeton Nathan Lyman do on behalf of America in South Africa? Or, more precisely, who did he sideline?

Ronald Reagan, who favored “constructive engagement” with South Africa, foresaw the chaos and carnage of an abrupt transition of power. So did the South Africans Fredrick van Zyl Slabbert, RIP (he died in May 2010), and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The first was leader of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, who, alongside the late, intrepid Helen Suzman became the PFP’s chief critic of Nationalist policy (namely Apartheid). The second was Chief Minister of the KwaZulu homeland and leader of the Zulu people and their Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). …

… READ THE REST. “The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe” is on the Mises Institute’s Wire.

UPDATE 10/23/017):

Into the Cannibal’s Pot: advocacy as early as 2011: