Tag: Leonard Cohen

Be Courageous: You Know More Than You Think

Recently, a friend sent a response to my last posting on the Kyle Rittenhouse affair. My article had argued that the mainstream media (MSM) revealed its laziness, bias, and mendacity by misrepresenting the facts of Rittenhouse’s actions as well as of his trial.

In doing so, it led the public to believe that Rittenhouse lived in an Illinois location far distant from Kenosha Wisconsin, that he had “crossed state lines” with an illegal weapon, that the two persons he killed and the one he wounded were black, and that the decision of his nearly all-white jury was problematic in its blatant racism. None of those implications turned out to be true. My piece ended by urging caution in taking the MSM at its word.

Liberal Caution

My friend’s sympathetic response to all of that was to share a March 9th article from NEUROPSYCH. It was based on a book written by philosophy professor, Michael Patrick Lynch. The article was called “Is Social Media Killing Intellectual Humility?” It specifically cautioned liberals against “overestimating our knowledge of how the world works” based on what our favorite internet sources tell us.

The article’s bullet-pointed “takeaways” noted that:

  • Social media echo chambers have made us overconfident in our knowledge and abilities.
  • Social psychologists have shown that publicly committing to an opinion makes one less willing to change that position. So, readers should be careful about commitment before knowing all the facts.
  • To avoid a descent into epistemic arrogance and tribalism, we need to use social media with deep humility.

But We Know More than We Think

While I can agree with the direction of Dr. Lynch’s recommendations, the caution it urges can be counterproductive and silence protest. In fact, all of us know a lot more than we’re willing to admit. Moreover, Lynch’s observations do not really apply to his big question of “how the world works.” They apply instead to details of particular stories such as the Rittenhouse saga. That distinction is important.

Yes, it’s true that none of us (including our politicians and the MSM) can understand every detail  of every story. However, that fact should not prevent us from adopting a position of skepticism, not about our own abilities to know the truth, but about the MSM and other establishment “thought leaders.”

That skepticism would have us recognize the simple fact that the MSM and our politicians are inveterate liars. After all, they are the keepers of an inherently unjust status quo. They arrogantly want to keep us “humble,” and distrustful of ourselves. They want to keep us from understanding and voicing our conclusions about “how the world works.”

How the World Works

In the spirit of Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows” that the world is arranged:

  • To overwhelmingly benefit the rich and powerful
  • Who run a system of white supremacy, imperialism, and war
  • And make the laws to keep that system in place
  • While applying them mercilessly to the poor and powerless
  • Aided by militarized law enforcement agencies that routinely lie, plant evidence, cover up malfeasance, commit perjury, and misinform juries.
  • Meanwhile those in charge avoid applying such laws to themselves and their friends
  • All the while pitting members of the working classes against one another as right-wing vs. left-wing, white against black, former immigrants vs. current ones, and straights against gays
  • But never, rich vs. poor, or employer vs. employees.
  • Increasingly, those in charge criminalize protest and often act as agents provocateurs to discredit those who exercise their First Amendment rights by rebelling against this intolerable situation.

Under such a system, the details of particular “stories” matter less than grasping the big picture that Dr. Lynch claimed to address.

This is particularly true of foreign affairs where defenders of imperialism, regime change, and neocolonial control are ALWAYS WRONG. Yes ALWAYS. That stark conclusion will be inevitably drawn not by the cautious one who needs to grasp every detail of particular imperial interventions. No. It will be understood best by those who grasp the background pattern behind virtually EVERY U.S. foreign intervention since the Second Inter-Capitalist War (1939-’45).

The invariable pattern is this:

  • Whenever any government of a former European or American colony tries to improve the lives of its poor majority
  • The U.S. will accuse it of being socialist, communist, or terrorist.
  • It will support local elite forces defending their own riches and privilege
  • While intervening on behalf of those local rich to fix elections, fund death squads, assassins, and paramilitaries
  • To thwart the programs in question and remove their proponents from positions of influence.

That is what the U.S. does in the world. It’s the pattern behind practically all its wars. The details are unvarying and nearly irrelevant. The pattern leads those concerned with social justice to a simple preliminary conclusion, “If the US. Is against them (e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, Yemen, . . ..) they must be doing something right.

Conclusion

My own bottom line here is that adopting a position of what Dr. Lynch calls “humility” and self-doubt plays directly into the hands of the powers that be. It leads to adopting a typical “liberal” position of supposed neutrality that holds, for instance, that the government, the CIA, the FBI, the Supreme Court can (at least sometimes) be trusted to be similarly neutral. Such trust always ends up siding with the status quo.  

In reality, none of the institutions just mentioned can be trusted. Their minions are not on our side. They are not our friends. It’s their job to lie to us and to misrepresent their real agenda in the world. And, very simply, that agenda is to keep the money and the power where it is.

Instead of humility, the liberals addressed by Dr. Lynch and the NEUROPSYCH article need boldness. That includes COMPLETE SKEPTICISM about anything the Powers that Be tell us – including, of course, the MSM.

Moreover, liberals-turned-radicals need our echo chambers. They encourage us, i.e., they give us courage to take a stand against the patterns endemic to the imperialism, racism, and white supremacy that govern our world. Though everybody knows those patterns subconsciously, they need to be identified and denounced out loud and without ceasing.

Yes, you and I know more than they want us to think.  We already know how the world works.   

“War Dogs”:  What Everybody Knows: War is All about the Money

war dogs

“What do you know about war? They’ll tell you it’s about patriotism, democracy . . . You want to know what it’s really about? War is an economy.”

That’s the way director, Todd Phillips’ “War Dogs” begins. It’s the (mostly true) tale of two bumbling stoners from Miami Beach who become wealthy arms dealers supplying weapons to the U.S. military and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The story line reminds us that money is the major reason for the endless wars the U.S has waged across the Muslim world since 9/11. It also reminds us of our moral duty to oppose the corrupt war system that is eminently reformable with a few simple measures – if for no other reason than saving money that is currently wasted.

To begin with, it’s true: war has nothing to do with patriotism, democracy or freedom. It’s simply good for the economy. In fact, war is the economy – or at least its heart where the military budget consumes 57% of the U.S. budget’s annual discretionary spending – $3.8 trillion to be exact. (That’s very nearly as much as the rest of the world combined spends on “defense.”)

In other words, our economy is dependent on blood sacrifice. Pope Francis said as much last September when he spoke to members of the U.S. Congress. He remarked, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money – money that is soaked in blood.”

At the conclusion of “War Dogs,” Todd Phillips echoes the pope’s phrase, “as we all know.” For as the credits roll, Leonard Cohen sings his own “Everybody Knows.”

And what is it that everybody knows about war?  At some level, we all know that it has fundamentally corrupted our society. Our way of life is based on murder. Yet we refuse to put a stop to the killing. It’s as if we see no alternatives, though they’re staring us in the face.

We’ve become so inured to permanent mayhem that we rarely ponder what it all means for the defenseless poor of the world who (rather than the rich) habitually end up on the wrong end of the guns, bullets, drones, bombs, missiles, air planes, tanks and ships with which our government and U.S. corporations greedily supply the entire world.

For example, here’s what our war economy has meant for the people of Yemen the poorest country in the Middle East. (Their plight is barely reported in the U.S corporate media.) For the past year and a half, Yemen has been the target of bombs dropped by Saudi Arabia, the richest country in the Middle East, with the full support and cooperation of the United States, the richest country in the world. For the impoverished of Yemen this class war has meant:

  • 2,7 million Yemenis driven from their homes.
  • 7000 Yemenis killed – 3,000 of them civilians, including hundreds of children.
  • 30,000 Yemenis injured.

In the end however, “War Dogs” only hints at such disaster. It only suggests the profound corruption of the entire war system. That’s because its two twenty-something principals, Ephraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller) are only small-time bottom-feeders in a system that allows the two –  virtually without education or knowledge of the world – to secure a $3 million Pentagon contract for 100 million rounds of Ak47 ammunition for use in Afghanistan and the longest-running war in U.S. history. The bullets, of course, will be fired at poor people in Afghanistan.

The top-feeders in the system put Diveroli’s and Packouz’s profits to shame; by comparison, the latter come off like choir boys. The big guys are after much, much more.  Their corporate names include the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, Boeing and Motorola. Most recently, the personal names at the top are Bush, Cheney, and Obama. Their bald-faced corruption and indifference to human suffering is absolutely mind-boggling. It has:

  • $6.5 trillion (yes, “trillion” with a “T!”) gone entirely missing from the Pentagon budget without any explanation or even a single audit of the Defense Department over the past 20 years.
  • A father (and former U.S. president), George H.W. Bush, working for a defense-oriented firm (the Carlyle Group), while his son waged permanent war all over the world.
  • A vice president’s company (Halliburton) receiving $39.5 billion in federal war contracts without any bidding from competing firms.
  • A spokesperson for the sitting U.S. president defending the killings in Yemen by saying that the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia would “positively impact the U.S economy and further advance the president’s commitment to create jobs by increasing exports.”

[Imagine if such words and/or practice were reported of a designated enemy like Russia, Korea, Venezuela or Cuba! Imagine a cynical system of war in those countries involving family members, government colleagues, business cronies, and revolving doors connecting presidencies, vice presidencies and defense industry offices. We’d have no trouble identifying it all as “corrupt” and “criminal” Yet somehow we can’t make the same designations when our own government (with our tax dollars!!) is involved.]

Yet that is exactly what “War Dogs” should invite thoughtful viewers to do. It should have us demanding:

  • The cessation of war against the Muslim’s world’s poor.
  • Audits of the Defense Department as rigorous as those monitoring welfare programs for the poor.
  • The nationalization of weapons manufacture to remove the profit motive from war.
  • A 50% cut in the nation’s military budget.
  • The investment of that 50% in rebuilding the homes of the poor destroyed by the U.S. military.
  • The opening of U.S. borders to refugees created by U.S. wars in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.
  • The imposition of special war taxes to fund (and discourage) each additional war our country’s leaders choose to engage.
  • The centralizing of such recommendations in the upcoming presidential debates.

Each one of these proposals is not only anti-war; it is economically sound. Or as Diveroli explains to Packouz whose anti-war sentiment makes him initially demur at joining his friend in the gun-running business: This isn’t about being pro or anti-war . It’s about money. “This is . . . pro-money!” It’s about our tax money.