Worldwide Nightmare Theatre, Empire of Chaos Enhanced and Expanded

[kladner]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08...s-born-lethal/

For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

– Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852

I annually curse the air show, which we on the North Side of Chicago are also subjected to. [See postscript below.] This partly due to the reckless flights over densely populated neighborhoods. Air shows have many accidents, some impacting spectators and other civilians. Beyond that, it is the blatant display of the iron fist, with the message, "Be glad you're not in Baghdad, Tripoli, or wherever else among the many places YOU are paying to bomb. Just remember, it Could be You."

One of the occupational and intellectual hazards of being a historian is that current events often seem far less new to oneself than they do to others. Recently a leftish liberal friend told me that the United States under the Donald Trump had “become a lethal society.” My friend cited the neofascist Trump’s: horrible family separations and concentration camps on the border; openly white-nationalist assaults on four progressive nonwhite and female Congresswomen; real and threatened roundups of undocumented immigrants; fascist-style and hate-filled “Make America Great Again” rallies; encouragement of white supremacist terrorism; alliance with right-wing evangelical Christian fascists.

Another friend received news of the recent mass-shooting of mostly Latinx Wal-Mart shoppers by racist and nativist white male Trump fan in El Paso, Texas by denouncing Trump’s “fascism” and linking to an essay he’d published about the white-nationalist president’s racist and authoritarian behavior.

I agree with my friends about the lethality of the contemporary United States. I largely share their description of Trump and much of his base as fascist or at least fascistic. “Durable fascist tendencies,” the prolific left political scientist Carl Boggs warns in his important book Fascism Old New: American Politics at the Crossroads, “run deep throughout present-day American society…In the absence of powerful counterforces and a thriving democracy, …those tendencies could morph over into something more expansive and menacing – and Donald Trump could serve, wittingly or unwittingly, as a great historical accelerator.”

It’s nothing to sneeze at. The institutional forms and technologies of militarized surveillance and policing and thought control that are available to fascism-prone elites in the United States are daunting indeed. The United States enjoys historically unprecedented global power on a scale the fascist Third Reich’s leaders dreamed of achieving but never remotely approached.

Still, I sometimes worry about reaching beyond American history to label horrors of its own making. Longstanding foundational aristo-republican U.S. white-settler nationalism and its state-military-capitalist, imperialist, and corporatist evolution has long been disastrous and dystopian enough without “charismatic” dictators, Baretta-toting squadristis, single party states, the suspension of elections, the end of bourgeois law, jackbooted brown-shirts, death squads, state propaganda, political executions, shuttered media, and the rest of the full-on fascist nightmare.

Postscript: This essay was completed in the South Loop of Chicago, beneath the intermittent roar of deadly U.S. fighter jets doing practice flights over and around the Midwestern Metropolis’s downtown lakefront. The pilots are practicing for this weekend’s annual Chicago Air and Water Show, when a disproportionately white crowd of one million metropolitan area residents gather along the Chicago shoreline to ooh and ahh over some of the global American Empire’s most awe-inspiring weapons of air-borne mass destruction. The swoosh of the military planes can he heard in 95% Black ghetto South and West Side neighborhoods where a third and more of children are living at less than half the federal government’s hopelessly inadequate poverty level. The cost of just a single U.S. F-35 B Fighter Jet is $250 million (in 2014 dollars) a sum that could be used to vastly improve Chicago’s poorly funded and hyper-segregated inner-city public schools. Many parts of the U.S. military’s airborne arsenal bear Native-American names: the Blackhawk, Apache, and Chinook helicopters are three examples. The city’s National Hockey League team is named after the Sauk warrior who led the battle against white invaders in 1832, only to see his nation devastated and removed from the fertile planes of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Many Chicagoland residents wear “chief” Black Hawk’s profile on t-shirts and jerseys. When you ask them who Black Hawk was and what happened to his people, their responses range from embarrassed ignorance to bemused indifference, mild irritation, and overt hostility. One of the very top U.S. military aviation manufacturers, Boeing, is headquartered in downtown Chicago. Its overseas body count over the decades is incalculable but surely ranks in the millions.

[Dr Sardonicus]

re: Amilcar Perez-Lopez

Originally Posted by kladner

** Murdered by San Francisco police, under a false accusation, with NO CONSEQUENCES.

Well, no criminal charges were brought in the case where the two plainclothes detectives shot him five times in the back in self-defense, giving accounts differing from those of several eyewitnesses.

The city did, however, agree to settle the ensuing wrongful-death suit for $400,000.00 so it seems incorrect to say there were "no consequences."

There may be those who would consider this suit as "politically motivated" and perhaps extortionate, and the settlement a "business decision."

[kladner]

The settlement is a consequence for the taxpayers, not the killers.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

Beyond that, it is the blatant display of the iron fist, with the message, "Be glad you're not in Baghdad, Tripoli, or wherever else among the many places YOU are paying to bomb. Just remember, it Could be You."

Especially if Il Duce starts talking about "urban renewal."

[kladner]

-by Sidney Blumenthal
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...li-confederate

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), is an aspiring literary critic as well as a revisionist historian. After issuing new draconian policies discriminating against poor immigrants resembling his Italian ancestors, he decided to show off the far-ranging interests of his multifaceted mind with his reinterpretation of the poem engraved inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, whose beacon welcomes “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”.

Cuccinelli insisted that the poem should be reworded to read: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.” Then, when asked by the CNN host Erin Burnett to explain his reason for changing the language, he offered his superior knowledge of its history.

“Well, of course,” he said, revealing a slight tone of exasperation, “that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class.”

Cuccinelli’s proposed correction of Lazarus’s poem was not his first attempt to alter patriotic symbols. Nearly a decade ago, he engaged in sleight of hand to shuffle in the Confederate version of the great seal of the commonwealth of Virginia.

[Dr Sardonicus]

The audience may be "disproportionately white," but not entirely.

Chin up, the article does have a link to another article about a police shooting
:-D

[kladner]

It may eventually end the war, but a lot of blood and oil will be spilled before the end.


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52119.htm
-Moon of Alabama

Drones launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels attacked a massive oil and gas field deep inside Saudi Arabia’s sprawling desert on Saturday, causing what the kingdom described as a “limited fire” in the second such recent attack on its crucial energy industry.

The Saudi acknowledgement of the attack came hours after Yahia Sarie, a military spokesman for the Houthis, issued a video statement claiming the rebels launched 10 bomb-laden drones targeting the field in their “biggest-ever” operation. He threatened more attacks would be coming.

Today's attack is a check mate move against the Saudis. Shaybah is some 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from Houthi-controlled territory. There are many more important economic targets within that range:

The field’s distance from rebel-held territory in Yemen demonstrates the range of the Houthis’ drones. U.N. investigators say the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone, found in recent months during the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500 kilometers (930 miles). That puts Saudi oil fields, an under-construction Emirati nuclear power plant and Dubai’s busy international airport within their range.

Unlike sophisticated drones that use satellites to allow pilots to remotely fly them, analysts believe Houthi drones are likely programmed to strike a specific latitude and longitude and cannot be controlled once out of radio range. The Houthis have used drones, which can be difficult to track by radar, to attack Saudi Patriot missile batteries, as well as enemy troops.

AP article on the drone strike:

https://apnews.com/9edb1f71010847f2b321d1951997e797

Drones launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels attacked a massive oil and gas field deep inside Saudi Arabia’s sprawling desert on Saturday, causing what the kingdom described as a “limited fire” in the second such recent attack on its crucial energy industry.


The attack on the Shaybah oil field, which produces some 1 million barrels of crude oil a day near the kingdom’s border with the United Arab Emirates, again shows the reach of the Houthis’ drone program. Shaybah sits some 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from Houthi-controlled territory, underscoring the rebels’ ability to now strike at both nations, which are mired in Yemen’s yearslong war.

The drone assault also comes amid heightened tensions in the wider Mideast between the U.S. and Iran, whose supreme leader hosted a top Houthi official days earlier in Tehran.

How Iran (probably) Acquired A Stealth Drone

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/1...lth-drone.html

It seems that Iran has acquired a U.S. stealth drone which was illegally flying within its airspace.

A secret U.S. surveillance drone that went missing last week in western Afghanistan appears to have crashed in Iran, in what may be the first case of such an aircraft ending up in the hands of an adversary. Iran’s news agencies asserted that the nation’s defense forces brought down the drone, which the Iranian reports said was an RQ-170 stealth aircraft. It is designed to penetrate enemy air defenses that could see and possibly shoot down less-sophisticated Predator and Reaper drones.
...
U.S. officials acknowledged Sunday that a drone had been lost near the Iranian border, but they declined to say what kind of aircraft was missing.
...
The first reports of the drone crash came from Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency. “Iran’s army has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran,” the Arabic-language al-Alam state television network quoted an unnamed source as saying. “The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the armed forces.”

[kladner]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The audience may be "disproportionately white," but not entirely.

Chin up, the article does have a link to another article about a police shooting
:-D

Gotta take comfort where we can find it. [/IRONY]

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kladner

It may eventually end the war, but a lot of blood and oil will be spilled before the end.

My inner pedant forces me to ask: doesn't this make it a cruise missile rather than a drone?

The German WWII V1 had a similar behaviour, though programmed for a specific flight duration rather than terminal position. The V1 is generally regarded as being the first fielded cruise missile.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by xilman

My inner pedant forces me to ask: doesn't this make it a cruise missile rather than a drone?

The German WWII V1 had a similar behaviour, though programmed for a specific flight duration rather than terminal position. The V1 is generally regarded as being the first fielded cruise missile.

Good point. I don't know, though, if some weapons designated as 'cruise missiles' are strictly destination-controlled once launched. If it has satellite guidance does that make it a drone? Perhaps the ability to choose whether to complete the mission is the essence of 'droniness'? If it can return home it's a drone? There was mention of retaining some control while in radio range for the Houthi devices. Are they cruise missiles once they are out of range?

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kladner

Good point. I don't know, though, if some weapons designated as 'cruise missiles' are strictly destination-controlled once launched. If it has satellite guidance does that make it a drone? Perhaps the ability to choose whether to complete the mission is the essence of 'droniness'? If it can return home it's a drone? There was mention of retaining some control while in radio range for the Houthi devices. Are they cruise missiles once they are out of range?

My view: cruise missiles may use satellite but not human guidance after they are launched. Drones have an element of on-going human control over their trajectory after launching. I may be wrong.

When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department says Wernher von Braun.