Tag Archives: US military

The fascist conundrum that is Israel

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The Gaza Massacre–as it’s now being accurately referred to by some–is horrible and sad and yet another black mark against the thugs who run Israel and the thugs who run America.

Another great post from Caitlin Johnstone, although it’s a week old now, lists a number of the things that make it difficult to write about or have conversations about Israel. When most people in America simply support it because “they are God’s chosen people,” it’s hard to even know where to begin if you want to talk to someone about it.

But we need to have that conversation, because this latest massacre is likely just the beginning of a full-scale genocide against the Palestinian people, and it’s our problem because we support it. In fact we more than support it, we are it. The Israeli government and military are really just proxies for us, and it’s our tax money that bought what killed those Palestinians.

A deeper understanding of the relationship is that we’re both just proxies for some overriding oligarchy that uses the illusion of nation-statehood to further its own interests everywhere. As Johnstone says,

There’s good conspiracy theory and there’s bad conspiracy theory. People who say America controls Israel or Israel controls America are engaged in bad conspiracy theory. We don’t live in a world where the lines between nations mean anything to those with real power; in reality “Israel” and “America” are both purely conceptual constructs which only exist to the extent that people believe in them. There is no actual “Israel” which can exert control over an actual “America”, and vice versa. It isn’t nations and governments pulling the strings of real power in the world, it’s a class of plutocrats who aren’t ultimately answerable to any government. This class of plutocrats uses governments like Israel, the US, the UK, and the KSA to advance its agendas to exploit, loot and plunder the rest of humanity.

Our support for Israel also is the primary factor that keeps terrorism going in the Middle East, as they all see Israel as their ultimate enemy and the biggest threat to their existence. The terrorists have made no secret of the fact that it’s their main reason for attacking us and regarding us as the Great Satan. Immediately after 9/11, Bin Laden put out a statement, publicly explaining that the reason for the attack was that we continued to support Israel and we maintained bases in Saudi Arabia.

But you’ll struggle to find any of that mentioned in the national dialog. Not in the media, even most progressive media, nor in the political rhetoric at any level. It’s toxic to mention it because so many people think Israel is a holy cause and to fail to support it would be bad faith or something.

There is plenty of reason of course, not to support Israel… look up Jews for Justice — I suppose they still exist — and you’ll find a well-documented, clear and rational explanation of just how horrible Israel is and always has been. And obviously they’re not anti-Semitic. In fact it seems even anti-Semitic folk love Israel. Maybe because they’re such fascist and racist assholes that they miss the fact that most of the people in Israel are Jewish, even though it’s not a religious state, and even though most of those Israelis probably are not practicing Jews, they’re Jewish nonetheless.

The simple fact is that Israel’s horribleness has nothing to do with it being Jewish and everything to do with it being an outpost of the Empire. So that’s another factor that makes it very hard to talk about in a rational way. People are in denial about the very existence of the Empire, so it takes a long and patient workup to get them to see anything related to that dominant reality of the world.

That point is also addressed in a great forum in the June Harper’s Magazine. The forum “Combat High” is an excellent, though depressing, read. (It may require membership to access, but here’s a link: Combat High.) The participants all seem to agree that Americans in general don’t know enough about what’s happening in the world–especially in the machinations of Empire–to care.

In the discussion of where and how many U.S. troops are stationed around the world, Jason Dempsey, who served as an infantry officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a senior adviser to the Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration, says, “Most Americans don’t know enough to care.”

It’s a sad commentary.  A nation of people who claim to embrace Christian and democratic values and yet we don’t care that our military and its subsidiaries around the world kill people for little or no reason other than to support the oligarchy and protect its financial interests.

Amelia Abadoned

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Now you have heard my story of that awful tragedy;

We pray that she might fly home safe again.

Oh, in years to come though others blaze a trail across the seas,

We’ll ne’er forget Amelia and her plane.

—Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight

—by Red River Dave McEnery

It certainly seems that Red River Dave was right about America remembering Amelia.

It’s been eighty years since the July 2, 1937 disappearance of “America’s Sweetheart” Amelia Earhart, and the debate over her fate goes on. A History (formerly The History Channel) docudrama a few weeks ago and a current expedition sponsored by National Geographic testify to the continuing interest in the story.

July 7 articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post discussed the controversial subject. The internet is rife with competing theories, most of which can be boiled down to three primary ending points: 1. the Pacific Ocean, 2. the Marshall Islands/Saipan and 3. the island of Nikumuroro.

It’s been a subject of interest to me ever since I learned the song from college friends who formed “The Amelia Earhart Memorial Bluegrass Band.” Oddly enough, on this last July 2, I was flipping through my old song sheets looking for things I might learn to play on the mandolin, which I have lately taken up, when I came across McEnery’s 1939 song about Amelia. I was just into the first verse when I realized that as I sang “onthe second of July” it was the second of July! Then I looked at the year and realized I was singing this song on exactly the 80th anniversary of her disappearance. I was so moved that I noted this on social media with a first-ever recording of myself singing and playing. ( I won’t go into how that went.)

And then all the media hype about Amelia began to pop up. It felt like the universe was speaking to me about her. I got more interested; I watched the History program; I read articles; I did a salon presentation on her.

I now know more about Amelia Earhart than I ever imagined there was to know.

The official story, the one produced by the U.S. Navy about a week after her disappearance, is that she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, crashed in the ocean. No evidence, other than a lack of any evidence to the contrary, has ever been found to support that theory. It was widely disbelieved at the time, as Dave’s line “we pray that she might fly home safe again” shows, and has been labeled everything from convenient to coverup.

Possibly the most-favored theory, the one propounded by the History docudrama and the one that seems to me to have the most evidence, is that she landed on an atoll in the Marshall Islands and was taken to Saipan where she died a prisoner.

The third major strain of investigation is the one currently being followed by a National Geographic-supported team, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). This theory holds that she wandered far to the south and crashed on or near Gardner Island, now called Nikumuroro, where she lived for some time and died a castaway.

The details of all these notions fill countless volumes. Books, articles, movies, documentaries, websites, talk shows and more recount the stories of supposed eyewitnesses, the material evidence —including, perhaps most intriguingly, a jar of freckle cream!—and maps and charts depicting how the plane managed to miss Howland Island and arrive somewhere else.

The whole affair is certainly an extreme exercise in historical epistemology: How do we know what we know?

Of course, history is nothing more than what historians say it is, and our best efforts will always be only rough approximations, but this one is intriguing.

It also has some deep social and political implications, especially the theory I favor: that Amelia ended up in a Japanese prison on Saipan, via Milli Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

THE MARSHALL ISLANDS

The thing I like about the Marshall Islands/Saipan version is that it offers a pretty good rationale for the persistent claims around the fringes that this whole thing was a huge government coverup from early on. The thing that makes me tend to believe it is that there are at least five eyewitnesses whose independently recorded stories mesh with this version. The History program includes video, some of it original, some recorded by the researchers, of witnesses and second-hand reports of witnesses accounts. These recordings all have that ring of truth that is hard to falsify.

The photograph that History claims is new evidence has already been pretty well discredited, but in fact did not add anything of substance to the theory. Just drama. The story works just as well without it.

While I readily admit that much of this would not likely meet the standards of evidence, here’s the version of what happened that, to me, makes the most sense and seems to have the most corroborating evidence:

On account of navigational errors (possibly because of faulty or poorly understood equipment installed just before takeoff from Lae headed for Howland) Earhart and her Electra angled slightly to the north, ending up quite far north of Howland. Realizing that they should be at Howland, she and Noonan turned back, thinking to either cross Howland or return to Lae.

Instead, on account of the more northerly position, she came across the Marshalls, and either decided it looked like a suitable place to land or was forced down by the Japanese. Realize, this was just months before the outbreak of World War II and the Japanese were already in a highly militarized posture in the Pacific.

It’s also possible that Earhart, who was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and other high officials in the U.S., had agreed to do some low-level spy work under the cover of her ‘round-the-world flight attempt. So the Japanese may well have been suspicious, and the deviation in course over the Marshalls could have been intentional.

Both physical evidence and accounts from Marshall Islanders indicate a plane similar to the Lockheed Electra was dragged to a port on Milli Atoll and loaded onto a barge, which theoretically could have taken plane and crew to nearby Saipan.

Several witnesses attest to the presence of a short-haired American woman wearing pants (which was notable in 1937) who was held prisoner in a Japanese facility on Saipan, and two U.S. Marines have said they were sent to Saipan to recover her remains from a graveyard near the prison.

The level of detail one would need to sort through to ascertain the truth about all this is pretty daunting, but this evidence fits well with another long-touted piece of the story: the U.S. Navy intercepted Japanese transmissions stating that Amelia had been captured, and thus U.S. military officials knew that she was being held prisoner, but refused to admit it because they didn’t want the Japanese to know that they could de-code their messages.

In addition, with the war looming, U.S. leaders would not risk sparking conflicts with the Japanese to actually search for or even request return of the Americans. And of course, it even fits the scenario that the massive search for Amelia and her plane gave the entire U.S. Pacific fleet good reason to wander all over the Japanese-controlled areas, unobtrusively gathering military intelligence.

Amelia and Fred it seems, like many Americans before and since, were abandoned by their country because their lives were an inconvenient obstacle to the pursuit of a global war.