Operation Barbarossa

One June 22, 2011 an important anniversary passed us by. It passed us by without any hoopla whatsoever. We in the US don’t do our own history, were not about to observe someone else’s history. But that history is critical, it is the turning point of one of the greatest conflicts of the 20^th century; World War Two. On this date seventy years ago, on the 22^nd of June, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. In a single stroke one of the greatest land battles of history began. This was the Ostfront of WWII, this was killing fields of the “Good War.”

As Dan Carlin points out in his “Ghost Of The Ostfront” series, this was a war between two utterly evil political systems; Communism and Nazism. It was a battle of annihilation, a battle to the death. No quarter was asked or given. 

Once you actually look or listen to the facts of this war, it becomes an amazing story. The entire US effort in Europe becomes a sidebar, a diversion, something barely worth mentioning. Our greatest general, Ike, would be a third tier or at best a second tier general in the Soviet Armies.  

The four years of war on the Ostfront cost the Soviet Union almost thirty million lives. That is the population of the Greater New York City and Los Angeles County together. Losses among the Germans and their allies was also gargantuan.

Even when you limit the narrative to the year of 1941, the history of the Russian front still defies imagination. Until they were halted by the very greatest Russian general of them all, General Winter, the Germans had swallowed up a huge chunk of real estate. It was an area roughly 1200 km by 800km. Only the triple whammy of winter, unpreparedness, and a brilliant counter offensive by fresh Siberian troops saved Moscow. 

It is no exaggeration to say that it was the Soviet Union that broke the back of Nazism. It is no exaggeration that the men and women who fought for Russia were a breed apart. If our US WWII Veterans are the “Greatest Generation,” then what do we call those Soviets who fought, and defeated the Nazis, in the greatest land war of all time? What of their suffering, what of their sacrifice, what of their bravery? It is true that they fought for one of the worst dictators in history; but what of it? They fought for the Motherland, and against a Nazi terror that was even worse than Stalin’s depredations. 

Many historians are wont to claim that with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had inevitably lost the war. That view, in my opinion, is anachronistic. It has the benefit of hindsight. The results of Operation Barbarossa balanced on a knifes’ edge, especially in 1941. A few winter coats here, a better plan there, better management of resources over here, and the results could have been far different. What would of happened to the Soviet war effort if Stalin had stayed in his funk for longer? What if Stalin had decided to abandon Moscow to “safer” ground? What if the Japanese had not concentrated their efforts in Asia, and had decided to kick Russia when it was down? The only reason those Siberian troops arrived to surprise the Nazis was because Japan had signed an Armistice with the Soviet Union. No Armistice, no Siberian troops, no counter offensive, and who knows what happens in the spring of 1942? 

History is a lot more dynamic than most US citizens supposed, many times it rests on the most random of events. It is not quite the fluttering of butterflies wings in Peru, but it is very close.The what-ifs that surround the war in the east are numerous. You could spend numerous lifetimes working out the counterfactuals surrounding the “Great Patriotic War.” Granted most people do not have much enthusiasm for such pallor games, but at the very least we should honor the efforts of Soviets. They deserve our gratitude for their sacrifice, they took the brunt, and somehow survived. Without their suffering our world would be much different today.

One Hundred and Fifty Years Latter; Fort Sumter.

There something oddly amusing, almost cute in a perverse way, that the Southern Citizens of the USA can still manage to be so charmingly dishonest and disingenuous about why the US fought the worst war in its history. They have done such a good job that Keith Olbermann reports that up to forty percent of US citizens feel that the Civil War, as we damn Yankees are wont to call it, was not about slavery. KO is, of course, apoplectic about this datum, outrage is his calling, his raison d'etre. It’s his schtick. I am not very surprised. In almost every state of the Union, what passes for History in schools is nothing more than a fifty-fifty mix of hagiography and trivia. It is only more so in the South. Real History, because it involves real people, is much more conflicted and messy. All sorts of inconvenient facts get in the way of our preferred narrative.  Both in the North and the South, we much rather kowtow to the marble edifices we have created for our preferred narratives than deal with the grubby realities of the real people who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The conflict of the mid-nineteenth century was all about slavery. Remove chattel bondage from the discussion and you have a lover’s tiff about tariffs between Dixie and the North. The Peculiar Institution of Dixie was big business. It was huge. It was a monster. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the value of slaves in the South outstripped the entire value of Northern economy by several fold. Enormous amounts of wealth was locked up in human bodies. The claim that slavery was a loosing proposition, headed for the dust bin of History, is simply wrong.

Strip away moral considerations and slavery is very profitable in an agricultural setting; especially in labor-intensive items like sugar and cotton. Even  today, labor is still considered the largest controllable expense of any business. Slavery drives the cost of labor down to near nothing. The slaver does have to offer food, clothing and lodgings for the slaves, but none of this has to be any good. The slaver can feed the slaves slop, dress the slaves in rags, and house the slaves in hovels; and they did. Forget Gone With The Wind, that was Hollywood, slaves lived a Hobbesian existence. It was an institution enforced with brutal efficiency and overarching racism. It was brutal and brutalizing. It was also very, very, very profitable.

The Achilles’ heel of slavery was that this profitability was on hand for only a very select few. Only the thin crust of the very upper Southern planter elite made any real money from slavery. The vast majority of Southern whites were either too poor to own slaves or had the resources to own a few. These people had no real pieces in the game. They did have the vicious racism of their betters, and they had a dream. They had a dream of climbing the economic ladder and becoming gentleman planters too. It was this dream that caused the South to attempt to keep spreading slavery to new lands.

It was in this expansion that South and North came into conflict. It is also here that you, gentle reader, must forget all that pious nonsense them damn Yankees spout about the Abolitionists. The conflict between North and South was mainly economic. Northern settlers, the free men of the free soil, were dead set against competing against slave labor. For most supporters of the Republican Party the antipathy toward slavery was two fold: it was economic and deeply racist. The racial fear and the economic fear of African -Americans fed each other. Even when you look at the Abolitionist movement, the level of fear, distrust, and outright toxic hatred of African-Americans is phenomenal. After the Civil War, more than a few prominent Abolitionists became rabid supporters of Jim Crow. Being your bothers’ keeper only went so far for some Abolitionists.

The constant hunger for new land by both Northern and Southern pioneers is what finally moved the nation to war. More than anything else, it was the constant breaking of compromises by the South that led to the fracture. Southern pioneers’ insistence on bringing their “property” into places where it was not wanted  and legally prohibited, finally caused the North to draw a line. The election of Lincoln was that line. Slavery was to stay put. It was not placing one foot forward from where it was. There were to be no more bleeding Kansas, the North was done with that.

Unfortunately, the South was not done with that. The South correctly interpreted the election of Lincoln as a slap in the face. How they reacted to that slap was what caused the death of almost three quarters of a million men. The South went into high dungeon. The South went berserk.  After the fact, the South, in typical fashion, blamed the North for this temper-tantrum. Dixie still teaches  the conflict of 1860-1865 as “The War of Northern Aggression;”  but all the aggression came from the South in 1860-1861.  Remember , the only “aggression” Fort Sumter offered was sitting in Charleston harbor. It was the South Carolina fire-eaters who decided to shell the fort when the Union tried to resupply the position.

Once free of the hated “aggressive” Union fort, South Carolinians went on an orgy of secession and legislating. And what did the newly “liberated” state of South Carolina concern itself with? Laws about slavery.  Specifically these new laws were all about supporting, defending and entrenching the Peculiar Institution into the warp and woof of South Carolinian law. To even speak out against slavery was made a crime in South Carolina. By enshrining slavery in the law, South Carolina was showing exactly why it was attempting to secede from the Union.

Forget the nonsense about States Rights, that was and continues to be a McGuffin. The  right that the South was so fiercely defending was to hold men and women in chains. The right that was being defended was to treat people as property--full stop. Every other conflict between North and South was based on this one institution of the South, the Peculiar Institution of slavery. At first, this prime mover was implicit in the war. Later, via the Emancipation Proclamation, this prime mover was made explicit. To ignore or deny this central fact is an act of astounding intellectual dishonesty.

It takes several quantum leaps in cognitive dissonance  to pull this off; this denial of the centrality of slavery to the Civil War. It takes putting cognitive dissonance on massive amounts of steroids to pull this off. It takes deliberate ignorance and toxic amounts of racism to pull this off. It takes a deliberate policy of feeding children with lies at home and the classroom to pull this off. It takes teaching children something other than history. It takes teaching them a deliberately distorted concoction of half-truth, spin, hagiography, and outright lies as history. It takes teaching a perversion of history to willing fools to perpetuate this numbskullery.

If this Nation is ever  to really progress, to become a more perfect Union, it really has to come to grips with the long, sad history of the Middle Passage. In many ways we are still undergoing that passage. No part of the nation is clean. All have been soiled by the perversion that was slavery. It was not only the planter aristocracy of the South that made fortunes from the bitter tears of African-Americans. Many a New England dynasty was built on shipping human flesh from Africa to the New World. The heroes of the narrative are painfully few, the scoundrels are legion. We are still dealing with the toxin of the racist narrative that made slavery possible. It is a toxin that still sickens the politics of the nation.

In many ways, the election of Barack Obama has only made the toxin stronger. There has been a vicious blow-back from the usual suspects of the right. They are not as crude as George Wallace, or Bull Conners, or the other yellow-dog racists of yore. The new bigots hide under a thin patina of respectability. Still it is not too hard to scratch the surface and find the vicious hater beneath. All you have to look at is a salient datum to find the redneck, all you have to do is look at the forty percent who claim slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War.

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

The Battle Of Trenton, Or No Holiday for Hessians

This Sunday, December 26, 210 Marks the Anniversary of the battle of Trenton. If this Revolutionary War battle name does not jog one’s memory, ask yourself why Washington crossed the Delaware in the first place. Those now famous Hessians he fought were encamped in winter barracks in Trenton, New Jersey.

Washington achieved tactical and strategic surprise that day, routing the Hessians and raising the moral of his troops. It was a near run thing. Washington was delayed by foul weather. It was deep winter and New Jersey after all. Washington wanted to strike at midnight but the weather delayed the attack to dawn and caused some artillery units to be left behind.

Still the dawn attack was a very unpleasant surprise to the Hessians. The Hessian commander had some intelligence that Washington was up to something and was screaming for more troops and a change of venue, but he had no idea where or when Washington might strike. Thus when he was given his early wake up call, the Hessian commander was out of sorts.

The Hessian troops were not too happy either. They were sober, but the lack of a dawn post had left them bleary eyed, and lethargic. They attempted resistance, but tactical surprise and bad moral in the Hessian troops wrong-footed the mercenaries. The Hessian resistance quickly collapsed.

As battles go Trenton was minor both tactically and strategically. The real impact was psychological. After being pushed out of both New York and New Jersey moral was low in the Colonial Armies. Trenton was a much needed shot in the arm. Spirits rose after Trenton as did much needed recruitment and reenlistment efforts.

As for the British, they were shocked and dismayed by the news from the Garden State. Pacifying New Jersey was turning out to be a much taller order than suspected. Who knew such a small state could cause so much trouble? The Militia of New Jersey was especially irksome to the British, bloodying the noses of the Red Coats in several engagements.

The winter of 1776-1777 was none too jolly for British. The forces of King George III were getting the first taste of what was to be a long attritional struggle with an opponent that was often down, but never out.

So happy Delaware River crossing day. Hopefully December 26 will mean more to you than the first day you can return some of those awful gifts your clueless friends and relatives gave you.  “ A fruit cake; you shouldn’t have. No. Seriously. You really shouldn’t have. I’m allergic to the nuts.

They Killed Kennedy.

It is late November and that means one of the more enduring cottage industries of the United States is  producing at full capacity. That would be the producers of books and articles proving that JFK was done in by a conspiracy. It is entirely appropriate that these notions come out at the same time with the turkeys.

If you are sensing a little irritation here, you are correct. Nothing sets your faithful reporters’ teeth on edge quicker than these tales of an all singing, all dancing,conspiracy with out end, and the “proofs” offered for their existence. Time to pour the ice cold water of reason on these matters.

Uffelman's Razor:
[Given Murphy's law, ...] One should not attribute to evil design any unfortunate result which can be attributed to error. A mistake (or series of mistakes) is the simpler and more likely explanation.
Conspiracy Corollary to Uffelman's Razor:
Nothing should be attributed to conspiracy that can be explained by error or a succession of errors.

Granted the “explanation” that JFK died because of an epic cock-up by National, State and Local security agencies is very cold comfort. It has the small saving grace of being true.

Let us lay the ground work gentle reader. Let us deal with the facts on the ground before JFK got shot.
Federal agencies were rusty and sub par.  The last successful assassination of a President was beyond the living memory of most citizens of the United States in 1963. William McKinley in 1901 was the previous president to fall to an assassin’s gun.  More to the point, an assassination via a lone gunman was more of a mental exercise for the Secret Service than a point of concern. The last attempt on the life of any President was against Harry Truman by a group of radical Puerto Rican Nationalists. Not to beat this particular drum too hard but, the organization memory of the Secret Service had large holes in it. There was far too much slop and slack in the organization by 1963.

If the Feds were not running their “A” game that day, what of the state of Texas? Specifically what about law enforcement in the city of Dallas? Dallas in the 60’s was still a raw, violent and corrupt cow town. Incompetence and corruption ran rife though the Dallas Police. The Dallas Department of Public Safety was barely up to the task of controlling the mean and violent streets of Dallas. Tasked with Protecting the life of JFK they failed miserable.  

If you follow any kind of history, the history of nations, the history of peoples, the history of government, the history of organizations, you will see that they all have high and low points. Often you will see a nadir, or a low point in the history.  At these low points, incompetence and idiocy rule the roost. Common sense precautions and proceedings fall by the wayside. Sloth and slovenly behavior are the order of the day. Things fall apart. Things do not get done. Common sense proscriptions and preventative measures get ignored because no one wants to put in the effort to do them.

The security apparatus tasked with protecting JFK was thing of patches and shreds. There were gaping institutional holes in the system. It would take the assassination of JFK, RFK, and George Wallace for the Secret Service to spool up to the present policies and procedures. Even after significantly beefing up security for the president, the Secret Service still nearly lost Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. Only John Hinckley’s poor mental state and even worse aim saved the Gipper’s life.

The mind reels that the death of a man like JFK could be cut down so randomly, and so easily, by a marginal schlub. It rebels at the notion that a cypher, a complete nonentity like Lee Harvey Oswald, could cut down the most powerful man in the world. But it happened in just such a manner. All it took was Oswald’s desire to make something of himself, a literal window of opportunity and easy access to small arms.

Incompetence and sloppy planing delivered a clear shot to Oswald. His Marine Corps training provided a competence in rifle fire. The U.S. Mail provided the actual weapon. It was that simple
Even today, with all the tragedy that has occurred via easy access to fire arms, those weapons are still ridiculously easy to acquire. One could waltz into most gun shows with a huge thin foil hat on one’s head and a sock puppet on the hand, and still walk out with Semi-Automatic rifle. Just bring cash.
Unfortunately none of these arguments will hold much water with the CT true believers. They will continue to spin their confections, and people will continue to purchase those intellectual empty calories. The route through Daily Plaza was a set up? And how was that achieved? Do any of the proponents of that notion understand how many people would have to be in on the conspiracy to make that work? Far too many for success.

Real conspiracies are small and focused. Think Cheney’s WHIG and the staffing of that effort. It was Dead-Eye Dick and a handful of others, Conspiracies are always small because each new member brought into the conspiracy multiplies the risk of exposure.

One more thing about conspiracies, at least conspiracies in governance, they are short-lived. Because they are focused on a discernible goal, they end within a short period of time. They end because their goal has been reached; or because of some internal failure. Either way their secrecy ends in discreet amount of time. Secret conspiracies that stretch over decades of time are the product of over-active imaginations. They are as thick on the ground as unicorns. Conspiracies that hire a cast of thousands, which is about every JFK CT out there, are equally mythical.

It is almost certain that this newest JFK CT theory to hit the silver screen will play well. Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner did well with their movie based on the facts-free efforts of  epically corrupt Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Don’t get your faithful corespondent started on what a soup sandwich that prosecution was.

Despite the gross receipts DiCaprio and company pull in, no one should confuse their success at the box office with any kind of final truth telling about JFK.   As pointed out by Gerald Posner in Case Closed, the final answer is still that Oswald was the shooter, and that he acted alone. If Posner is too flawed a vessel for you, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi covers the same ground and reaches the same conclusion. Nothing offered by Hartmann and his collaborator is going to change that conclusion.

It is beyond reason to believe that a Justice Department run by RFK would not follow the possibility that JFK was done in by the mob. If there was a single shred of actionable evidence that supported that possibility, RFK, one of the most ruthless of Federal Prosecutors ever to be US AG, would not go after the mobster(s) that killed his brother? In what parallel universe did this happen? No, even if the AG was not kith and kin, the Feds would rip the Mobster(s) to shreds if they had evidence to link them with the murder of the president. This is the simple institutional facts on the ground. The Federal Government cannot let gagsters shoot up its chief executive officer on a whim. The Federal Government cannot tolerate such goings on for any reason whatsoever. The Feds would find a way to put an epic hurt on the Mafiosi by legal or extra-legal means. As they say in the Godfather, it would not be personal; it would just be business.

As goes that conspiracy theory, so go the rest. Pull back from the vortex of the illogic hole, and every Kennedy CT falls apart. They fall apart because they fail Occam's razor. They drag one into a bizarre parallel universe where needless complexity runs rampant.

Even the explanation offered for “them,” “they,” killing JFK becomes needlessly Byzantine. When your CT can’t offer a believable motive, you’re in deep trouble. Gentle reader, your faithful correspondent has yet to read or hear an “explanation” from JFK C.T. enthusiasts that makes any sense. The risk to benefit ratio Is totally out of whack. Its rational only exists in the minds of the CT faithful, not in the cold light of reason.

The Conspiracy to assassinate JFK is not now, nor ever been a part of History, even alternate history. It is not science. It is not art. It is religion. It is a confession of faith. It is  in the same league as belief in the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. This belief is a thing of shadow and mist. It is a combination of myth and wishful thinking. In a very real way it corrupts and degenerates the very tragedy of JFK’s death.
That tragedy is that a systemic failure of governance, and a culture that fetishizes guns, allowed the most marginal of its citizens to cut down JFK like a rabid yellow dog. The other tragedy is we would rather grasp on to fantastical stories of grand conspiracies than to deal with that awful truth.
 

The “Machine” Gets Beta Tested

he problem, if there is a real problem, with listening to Dan Carlin is that he gets very dark and dangerous parts of the brain firing off. In Episode 182 of his Common Sense podcast he went off on his frequent hobby horses: our interventionist foreign policy.  Not to dumb down such a passionate and flexible mind, and his arguments, but I am about to do that exact thing. He tore into what he saw as TR’s contribution to the corruption of the  Constitutional office of the President. He saw TR as radical usurper of Congressional prerogatives and man guilty of setting up the American Empire.

A miss is as good as a mile, and Dan, as he is wont to do, tosses his darts at the wrong target. If TR was an awful President, one of the worst in Mr. Carlin’s estimation, what about the President who really set up the hated machine of what is now called “The Forever War,” William McKinley? Why no love, or rather hate, for the man who gave us the Spanish American war?

Not having the pile of books that Dan can dive into, I will attempt to support my argument via the rickety structure that is the series of tubes known as the Internet; and my own incredibly biased opinion.

Instead of focusing on the proximate cause of the war, Cuba, I will sail much further east. If you are looking for remembering the Maine, or T.R.’s Rough Riders (whose Amateur flailing about, and bacon, was saved by the black professionals of 9th Cavalry) look somewhere else.  I am not going to Cuba, I am going to the Philippines.

It is in the Philippines that we see how propaganda can live on much longer than the actual need for it. In the U.S., the not so jolly, not so little war fought in the Philippine Archipelago is still called an “insurrection.” In the PI, they are much more clear about these things, they call it by its proper name “The Philippine-American War.” It was a brutal and nasty conflict that killed a large amount of the Pinoy Nation. No one knows for sure, but some say up to a million Filipinos lost their lives. The U.S. was not exactly counting.  They were doing unto the Pinoys what they did to the Apache, the Nez Perce, the Comanches, the Lakota, and other First Peoples of the United States. One reads of the later “battles” of the conflict in the Philippines, and it reads exactly like what happened at Wounded Knee. There were lots of dead natives, and barely a scratch on the U.S. combat effectives.

If anything is remembered of the conflict, it is the Battle of Manila Bay. It was there that the famous words, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” were uttered. No one bothers to ask what Gridley and his Admiral were doing floating in a bay half the world away from the supposed casus belli. What they were doing was pure and unadulterated back-stabbing imperialism.

The back-stabbing was perpetrated on one of the tragic heroes of the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy. He had fought a bitter independence struggle with Spain. The hostilities ended rather oddly with Aguinaldo in exile, and with Spain paying Aguinaldo’s partisans $800,000 Mexican to just go away to Hong Kong. But when the U.S. came to “liberate” the Philippines, Aguinaldo took up arms again.

The U.S. made very short work of the Spanish colonial forces. Not only had rot affected the combat effectiveness of Spain’s Philippines garrison, but they had been fighting a long demoralizing guerrilla struggle since 1896. By 1898, Spain colonial presence was a thoroughly rotten door that only needed a swift kick to splinter. The U.S. was only too happy to provide the kick.

It did not take too long for the goals of the U.S. government and the goals of Aguinaldo’s Ilustrados to come into conflict. While they both wanted a top-down style government, there was a huge argument on who was to be on top. Aguinaldo would come to grief because a group of Filipinos known as the Macabebe preferred the foreign Americans as their boss to the domestic Ilustrados.

With the Macabebes providing the actual double-cross via Funston’s raiders, Aguinaldo was out of action on March 23, 1901. The resistance to the U.S. occupation slowly fell apart. By April 13, 1902, all formal resistance by the Filipinos had ended with the surrender of Miguel Malvar and his devastated collection of three thousand men.

Informal resistance sputtered on for quite longer especially in the Muslim South; from 1902 until 1913. This was the “Moro Rebellion.” U.S. forces continued the winning strategy of concentration camps and total war that had given them victory in the North. But Mindanao is not Luzon. Moro tribesmen wielding spears and swords offered a fanatical resistance to U.S. occupation. It was an opposition informed by the prerequisites of jihad. The U.S. forces did not cover themselves in glory. In places like the First Battle of Bud Dajo, U.S. forces covered themselves knee deep in gore. Of the 800 to 1000 Moros who took refuge at Bud Dajo, a fortified volcanic crater, a whopping 6 lived to tell the tale.

In this first beta test of American Imperialism, we not only see the pattern that would become routine in later years; we also see how the opposition to “Manifest Destiny” operated.

The opposition to the 1898 war with Spain was vigorous.  Many leading lights of late Victorian America were solidly against the Spanish-American War. Men like Mark Twain inveighed against what they saw as a betrayal of the U.S.’s anti-colonial roots. If Glenn Greenwald has a spiritual and political father, it may very well be Mark Twain. If you doubt that, read Twain’s “War Prayer” ( http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html )

If Twain set a pattern, then what of yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst? What of the man who was one of the midwives to the “Jolly Little War”? What of the expansionists who urged the U.S. to “Take up the White Man’s Burden?”

Almost every military adventure the U.S. has participated in began first as an act of high moral dudgeon. This bears an uncanny resemblance to the  wars of the Roman Empire. Only once in Roman History, and then only after the fact, did the Romans admit their motives may have been less than pure. That was the Third and Last Punic War. Of course the fact that the casus belli was morally suspect did not prevent the Romans from burning Carthage to the ground, and taking the survivors into slavery. Other than the raising of Carthage, every war fought was pure as virgin snow, and if you objected to that talking point, the Romans would gut you.

It is in those Roman echos that we hear the defense of our current U.S. empire, an empire that began in the Philippines. It is in the PI that one can see the persistence of empire and the longevity of colonialism. In many ways, the PI is still trying to work out its daddy issues with its Tito Sam. Washington has big-footed the political processes of the PI ever since that fateful day of April 13, 1902, when the last vestiges of truly independent Philippine government was snuffed out on.

The conflicted emotions on the U.S. side cropped up early and often. Just a few years after invading the PI, (to offer the benighted people there the benefits of civilization) the U.S. passed the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934. In this act, the U.S. set up a Commonwealth of the Philippines with the aim of granting the Island full independence in ten years. The small price that the Filipinos had to pay for liberation was that they would no longer be allowed to come into the U.S.  A quota of 50 Filipinos a year would be magnanimously allowed to come to the promised land. Thus, once being “Christianized” and “ civilized”, the Filipinos would not be allowed to work in civilized and Christianize America. There was a “here’s your hat, what’s the hurry” aspect to both the Filipino people and the Pinoy nation that Uncle Sugar affected.

World War Two torpedoed those plans. Nothing makes an Imperial Nation value a territory more than when another Imperial Power tries to grab that piece of land. The blood and treasure spent on recovering the PI to the breast of Lady Liberty warped both Washington and Manila in ways that were never healthy. The horrors of the Japanese occupation and the Liberation by the U.S. put the Pinoy Nation deeply in Tito Sam’s debt. The Philippines may be 80% Roman Catholic, but for a certain generation, their true god is Douglas MacArthur. The Holy Trinity is no mach for the general with the corn-cob pipe. Washington overvalued the PI as a strategic asset, and the PI spiraled down into dependence and Kelptocracy

The deference that Filipinos showed their Ninong in D.C. became sycophantic, it became clinging and unbalanced. This most devout of Roman Catholic nations, became, in slow degrees, the U.S. military’s brothel and adult Disneyland. Two huge military bases were built on Philippine soil, and the PI became a minor pawn in the global machinations of the Cold War. It was almost inevitable that the social distortions would finally create the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Marcos and his happy bunch of thieves were allowed to run riot through the archipelago. Whatever was not securely nailed down was whisked away into hidden Swiss bank accounts. The Administrations in Washington turned a blind eye toward the rampant corruption because in the words of FDR (said about a South American dictator), Marcos may have been a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.

Thus, the U.S. was willing to have the PI slide into a fairly typical third world dictatorship so it could keep its military toys stationed in the tropics. The U.S. did OK, the PI did not. The years of Martial Law by Marcos corrupted the politics and the culture of the PI in ways that are still being felt. Thanks to our assist, the PI is a desperately poor, dysfunctional, and hierarchical nation that is spinning out of control. Even in “Imperial Manila” the infrastructure is a cruel joke. A heavy rain can cause massive flooding. A week of heavy rain caused epic flooding that brought the northern island of Luzon to its knees in 2009. In the outlying provinces the infrastructure exists only on paper. The actual money spent to “complete” the roads, bridges, electrification, etc. was stolen outright by corrupt government officials.

The only things that got Washington out of the PI were the end of the Cold War and Mount Pinatubo.  Washington began to wonder if keeping the bases was such a great idea after the Soviet Union evaporated. Washington was even less enamored when those same bases got covered in millions of tons of volcanic ash. Clark Air Base was a total loss. What Pinatubo did not ruin, the looters stole. With only Subic Naval Base on the table, negotiations between Washington and Manila went flying off the rails and straight into a ditch. The UP educated section of the Filipino elites were angrily talking about the need to “kill the father;” and the government of the PI was making noises of its own. With such nationalist notions swimming about in the public consciousness of the PI, Uncle Sam decided to dash out the nearest exit with all his toys.

But it was all too soon before both the U.S. and the PI had their Brokeback Mountain moment of “ I wish I knew how to quit you.” Uncle Sugar was back in PI to assist the nation in the “War on Terror.” It was not long before the old status quo was reestablished. Proof positive of this was illustrated by a very nasty rape “allegation” involving U.S. Marines and a young teen-aged Filipina. The “alleged” gang rape of the young woman magically disappeared after her family was granted some money and a get-out-of-poverty jail cards (U.S. green cards). Thus was an “alleged” gross violation of a young woman’s rights and dignity smoothed over.

Looking back over more than one hundred years of U.S. colonial misadventure in “The Peal of the Orient”, one can see the disconnect between U.S. avowed goals and grubby reality.  The U.S. went to the PI to “pick up the White Man’s burden” and to “civilize the degenerate brown races.” What really occurred was the feckless creation of a dysfunctional client state whose only real export is its own people. It is said that the PI spent four hundred years in a Spanish convent, and Fifty years in Hollywood. Unfortunately for the PI, the years in Hollywood have been spent making an Irwin Allen disaster flick.

The long and tangled history of the United States in the Philippines is illustrative of how the US interventionist foreign policy really works. Interference by Washington in the Affairs of the Pinoy Nation have made an epic mess. The PI is less of a nation and more of a therapy session between Imperial Manila and its neglected and needy citizens. The recriminations, backbiting, co-dependency and dysfunction of the relationship is depressing to watch. The only thing that is worse is watching the relationship between the paternalistic and negligent United States and the always-desperate-and-chronically-needy PI. Washington only seems to care about the archipelago when it fits into some broader foreign policy concern. The PI is a useful pawn to push around the Asian chess board. Of course, the best and brightest of Foggy Bottom never consult Manila on whether it wants to participate in the game. The interest, needs, or desires of the Pinoy Nation are either made subservient to the needs of U.S., or totally ignored.  It has been this way for a long time, ever since 1898.

It was in that fateful year that the experiment in American Empire began in earnest. The P.I. was the beta test of U.S. hegemony. It is in that island chain’s history that we can see how that hegemony really works, or more exactly fails to work. For the most part, it is hard to see what, if any, benefit the vast majority of Pinoys have accrued from the long association. A small, connected elite have gotten fabulously wealthy but the poor have only grown more numerous and more desperate. Adding the pluses and minuses it appears a wash at best.

If after more than 100 years in the PI, the best the U.S. interventionists efforts can manage is a shrug of the soldiers; then what of the rest of the developing world?  That is a question best not answered if one believes in U.S. exceptionalism. The answer is not pretty, gentle reader; it is not pretty at all.

Papers reveal Nixon plan for North Korea nuclear strike | World news | The Guardian

Papers reveal Nixon plan for North Korea nuclear strike | World news | The Guardian: "It is more than 35 years since he was shunted out of office, but the thought of Richard Nixon's finger on the nuclear trigger still has the power to terrify.

Now it has been revealed that the highly erratic president's metaphorical digit was hovering even closer than was widely realised as his administration laid plans for an atomic strike against North Korea in 1969 following the shooting down of a US spy plane.

According to newly revealed government documents, Nixon is even believed to have ordered nuclear bombers to be put on standby for an immediate strike after North Korean jets downed the American plane as it flew over international waters collecting electronic and radio intelligence.

The documents, obtained by the National Security Archive in Washington after a freedom of information request, describe the plan codenamed Freedom Drop, which called for 'pre-co-ordinated options for the selective use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea'."