No to THAAD: S. Koreans protest, sue military over US missile deployment plan

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South Koreans have staged a protest against a land-swap deal which will see their country host the controversial US defense missile system THAAD. Some living near the host site have also filed a lawsuit against the Defense Ministry, according to attorneys.

Demonstrators holding signs and chanting slogans gathered in front of the Seoul headquarters of retail giant Lotte on Tuesday to protest its deal with the South Korean government.

The agreement, signed between the two sides on Tuesday, will see the company trade its golf course for military-owned land near the capital, with the golf course becoming the future home of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

THAAD is an advanced system designed to intercept short, medium, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal flight phase. Equipped with long-range radar, it is believed to be capable of intercepting North Korea’s intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

The Tuesday protest comes as Yonhap news agency reported that the military would be using helicopters to bring in barbed wire fencing to close off the golf course after weeks of daily protest.

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China warns US, S. Korea of 'consequences' over THAAD land swap deal

Protest leader Kim Chung-hwan told AFP that hundreds of soldiers and riot police had been deployed to the golf course to guard entrances.

Meanwhile, those living near the golf course have protested by filing a lawsuit against South Korea's Defense Ministry.

The suit from residents of Seongju county and neighboring Gimcheon accuses the defense ministry of bypassing legally-required procedures, including prior agreement from locals and an environmental impact assessment, according to AFP.

“This is only the beginning of our legal battles to stop this project,” lawyer Kim Yu-Jeong told journalists outside the ministry, where some 40 activists and residents were also holding a demonstration.

The South Korean government reiterated on Tuesday that the deal is aimed at self-defense against Pyongyang.

“We will maintain our principle that the decision for the THAAD installation is a sovereign and self-defense act aimed at protecting the country and its people from North Korea's nuclear and missile threats,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said, as quoted by Yonhap.

The government also vowed to take necessary steps to prevent South Korean companies from any unfair treatment by China, which has repeatedly spoken out against THAAD, fearing it will undermine its own ballistic capabilities. On Monday, it warned of “consequences” against the US and Seoul if the deal were to be signed by the two parties. 

Beijing has already taken what many claim are retaliatory measures, including halting Lotte's construction of a multibillion dollar real estate project in China.

A Troubled CIA Analyst Finds Jesus

And the devil is spelled T-R-U-M-P

PHILIP GIRALDI •

Last Monday The Washington Post featured an op-ed by one Edward Price entitled “I didn’t think I’d ever leave the CIA. But because of Trump, I quit.” I must admit that it was refreshing at first to read something in The Post that did not rush to blame BOTH Trump and Vladimir Putin for everything going wrong in the world but, not to worry, evil Russia was indeed cited a bit farther along in the narrative.

Edward “Ned” Price is a likely lad. He has a nice intense look, clean cut, neat tie, good credentials with a degree in international relations from an unidentified college. He decided on a CIA career fifteen years ago and “work[ed] proudly for Republican and Democratic presidents…” Perhaps not temperamentally cut out to be an operations officer or spy, he claims that “as an analyst…[he] became an expert in terrorist groups and traveled the world to help deter and disrupt attacks.”

Price reports that he was quite happy in his work, because both the Bush and Obama administrations “took the CIA’s input seriously.” He was seconded to the White House in 2014 and pats himself on the back for “having [his] analysis presented to the president and seeing it shape events.”

But that was before the wheels came off the car. Per Price, “I watched in disbelief when, during the third presidential debate, Trump casually cast doubt on the high-confidence conclusion of our 17 intelligence agencies, released that month, that Russia was behind the hacking and release of election-related emails.”

Price was also unhappy with Trump’s admittedly odd speech combined with photo op to the CIA staff on his first full day in office but was particularly peeved over the reorganization of the Nation Security Council (NSC), which excluded the CIA director and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), but included Stephen Bannon, “who cut his teeth as a media champion of white nationalism.” Even though Price was wrong about the DNI and the White House quickly reversed course on including CIA Director Mike Pompeo as the duplicative DNI position might be eliminated, for Price the message was “It [the White House] has little need for intelligence professionals who, in speaking truth to power, might challenge the ‘America first’ orthodoxy that sees Russia as an ally and Australia as a punching bag.”

Towards the end of his apologia, Edward Price noted that his decision had “nothing to do with politics,” before observing how he served “under President George W. Bush, some of whose policies I also found troubling, and I took part in programs that the Obama administration criticized and ended.”

There is inevitably some concluding drivel about intelligence professionals who deliver “the fruits of their labor-sometimes at the risk of life or limb…” being “accorded due deference” by the White house, an amusing commentary from a careerist who clearly spent his time behind a desk.

There are a few things one might say about Price. First of all, his “nothing to do with politics” is pure balderdash. He found Bush policies “troubling” while the clearly more admirable Obama “criticized and ended” the nasty bits. Yes, Bush authorized the use of torture and renditions initially after 9/11 but they were de facto suspended in his second term. And while Bush presented the American people with Iraq, Obama gifted us with Libya and Syria while continuing Afghanistan. And Price was at CIA while the organization was surreptitiously monitoring the Senate Intelligence Committees investigation into its torture program. He was willing to continuing working for the Agency after the spying and the war crime that it was trying to hide was revealed but suddenly found Jesus or a backbone or a conscience (select whichever one applies) only when Trump was elected.

Ned appears to forget that it was Bush who demurred at killing civilians en masse using drones and Obama who has embraced and expanded the practice. Obama also initiated the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas without due process and used the State Secrets Privilege more than all his predecessors combined to block any judicial challenge to his actions. Apparently, Price considered all that to be just fine since it was a liberal Democrat at the controls. And, by the way, Price is on record as having contributed $5,000 to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. He is a registered Democrat in the District of Columbia. His characterization of Steve Bannon as a “white nationalist” and mention of the “Russian hack” come straight out of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s playbook and the more recent Democratic Party narrative to explain why it lost the election.

And there’s more. Price’s rapid rise through the Agency ranks came after his assignment to the Obama White House where he worked for deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and became an administration spokesman on the NSC. That means he was not exactly a highly principled intelligence briefer “speaking truth to power,” which is itself a bullshit feel good expression as the CIA has a long history of trimming facts to please the audience, most particularly the president. Price should do a little background reading on what former leading Agency analysts Robert Gates, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell and John Brennan dissimulated about to make the client in the White House happy.

Ned Price was apparently renowned as a White House apologist working to sell a product to a possibly skeptical audience. He was reportedly a highly regarded spin-meister for administration policies, working a well-cultivated group of media contacts that would replay his analysis and attribute it to “a senior White House official.” The analysis would bounce back and forth until it was picked up and validated by appearance in the mainstream media. That used to be called by some “information management” while others would regard it as propaganda.

And then there are the errors in fact and interpretation that Price provides to make his case against Trump. The alleged “conclusion” regarding Russian hacking of the election was really based on the input of the only two intelligence agencies that have the capability to analyze and trace the origin of a hack – the NSA and the FBI. The FBI had to be pressured into agreeing with the conclusions of the report Price cites and the NSA supported them only with “moderate” confidence, meaning that it recognized that the evidence linking the hack to Russia just wasn’t there. Many former intelligence officers and some in the media have questioned the validity of the report and have demanded to see at least some of the evidence to support its conclusions, which, to this date, has not been produced.

Price’s account of the Trump reorganization of the National Security Council also is incorrect. The reorganization states “The Director of National Intelligence…will attend where issues pertaining to [his] responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.” So the DNI was included and Price fails to recognize that after the DNI position was created under George W. Bush he or she was to be the intelligence referent and the CIA Director no longer filled that role and was excluded. That practice continued under Obama, which Price ignores even though he worked on the NSC, and he also does not note that the CIA and FBI Directors often have, in fact, joined in on the NSC “Principals” meetings as a courtesy. If the office of DNI is eliminated in the current reorganization, the head of CIA will step up and assume those responsibilities in the new structure, so the intelligence community is not in any sense being pushed out.

Price aside, I don’t know how many, if any, CIA officers have resigned recently either for ethical reasons or out of dislike for Trump. But if some have, I would hope they had better rationalizations for doing so than were produced in the op-ed, which is reduced to anti-Russian sentiment, dismay at government reorganization and longing for the good old days when a liberal Democrat who was able to lie very convincingly was running the show. I would have preferred an Edward Price op-ed explaining how he had resigned over a real issue, like the bipartisan unrelenting pressure on Iran that could easily lead to war, or the continuing practice of drone assassinations and special ops killings, like the recent raid in Yemen in which 15 women and children, including an eight year old, died. Still, even lacking that, I get it. Ned Price just doesn’t like Trump very much.

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/a-troubled-cia-analyst-finds-jesus/

Inside Dharavi, a Mumbai Slum

by KENNETH SURIN

Mumbai.

At an academic conference in Mumbai last week, some of us were in two minds when the organizers proposed a tour of Dharavi, the largest slum in Mumbai, made famous by the film Slum Dog Millionaire.

The phenomenon of poverty porn is well-known—it is no longer news when the egregious Bono scurries to Africa every now and again for a photo-op with a child who is nothing but skin and bone.

In the end, we decided to go on the tour.  The institute of social sciences hosting our conference is widely respected, and has dozens of cooperative projects in Dharavi.  One of Dharavi’s leaders was going to be a guide for our group, which was a good sign.

Another good sign was the strict ban on photography by visitors.  Among other things, this reduced to almost zero the possibility of our running into the camera-addicted Bono or Bob Geldof.

Like many mega-cities in the developing world, Mumbai is a city of almost unimaginable contrasts, as Bollywood stars and celebrity cricketers (cricket being India’s national sport) in their opulent high-rise apartments exist alongside crowded millions living in dismal poverty and squalor.

The population of Mumbai is 24 million, most of whom– 60%– live in slums.  The scale on which things are done is impressive–  according to the Guardian, 7 million people use Mumbai’s trains everyday (this is slightly less than the population of Switzerland), and 5.5 million use the buses daily (this is roughly the population of Denmark).

Mumbai appears chaotic, but this is not the chaos of unbridled disorder.  After a while one notices patterns within the seeming disorder, how the ostensible free-for-all on roads is underpinned by informal rules (quite different from the official highway code!), how a basic civility prevails despite the obvious rough edges, how forms of social collectivity and mutual responsibility absent in the west continue to exist in Mumbai, how industrious and business-like the people on the street are, and so on.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the celebrated 127-year-old system of lunch delivery by Mumbai’s tiffinwallas (or dabbawallas in the local language).  The tiffinwallas pick up hot meals in tiffin carriers from the residences of office workers in mid-morning, deliver the meals to the appropriate offices using bicycles and trains, and return the empty carriers to the worker’s residence later that afternoon.

Over 400,000 lunches and more than 200,000 customers are served by a workforce of over 5000 each day.

The tiffinwallas are from poor backgrounds and tend to have limited literacy. As a result, they use a relatively simple coding system inscribed on the lids of the tiffin carriers.

There is nothing high-tech about this operation, which makes it astonishing that the tiffinwallas have an error rate of 1 in 16 million deliveries.  FedEx or UPS would eat their hearts out for this kind of efficiency.

All earnings are shared, and the tiffinwallas receive the same pay. Each tiffinwalla is given the responsibility of negotiating the price per delivery with their customer, with the strict expectation of truth and trustworthiness.  (Clearly a con artist like Donald Trump could never belong to this kind of organization, with its powerful fiduciary element!)

The tiffinwalla system is a vast network of inbuilt interdependencies, with a minimal organizational structure, and although the name is not used, it is socialist to the core.

At Dharavi, between 750,000 and a million people live in an area of 1 sq. mile, i.e. the size of New York’s Central Park or 1/3 that of London’s Hyde Park.  Residences are between 200 and 400 sq. feet, some are shanty-like, others have a bricks-and-mortar solidity indicating permanence.

Dharavi’s striking feature is its combination of a residential area with another devoted to micro-industries including recycling, leather, metal, pottery, and garment-making.  There are over 20,000 mini-manufacturing units, generating an annual turnover of around US$650 million.

This is an informal economy primarily, so health and safety standards and supervision common in the west are in abeyance where Dharavi is concerned.  Some of our group went into a mini-factory where recycled aluminium cans were being smelted down.  It had no ventilation system, and we beat a rapid retreat as the acrid fumes stung our eyes and nostrils.  The workers operating the smelters seemed habituated to the toxic breathing environment.

Officially, child labour is forbidden in India, but a fair number of children seemed to be working.

An easy way to gauge the well-being of a community anywhere in the world is to look at the appearance of its children.  In Dharavi, they seemed well-cared for and happy.  There were a number of rooms full of children of pre-school age sitting on the floor and reading aloud to a teacher who was seated in the only chair in the room.

Our guide told us that an impressive 15% of the children go on to higher education, compared to the national figure of 24% in 2013.  Impressive, because many of these children have parents with little or no formal education, and countless studies worldwide confirm that the golden road to a good education is having educated parents.

Life in Dharavi is tough and challenging.  Sanitation, while improving, is still inadequate, and the water and electricity supplies are erratic and prone to interruption.  Drainage, especially during the monsoon season, is inadequate.  Infrastructure is rudimentary.

However, Dharavi’s biggest challenge lies ahead.  This is the collusion between commercial developers and neoliberal governments at both the state and central levels, which regard “development”, measured crudely in terms of increases in GDP, as a one size fits all panacea.

Dharavi is situated in-between two major railway lines, and is next to the central business district, making it a prized location for developers.

Unless held in check, private developers everywhere are likely to put profits ahead of the interests of local people, especially when the latter lack the power to resist what is likely to be imposed upon them.

The state government, in its desire to get rid of the slums and “rehabilitate” their occupants, enacted a policy which gave developers land for commercial development provided they built free houses for slum dwellers.

There was a catch:  slum dwellers must have have lived in the area to be cleared from before 1995, or, in some cases before 2000, in order to qualify for free housing.

As a result, almost 70% of slum occupants in Mumbai do not qualify for free housing, and are likely to move to a slum somewhere else in the city when they are evicted by developers.

According to Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority, as of January 2017, a mere 162,000 housing units have been built for former slum dwellers in Mumbai over the course of two decades.  The new housing tends to be on the city’s outskirts, far away from the downtown area where the former slum dwellers work as office cleaners, restaurant and hotel workers, porters, sweepers, delivery men, and security personnel.

If Dharavi is cleared and redeveloped, it is almost certain that its micro-enterprises, employing tens of thousands of people, will die a quick death.  Commercial developers make their money from building luxury apartment towers and space-age malls, and the moneyed individuals who are their clients are not going to tolerate the sulphurous fumes, the cacophony of metal-crushing machines, and the stench of leather processing emanating from Dharavi’s mini-factories.  These will be gone in the blink of an eye.

80% of the people who live in Dharavi work in these micro-industries, and it will be almost impossible to replicate these homegrown enterprises elsewhere on the same scale and with the same defining principle, that is, Dharavi as an integrated community where people work where they live and live where they work.  The fabric of Dharavi as a community, socially cohesive and with a robust entrepreneurial spirit, will be destroyed overnight.

As long as its land is treated as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, or to someone with the requisite political connections, the redevelopment of Dharavi will be fraught with disaster.

A more promising recent proposal for its redevelopment in fact calls for its land to be made over to a non-profit communal land trust, thus safeguarding it from the circling land-grabbing sharks who are interested in its commercial exploitation and little else.

(Taking the taxi from our hotel to the conference venue in another part of Mumbai each day we passed a large construction site with a billboard in front of it that read: “Luxury apartments for the precious few”.  A perfect way to let the cat out of the bag, in this case by not putting it in the bag so it’s always there for all to see.)

The same promising redevelopment proposal referred to above also calls for a “bottom up” approach to slum redevelopment.  “Top down” urban planning undertaken by “experts” on drawing boards and computer simulations prior to being implemented willy-nilly has had a woeful record of success all over the world.

Far better to take a “bottom up” approach, and involve the slum’s inhabitants from the outset, by asking them what steps they want taken to improve their community.  The inhabitants have a crucial “user knowledge” that should be the starting-point for any transformation proposed for Dharavi.

If asked whether they want an improved living and work environment, slum-inhabitants throughout the world are likely to say “yes”.  But if this involves placing them in high-rise buildings which jeopardize their long-established social networks and cooperative work practices, then they invariably say “no”.

This has been the case with Dharavi.

Join the debate on Facebook

Kenneth Surin teaches at Duke University, North Carolina.  He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/27/inside-dharavi-a-mumbai-slum/

Consolation Prizes

by    John Palattella  

Immediately after 9/11, one of the ways Americans tried to explain the terrorist attacks to themselves was by reading, and sharing through fax and email, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” Auden wrote the poem after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and his description of how “the unmentionable odor of death” offended “the September night,” along with his expressions of fear (“Defenseless under the night) and determination (“We must love one another or die”), appealed to Americans overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness and the urgent need to understand a new international enemy.

Although the philosopher Richard Rorty never wrote a line of poetry, in November he became the Auden of the country’s post-election stupor. A few days after Donald Trump’s electoral-college victory over Hillary Clinton, a picture of three passages from Rorty’s Achieving Our Country started to circulate widely on Twitter. (The book first appeared in the middle of Bill Clinton’s second term.) “Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrial democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period,” Rorty wrote. It will be a time “in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments … something will crack.” The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system had failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for.”

The tweet went viral. Rorty’s publisher, Harvard University Press, was inundated with requests for Achieving Our Country—more than it has received for any of its titles, including the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s recent bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century—and so his book was rushed back into print. Twelve days after the election, the New York Times published a review of it under the headline “Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming.” A week after that, in a New Yorker article about President Obama, David Remnick credited Rorty with predicting that “the neglected working class would not tolerate its marginalization for long.” A philosopher best known for making a postmodern turn in the 1980s had become the oracle of liberals and leftists feeling defenseless against a new internal enemy who seemed like a stranger from another part of the country.

Rorty culled the title for his book from James Baldwin’s essay about Elijah Muhammad in The Fire the Next Time. In that essay, Baldwin criticized Muhammad and the Nation of Islam for their bitter isolation and disaffection, and their aloofness to the plight of African Americans in the early 1960s. He concluded by insisting that “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”

The dream of a country capable of remedying its imperfections wasn’t new to Rorty. His parents broke with the Communist Party in 1932, the year after he was born, and in Achieving Our Country he writes of growing up as “a red-diaper anticommunist baby” amid relatives and friends who were part of the old reformist left. His mother’s father preached the Social Gospel. Some of his other relatives “helped write and administer New Deal legislation,” he explains, and like them he came to believe that the most important work of government is to protect the weak from the strong. Above all, that has meant fighting against all the ways that the rich in America fight against the poor.

Although none commanded the stage like Rorty, other dead writers were also auditioned as soothsayers in the weeks after Trump’s victory. Dark Days Ahead (2005), the final book by the urbanist Jane Jacobs, was touted as “a survivor’s guide to the Age of Trump” for having “ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash.” In the New Yorker, a week after Remnick had pointed to Rorty’s book as an example that Trump’s victory wasn’t “beyond prediction,” the magazine’s music critic Alex Ross explained that the Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming. America’s “combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity is precisely the scenario” that it feared, he wrote, because “mass distraction” ends up masking “élite domination.” It’s a fair point, but if you’re in need of a soothsayer, why settle for Adorno and Horkheimer, or limit the search to the twentieth century? In the late first century C.E., Juvenal pointed to the dangers of distraction and domination when he coined the phrase panem et circenses in his Tenth Satire to describe the corruption of the populous and democratic politics in Rome. All that’s missing is a New York Times headline blaring “Ancient Poet Saw Trump Coming.”

●

The infatuation with portents—with the supposed relevance of voices from the past—is neither bread nor circus. It’s an obsession with history that can also be a form of amnesia. In the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders made an unlikely bid for the party’s nomination by promoting a program of economic populism that defended the economic interests of lower-income voters and attacked those whom Teddy Roosevelt once called “the malefactors of great wealth.” (Rorty probably would have seen Sanders as a throwback to his parents’ generation.) Much of Sanders’s appeal was based on his arguments about the political dangers of inequality—yet for those who have looked to what Adorno or some other famous writer said decades ago about that subject, it’s as though Sanders hadn’t campaigned at all.

This infatuation comes with other blind spots—such as not seeing that many of Trump’s voters were more affluent than Clinton’s and just as well educated, or not noticing that a fixation on voters’ economic motives marginalizes other reasons for Trump’s appeal. For example, in the lead-up to the election many of his supporters expressed a desire to watch the system crash or to see other people suffer from his policies, and during the campaign Trump himself enjoyed publicly humiliating his critics, along with women, a disabled reporter and the other contenders for the Republican nomination. But the appeal to voices from the past, in a time of historical turmoil, may not have much to do with accuracy in the first place. In a recent essay about the apocalypse, Mark Lilla discusses how people come to see themselves as history’s victims, and in turn how they imagine the future:

Narratives of progress, regress and cycles all assume a mechanism by which historical change happens. It might be the natural laws of the cosmos, the will of God, the dialectical development of the human mind or of economic forces. Once we understand the mechanism, we are assured of understanding what really happened and what is to come. But what if there is no such mechanism? What if history is subject to sudden eruptions that cannot be explained by any science of temporal tectonics?

Lilla focuses on how history is made from the ways that people narrate accidents in time. An accident is something unintended and without necessity: a pure blast of contingency. It can be painful, even if it causes no physical injury, because it’s an event beyond any one person’s power to predict, and recognizing that one’s life hinges on a series of accidents can be hard to stomach. Leaning on Rorty or Adorno is one way to get around reckoning with what may be new, uncertain and terrifying about Trump, because it makes his victory look as if it had always been understandable, if not predictable. The story the soothsayers are being used to tell is not that the Trump phenomenon was like an accident—a sudden eruption with a dynamic all its own—but rather that it was an accident waiting to happen, which is to say no accident at all. The moral of the story is not “What was it that we did not know or could not have known, and how can we correct that?” but instead “We had the knowledge but missed the meaning. We should have understood all along.”

There’s a Freudian dimension to this moral. In his analysis of repressed psychological material, Freud suggested that through dreams and accidents, the present is filled with the murmur of repressed voices and desires from the past demanding recognition. As Adam Phillips has written, Freud considered accidents to be evidence of a “disowned intention,” an instance when voices repressed in the past end up speaking “through our mistakes.” Rorty and others have become such fateful voices, signs once disowned through ignorance. The therapeutic comfort of listening to them now is that they make it seem like our mistakes—the election of Trump being one—are in some sense predictable or knowable, as opposed to being inexplicable. They drag Trump’s victory from the muck of contingency onto familiar, less painful ground.

●

But Rorty is a special case, because the soothsayer who has been murmuring to us in his voice is a specter. For all his dismay in Achieving Our Country about the direction of American democracy, he has very little to say about the radical right and economic inequality. The tweeted passages about the rise of populism and the coming of a strongman appear late in his book, almost as throwaway lines. Rorty makes his prediction, with a nod to Edward Luttwak’s The Endangered American Dream (1993) for support, and then moves on. It’s as if “September 1, 1939” had ended after “Defenseless under the night.”

The main source of Rorty’s disenchantment in Achieving Our Country is not with the political right but with what he calls the cultural left, the sphere of activists and academics that arose in opposition to the war in Vietnam and eventually found a home in the country’s universities. He praises this left for founding academic programs about gender and race that have done much to overcome the “socially accepted sadism” directed at minorities in the United States; he also credits its protests against Vietnam with saving the country’s moral identity. But he derides it for thinking of the war as the country’s scarlet letter instead of as a series of “mistakes correctible by reforms.” (This is glib. A government lying continually to Americans about a war is not just a mistake.) Most of all, Rorty bemoans how once it entered the universities, the cultural left developed a passion for social theories “about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology.” The cultural left, he complains, imagines “a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce” because hopelessness has been rationalized into a sine qua non.

For Rorty, the only alternative to such hopelessness is “to remind the country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of.” The left must “tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past—episodes and figures to which the country should remain true.” This is Rorty’s version of “we must love one another or die.” He stresses that the resolution of any disagreement about those hopes cannot involve “an appeal to the way reality, apart from any human need, really is.” The moral or political high ground will be won not by those with the best facts but by those with the best stories.

Rorty came to champion stories over facts during the postmodern turn that he made in the 1980s, when he shrugged off analytic philosophy for pragmatism. The core idea of the three books he published during that time—Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), The Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)—is that truth is not found but made. This means that thought neither reflects nor represents reality; it is neither the mirror of nature nor the result of a quest for transcendental Truth. For Rorty, concepts like God, the Good, and the Mind are nothing more than the proper nouns of scientific and moral vocabularies. There are countless ways of knowing and describing the world, he insisted, philosophy being just one of them—and none are intrinsically superior to any other.

His pragmatism may seem like a recipe mostly for individual self-perfection (each person invents his or her own language for describing the world, and with it his or her self), but Rorty hadn’t given up on compassion or solidarity. He just saw them as the goals of a different kind of language. Solidarity would be “created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people,” he explained, and that’s “a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like.” At home you can be like Nietzsche or Proust, perfecting the self, but in public you should follow the example of writers like George Orwell or James Baldwin, telling stories that work on other people’s moral imaginations to warn against the temptation to be cruel and to remind them that fixing mistakes is not beyond our control.

Rorty the philosopher emphasizes the importance of telling the most effective political story. In a few hundred words in Achieving Our Country, Rorty the oracle confirms the assumptions of many people on the left who were already inclined to doubt the wisdom of the “system” or suspected that the election was mostly about economics. The oracle is their echo chamber, which is why he’s been comforting. Yet a crucial question remains, and neither Rorty nor any other figure from the past can answer it for us: How to stop telling comforting stories about ourselves, and start telling more convincing ones about the common good?

https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/consolation-prizes

Even Today Washington Remains the Same Unapologetic McCarthyism Fortress

Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Column: Society

Region: USA in the World

The US has always been a country of religious and national exclusiveness and messianism. 

Millions of Americans ever since the XVII century have been convinced that their country is a stronghold of democracy and freedom, especially the freedom of business and religion. American messianic nationalism has played a pivotal role in the fact that the US even started the Cold War against the Soviet Union. That is why ever sing 1945 there’s been a belief about America’s right to redraw the entire world in accordance with its perception of freedom. It was argued time and time again that this right will allow Washington to get the people of the world “liberated”, bring them in the sphere of interests of US business cycles.

All those who disagreed with notions beyond the borders of the United States were receiving the “cold war treatment”, while internal opposition was harshly suppressed with McCarthyism and the anti-Communist demagogy.

It is believed that the era of McCarthyism that was directed against leftist and liberal activists and organizations reached its heights in the 50s, yet, the recent events in the US demonstrate that this ideology hasn’t gone anywhere and Washington’s political establishment is determined to revive it today in the United States in all of its former “glory”.

Yet, a lot has changed since the Cold War days, even though US politics remains the same endless repeat of the same debates, conflicts, and tactics.

As it’s been noted by The Intercept, even back in 1950s he intrepid and independent journalist of the Cold War, Isidor Stone tried to explain why it’s impossible to stop McCarthyism in the US, as Kremlin leaders are constantly being depicted as gravely threatening and even omnipotent for the sole purpose of sustaining militarism at home. Other than the change in Moscow’s ideology — a change many of today’s most toxic McCarthyites explicitly deny – Stone’s observations could be written with equal accuracy today. For instance, he would state that:

If the public mind is to be conditioned for war, if it is being taught to take for granted the destruction of millions of human beings, few of them tainted with this dreadful ideological virus, all of them indeed presumably pleading for us to liberate them, how can we argue that it matters if a few possibly innocent men lose jobs or reputations because of McCarthy?

That is why today’s advocates of McCarthyism are doing everything they can to to sustain fears over foreign adversaries, depicting them as all-powerful and ubiquitous. Аnd once that image takes root, few will be willing to question the propaganda for fear of being accused of siding with the Foreign Evil. Those are the notions that no American dares to challenge anymore without the fear of becoming suspect himself.

Few foreign alleged villains have been vested with such omnipotence and ubiquity as Vladimir Putin has been — at least ever since Democrats discovered that he was a perfect candidate for the bogeyman role that remained vacant for a short while after the end of Cold War. The modern McCarthyism believers are trying to convince the US population that Russia is lurking behind all evils and whoever questions any of that is revealing themselves to be a traitor, likely on Putin’s payroll.

As it’s been noted by The Nation:

The bipartisan, nearly full-political-spectrum tsunami of factually unverified allegations that President Trump has been sedi-
tiously “compromised” by the Kremlin, with scarcely any nonpartisan pushback from influential political or media sources, is deeply alarming. Begun by the Clinton campaign in mid-2016, and exemplified now by New York Times columnists (who write of a “Trump-Putin regime” in Washington), strident MSNBC hosts, and unbalanced CNN commentators, the practice is growing into a latter-day McCarthyite hysteria.

Much has changed since the Cold War days, except for the fact that US policies remain the same dull and mindless repetition of the same debates, conflicts, and tactics.

http://journal-neo.org/2017/02/28/even-today-washington-remains-the-same-unapologetic/

Iran and the New Multipolar World

James O’Neill, an Australian-based Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Column: Politics

Region: Middle East

Country: Iran

During the last Presidential campaign, the Republican nominee Donald Trump made a variety of statements that suggested a changing focus in US foreign policy. He promised, inter alia, no more attempts at regime change, an effective fight against the terrorist organisation ISIS, and better relationships with Russia.

Fine words, but as has been said before, “don’t listen to what we say, watch what we do.”

What they do has remained fundamentally unchanged since at least the end of World War 2. The central geopolitical goal is the retention by the United States its status as the world’s sole superpower. That status has not been the case for at least the past decade, but it has not prevented the US from acting in such a way as to make others believe that it is still the case.

Challenges to that unipolar status are not tolerated. Countries fall in or out of favour according to their degree of compliance with American demands. That is very clearly demonstrated in the case of Iran.

Iran’s experiment with the concept of a western style democracy existed under the quasi-secular government of Mohammad Mossadegh. In 1952 Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-American (now BP) oil company so that the benefits of its considerable wealth would accrue to the Iranian people.

That was intolerable to the Americans and the British, the latter having controlled Iran’s oil wealth since 1913. A coup organized by Britain’s MI6 and the CIA overthrew the Mossadegh government and reinstated the brutal regime of the Pahlavi dynasty. No longer being a democracy did not enter the equation, a point always to remember when one hears western propaganda about America and Britain’s mission to bring democracy to the world.

For the following 25 years Iran enjoyed a good relationship with the United States. That ended abruptly with the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Since then Iran has been subject to sanctions that crippled important sectors of the economy. It has been subject to terrorist attacks, mainly by the Mujihideen el Khalq (MEK), a terrorist organisation not regarded as such by the United States.

In 1980, when the sanctions and other measures failed to bring Iran into the American line, it was attacked by Iraq and the ensuing eight-year war cost a million Iranian lives. The Iraqis were armed and supported by the United States. It is a measure of the fickleness and expediency of American support that two years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was itself attacked by the US, having been lured into a misadventure with Kuwait.

Other continuities may be seen in the public statements of prominent officials of the new Trump administration. Secretary of Defence James Mattis, the short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and Trump himself have all repeated the long-standing American accusation that Iran is the world’s “biggest sponsor of terrorism”.

Putting to one side the irony of such statements being made by officials of a State that has attacked more countries and killed more people in the past 70 years than all other nations in the world combined, it is an accusation that, as Gareth Porter has pointed out, has been leveled against Iran since at least the Clinton administration.

In 1995 Clinton imposed a further wide range of sanctions against Iran. In his state of the Union speech in January 2002, President George Bush nominated Iran as part of an “axis of evil” (along with Russia and North Korea). Some things never change.

Again to quote Porter, this accusation against Iran is not made on the basis of any evidence, but as a settled principle of US foreign policy.

In 2007 the then Vice President Richard Cheney wanted to attack Iran and was only dissuaded from doing so by Defence Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not on any principled basis but because the risks such an attack would pose for US military assets in the region.

In the last presidential campaign, the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton threatened to attack Iran if elected, an action that would surely have sparked a much wider war. Her belligerence owed more to America’s close relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia than it did to any legitimate complaint about the conduct of the Islamic Republic.

In January of this year Trump used the excuse of the Iranian ballistic missile tests to impose fresh further sanctions on Iran. He made the patently false claim that the tests were in breach of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) concluded on 14 July 2015. That plan had been negotiated at the instigation of Russia to head off what looked very likely to be an attack on Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program.

The Security Council in Resolution 2231 unanimously endorsed the JCPOA. Trump denounced the “deal” as “dumb” and threatened to ignore it. It is highly unlikely that Trump has ever read the 108-page resolution, much less understood its detailed provisions that do not prohibit the conduct of missile tests such as Iran carried out.

Even if he had done so it would not have mattered because another continuity of US foreign policy is to simply ignore international law when it perceives it to be in its national security interests to do so.

Despite the sanctions and other obstacles placed in its path, Iran has nonetheless made significant improvements on a number of social indicators since the 1979 revolution. Life expectancy has increased from 55 years to 71 years; infant mortality rates have declined by 70%; paid maternity leave exceeds ILO standards; and 60% of university students are women with no gender bar on the subjects studied.

On all major social indicators, the status of women significantly exceeds that of all other countries in the region. It can be expected that these trends will continue, much to the chagrin of Iran’s two greatest foes in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Although Trump unilaterally imposed further sanctions on Iran these are unlikely to have the same impact as previous attempts to undermine the Islamic Republic for a very significant reason.

Iran now has two very powerful friends in Russia and China, both of whom for a variety of reasons see Iran as an essential component of the world’s greatest infrastructure project, the Chinese-led One Belt One Road (OBOR.) Both nations are also acutely aware of the dangers of Islamic extremism within or abutting their borders. Iran, contrary to much western propaganda, is seen as a counterweight to the largely Sunni nature of the violence that is wracking the Middle East.

A look at the map shows the obvious strategic position of Iran. It is the logical fulcrum for the great Eurasian development projects that are a central component of OBOR.

One of the high-speed rail links from China to Europe will transit Iran. A further high-speed rail line will link Iran to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that terminates at Gwador on the Persian Gulf.

A separate development, the International North South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a 5600km route will run from Mumbai in India via Iran and then through Azerbaijan to Russia. Test runs were conducted in 2014.

INSTC in turn links to the maritime component of OBOR, and the Ashgabat Agreement signed by India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Oman, Turkistan and Uzbekistan in 2015. The object of this agreement is to facilitate trade between Central Asia and the Persian Gulf States.

The OBOR developments are built around a number of trade and finance structures, one of the most important of which is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SC0), the membership of which extends from China through Central Asia to Russia. Iran is an associate member of the SCO and its full membership is strongly supported by Russia.

Russia is also the key member of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Armenia, another member of the EEU recently made a statement supporting a free trade agreement between Iran and the EEU. On 21 February 2017 Russia’s first Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov visited Iran to discuss such a free trade agreement.

None of these developments are welcome in Washington which is mounting a counter-strategy, the core objective of which is to break up the increasingly strong relationship between Russia and China, with Iran being used as a pawn in the geopolitical maneuvering.

That geopolitical US objective accounts for much of the tentative noises from the Trump administration (with many contradictory voices) about a normalization of relations with Russia.

There is nothing subtle or altruistic about these moves. Trump’s comments probably reflect the advice he is receiving from Henry Kissinger who sees American rapprochement with Russia as a wedge to be used against China. Russia would be expected to sacrifice its relationship with Iran in exchange for concessions on its European borders, especially in Ukraine.

Russia’s President Putin is far too astute to fall for such blandishments. Although the western media largely ignored it at the time, Putin spelt out his version of a very different world in a speech to the Munich Security conference ten years ago in February 2007.

Putin referred to the “pernicious” nature of the unipolar world. Such a system ultimately destroys itself from within. Putin said that the “unipolar model is not only unacceptable, but also impossible in today’s world.” The model itself “is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilization.”

“Today”, he said, “we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”

“We are seeing,” Putin went on, “a greater disdain for the basic principles of international law…One State, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well who likes this?”

Putin’s prescient comments fell on deaf western ears. If they had listened, and paid heed, then the remarks made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the same conference ten years later in February 2017 would not have created such a shock.

Mr Lavrov called for a “post-West order” which is how the Russian government perceives the future. Lavrov’s speech confirmed that Russia was not interested in returning to the pro-Western path pursued by Boris Yeltsin during the disastrous 1990s. He was telling the West, in effect, if you think you can use Russia to “contain” China, or drive a wedge between those two other great poles of the new multi-polar world, then they haven’t been paying attention.

The same applied to western hopes to use concessions to Russia (insofar as they can be trusted) to drive a wedge between Russia and Iran.

Far from indulging in what Putin has described as “a mad persons dream” of Russia attacking NATO states or anyone else, Russia had more important priorities. These included assisting and safeguarding the sovereign interests of its friends, as with the Syrian intervention at the request of the Syrian government.

Another manifestation of this reorientation was developing trade, communication and defence links with Iran. This included providing the S-300 anti- missile system to Iran and the possible upgrading of the Iranian air force with Sukhoi 35 fighters. A possible return of Russian forces to the Hamdan air base in Iran is also being discussed.

Most importantly, as noted above, Russia is joining with China in President Xi’s “win-win” strategy of peaceful development in Eurasia that has the potential to transform the geopolitical structure of the world. Ironically, the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder first voiced this great vision in 1904, but it is the Chinese, in cooperation with their partners in the SCO and allied financial structures that is giving effect to Mackinder’s vision.

It would be naïve to assume that the Americans will peaceably accept their dethronement as the world’s sole hegemon. They will undoubtedly engage in what Andrew Korybko describes as “hybrid wars”, and one can expect Iran to be a prime target for precisely the reasons that make it a key component of the OBOR and related developments.

The SCO already has a counter-strategy with its Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure. That is a rapid reaction force designed to counter threats posed by the US’s hybrid warfare strategies of terrorism, colour revolutions and economic warfare to bring about regime change.

The progressive elimination of the US dollar as the main medium of international trade, already well advanced with the BRICS, SCO, and OBOR developments will further provide defence mechanisms to complement the military strategies being put in place. The world being created around the China – Iran – Russia triangle offers a very different prospect from perpetual war that is the default position of the Anglo-American world order. The future of the world depends upon it succeeding.

http://journal-neo.org/2017/02/28/iran-and-the-new-multipolar-world/