Wednesday, March 27, 2024

A Slow-Motion World War III? by Tom Engelhardt

 


I’ve been describing this world of ours, such as it is, for almost 23 years at TomDispatch. I’ve written my way through three-and-a-half presidencies — god save us, it could be four in November! I’ve viewed from a grave (and I mean that word!) distance America’s endlessly disastrous wars of this century. I’ve watched the latest military budget hit almost $900 billion, undoubtedly on its way toward a cool trillion in the years to come, while years ago the whole “national security” budget (though “insecurity” would be a better word) soared to well over the trillion-dollar mark.

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? 

And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. 

But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. 

But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” 

And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

CounterPunch: This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.


Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian Nationalism Gets Congressional Attention—Not the Good Kind by Robyn E. Blumner

 


We have a caucus in Congress. Yes, we do. The Congressional Freethought Caucus (CFC) is dedicated to promoting the secular character of government by protecting the strict separation of church and state, as well as evaluating public policy based on its adherence to reason and science…

If you were to look for the opposite to this approach to lawmaking, one name would stand above the rest: Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House and the second in line to the presidency.

The Louisiana congressman is a Christian Nationalist of the first order and an energetic promoter of young-earth creationism. As HuffPost reported in December 2023, Johnson once lauded the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, saying they are “one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”1

He sought to have a course on the Bible, grounded in biblical literalism and the Genesis creation story, offered to public school students. The course was created by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a group that claims “the Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years.”2

My sense is no one at the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has read our godless Constitution or has the vaguest clue about the religious antipathy of Thomas “A Wall of Separation between Church and State” Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But I guess if you fall for one delusion, you can fall for more.

Parroting these views is Johnson, who has talked of the “so-called separation of church and state” and said that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”3

But remember we have a congressional caucus, and it has not taken all this lying down. First, the CFC invited Johnson to talk with the caucus about protecting religious freedom. That invitation was ignored. Then, in January, the CFC put out a white paper titled “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” I urge you to read it in full.4

The twenty members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus say that what is known about the Speaker’s record on religious freedom and church-state separation is “troubling and alarming.” It states bluntly that Johnson “is deeply connected” to Christian Nationalism.

As the CFC report points out, Johnson has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, a dominionist philosophy that says Christians must take over the key levers of society, including government, business, media, etc., to bring society into alignment with what they consider God’s plan for Christian hegemony.

“He has spent decades working to deny, reject, and undermine the constitutional separation of church and state, including trafficking in fake histories about our nation’s founding and distorting the meaning of the Establishment Clause,” the CFC says.

Johnson has spent much of his professional life working to impose Christian dogma on society through operation of law. As senior legal counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian Right legal organization (with contributions and revenues in 2022 totaling $104 million!), he promoted the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classes and worked to shut down abortion clinics in Louisiana.

As the CFC reports, as a member of Congress, Johnson has pushed for a nationwide ban on abortion and called for prison time and “hard labor” for any doctor who performs one.

The CFC has put forth a series of nearly two dozen questions for Johnson. Questions such as: “Does he believe, as many Christian Nationalists argue, that the Bible—not the Constitution—must function as the supreme law of the United States and that the Bible must prevail in the event of conflict between the Bible and civil law?”

A simple “no” would suffice.

The caucus members are asking Johnson to talk with them to alleviate some of their concerns. They want assurances that he is not trying to impose his own “radical religious views” on others or “transform our secular democracy into an authoritarian theocracy.”

There is little likelihood of a response or of anything reassuring to come. Johnson is the real deal: a man who sees himself as a modern day Moses being called by his god—a god who talks to him apparently—to lead the nation.5

Where he wants to take us, none of us should want to follow.


Notes

1 Paul Blumenthal, “How Mike Johnson Helped Open the Door to Creationism in Louisiana Public Schools.” HuffPost, December 9, 2023. Available online at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-johnson-creationism-schools_n_657380ffe4b09724b4342739.

2 Mark A. Chancey, “A Textbook Example of the Christian Right: The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion vol. 75, no. 3 (September 2007), pp. 554–581.

3 Rob Boston, “Down the Memory Hole: House Speaker Mike Johnson and His Allies Would Like to Cover Up His History of Extreme Statements. It’s Not That Easy.” Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, December 30, 2023. Available online at https://www.au.org/the-latest/church-and-state/articles/down-the-memory-hole-house-speaker-mike-johnson-and-his-allies-would-like-to-cover-up-his-history-of-extreme-statements-its-not-that-easy/#.

4 Congressional Freethought Caucus, “Speaker Johnson: Christian Nationalism in the Speaker’s Office?” (white paper), January 10, 2024. Available online at https://huffman.house.gov/imo/media/doc/CFC%20White%20Paper%20–%20Speaker%20Johnson.pdf.

5 Azhar Majeed, “Mike Johnson Isn’t Just the Avatar for Christian Nationalism—He’s Actually Much Worse Than That.” Free Thinking, January 10, 2024. Available online at https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/mike-johnson-isnt-just-the-avatar-for-christian-nationalism-hes-actually-much-worse-than-that/.


-Robyn E. Blumner is the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &, Science. She was a nationally syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) for sixteen years.

 


Monday, March 25, 2024

"It’ll be bedlam": how Trump is creating conditions for a post-election eruption

 


As the ex-president fans the flames of violence, experts and insiders say November will be a brutal test for US democracy.

A bloodbath. The end of democracy. Riots in the streets. Bedlam in the country. Donald Trump has made apocalyptic imagery a defining feature of his presidential election campaign, warning supporters that if he does not win – and avoid criminal prosecution – the US will enter its death throes.
 
The prophecies of doom, repeated ad nauseam at rallies and on social media, have raised fears that the former president is making an electoral tinderbox that could explode in November. While there has been much commentary assessing the implications of a Trump win, some experts warn that a Trump defeat could provide an equally severe stress test of American democracy.
 
“Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses, there’s going to be violence,” said Michael Fanone, a retired police officer who was seriously injured by pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. “If Donald Trump loses, he’s not going to concede and he’s going to inspire people to commit acts of violence, just like he did in the weeks and months leading up to January 6, 2021.
 
“If he wins, I also believe that there’s going to be violence committed by his supporters, targeting people who previously tried to hold him to account, whether it was members of the press, average citizens like myself, Department of Justice officials, state, and federal prosecutors. I believe him when he says that he will have his vengeance.”

Trump has long sought to sow distrust in the electoral system while using rhetoric outside the boundaries of modern political discourse, dehumanizing opponents and immigrants and portraying the US as a nation on the verge of collapse.

During his first run for president, in 2016, he encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap out” of protesters and said he would pay their legal bills if they got into trouble. Should he be denied the presidential nomination at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, he warned: “I think you’d have riots.”
 
In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have called for the military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. When he disputed his election defeat that year, he suggested that an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania supreme court would “induce violence in the streets”.

Then, at a rally before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, Trump said: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness … If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”
 
After the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August 2022, he predicted that “terrible things are going to happen”, and then quoted the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham warning of “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.
 
Since declaring his candidacy in November 2022, Trump has intensified inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail. He has promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggested that Gen Mark Milley should be executed and asserted that immigrants who are in the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared: “This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”
 
He threatened “potential death & destruction” if he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney over a hush-money payment and criticized those urging his supporters to remain peaceful, fuming on his Truth Social platform: “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”
 
In November, at a rally in New Hampshire, he promised that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” In January this year, returning to New Hampshire, Trump told supporters: “I only want to be a dictator for one day.”
 
Addressing efforts to remove him from the ballot under the 14th amendment, Trump warned that “if we don’t [get treated fairly], our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.” 

And referring to those 88 criminal charges that could yet scupper his electoral chances, he opined: “I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes. It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.”
 
Campaigning this month in North Carolina, Trump claimed that Biden’s immigration policies amounted to a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States” because, in his view, they allow millions of people to stream across the border with Mexico.

History has shown that Trump’s words are taken both seriously and literally by his base. Hannah Muldavin, a former spokesperson for the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack, said: “We know when Donald Trump says something – whether it’s in a tweet or in a speech – his supporters listen.
 
“That’s what we saw on January 6. His tweet – ‘Be there. Will be wild!’ – led to a rise in activity online that led people to organize and come to DC on January 6. When Trump uses this incendiary language, it’s concerning.”

Last week, appearing alongside a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Trump again referred to immigrants in the country illegally in subhuman terms. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.”

At the same rally, Trump warned: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” At the time he was discussing the need to protect the car industry from overseas competition, and Trump and allies later said he had been referring to the car industry when he used the term. Biden’s campaign team rejected that defense.
 
Once again, Trump has crossed lines and broken conventions like no other politician in his lifetime. Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Since 1945 I don’t think there has been a politician in a democracy who’s used such authoritarian language, ever. It’s hard to think of anybody. 

Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin when running for office don’t use the kind of language that Donald Trump uses, so that’s pretty notable.”
 
As historical examples around the world have shown, such language can create a permission structure for violence. Ziblatt added: “No matter what happens, there will be some effort to deny the results of the election if he loses. My best-case scenario is a decisive defeat so that his claims of a stolen election are just simply not credible. But if it’s close, as it seems like all indicators suggest, then I would expect violence and threats of violence and at least protests of the sort that we experienced in 2021.”

Opinion polls suggest another tight race. Several have shown Trump with a narrow lead and, in the bars and cafes of Washington DC, it is not hard to overhear idle chatter predicting a Trump victory as more likely than not. This, combined with Trump’s own exaggerated projections, raises the prospect that his supporters will take victory for granted – and assume foul play if, in fact, he loses again.

Trump supporters at a North Carolina rally this month. Larry Jacobs, director of the center for the study of politics and governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Donald Trump is engaged in a misinformation campaign both to raise the expectation of his supporters that he is going to win, he’s ahead, it’s in the bag, and to set the conditions for claiming that the election was stolen if he doesn’t win. Obviously, these polls are far out and not predictive but he’s clearly using them now to set the conditions.
 
In an early preview of how aggressively Trump’s supporters might react to defeat, Charlie Kirk, a far-right political influencer, told an audience at a faith-based event last week: “I want to make sure that we all make a commitment that if this election doesn’t go our way, the next day we fight. It’s a very important thing; a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They say: ‘What do you mean it doesn’t go our way? It has to go our way. We have to win.’ I agree.”
 
Trump’s divisive rhetoric and election denialism in 2020 culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. But members of Congress returned the same night to certify Biden’s election victory, and Trump reluctantly departed the White House two weeks later. This time Biden is the incumbent and Trump has no control over the levers of government, making a replay of the insurrection in Washington less likely.

Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots movement, said: “Trump is already spreading lies that this election is rigged and we know there is no realistic scenario where he concedes after losing. One big difference between his loss this year and 2020 is this time they’re better prepared and have already gone through a dress rehearsal. But the other big difference is he won’t be a sitting president – he’ll just be a sore loser who the nation rejected in record numbers two elections in a row.”

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, added: “What I fear is that the repetition of violent rhetoric will lead to the normalization of violent acts. There’s no sugarcoating it. This is a dangerous period for American constitutional government. In the end, the institutions are no better or worse than the men and women who are sworn to defend them and, if they do their duty, we’ll be OK. If they’re stormed, or if they’re paralyzed by fear, then there’s a chance that they would not hold. It’s more likely than not that it won’t happen, but this election will be the ultimate stress test.”

-David Smith, The Guardian