50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War

 After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.

 

Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, bands of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh's imminent victory. 

 

At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons, rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.  

 

Saigon was no more.*

To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.  

The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished, are punished anew. 

After two decades of Western terror, retribution deaths were near zero. The much predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese. 

This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those who Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures. 

The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.**

 

As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless: 

 

"There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth . . . A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel."

Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for "success." This position, re-iterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.

U.S. hands off other countries.

To the Times' editors, these words were incomprehensible.***

 

U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that, "We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in," perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the "loss" of Vietnam on the "impatience" of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. "You can't fight a war on television," he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would "be well advised to silence future critics by executive order."

 

With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. "The lessons of the past," he implausibly advised, "have already been learned . . . and we should have our focus on the future."****

Sources:

*Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History, (Grove Weidenfeld, 1985) pps. 266-70; Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, (Random House, 1969) pps. 206-7

 

**Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, (South End, 1979) pps. 28-9 

 

*** Raphael Salkie, The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) pps. 131-2 

 

****Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 389 

  

Empire's End: Trump Endorses Sending U.S. Citizens To Banana Republic Gulag

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

              -----Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

 

President Donald Trump has endorsed sending "the worst of the worst" criminals (i.e., anybody he so labels, regardless of what the facts show) to a foreign gulag for life whenever he sees fit. Trump revealed this view during a meeting with Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele at the White House, where both men agreed nothing should or would be done to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who ICE agents kidnapped and mistakenly sent to Bukele's notorious mega-prison CECOT due to what they called an "administrative error" last month. Trump labeled Garcia a MS-13 gang member and Bukele gratuitously proclaimed him a "terrorist," though there is no evidence he was even a criminal, much less a political actor using violence to force changes in government policy. In any event, neither president sees any reason to try to correct the error and return Garcia to his life and family in the United States, so he continues to rot in a Salvadorean prison.

Trump's interpretation of presidential power to justify such outrages is the one U.S. presidents always use:  that we are at war with evildoers and so are obliged to toss aside trivialities like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In the latest iteration of this farce Trump has stripped away the rights of foreign workers, natural residents, and even naturalized citizens, with birth citizens soon to be persecuted for thought crimes, another venerable American tradition. When questioned about the legitimacy of his self-serving views, Trump asked without irony if there were any reason to regard U.S. citizens as a special class deserving of protection, regarding it as self-evident that once he labels U.S. citizens or anybody else "criminal," they deserve to be treated as sub-human. Clearly, the president sees no reason to acknowledge that U.S. law enforcement has the dual purpose of punishing criminal conduct and protecting individual rights, with the latter responsibility being the more important of the two, since without rights the state itself becomes boundlessly criminal, and no one can escape being victimized by its crimes on a constant basis. Indeed, the president may not even understand these responsibilities.

It is easy enough to mock Trump's buffoonish approach to governance, but this only misses the forest for the trees.* All of U.S. history shows that the law has only the most tangential relation to power, and is promptly cast to the flames whenever authority or profit is at stake. The USA really was founded on slavery and mass extermination, with the presumed legitimacy of the first written into the Constitution itself, and official justification of the latter codified (preposterously) in the Declaration of Independence as self-defense against "merciless Indian savages." It took the law centuries to ban slavery while a century-and-a-half later it still hasn't provided even the merest pretense of legal justification for the robbery of Indian lands, upon which the very existence of the United States depends. 

So president Trump should properly be seen as the culmination of a process of contempt for human rights, not an aberration from a tradition of upholding them. He is able to use ICE as his personal kidnapping force only because George W. Bush invented the agency out of thin air as part of his modest ambition to "rid the world of evil." He may get away with dispatching U.S. citizens to a foreign dungeon because Obama already got away with murdering a U.S. citizen on foreign soil. He can attract support for making America "great" again by seizing Greenland or annexing Canada because our schoolbooks and media mouthpieces have long taught us that U.S. conquest and expansion are by definition glorious.

In other words, bringing down Trump, which more and more people want to see done, may require that we repudiate the long tradition of Trumpism that preceded his rise to power, that is, if we really intend to get rid of arbitrary rule. 

 

After all, if George W. Bush could rig intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and then destroy Iraq on that false pretext, why can't Trump rig intelligence to show that Iran has nukes and later bomb Teheran? If McKinley could grab Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, why can't Trump take Greenland and the Panama Canal? If John F. Kennedy could invade Cuba and Vietnam, why can't Trump invade Mexico?

Trump's rule by executive fiat is the consequence of what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim once identified as "anomie" - literally normlessness - a state of intellectual vertigo owing to a complete lack of coherent expectations regulating conduct. We have arrived at this state of affairs because a long line of U.S. leaders and their media propagandists have obliterated rationality with double-talk and lies, leaving Trump an intellectual black hole that allows him to "govern" by authoritarian impulse.

The only potential plus in all this is that power weakens as legitimacy erodes, and the whims of an ignorant narcissist are provoking massive discontent.

And thus the U.S. empire implodes with gathering momentum.

 

 *The Democratic Party, ever-eager to indulge yet another bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome, does not care about due process in principle any more than President Trump does, as their "always believe the woman" dogma clearly demonstrates. The two parties differ only in how to prioritize the groups treated with official contempt.

A Capitalist Running Capitalism?

 

 

A Capitalist Running Capitalism?    

 

It becomes clearer to more people everyday that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” maneuvering and shaping market forces into being beneficial towards humanity has become a massive force of waste and destruction visibly giving humanity the finger in far more than symbolic ways. One of the materially obvious ones is Donald Trump once again being president of the United States. Some LibCons and ConLibs rejoice but most capitalists are near terrified, along with a general public manipulated but for once almost equal to a ruling class though only in fear.

 

The center of global capitalism has been imperial America since the end of the second world war and that ruling power is nearing its finish which cant come too soon and may mean ultimate destruction if it doesn’t happen soon enough. But this happening is not a matter of fate but of human action taken on behalf of humanity’s survival. Unfortunately, under the near total control of anti-social corporate media, millions of decent citizens are reduced to calling the American minority owned and operated society “our” democracy, totally swallowing the notion that being able to vote defines democracy.

 

When reminded, or just as likely learning for the first time, that the all encompassing boogie man Adolph Hitler came to power under supposed democratic election rules and not by shooting his way into power, as infantile political science teaches from grade school through college, they accept the notion that his evil was so great and powerful nothing could stand in his way. Much as naïve Americans think Trump winning an election for the second time was anti-democratically arranged by fascists who somehow materialize when things are going wrong anywhere and everywhere that capitalism rules. The lesser evil form of capitalism that ran the nation and much of the west after the end of WW2 was known as capitalist social democracy and it made life better for a broad section of the working class so that ruling wealth and their professional class servants would not face the danger of revolutions such as happened in Russia and China and were threatened in growing numbers of nations. That phase ended later in the 20^th century and became a return to alleged free market and austerity politics that saw much freedom for a minority class of capital and growing degradation for the great majority as previous government programs at least partly aimed at people who needed help mostly reverted to help for wealth to become more wealthy and in the inspired capitalist religious faith able to invest and thereby create more jobs and prosperity for the great unwashed, as advertisers and politicians often referred to the public.

 

Screeching about fascism without pointing out that it is the logical extreme of the system when it is in trouble as always neglects the basic point that the only connection between Hitler fascism in Germany and alleged Trump fascism in America is capitalism. In its local and global forms it is sinking into bloody degeneracy that humanity can see more clearly than ever, whether in Israel, Ukraine, Yemen or dozens of other places in Africa and Asia and Europe. Naturally, consciousness control works harder than ever to distract, misinform and lie, still successful among a shrinking number of mortals but failing fast among the majority paying for the wretched outcome of a tinier minority than ever lavishing in wealth while growing millions suffer physically and mentally.

 

 

 

 

Decent, well meaning and sincere Americans who refer to “our” democracy miss that it is a market commodity in which a we get what they pay for minority pays for and a majority suffer as parishioners at the Capitalist Cathedral where prayers are about as useful as belief in the hypocrisy that passes for “our” democracy. Our true belief and acceptance of the faith needs to end soon or all of us – true believers, agnostics, atheists, members of the WGAS minority and others – will pay the ultimate price of dying in a nuclear war, at worst, or suffer a slower death as nature in all its form succumbs to minority rule that reduces humans, earth, air and water to profit making consumables. Trump’s seeming blundering represents marketing at its near extreme with failure looming larger as does hope for humanity.

 

 

 

 

Voting is easier-and as meaningless as ever if not more so - than at any time in our crippled history. All one had to do was fill out a postcard and mail it postage free to have the right to vote for an employee or well-meaning stooge for capital. Black vote white vote testicle vote vagina vote etc. the voter is guaranteed unaffordable housing and healthcare while being allegedly represented by moral disgraces who rush to bury their faces in the crotch of banking, finance, Israel and the military murderers who make our alleged democracy smell like a combination of social vomit and political excrement. 

 

Trump’s assault on business as usual horror has introduced new techniques to do the same thing: create profits for a shrinking minority while increasing losses for the majority, which has reduced the upper professional class to near hysteria and their subjects to worse. Instead of the usual form of society being run for capitalism by its upper servant class it has an actual capitalist acting as CEO of the bloody corporation, this one having an ego beyond measurement accompanied by an intellect almost incapable of magnification. Yet while reducing most to panic he has pleased many by making sounds of peace in Ukraine even while increasing the menace of possibly the most insane, stupid, dumb thing imaginable: war with china.

 

The wider and more populated world is being brought closer by capital’s demise and this while the minority west is facing economic ruin and further social disgrace. Trump is a further sign of the end of empire and the hopeful beginning of a global population united by common interest that all of us should be assured of food, clothing and shelter before anyone can have so much more than is needed for survival as is the current case, with billionaires making more money while mass murder goes on in Palestine/Israel and more American live in the streets while our pets are guaranteed creature comforts and health care while more American humans suffer than during what was called the great depression. Since that time depression has become a moneymaker for the psych business but humanity will cheer up once it/we works together, for a change. Maybe we’ll ultimately thank Trump for helping to bring about the end of capitalism and the beginning of global democracy. Whatever and however, we need to unite as members of the one and only human race and speed up the process.

 

 

Timothy McVeigh: Model Soldier Sickened By Iraq Massacres, Turned on His Own

Growing up in the Reagan years with first-strike nuclear weapons pouring off assembly lines, he became a survivalist. Fresh out of high school, he pooled money with a friend to buy nine wooded acres on the side of a mountain in New York on which to build a bomb shelter. 

Opting for a military career, he became a superb soldier. Of fifty-six gunners at Fort Riley, he out-shot them all. His written evaluations glowed with praise, including the observations that he "displays absolute loyalty to superiors and to the unit . . . and a high degree of honesty, loyalty, and integrity," and that he "inspires soldiers to win."

Decorated for his performance in the Gulf War, he was shocked by the butchery of Iraqis that Pentagon estimates claimed killed 200,000 people in all.* After waiting out weeks of U.S. bombings before he could join the mission, he encountered not the battle-hardened Iraqi army he had been told to expect, but hordes of panicked conscripts, eyes wild, mouths agape, outstretched hands begging for mercy. Bulldozed into mass graves, they were succeeded by starving Iraqi children pleading for food, which the U.S. army forbade soldiers to give out. McVeigh disobeyed orders and dispensed cases of prepackaged meals to the desperate. After he got home, he reflected on the gruesome mission, deeply regretting the injustice of it all. 

 

The 1993 Waco Massacre was the final straw.  Watching on television, McVeigh saw tanks and CS gas used on U.S. citizens, heavy weaponry smashing through the Branch Davidians' defenses, and then the entire compound wrapped in flames. Dozens of men, women and children trapped inside were burned alive.  McVeigh screamed in horror. 

On the second anniversary of Waco, McVeigh loaded a bomb onto a Ryder truck and drove to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. **

The north face of the building buckled when the explosion peeled the roof back on the top floor, slicing the edifice in half.  Dozens of office workers pitched to their deaths as large sections of concrete, mortar, glass and plywood cascaded deafeningly into a huge crater where solid structure had been moments before. 

Beyond the building's collapsing walls, parking meters were ripped from the ground, roofs caved in, and metal doors twisted around themselves. At 9:02 a.m. a red-orange fireball hung over downtown and thick black smoke mushroomed into the morning sky as glass, paper and debris rained down on whole sections of the city. Fifth and Harvey Streets were engulfed in flames. 

With cable and concrete drooling out of the building's carcass onto the plaza below, stunned and bleeding survivors emerged from the smoking ruins, stumbling along in blood-filled shoes or staggering barefoot over the glass-strewn ground. Frantic parents scrambled through the wreckage screaming for the children they had left in the daycare center on the second floor. Rescue workers plunged into the devastation to excavate blackened babies and children with their faces blown off. 

 

Scattered toys and severed limbs lay everywhere. ***

Within hours of the attack talking heads in the U.S. media were glibly announcing that Muslims had to be behind the bombing. A "terrorism expert" on CBS Evening News asserted that, "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait." The New York Times editorialized that, "Whatever we are doing to destroy Middle East terrorism has not been working." In a Newsday column Jeff Kamen recommended that U.S. military commandos "shoot them now before they get us." 

A Palestinian-American on his way to Jordan was strip-searched and paraded in handcuffs through London's crowded Heathrow Airport. Photographed and finger-printed, his name was leaked to the news media and reporters besieged his family's home in Oklahoma City. An angry crowd spit at the house and threw trash on the lawn. 

Elsewhere in town vigilantes shattered the windows of an Iraqi refugee's home with stones. Seven months pregnant, Saher Al-Saidi  began suffering abdominal pains and internal bleeding.

Her baby was born dead. ****

No one could conceive that a decorated U.S. soldier driven over the edge by his required participation in wholesale massacre against people with no effective means to fight back might be moved to launch an attack against his own side.

But that is what happened.

 

Notes: 

 

* Michael Parenti, "Democracy For The Few," 7th Edition, (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2002) p. 89

**Richard A. Serrano, "One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," (Norton, 1998)  pps. 21, 26-30, 32, 36, 44. Mark S. Hamm, "Apocalypse In Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged" (Northeastern University, 1997)"  pps. 146-9)

 

***Time Annual, 1995, "A Blow To The Heart," The Year in Review, pps. 40-5

 

****Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, "The Wizards of Media Oz," (Common Courage, 1997,) pps. 104-6. "Oklahoma Fallout," Z Magazine, July/August 1995)

Eduardo Galeano: Ten Years Gone

Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015: A Voice, Not An Echo

"We are opinionated, yet we cannot offer our opinions. We have a right to the echo, not to the voice, and those who rule praise our talent to repeat parrot fashion. We refuse to accept this mediocrity as our destiny."

-----Eduardo Galeano, opening speech at "Chile Creates," an international meeting in support of Chilean democracy, July 11, 1988

In him was wedded the wonder of a child with the wisdom of a sage.

In school, he hated history and was a lousy history student. He wanted to be a soccer player, a saint, and a painter. He abandoned the first two ambitions, and achieved the third only by learning to use words in place of paint.

He always took the side of the doomed, despised, and damned. Even at the height of the Cold War, with shrieking anti-Communist hysteria the norm, he was not afraid to befriend those Washington denounced as satanic. He praised Che Guevara as a man "who said what he thought and did what he said he was going to do," a rare example of moral and intellectual coherence in a world of near total hypocrisy, which in his view redounded to Guevara's perpetual glory. Galeano summed up just how rare an achievement this was by stating that, "In this world, when words and deeds run into each other in the street, they don't say hello, because they don't recognize each other."  

He wrote not from duty but from joy, always waiting until "his hand began to itch." Immune to the obsessions of established literary critics, he casually combined literary styles and ignored the (alleged) border between journalism and literature. His most famous work, Open Veins of Latin America, (1971) only won honorable mention in the House of the Americas literary competition because the judges felt that a history book that wasn't boring couldn't be a serious work. Fat, dry tomes dominated the social sciences at the time (they still do), and Galeano's lush and lyrical prose was anything but boring, so he had to settle for a consolation prize. 

The book was going nowhere on sales charts - even Galeano's family wasn't reading it - until Latin America's ubiquitous dictatorships did it the honor of banning it. The Uruguayan dictatorship, relatively unpracticed in the repressive arts, lagged behind its authoritarian brothers, mistakenly classifying the book as an anatomy text at first, before making up for lost time by jailing the author along with the book. Upon his release, Galeano fled to Spain, where almost ten years of intense research led to the publication of his magnificent trilogy on the history of the Americas:  Memory of Fire. In these microhistories he found his permanent style - richly textured vignettes portraying historical characters and events in the present tense - as though glimpsed through a keyhole. Galeano's vividly creative prose was too much for the jealous guardians of literary boundaries, who classified the English translation of Memory of Fire as fiction, albeit with a bibliography and index. 

Serious but never solemn, he wrote with a gentle, leg-pulling humor that forever had a smile playing at the corners of his readers' lips. In his masterpiece, "Upside Down - A Primer For The Looking Glass World," - he opened with a "message to parents" lamenting the loss of "virtue, honor, and truth" in the modern world. The message was from Al Capone. In a vignette about the death of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world at the time, he wrote that, "In the autopsy, no scruples were detected." Commenting on the fact that cigarette ads in magazines were required to carry the warning, "Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide," whereas highly polluting automobiles were under no similar obligation, Galeano simply said, "People can't smoke. Cars can."  

Even horrible scenes, all too familiar in history and politics, could not deflate his good humor, or cause him to avert his gaze. He once paid tribute to the "skill" of the torturers who worked for former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by highlighting the precision of their work: "Armed with pincers and spoons, these lads can tear out fingernails without breaking the roots and eyes without injuring the lids." Simple denunciation would not capture the horror nearly as well as Galeano's detached irony.

Detached though he might sound, uncommitted he was not. With relentless application (he once re-wrote the entire manuscript of a book eleven times) he dedicated himself to revealing the most painful realities, drawing on a deeply thoughtful joy that became his trademark. Nevertheless, he shunned the title "thinker," as though he were merely a disembodied head, pointing out that he wrote with his whole being, not just from his neck up. He delighted in the name a Colombian fisherman once gave his work - "senti-pensante" - feeling-thinking, which was much more in line with how Galeano regarded himself and his writing. He recognized that, dualistic conventions notwithstanding, thought and feeling cannot ultimately be divorced, and was astute enough to avoid the twin dangers of sentimentality and frigidity, as all too many other writers do not.

The enemy of verbosity and inflated speech, Galeano was aghast at the ever increasing torrents of empty words, and rated "word inflation" even more dangerous than monetary inflation. Brevity became his natural style and irony his habitual tone. This preference for the concise he picked up from his mentor and friend, Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, who helped Galeano early in his career. To lend authority to his literary advice, Onetti used to disguise it as proverbial wisdom: "There is a Chinese proverb that says" . . . or, "according to the Persians" . . . But in reality the sayings were all his. One of his favorites, which Galeano took to heart, was: "The only words that deserve to exist, are those that improve upon the silence."

Onetti taught Galeano to boil his writing down to pure "meat and bone." The immense struggle involved in learning to say more with less is nowhere better illustrated than in Galeano's effort to describe the 19th century love affair between a young woman of Buenos Aires high society (Camila O'Gorman) and her priest (Ladislao Gutierrez), a story he related to sociologist and philosopher Aurelio Alonso in a Havana interview some years ago. The young woman and her priest had fallen madly in love and fled the scandalized capital, only to be captured and executed for "the crime of love."  

At the time Galeano was trying to describe the love that had impelled them to their deaths, he had a friend and literary critic living with him, a founder of the Tupamaros who had lost one lung to tuberculosis and most of the second one to the beatings he received after being taken prisoner. The man had a remote rural upbringing and knew nothing of formal literary training, but possessed a fine aesthetic intuition that Galeano greatly appreciated. When he showed him his description of the love affair between the young high society woman and the priest, his friend abruptly dismissed the effort with a gesture of contempt: "There are a lot of pebbles in the lentils. You've got to get those pebbles out of there." So Galeano wrote draft after draft, trying with mounting frustration to capture the scene in words, only to have his friend reject them all: "I still see pebbles in the lentils." Finally, Galeano reached the limit of his patience, and told his friend that the latest version would be the last: "If you don't like this one I won't ask you again, because this is abuse. I wrote six pages and all I've got left is a single sentence." His friend responded, "But what a sentence. You have me to thank for it, because without me you wouldn't have made it." And the sentence that described the love of the young high-society woman and the priest who fled with her to certain death was vintage Galeano:  

"They are two by an error that the night corrects." 

Now we mourn the man that gave voice to those moving words, a superb writer finally indeed reduced to an echo, though not that of a lickspittle parroting official cliches, but of a free man who spent his life telling the truth.  

Let that echo sound long, and loud, and often.

Sources:

Most of the Galeano quotes are from an interview (in Spanish) with Cuban sociologist Aurelio Alonso on "Countercurrent," published on You Tube 1/7/13

On Somoza's torturers, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire" Vol. 3 (Pantheon, 1988) p. 249 

On Galeano's quote regarding the right to a voice instead of an echo, see "We Say No," (Norton, 1992) p. 243

On the love affair between Camila O'Gorman and her priest, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire," Vol. 2, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 163-4

"Senti-pensante" and "my hand begins to itch," see "Democracy Now," May 19, 2006

 

The Method In the Madness: Trump Tariff Meltdown Is An Echo of the Nixon Shock (pulling the world off the gold standard)

"What they [the Trump administration] want is they want to have their cake and eat it [too] . . . .They want to devalue the dollar without jeopardizing the exorbitant privilege of the dollar, the reserve currency status of the dollar . . . . Is this far-fetched? No, it's not far-fetched. They may succeed in doing [so] . . . .I'm not saying they will succeed in doing it, but, what I'm saying is that they have a rational plan, a fiendish plan, as they would say in cartoons, but it is not unprecedented.* 

 

"You know, this is why I mentioned the 1970s, 1971, [when] Richard Nixon did exactly the same thing. I mean, in one of his autobiographies, I think he's written more than one, Henry Kissinger, in one of the chapters, just from memory, I read it many years ago. He asks a question in one of the chapters, the chapter title is a question: "Who caused the oil crisis?" And the first sentence is, "We did." And he was very clear on this. 

 

"That myth that it was the Arabs and the OPEC Third World countries that imposed the high prices on America, that's all rubbish. Let's not forget who was in OPEC back then. It was the Shah of Iran, who was on the payroll of the CIA, the Suharto regime in Indonesia, utterly driven by the State Department and the CIA, and Saudi Arabia, which can't move one inch without the OK of Washington DC. 

 

"So why did they create this huge oil crisis then, if Kissinger is right? Remember Richard Nixon sent his Treasury Secretary to the Europeans with a message that 'the dollar, mates, is our currency, and from now on it is going to be your problem.'

 

"Nothing more aggressive has ever been sent to the Europeans. I don't think J. D. Vance said anything worse than that. Indeed, Paul Volcker, who, much, much later became the president of the Federal Reserve, he was a member of that team and he reports that it was Connally, the Treasury Secretary, who convinced Nixon on the fifteenth of August of 1971, to blow up the Bretton Woods system with the following expression, and this is verbatim because it is etched in my memory when I read it. He said, 'Mr. President the foreigners are out there to screw us, and we must screw them before they screw us.' And two days later he blew up the Bretton Woods system.  

 

"He did it for a very simple reason. Once you have deficits, either you go German, in other words, you tighten your belt, you go austerity, big time, like the Germans would do, or they made us (the Greeks) do, or, Nixon was not prepared to do that to his own people and to his own ruling class, to his own country, or, you boost your deficits, if you are the dominant, hegemonic power, which is exactly what Nixon did, and you make other people pay for it. Essentially the American deficit becomes the magnet that magnetizes into the United States both the net exports of the Germans, the Japanese, and the Chinese, and their money, which goes between New York through Wall Street to get recycled in the form of government debt, shares, and real estate. 

 

"So everything . . .  the major shock, the plan to devalue the dollar, the plan to enhance the dollar's hegemony, the plan to damage seriously its most important allies, back then it was Europe and Japan, well, it's more or less the same now, that happened, it included to introduce enormous uncertainty, lots of businesses in the United States suffered, including the markets, the working class was damaged beyond redemption in 1971, '72, '73. 

 

"Remember, American hourly real wages have not recovered to the level that they had in 1973 - to this day - they are lower than they were in 1973. So, you talk about uncertainty, damage, carnage, and all that. Well, Nixon did it. That was the whole point of the Nixon shock. But you know what? It was utterly successful from his perspective. 

 

"Why? Because he managed to create, I'm talking about Nixon now, through his shock, something that has never happened before in human history. Every hegemon, every empire, every large force until 1971, the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, before that the Roman Empire, every such power that went from being a surplus producer to a deficit producer, lost its power. The United States is the only hegemon whose power has been enhanced by its deficits. And that's due to the Nixon shock. 

 

"So when Trump's men, and a small aside here, when people say that Trump is a very poor excuse for human nature, that he's inarticulate, that he's half-crazy, all that applied to Nixon, right? I mean, was there a man more despicable than Richard Nixon? And yet, the Nixon shock worked. You know, what I find astonishingly ironic, is that all these centrists around the world, in Europe, in Britain, in the United States, who are lamenting the great world that was destroyed by Donald Trump. What world are they lamenting really? The one that was created by madman Richard Nixon's shock. Because everything we have been experiencing recently, taking for granted, globalization, neo-liberalism, financialization, those were the results of a very deliberate plan by Richard Nixon."

-----Yanis Varoufakis, "Yanis Varoufakis Analyzes Donald Trump's Tariff War," Politics Joe, April 8, 2025

*The plan will not succeed. The Nixon shock bought the U.S. empire some time, but Trump backpedaled immediately when the bond market told him there would be no similar result this time around.

Anonymous American Thoughts on Survival

 

 

 

 

Anonymous American Proposes SHAME celebration

 

(Unpublished letter sent to major media)

 

I have nothing but shame about the group we all belong to: Americans. Hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live, millions have no health insurance and all of our tax dollars- whether we have testicles vaginas both or neither, are financing slaughters in Israel and Ukraine and we are threatened with nuclear war. Let me know when there is a shame flag and parade. 

 

We understand how they (present plural form when not certain of sex-gender-political party etc.) feel.

 If the society has real democracy instead of the ugly joke we give that name to, all of our individual and identity group "selfs" can exercise their best motivations, as opposed to the ugliness of so much of present reality with various "selfs" blaming all other "selfs" operating in the same dictatorship of the rich and calling it "our democracy"”

 

 

868 billion for defense…from what? Most Americans are in terror at what other Americans can do to them.

Russia’s “brutal” attack on Ukraine, America’s “gentle loving” slaughters in Korea, Viet name, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Palestine, Yugoslavia. U S military in nations all over the world but China and Russia are a global threat. Yes, and rapists prevent sexual frustration among their victims.

 

Market capitalist religious service is an economic rite of moral wrong.

 

 We need public banks, public ownership of utilities, employee owned and controlled business which will mean higher wages for majority workers and lower prices for majority consumers by removing the minority anti-democratic anti-social private profit investor class.

 

That means the end of anti-democratic capitalism and the beginning of the democratic communism we practiced in order to survive our earliest experiences of life

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anonymous American Proposes SHAME celebration

 

(Unpublished letter sent to major media)

 

I have nothing but shame about the group we all belong to: Americans. Hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live, millions have no health insurance and all of our tax dollars- whether we have testicles vaginas both or neither, are financing slaughters in Israel and Ukraine and we are threatened with nuclear war. Let me know when there is a shame flag and parade. 

 

We understand how they (present plural form when not certain of sex-gender-political party etc.) feel.

 If the society has real democracy instead of the ugly joke we give that name to, all of our individual and identity group "selfs" can exercise their best motivations, as opposed to the ugliness of so much of present reality with various "selfs" blaming all other "selfs" operating in the same dictatorship of the rich and calling it "our democracy"”

 

 

868 billion for defense…from what? Most Americans are in terror at what other Americans can do to them

Russia’s “brutal” attack on Ukraine, America’s “gentle loving” slaughters in Korea, Viet name, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, Palestine, Yugoslavia. U S military in nations all over the world but China and Russia are a global threat. Yes, and rapists prevent sexual frustration among their victims.

 

Market capitalist religious service is an economic rite of moral wrong.

 

 We need public banks, public ownership of utilities, employee owned and controlled business which will mean higher wages for majority workers and lower prices for majority consumers by removing the minority anti-democratic anti-social private profit investor class.

 

That means the end of anti-democratic capitalism and the beginning of the democratic communism we practiced in order to survive our earliest experiences of life