Manufacturing Dissent

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the author of many important books. His latest is The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity. Chossudovsky shows that Washington has globalized war while the US president is presented as a global peace-maker, complete with the Nobel Peace Prize. Washington has military deployed in 150 countries, has the world divided up into six US military commands and has a global strike plan that includes space operations. Nuclear weapons are part of the global strike plan and have been elevated for use in a pre-emptive first strike, a dangerous departure from their Cold War role.

America’s militarization includes military armament for local police for use against the domestic population and military coercion of sovereign countries in behalf of US economic imperialism.

One consequence is the likelihood of nuclear war. Another consequence is the criminalization of US foreign policy. War crimes are the result. These are not the war crimes of individual rogue actors but war crimes institutionalized in established guidelines and procedures. “What distinguishes the Bush and Obama administrations,” Chossudovsky writes, “is that the concentration camps, targeted assassinations and torture chambers are now openly considered as legitimate forms of intervention, which sustain ‘the global war on terrorism’ and support the spread of ‘Western democracy.’”

Chossudovsky points out that the ability of US citizens to protest and resist the transformation of their country into a militarist police state is limited. Washington and the compliant foundations now fund the dissent movement in order to control it. He quotes Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman about manufacturing consent. He lets Paul Kivel describe how funding of dissent by the elite results in the co-option of grassroots community leadership. The same thing is happening to environmental organizations. Black Americans also have lost their leaders to the elite’s money and ability to bestow position and emoluments.

Chossudovsky notes that progressive, left-wing, and anti-war groups have endorsed the “war on terror” and uncritically accept the official 9/11 story, which provides the basis for Washington’s wars.

Having accepted the lies, there is no basis for protest. Thus its absence.

As Professor Stephen Cohen has observed, dissent has disappeared from American foreign policy discussion. In place of dissent there is exhortation to more war. A good example is today’s (March 26, 2015) op-ed in the New York Times by neoconservative John R. Bolton, US ambassador to the UN during the George W. Bush regime. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?_r=0

Bolton calls for bombing Iran. Anything short of a military attack on Iran, Bolton says, has “an air of unreality” and will guarantee that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey will also develop nuclear weapons in order to protect themselves from Iran. According to Bolton, the Israeli and American nuclear arsenals are not threatening, but Iran’s would be.

Of course, there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but Bolton asserts it anyway. Moreover, Bolton manages to overlook that the agreement being worked out with Iran halts the Iranian enrichment program far below the level necessary for nuclear weapons. Bolton’s belief that Iran would be able to hide a weapons program if permitted to have nuclear energy is unsubstantiated. It is merely an implausible assertion.

The neoconservatives constitute a war lobby. When one war doesn’t work, they want another. They have an ever expanding war list. Remember, the neoconservatives are the ones who promised us a 3-week “cakewalk” Iraq war costing $70 billion and paid for by Iraq oil revenues. After 8 years of war costing a minimum of $3,000 billion paid for by US taxpayers, the US gave up and withdrew. Today jihadists are carving a new country out of parts of Syria and Iraq.

It is now a known fact that the neocon Bush regime’s Iraq war was totally based on lies, just as is every other neocon war and the current drive for war with Russia and Iran. Despite their record of lies and failure, the neocons still control US foreign policy, and neocon Nuland is busy at work fomenting “color revolutions” or coups in the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

Without the support of the New York Times, the neocons could not have got the Iraq War going. Now the New York Times, faithful to the neocons but faithless to the American people, is helping the neocons get a war going with Iran and Russia.

I have friends who are college presidents who still read and believe the New York Times. The wars with Iran and Russia that the New York Times is encouraging will be much more dangerous than the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. Humanity might not survive them.

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NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,

Mr. Roberts is correct. The problem, much like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is that once the NeoCons run out of or can not attack “the enemy” the citizens themselves will become the enemy. The very last people to experience the crimes of the Third Reich were the German middle class. As long as the NeoCons have their foreign enemies, they will not be inclined to put us into camps. But, and this is important, the moment we can not field a world wide military, they will turn fully unleash their murder campaign here at home.

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

Somehow someway we must marginalize these fucking neo-cons for what they are….war mongers. And for the record, Victoria Nuland’s husband is none other than the biggest neo-con of them all, Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC. You’ll remember PNAC as the organization that called for a “new Pearl Harbor” to get the American people on board their crazy train of overthrowing elected governments and bombing the hell out of civilians in the middle east.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan

flash
flash

Christian nation , my bony ass…not even close. .. sadist nation works for me.

Judge Orders U.S. Government to Release More Than 2,000 Photos of Abuse and Torture by U.S. Military in Iraq and Afghanistan

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bb

Flash , you should be doing something else on a Saturday night besides attacking our nation ,our brave soldiers and the overall conduct of our CIA chiefs.Damn man get a life!!!!!

Overthecliff
Overthecliff

Wise up bb. There is only one country in the world that is intrinsically evil. That would be the FUSA. All the others are peace loving benign cannibals,commits and especially 1.5 billion followers of the religion of peace.

Overthecliff
Overthecliff

Commies

Stucky

bb, why don’t you go finger your pet pussy? You’re such a fucking moran.

flash
flash

bb, taking the Lord’s name in vain is a mortal sin.Did you not know ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM6Po862pGA

bb

Stucky , don’t be cruel to me .I so sensitive it hurts my feelings.I think I gonna cry.

flash
flash

bb, you have two choices , tyranny or more tyranny …choose wisely.

comment image?oh=8187e7df4b081c69fa2ca9e7a2b70dfe&oe=55AD3E47

bb

Flash , it is not what Jesus would do but what you will do .Pacifism is never the answer when it comesto national security.

flash
flash

Security is am myth. Just try to start up a business or build a home without permission from your overlords.

And to , it’s an eternal test bb.Sure hope you don’t flunk this one.

Matthew 16:26

And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?

Zarathustra

Westcoaster says:

Somehow someway we must marginalize these fucking neo-cons for what they are….war mongers. And for the record, Victoria Nuland’s husband is none other than the biggest neo-con of them all, Robert Kagan, co-founder of PNAC. You’ll remember PNAC as the organization that called for a “new Pearl Harbor” to get the American people on board their crazy train of overthrowing elected governments and bombing the hell out of civilians in the middle east.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan
_________________________________

Dancing Jews 9/11. Stucky knows what I’m talking about.

Montefrio

Forty-plus years ago I took a course on the origins of war taught by Kagan’s father, best known for his history of the Peloponnesian War. The course was interesting indeed, but one comment remains vivid in my memory. One of the class Marxists airily dismissed Kagan’s assertion that WW I could in part be attributed to the fact that the Kaiser had a withered arm and was jealous of his royal cousins the English king and the Russian czar and thus decided to make Germany a sea power with colonies. When the Marxist had finished with her carping, Prof. Kagan looked her in the eye (which in his case meant a bit to the left owing to a vision problem) and replied “Crap”. He went on to point out that Miss Goldfluss (actual name) couldn’t understand this because she had never been ” a six year old in the schoolyard fighting to keep his lunch money” or words very close to those. Thus do wars begin if Kagan was correct; personally, I believe there’s an element of that, but in the final accounting the primary cause is the machinations of behind-the-scenes manipulators with a pathological craving for wealth and power. No one’s getting THEIR lunch money, but they’re determined to swindle you out of yours as revenge for being cast as misfits,

Mr. Roberts is correct: organized dissent has been co-opted. Dissent in an atomized society is theater as a rule. True dissent is built one person at a time, starting with oneself and those whom one might be able to convince, hopefully growing from there. Ghandi knew what he was doing and his plan of passive resistance was very effective. Make the machine grind to a halt and the results may be surprising.

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