It is unclear how the contents of the DNC emails are supposed to have swayed the US electorate. Was anyone shocked to learn that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign managers were manipulative, lame, and fearful of Bernie Sanders?

The current brouhaha is utterly trivial compared to the extreme, direct interference by US government-connected campaign professionals in the election that solidified oligarchy in the former Soviet Union.* Ahoy, out there in the United States of Amnesia… Does anyone remember when Time Magazine was influential?  

A team of US political consultants operating clandestinely in Moscow was paid $250,000 plus expenses to help a very unpopular Boris Yeltsin get re-elected as Russia’s president in 1996. After Yeltsin’s victory a Time Magazine cover story credited the consultants with engineering it. “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of how American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win,” ran the text under a graphic of Yeltsin holding a little stars-and-stripes flag

ABC News on “Nightline” also glorified the consultants’ exploits. In due course, so did a Showtime movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Anthony LaPaglia and Liev Schreiber.

The Time story implied that US President Bill Clinton gave the consultants —and Yeltsin— crucial help. As reported by Michael Kramer in the issue dated July 15:

…Yeltsin is arguably the best hope Russia has for moving toward pluralism and an open economy. By re-electing him, the Russians defied predictions that they might willingly resubmit themselves to communist rule.

The outcome was by no means inevitable. Last winter Yeltsin’s approval ratings were in the single digits. There are many reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has remained a secret. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign…

Kramer identifies Felix Braynin, “a wealthy management consultant who advises Americans interested in investing in Russia,” as the man who pushed to hire US campaign professionals on Yeltsin’s behalf.

Braynin was instructed to “find some Americans” but to proceed discreetly. “Secrecy was paramount,” says Braynin. “Everyone realized that if the Communists knew about this before the election, they would attack Yeltsin as an American tool. We badly needed the team, but having them was a big risk.”

To “find some Americans,” Braynin worked through Fred Lowell, a San Francisco lawyer with close ties to California’s Republican Party. On Feb. 14, Lowell called Joe Shumate, a G.O.P. expert in political data analysis who had served as deputy chief of staff to California Governor Pete Wilson. Since Wilson’s drive for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination had ended almost before it began, Lowell thought Shumate and George Gorton, Wilson’s longtime top strategist, might be available to help Yeltsin. They were —and they immediately enlisted Richard Dresner, a New York-based consultant who had worked with them on many of Wilson’s campaigns.

Gov. Pete Wilson had undergone throat surgery which weakened his voice, and his head wobbled like a bobblehead doll when he spoke. Wilson had vetoed medical marijuana bills passed by the California legislature in 1994 and 1995. Grass-roots activists then drafted the initiative that made the ballot in 1996 as Proposition 215, and changed history.

Dresner had another connection that would prove useful later on. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he had joined with Dick Morris to help Bill Clinton get elected Governor of Arkansas. As Clinton’s current political guru, Morris became the middleman on those few occasions when the Americans sought the Administration’s help in Yeltsin’s re-election drive. So while Clinton was uninvolved with Yeltsin’s recruitment of the American advisers, the Administration knew of their existence —and although Dresner denies dealing with Morris, three other sources have told Time that on at least two occasions the team’s contacts with Morris were “helpful.”

Dick Morris was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1996. He is widely credited with the “Triangulation” strategy whereby the Democrats became barely distinguishable from the Republicans. He fell from grace after it was revealed that he let a prostitute listen in on his phone calls with the President. Morris’s wife insisted that he convert to Roman Catholicism. He did and thus the marriage was saved. And now back to Kramer in Time:

A week after the Valentine’s Day call from Lowell, Dresner was in Moscow. The Yeltsin campaign was at sea. Five candidates, led by Communist Gennadi Zyuganov, were ahead of Yeltsin in some polls. The President was favored by only 6% of the electorate and was “trusted” as a competent leader by an even smaller proportion…

To preserve security, a contract was drawn between the International Industrial Bancorp Inc. of San Francisco (a company Braynin managed for its Moscow parent) and Dresner-Wickers (Dresner’s consulting firm in Bedford Hills, New York). The Americans would work for four months, beginning March 1. They would be paid $250,000 plus all expenses and have an unlimited budget for polling, focus groups and other research. A week later, they were working full time…

The person really in charge [of Yeltsin’s campaign] was Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, 36, a computer engineer with no previous political experience.

The American team hired two young men, Braynin’s son Alan and Steven Moore, a public relations specialist from Washington, to assist them. and promptly established its office in a two-room suite at the President Hotel. The Americans lived elsewhere in the hotel and were provided with a car, a former KGB agent as a driver, and two bodyguards…

The Americans managed to hide their identity for many months. In interviewing various polling and focus-group companies before hiring three, they described themselves as representing Americans eager to sell thin-screen televisions in Russia. “That story held for far longer than it ever should have,” says Shumate. The Americans carried multiple-entry visas identifying them as working for the “Administration of the President of the Russian Federation,” a bit of obviousness that constantly threatened to undermine all the supposed secrecy surrounding their real work.

The President is not a normal hotel. It is owned by the office of the President, and residence is by invitation only. A fence surrounds the property, which is patrolled by police armed with machine guns and wearing bulletproof vests. When Dyachenko moved her own office to the hotel to be near the Americans, the rest of the campaign took three floors of offices there as well. Yeltsin’s badly split Russian advisers quickly set up separate fiefdoms on the eighth, ninth and 10th floors. Dyachenko worked almost exclusively on the 11th in Room 1119, directly across the hall from the Americans in 1120. She and they shared two secretaries, a translator, and fax, copying and computer-printing machines.

By the end, the team’s office resembled a typical American campaign headquarters. Soda bottles and old food shared space with computer printouts. Graphs charting Yeltsin’s progress in the polls hung on the walls, and the entire scene was dominated by a color-coded map of Russia with Post-it notes describing the vote expected in the nation’s various regions. A safe stood unused, and documents intended for a shredder remained intact, in plain view.

Gorton followed Dresner to Moscow and encountered in Dyachenko a shy, intelligent and idealistic young woman who for some time recoiled at even the most mild American-style dirty trick. “But it wouldn’t be fair,” Gorton recalls her saying when he advised that Zyuganov be trailed by heckling “truth squads” designed to goad him into losing his temper. At their first meeting across a long table covered in green felt, Dyachenko confided, “I don’t know this business. I don’t know what to ask.” For a few weeks, says Gorton, “the task was simple education, Campaigning 101, stuff like the proper uses of polling and the need to test via focus groups just about everything the campaign was doing, or thinking of doing.”

… A great deal of their communication with Dyachenko and Yeltsin’s other aides was conducted by written memorandums. “Translation was a constant problem,” says Dresner. “We spent a full day trying to convey what we meant by having Yeltsin stay ‘on message.'” Minister Borodin says, “Having the memos let the President consider them calmly. We had many discussions about the recommendations and in the end adopted most everything the Americans advised…”

[There was] a campaign-long insistence on a standard American campaign practice —repetition. “Whatever it is that we’re going to say and do,” Gorton explained to Yeltsin’s aides, “we have to repeat it between eight and 12 times.” Those numbers were invented. “The Russians believe that anything that’s worthwhile is scientifically based,” says Shumate. “This gave us a leg up when we started to seriously use focus groups to guide campaign policy, but right at the start it let us pretend that we knew more than we really did. There’s no data supporting how many times something needs to be repeated, but the Russians bought it as gospel.”

In hindsight, the need for an anticommunist emphasis by the Yeltsin campaign —the need to “go negative”— seems self-evident. But when the Americans first harped on anticommunism as the “only” route to victory, many in the campaign resisted. And despite their status and patronage, the Americans had to fight long and hard before that core strategy was accepted…

In early April Yeltsin gave a major televised speech in which he did not abide by the Americanskis’ advice and did not emphasize anticommunism as his message.

Angry about losing the battle over the speech, and certain it represented a disastrous trend in the campaign, the Americans set out to prove their point after the fact. They replayed excerpts of the address —and some other film footage and still photographs of Yeltsin— for an audience of 40 Russians wired to a “perception analyzer,” an instrument often used in the U.S. Audiences have their hands on dials and are asked to move them in different directions to indicate their degree of interest and approval of what they are seeing and hearing. An electronically produced chart records their reactions.

The results shocked Yeltsin’s Russian assistants… From then on, the American team’s influence grew —and anticommunism became the central and repeated focus of the campaign and the candidate.

Having helped establish the campaign’s major theme, the Americans then set out to modify it. The Americans used their focus-group coordinator, Alexei Levinson, to determine what exactly Russians most feared about the Communists. Long lines, scarce food and renationalization of property were frequently cited, but mostly people worried about civil war. “That allowed us to move beyond simple Red bashing,” says Shumate. “That’s why Yeltsin and his surrogates and our advertising all highlighted the possibility of unrest if Yeltsin lost. Many people felt some nostalgia for what the communists had done for Russia and no one liked the President —but they liked the possibility of riots and class warfare even less.”

“‘Stick with Yeltsin and at least you’ll have calm’ —that was the line we wanted to convey,” says Dresner. “So the drumbeat about unrest kept pounding right till the end of the run-off round, when the final TV spots were all about the Soviets’ repressive rule.”

… The Americans were “vital,” says Mikhail Margolev, who coordinated the Yeltsin account at Video International [an advertising firm]. Margolev had worked for five years in two American advertising agencies but freely acknowledges that his methods are still influenced by his earlier tenure as a propaganda specialist for the Soviet Communist Party and as an undercover KGB agent masquerading as a journalist for TASS, the Russian news agency. “The Americans helped teach us Western political-advertising techniques,” says Margolev, “and most important, they caused our work to be accepted because they were the only ones really close to Tatiana.”

… The TV ad the Americans most wanted was the one the campaign made last, which had Yeltsin himself speaking. “We actually wanted him in every spot,” says Gorton. “We wanted the President to come on and say that he understood what they were talking about, that he heard their complaints, that he felt their pain.” But Yeltsin resisted–and that caused the team to reach out to Bill Clinton’s all-purpose political aide, Dick Morris.

Communicating in code —Clinton was called the Governor of California, Yeltsin the Governor of Texas— the Americans sought Morris’ help. They had earlier worked together to script Clinton’s summit meeting with Yeltsin in mid-April. The main goal then was to have Clinton swallow hard and say nothing as Yeltsin lectured him about Russia’s great-power prerogatives. “The idea was to have Yeltsin stand up to the West, just like the Communists insisted they would do if Zyuganov won,” says a Clinton Administration official. “By having Yeltsin posture during that summit without Clinton’s getting bent out of shape, Yeltsin portrayed himself as a leader to be reckoned with. That helped Yeltsin in Russia, and we were for Yeltsin.”

The American team wanted Clinton to call Yeltsin to urge that he appear in his ads. The request reached Clinton —that much is known— but no one will say whether the call was made. Yet it was not long before Yeltsin finally appeared on the tube…

Yeltsin also had problems with his regular TV coverage, even though he essentially controlled the state-run networks… “It was ludicrous to control the two major nationwide television stations and not have them bend to your will,” says Dresner…  Beginning in April, Russia’s television became a virtual arm of the Yeltsin campaign, a crucial change that actually came fairly easily. With none of the more democratic candidates breaking through in the polls, most Russian journalists came to regard Yeltsin as the only effective bulwark against the Communists —and thus the best guarantor of their own careers…

Each day brought decisions on details that required careful thought and management. The Americans advised on staging crowds (and government employees were regularly instructed to attend Yeltsin’s rallies). They conceived Russia’s first-ever serious direct-mail effort (a letter from Yeltsin to Russian veterans thanking them for their service). They designed a campaign to use Yeltsin’s wife Naina on the stump, where she was regularly well received. And they fought continuously all suggestions that Yeltsin debate Zyuganov. “He would have lost,” Gorton says simply.

The possibility of Yeltsin losing led his closest aide, General Alexander Korzhakov, to suggest that the election be postponed. Gorton argued against this undemocratic ploy because his polling showed his client leading by 10 points. One wonders how he would have argued if his client had been down 10 points.

… The President’s three democratic opponents had long talked of coalescing behind one or the other of them, and the speculation reached a fever pitch at the beginning of May. Had “they managed that,” says Gorton, “it could really have killed us.” A good deal of time was devoted to strategizing about how Yeltsin could stop the so-called “third force” from emerging.

On election day

A bit of relief came when a CNN correspondent reported that “the only thing voters we’ve spoken with like less than Yeltsin is the prospect of upheaval.” Dresner howled. “It worked,” he shouted. “The whole strategy worked. They’re scared to death!” After months being cooped up in the President Hotel wearing blue jeans, sneakers and PETE WILSON FOR PRESIDENT T shirts, the Americans headed for the building where Russia’s central election commission would be announcing the results as they came in. “The hell with security,” Dresner said. “I want to see this.” And there they sat near the back of the auditorium, six guys in suits with computer projections in their hands and a lap-top computer. The place was overrun with reporters, but Yeltsin’s secret American advisers were never recognized.

The final tally for the first round showed that Yeltsin had edged out Zyuganov 35% to 32% (the Communists had indeed been held to the level they reached in December). Gorton began drafting a memo designed to guide Yeltsin’s remarks, and Dresner began plotting 20 emergency focus groups to determine what voters were thinking. In less than an hour, another memo was written urging the quickest possible runoff date. “We’ve got to try and keep Zyuganov from capitalizing” on the first round’s surprise tightness, Shumate said. “July 3 would be good,” said Gorton. “That’s about as soon as possible, and it’s in the middle of the week so that people will be in town rather than at their dachas.” “We need turnout,” Dresner said over and over.

Why, with unlimited funds, expert advice and the media in his pocket, did Yeltsin win the first round by only three points? The Americans identify several points:

The continuing underlying hostility toward Yeltsin. “He never overcame the fact that most Russians can’t stand him,” says Dresner…

A slackening of the Yeltsin campaign’s anticommunist message in the last 10 days. The Americans had advised “that you cannot hit hard enough, or long enough, the idea of the communists’ bringing civil unrest if they win.” In the first round, says Shumate, “the repetition lesson never took completely.”

… The first round’s closeness guaranteed that the two-week runoff campaign would be conducted with care, regardless of the predictions that Yeltsin couldn’t lose. The Americans’ insistence on the anticommunist message was pursued with a vengeance. At the end, Yeltsin’s television advertising was almost exclusively a nonstop diet of past Soviet horrors. Lebed’s law-and-order theme dovetailed nicely with the pre-existing Yeltsin emphasis on preserving stability. Several bogus poll predictions were put forth to make the race seem close and thus increase turnout.

Gorton predicts to Kramer of Time Magazine that the Russians will deny that his team enabled Yeltsin to triumph. And sure enough, a New York Times story by Alessandra Stanley July 9, 1996 (when Time Magazine hit the stands), questions the role the US consultants had played in Yeltsin’s victory. Russians involved in the campaign tell Stanley that Gorton and crew are self-promoters who had not been been present when the key decisions were made.

Stanley revisited the subject in 2004 when Showtime aired a movie, “Spinning Boris,” starring Jeff Goldblum as George Gorton.  This is how she sums up the plot:

In the movie the three men conduct focus groups and quickly realize that Mr. Yeltsin’s only hope is to ”go negative” and paint his Communist opponent, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, as a step back to Bolshevism and unrest. (”It’s the civil war, stupid,” one of them jokes.) Using American tricks of the trade —advance men, planted hecklers and negative ads— the Californians single-handedly devise a winning strategy that overcomes their candidate’s abysmal approval ratings and his habit of appearing intoxicated at public events.

Stanley’s 2004 piece notes that Gorton, Shumate and Dresner “most recently helped elect Arnold Schwarzenegger governor of California.” She adds her own trenchant commentary on Yeltsin’s victory in 1996:

The Americans’ poll analysis and focus group research helped shape Mr. Yeltsin’s campaign strategy, but it was money that tipped the balance. The Faustian bargain that reformers like Anatoly B. Chubais made with Russia’s new class of robber barons, or oligarchs, got Mr. Yeltsin re-elected and also spawned a second wave of crooked privatization deals, Kremlin favoritism and media control that discredited Russian capitalism. The reformers perverted Russian democracy to save it, paving the way for the neo-Soviet leadership of President Vladimir V. Putin, whose bid for re-election on Sunday is only nominally contested.

What means “neo-Soviet?”

Notes.

* This is but one example of US meddling in foreign elections and it is hardly egregious compared to some recounted by William Blum in “The CIA: a Forgotten History,” which covers 1948 (Italy) through 1981 (Nicaragua).

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n this day and age, ‘dissent’ means little more than feeding mostly vetted, crowd-pleasing opinions into some online algorithm that will yield better results for a pharmaceutical giant or a law enforcement agency. We can say all kinds of shit to a highly selective, built-in audience of multiple selves, and feel good about exercising our right to free speech – in the meantime forgetting that all this ‘activism’ is just more content to be harvested like organs for marketing and surveillance purposes.

As data donors, we entrust ourselves to a system that crunches us into numbers and demographics based on whatever self-serving agenda needs a conflated mathematical formulae to increase the bottom line of a corporation and/or the governments they run.

We can wage a “resistance” against the monster we have inadvertently, but predictably created, having empowered right wing populism as a means to further disenfranchise the left, which had already abandoned its economic platform to focus on ‘identity’ and sexuality. How long can you insist that a fashion faux pas is on par with The Killing Fields in terms of “appropriation” before your irrelevance becomes well-deserved fodder for the sub-Reddit community? And who would have guessed that prioritizing correct pronouns over actual policy to address a widening and worsening income gap would cause the most struggling and despairing segment of the voting bloc to throw their lot in with the now Cheeto-Bag-in-Chief as payback for NAFTA and Lena Dunham?

You could make the argument that the left’s capitulation to identity politics would be enough to convince the powers that be that they have eliminated the risk of stirring up the sort of social unrest that demands a radical overhauling of wealth distribution instead of cosmetic adjustments to speech. But why settle for an effective neutering of ‘left’ opposition when you can take a chainsaw to the whole damn dog?

For the same reason acquiring the lion’s share of the world’s wealth isn’t quite the same as ‘having it all’.  A mindset that could be best summed up as “My yacht is only 500 meters longer than an aircraft carrier because some fucking kid in Detroit still has the luxury of eating lead and ketchup for breakfast”.  Rather than tolerate pesky, profit-reducing labor unions, universal healthcare, public education and environmental regulations, why not just replace them all with angry men yelling at their TV sets? And equally angry women yelling at skinny models? As a strategy, it seemed to work until, well, . . . Donald Trump.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]cientifically speaking, an exploding, loose cannon ball of earwax as leader of the ‘Free World’ is what happens when you successfully kill off a vital organism – “good”  bacteria, if you will, in order to allow another one to thrive and multiply without impediment.  Either by accident or design, we are helpless against the ruling class as as our resistance to these ultimately host-killing predators have been eroded by the absence of a political organism that could create the necessary bulwarks against their expanding and unchecked powers.

Having purged the elements necessary for a diverse and evenly keeled political eco-system that provides the checks and balances necessary to maintain an actual democracy, we are left with a walled-in sectarian ‘Free Trade’ zone where the rights of pipelines and bathroom stalls are vigorously upheld and protected under a ‘No Smoking’ sign.

The deliberate and ongoing political engineering necessary to give multinationals their global stranglehold was introduced with predictable blowback-inducing results in much of the Middle East when left wing politicians and parties were dissolved at the behest of the US, and dissenters were driven into mosques, creating the present political vacuum that gives people in Muslim-majority countries the ‘choice’ between a corrupt neoliberal order enforced by a US installed dictator or a motley band of head choppers with a more proactive approach to capitalism.

People in South and Central America have been similarly forced to cede their sovereignty in exchange for not finding themselves at the mercy of armed drug dealers on the same payroll as their IS counterparts in Syria and Iraq.

It was only a matter of time before our overlords would apply the same divide-and-conquer strategies at home, where the so-called Red/Blue state divide discourages solidarity between unemployed autoworkers in the Michigan, and the equally redundant factory and farm workers south of the Rust Belt. This division is demarcated along ‘color lines’, even though both demographics are collateral damage left in the wake of deregulation, privatization and the ruinous trade deals that successive war party administrations have implemented to increase the bottom line of their donors.

Our own elite-ascribed ‘tribal’ affiliations result in an endless televised tug-of-war that pits “rednecks” against “thugs” and “snowflakes” against everything that isn’t organic, fair trade or LGBT-friendly for the short-term gains that meaningless victories engender when “clapping back” on Twitter represents the pinnacle of dialectical achievement.

The same strategies used to forestall Arab unity and Pan-Africanism are behind our own failing, upended political system, where both ‘left’ and ‘right’ issue meaningless, social-based ‘fatwas’ against, say, same-sex marriage and gluten as their corrupt leaders run victory laps around the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs.  And why shouldn’t they rejoice at their success in synthesizing globalization with a growing strain of a parasitic brain wasting disease to replace a system whose regulatory ‘glitches’ slowed down its cancerous growth.  Enter a murderous ‘healthcare’ bill to hasten the incremental death of surplus labor so that our smart phones can communicate with our lampshades in the worker-less, post-Trump utopia ahead.

In the meantime, it’s hardly surprising that a ‘super bug’ would emerge after three decades of the political and social engineering necessary to transform left opposition to war into a Red-baiting faction of warmongers.

The utterly corrupt Joe Lieberman (left)—who had mercifully disappeared from active politics—may yet have his most malignant incarnation as chief of the FBI.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat else could explain the liberal establishment agitating on behalf of the FBI and the CIA, citing “grave concerns” about national security based on Israeli espionage?  Notice how no one is asking why this particular foreign government is so closely embedded into the American state security apparatus, despite its refusal to curb its illegal settlement expansion in the occupied territories. Or why Joe Liebermann, the Apartheid regime’s biggest booster, is being considered to head the FBI, with the same bipartisan support his Israeli benefactors receive from both  Republicans and Democrats – most notably the “socialist” Bernie Sanders – to excuse Israel from adhering to international law.

American liberals are upset, it seems, over their “loose-lipped” president inadvertently cockblocking an Israeli strike on Iran by sharing gathered intelligence about impending terrorist attacks with a G8 member state.  Russia’s concern for its own security is just more evidence of the cunning Putin’s dark designs on the Oval Office where by sleight-of-hand, a leaking bag of Cheetos has replaced the US presidency.

You couldn’t make this shit up if you were gacked on ‘Krokodil’ laced with bath salts and asked to explain current events to a flock of invisible, face eating seagulls shooting out of the moon.  Welcome to the Meth Lab Matrix, where the Deep State cooks up the establishment-serving narratives necessary to enlist bipartisan public support for the coup that will rid the White House of its problematic resident, and replace his itchy Twitter finger with one more calmly poised over the nuclear codes.

You could say that the outcome of this symbiotic relationship between outrage producing organisms has resulted in the present political vacuum where liberals revive discredited cold war tropes to uphold their half of the war machine, while ‘conservatives’ genuflect at the feet of the entity who threatens to bring it all crashing down. In the absence of a left opposition, we are stuck with an ‘Alt-Center’, where social justice warriors, goaded on by the state propaganda organ known as ‘Comedy Central’, lob cruise missiles both figuratively and literally at domestic and overseas targets they deem not in line with the objectives of a sensitivity-training seminar.  In the meantime, their Republican cohorts get down to the actual work of dismantling the last remaining obstacles to their planetary host-devouring objectives.  

he United States is the most militarized and jingoistic nation on earth. Its foreign policy is guided by imperialist militarism, neoliberal capitalism and racial xenophobia. For more than sixteen years now, three presidential administrations have carried out a so-called “War on Terror” (GWOT), a perpetual state of war that is waged globally, under the depraved reasoning that “the world is a battlefield,” to quote investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. As demonstrated by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the GWOT is conducted through conventional warfare. More often, however, it is executed through covert or “dirty” wars, against groups and individuals in many other nations.

The U.S. has the financial and logistical capacity to wage these illegal wars. Its bloated military budget is larger than the next seven countries combined. It is by far the largest operator of military installations abroad, maintaining nearly 800 bases in around 70 countries. The ever-growing military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address, permeates every facet of our society – from an economy largely dependent on the war industry, to military recruiting in our public schools, to police militarization. This toxic culture of war is underscored on different national holidays, particularly Memorial Day.

"Patriotism" is inculcated early. Waving the flag is instinctive for most Americans. The US has innumerable parades commemorating the country's "glorious wars and fighting spirit." All of this is constantly encouraged by the media and the politicians.

Memorial Day – a day originating in 1868 (Decoration Day), on which the gravesites of the Civil War dead were decorated with flowers – has morphed into a day that conflates the memorialization of killed soldiers with the glorification of war. The perennial flag-waving, ultra-nationalist speeches, garish street parades and hyper-consumerism of Memorial Day do not honor these soldiers. What might, however, is working to prevent future war and nurture peace – honoring their memory by not sending more men and women into harm’s way and to kill and maim in wars based on lies. To have any chance at being effective, however, this work must include efforts aimed at increasing public awareness about the many causes and costs of war.

Long-time consumer advocate, lawyer, and author Ralph Nader affirms in the essay, “Strengthening Memorial Day,” honoring our war casualties should be about more than their loss. According to Nader, “waging strong peace initiatives is also a way to remember those human beings, soldiers and civilians, who never returned to their homes. “Never again” should be our tribute and promise to them.”

Referring to the post-9/11 invasions, in “Remember This on Memorial Day: They Didn’t Fall, They Were Pushed,” Ray McGovern, former Army officer and senior CIA analyst, tenders a hypophoric question: what constitutes a show of respect for the U.S. troops killed in these wars and for the family members on Memorial Day? To which McGovern responds, “Simple: Avoid euphemisms like “the fallen” and expose the lies about what a great idea it was to start those wars and then to “surge” tens of thousands of more troops into those fools’ errands.”

Ron Kovic, whose life was made into a major Hollywood film, Born on the 4th of July, in a demonstration with fellow wounded veterans (front plane)

Bill Quigley, law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, writes in “Memorial Day: Praying for Peace While Waging Permanent War?” that “Memorial Day is, by federal law, a day of prayer for permanent peace.” This is a contradiction, though — based on the conduct of our government. Quigley asks: “is it possible to honestly pray for peace while our country is far and away number one in the world in waging war, military presence, military spending and the sale of weapons around the world?” He offers five suggestions for how we might alter this reality, the first two being, “learn the facts and face the truth that the US is the biggest war maker in the world” and “commit ourselves and organize others to a true revolution of values and confront the corporations and politicians who continue to push our nation into war and inflate the military budget with the hot air of permanent fear mongering.” Quigley emphasizes that, “Only when we work for the day when the US is no longer the world leader in war will we have the right to pray for peace on Memorial Day.”

In an article published in The Boston Globe (1976), the people’s historian Howard Zinn urged readers to rethink Memorial Day, who we honor that day, and our national priorities. Dr. Zinn wrote: “Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.”... “Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.”

Pro-war propaganda selling the notion that US soldiers fight "to protect our freedoms"—a freedom which has not been threatened by anyone since 1812, not even in WW2—is a predominant meme in the pervasive brainwash to keep the population submissive to a regime of constant warmaking and meddling in other nations' affairs. The whore media is a key element in the success of this imposture.

Each Memorial Day, members of Veterans For Peace (VFP), an international nonprofit that works to abolish war and promote peace, participates in a wide range of nonviolent protest actions in cities and towns nationwide. This year is no different. A major VFP action will be held in Washington, DC, through a series of events termed “Veterans On the March! Stop Endless War, Build for Peace,” May 29 and 30, 2017. VFP’s military veterans, military family members and allies will converge in DC in solidarity to end war as instrument of national policy; build a culture of peace; expose the true costs of war; and, heal the wounds of war.

On Memorial Day, VFP and its friends will gather on this solemn and respectful occasion to deliver letters at the Vietnam Memorial Wall, intended as a commemoration of all combatants and civilians who died in Vietnam and all wars. VFP will mourn the tragic and preventable loss of life, and call for people to strive to abolish war, in the name of those who have died and for the sake of all those who live today. The “Letters at the Wall” remembrance is an activity of the Vietnam Full Disclosure Campaign, a national project of VFP. In her essay, “Preparing for the Next Memorial Day,” CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin shares the story of one of the veterans who partakes in the Project: “As Vietnam vet Dan Shea said when he reflected on the names etched and not etched on the Vietnam Memorial, including the missing names of the Vietnamese and all the victims of Agent Orange, including his own son: “Why Vietnam? Why Afghanistan? Why Iraq? Why any war? .…May the mighty roar of the victims of this violence silence the drums that beat for war.”

On Tuesday, May 30, VFP will host a mass rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where speakers will boldly and loudly call for an end to war, to the assault on our planet, and to the abuse and oppression of all people. Calls will also be made for people to stand for peace and justice, at home and abroad. Following the rally, participants will march to the White House to present a list of demands to the President stipulating that the systemic state violence which is preventing a just, peaceful and sustainable way of life for current and future generations must stop immediately. Planning for this rally/march started in response to VFP’s galvanizing statement about Trump’s Military Budget and the desire and responsibility of veterans, citizens and human beings to express strong resistance to Trump’s racist and antagonistic policies and commit to find a better way to peace.

In addition to these actions, VFP will once again fill a void in the National Memorial space by offering people an opportunity to bear witness on a touring memorial to all the costs of war on all sides. Not only do we lack a memorial to the American combat dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and other post-Vietnam wars, but we lack a monument to the many suicide deaths and families torn by the traumas of exposure to war. The Swords to Plowshares Memorial Belltower, a 24-foot tall tower covered with silver wind-blown ‘bricks’ made from recycled cans, provides an opportunity for tribute to these war victims. Initiated by VFP’s Eisenhower Chapter, the Belltower is dedicated to stopping the cycle of war and violence, healing the wounds of war that is caused on both sides of conflict, and providing a forum for all victims to start the healing process caused by wars.

Join VFP in Washington, DC on May 29 and 30 to stop hegemonic thinking, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and demand a transformation of national priorities from death and destruction to social uplift and peace. These shared goals can be achieved if enough people come together and engage in nonviolent social change for a better tomorrow.