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=By= Murray Polner

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n early 2010, one year after Barack Obama was inaugurated as President, the paleo-conservative American Conservative magazine asked me to write an assessment of how he would manage the country’s foreign affairs.

I concluded that, “but for a few crumbs here and there, antiwar views will rarely be welcomed by his White House. And when marginalized antiwar voters complain, the president’s men will remind them that they were told Afghanistan was a ‘necessary war’ and ‘national security’ is everything. Plus ca change.”

Yes, there was Obama’s opening to Cuba and there was his major deal with Iran when he managed to stand up to Netanyahu and his American Jewish and non-Jewish sycophants. Otherwise, his hawk side has dominated his dove side, as when he talked about Russia and Ukraine, often sounding more like DC’s gang of war-lovers.

He escalated the permanent war in Afghanistan and Iraq, went ahead with the disastrous intervention in Libya, and relied on drones to assassinate thousands including countless numbers of civilians in the Greater Middle East. He did nothing when the US Navy twice played Russian Roulette in disputed territorial waters near the Spratly Islands while at the same time creating a ring around China which one day could very well lead to yet another failed American Asian war.

He abruptly fired the moderate Republican combat veteran Chuck Hagel without offering any serious explanation and appointed instead a Pentagon insider, a move which probably warmed the hearts of its analysts, clerks and mystery men and women, and also its generals, who have never defeated anyone in a protracted war since 1945 and, for all we know, may be eager to show they know how to “win.”

More ominously, Obama’s policies threaten nuclear-armed, nationalistic Russia with American weapons and troops on its borders and neighboring Baltic and Black seas. Would it surprise anyone if some future administration decides to place nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep and Russia retaliates, potentially inviting mutual catastrophe.

The Pentagon has recently proclaimed Russia as our Number 0ne enemy, and the U.S. is building a cordon sanitaire around Russia. According to the NY Times, Secretary of Defense Carter has proposed quadrupling military spending in Europe in 2017, “the sheer size of the spending increase seems like a return to the Pentagon’s blank-check ways during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” a budget so pleasing to our Merchants of Death, the arms-makers. (“Endless money, the sinews of war, Cicero in Phillippics, V.25, astutely reminded us long ago but with obviously little persuasive power). Will Obama fight the Pentagon on this, much as he allowed neocon elements in the State Department to openly take sides in Ukraine? Once our great hope for a different kind of foreign policy, Obama has, with few exceptions, capitulated to our home front warriors and their fellow travelers who truly exemplify Charles Edwards Montague’s hallowed adage: “War hath no fury like combatants.”

Ronald Reagan, who was largely ignorant about foreign affairs, went to Reykjavik and after he and Gorbachev found common ground faced down to his furious neocon critics. Nixon courageously traveled to Beijing. George Kennan and even Kissinger, no less, warned that Ukraine should never be tied to NATO dreams unless we were ready to fight a nuclear war.

As 0bama prepares to depart to write his memoirs, oversee his presidential library, and await the judgment of history, and while his long-disappointed liberal fans now cheer ObamaCare and his final year of worthwhile executive orders dealing with domestic affairs, the rest of us have to wonder whether the seeds of future wars his administration has planted will come to fruition.

Then there is or was George McGovern. Largely dismissed today because he was swamped in the 1972 presidential race, McGovern, a WWII combat veteran, memorably spoke of America’s criminal adventure in Vietnam and leveled an unforgettable accusation against his fellow senators, an indictment which can be applied equally to the Establishment’s support for today’s wars, and tomorrow’s as well, whenever and wherever a new “enemy” is detected or invented.

“This chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across of the land—young men without legs or arms, or genitals. Or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure….”

So what might Barack Obama have tried as alternatives to war and intervention?

As commander-in-Chief he might have demanded genuine financial accountability in the Pentagon. He might have tried to push hard for arms control, which is highly preferable to another nuclear arms race. He might have pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan and allowed Middle Eastern states and non-states and its religious groups to settle their differences in their own way and thus saving the lives of an incalculable number of Americans and Middle Eastern civilians.

He might too have explained why we’re still at war. Does anyone really know or even want to know, especially now when we’re on the brink of dispatching ever more “boots on the ground?”

And he might have dared recruit a different breed of advisors willing to support alternatives to the futile status quo. Given his popularity he could also have cultivated the building of peace-oriented coalitions from the millions who marched and worked against the invasions of Iraq and Vietnam.

Perhaps he saw himself as Lincoln, FDR, and George the First. Unfortunately, he was none of them, at least in foreign policy. While he probably meant well, soon after he entered the Oval Office he took on the coloration of the DC’s political elite and their sacred status quo. That will be part of his legacy.

 

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Contributing Editor, Murray Polner wrote “No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran“; “When Can I Come Home,” about draft evaders during the Vietnam era; co-authored with Jim O’Grady,  “Disarmed and Dangerous,” a dual biography of Dan and Phil Berrigan; and most recently, with Thomas Woods,Jr., ” We Who Dared to Say No to War.”  He is the senior book review editor for the History News Network.

 

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=By= Rowan Wolf

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] think the American public has lost all touch with the reality of our wars. Most of the footage that we see is high drone footage of exploding dust clouds. The media, apparently, does little to no coverage of its own or perhaps we would see what we have made of the city of Homs, Syria. Then, perhaps, there would be less argument about Syrian refugees. Or perhaps there would be more because we can only imagine our feelings if this was done to our home.

There are those who will argue “That’s the outcome of ‘civil war’.” While technically correct, problematically, the US is at the very center of this “civil war,” and it would have ended long ago if the US policy of regime change was not at the top of the agenda – regardless the cost.

 

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Rowan Wolf, Managing Editor / Director, The Russia Desk, obtained her doctorate in Sociology from the University of Oregon and taught sociology for 22 years. Her specialized areas of interest are systems of inequality (particularly race, class, and sex); globalization;  environment; organizations; and culture and socialization.  She lives with her partner (Kelly), and their two dogs (Kacey and Mossy). Rowan Wolf is Managing Editor of The Greanville Post, and was appointed Director of The Russia Desk, a specialized section of The Greanville Post, on Nov. 23, 2015.

Rowan’s email is rowanwolf@greanvillepost.com.

 

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=By= Sputnik News

[dropcap]U[/dropcap]S historians claim that the proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Daesh that Congress is preparing will give President Barack Obama unlimited powers to declare war contrary to the US Constitution.

The proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against Daesh that Congress is preparing will give President Barack Obama unlimited powers to declare war contrary to the US Constitution, US historians told Sputnik.

“The proposed AUMF, with its intent to give virtually unlimited powers to the President, is a direct assault upon the Constitutional order of the United States, a virtual coup d’etat,” ex-US Army Major and former Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyer Todd Pierce told Sputnik on Friday.

According to the US Constitution, sole power to declare war rests with the Congress. However, the AUMF, which enjoys strong bi-partisan support, will give the US president the legal authority to unleash war operations in any country where he determines Daesh may be a threat.

“The United States looks at ‘potential military options’ for every location in the world… Unlike mere contingency planning, however, we have seen for 15 years now that ‘potential military options’ are planned steps for future military expansion,” Pierce, a historian of US presidential power said.

The sweeping scope of the powers offered to Obama in the AUMF reflected the confusion in Congress over conditions in Libya, where Daesh was a serious menace, and how to fight it, former US Foreign Service Officer and historian William Blum told Sputnik.

“Has the US even decided who are the good guys in Libya and who are the bad guys?” Blum asked. “They’re probably all bad guys: Another marvelous result of the US/NATO invasion [in 2011].”

Far from destroying the Islamic State in countries where it operates, US military actions actually helped the terror group grow rapidly by inflicting civilian casualties and wrecking organized societies in those nations, Pierce maintained.

“Apart from enriching our own military industrial complex, US military operations are self-evidently only serving the interests of groups such as the Islamic State, which owes its existence to the Iraq War, besides increasing the threat and numbers of terrorists,” Pierce pointed out.

The AUMF would also mark a giant step toward the consolidation of full military powers in the presidency, without Congress retaining any counter-balancing procedures, he warned.

“By centralizing war decision-making in the so-called commander-in-chief, the same office assumed by the German president in the 1930’s, we have recreated the same type of ‘command authority’ exercised in Germany in the 1940’s,” Pierce argued.

The AUMF is the latest step in a process of creating a more militaristic commander-in-chief, but such a centralization of power would lead to worse war-making decisions, not better ones, he predicted.

There will be “an increased likelihood of the sort of national security decision-making which led the Wehrmacht to Stalingrad,” he said.

On Thursday, former Republican Congressman Ron Paul said that if Congress approves the AUMF, the US Constitution will become a dead letter.

 

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Hegemonic Lies

=By= F. William Engdahl

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]lightly more than seven decades ago, when the United Nations was officially founded in San Francisco, there was no question in the world about who was the Great Power, the World Hegemon. Today the situation has radically altered to the severe disadvantage of Washington and her ability to dictate terms to the rest of the world in economics, politics, and the greatly-misused expression “human rights and democracy-building.” That disadvantage may, ironically, be a blessing in disguise for us all.

In 1945, the United States Federal Reserve controlled the overwhelming majority of the world’s monetary gold. As war approached in Europe in 1939, European gold flooded into the United States for safety. In 1935 US official gold reserves were valued at just over $9 billion. By 1940 after the onset of war in Europe, it had leapt to $20 billion. As desperate European countries sought to finance their war effort, their gold went to the United States to purchase essential goods. By the time of the June 1944 international monetary conference at Bretton Woods, the United States Federal Reserve controlled fully 70% of world monetary gold, a staggering advantage in what was then a Bretton Woods Gold Exchange System with the US dollar at its heart. That wasn’t even calculating the captured gold of the defeated Axis powers of Germany or Japan, where exact facts and data are buried in layers of deception and rumor to this day.

To grasp the full dimension of the internal crisis and foreign policy dilemmas facing Washington today, it’s useful to go back to the nature of the immediate postwar “triumphalism” of US policy circles in the wake of their emergence from the war.

An ‘American Empire’ emerges

One influential geopolitical thinker of the postwar American Century, sometimes referred to as “the first Cold Warrior,” was James Burnham. During the war he had been one of Wild Bill Donovan’s US Government intelligence operatives in the pre-CIA intelligence operation called Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Burnham was one of many American Trotskyist Marxists recruited by the US intelligence. After the war, Burnham, swung from far left to far right, much as fellow former Trotskyist, Irving Kristol, the so-called Godfather of the neo-cons. Burnham together with William F. Buckley, Jr. founded the arch-conservative National Review to propagate Cold War anti-Soviet missives and pro-free market propaganda, invariably serving the foreign policy agenda of the CIA and State Department.

In 1947 Burnham wrote a major paean to America’s new world power titled The Struggle for the World. The book was adapted from a Top Secret OSS memo Burnham had prepared for the US Delegation to Yalta about the Soviet geopolitical strategy in 1944.

Burnham described in the most positive terms what he called, “an American Empire which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control.” This is what Time-Life magazine founder, Henry Luce in his 1941 essay termed, “The American Century.”

Burnham’s vision and recommendations for his American world control were stark and unequivocal:

The United States cannot within the allotted time win the leadership of a viable world political order merely by appeals to rational conviction…Power must be there, with the known readiness to use it, whether in the indirect form of paralyzing economic sanctions, or in the direct explosion of bombs. As the ultimate reserve in the power series there would be the monopoly control of atomic weapons.

The reference to “direct explosion of bombs” from Burnham’s 1944 draft was a presaging of the August 1945 decision by President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, not to secure Japanese surrender which was already clear, but, rather to show the Soviet Union, as well as Western Europe, which power would rule the postwar world. The American Century was to be a “no nonsense” enterprise. As Burnham put it, “Independence and freedom are, after all, abstractions.”

Within that American-controlled economic space, encompassing more than 560 million people, lay a vast potential market beyond even the enormous expanse of the prewar British Empire. The United States, a mere two years into its postwar ambitions, held extraordinary power over much of the world in an informal economic empire. It had done so by using the mechanisms of the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and World Bank, through its control of broad western European economic policy via the Marshall Plan and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), through the role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, and the heart of world finance, and above all, through the major New York banks of the Wall Street money cartel and their allied civil servants in Washington at the Federal Reserve and US Treasury Department.

In 1948 George Kennan, architect of US Cold War Soviet “Containment” policy, noted in an internal US State Department memo the essence of the mentality of those special interests around the brothers Rockefeller and the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), who were busy then defining that emerging American informal empire. Kennan’s memo outlined the postwar agenda of the US power establishment very succinctly:

…[W]e have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. 

Kennan outlined the real nature of post-war US policies. Kennan was coldly honest and realistic about the true postwar goal of the US establishment. It was US domination of the world, or at least as much of it as it could seize and hold onto in 1948. That was the CFR’s proposed Grand Area.

Since 1945 the United States has formally been involved as combatant in twenty two wars, major and minor, from Korea to Vietnam, from Grenada and Panama to Syria and Libya, wars all to grab and hold that global empire.

Now, its domestic economy a hollowed-out shell, its transportation infrastructure in horrendous decline, its skilled labor force increasingly non-existent, its university engineering and science students mostly from abroad–mainly China and India–the United States of America is in the throes of a terminal decline, a decline caused by no one but her own people who tolerated the looting and destruction of a once-beautiful nation by a greedy, power-addicted cabal of bad people with names like Rockefeller, Gates, Russell, DuPont, Buffett and others whose names are hardly known to the broad public.

The crisis that the USA faces today as World Hegemon is the fact the nation has become bankrupt, morally, spiritually, intellectually and economically, in an eerie manner much as the British Empire after onset of their Great Depression of 1873.

A few basic indicators says volumes about the rapidly-growing limits to America’s global power projection and why Washington’s “bully” tactics are being increasingly scorned by the rest of the world.

USA Debt then and now

Today, unlike at the start of the 1930s Great Depression, the Federal Government in Washington must carry a staggering debt level to finance its ever-more impotent attempts to hold onto its global control. At the end of September, 2016 the total combined Federal, state and municipal US debt will likely pass the staggering amount of $ 22.4 trillion, with $19.3 trillion of it from the Federal government. If private corporate and household debt is added, today Americans owe a staggering total of $60 trillion. Forty years ago in 1974 total debt– the combination of government, business, mortgage, and consumer debt–was $2.2 trillion. About 50% of that Federal debt today is held by foreign countries, most by China and Japan, Russia and EU central banks.

This Federal Reserve graph of total USA debt, public and private shows clearly how and when the United States began its now precipitous decline as a Great Power

The only comparable time when US Federal debt as a share of GDP was anywhere near that of today was in 1946 at the end of the Second World War when Debt-to-GDP topped 119%. In 2014 total public state, federal and local US debt topped 120% of GDP.

The difference between 1946 and 2016 lies not in comparing the raw numbers. Then the US was the victor dictating terms to the vanquished. In 1946 Washington was at the center of global power. The US dollar was in demand everywhere, “as good as gold.” US industry was the world leader in innovation and technological efficiency. Detroit was the global symbol for making superb, affordable cars, and more of them than any other nation. US steel output was unexcelled. Research at US universities was unparalleled, aided by an influx of European and other war refugee scientists such as Albert Einstein. Most of the so-called “free world” rushed under the US nuclear umbrella known as NATO. They were to pay a hefty price for that umbrella.

Faking the numbers is no recovery…

Today, some 45 years after President Nixon unilaterally abrogated the Bretton Woods Treaty and declared the Federal Reserve would no longer buy US dollars held abroad for gold, the real US economy is a shambles. From time to time I’ve noted the absurd and politically-motivated lies that pass for “official US Government economic statistics.” It’s gotten successively worse since the first lying tricks ordered by President Lyndon Johnson to hide the soaring US debt during the Vietnam War era in the late 1960’s.

According to the widely-respected calculations by economist John Williams at the Shadow Government Statistics site, actual US unemployment in November 2015 was 22.9%, when we include the “long-term discouraged workers”–those who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That’s far from the Obama Labor Department fantasy level of 5% unemployed. One-fifth of the workforce jobless is a level previously reached over the past century only during the 1930’s Great Depression.

John Williams’ adjusted unemployment estimates explain the otherwise curious data released, without elaboration, by the same US Government, on the number of “working-age Americans not working.” Today, officially, more than 100 million Americans over the age of 16 are not working. That ain’t because they are sitting on the beach clipping coupons on their zero-interest-rate bonds. It’s because there are no jobs for them; there is no economic future for them in today’s America. Many young people even begin to look at fighting Washington’s wars as an option that at least gives a steady paycheck. This in fact is turning the United States into a Sparta, a war nation that thrives on blood. Not healthy.

Worst hit are the young just graduating college or high school, where last year of the new additions to the working age population, less than four in 10 found jobs. As one economist, Stephen Moore, noted, “for every three Americans added to the working age population age 16 and older, only one new job (1.07) has been created under Obama. At this pace, America will soon officially have a zero unemployment rate. But that will only be because no one will be looking for work.” Under Labor Department definitions those “not looking” because they have given up, do not exist. Veeeeery clever, Bureau of Labor Statistics!

America’s Homeless Crisis

Germany and Sweden have their refugee crisis, the direct result of a US-instigated series of wars going from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and now to Syria. The United States, however, has a human crisis of a quite different nature–soaring numbers of homeless.

As the number of permanent unemployed rises across America, much as during the Great Depression, today the number of cities where homelessness has reached crisis proportions is exploding.

In the once-thriving California city, Los Angeles, a 50-block area of downtown nick-named Skid Row is described as “the worst man-made disaster in the US.” More recently, Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle, Washington, as well as the entire state of Hawaii have become the latest to take drastic emergency measures to try to deal with spreading homeless populations.

In addition, the nation’s capital, Washington DC, as well as 22 other cities, are experiencing dramatic rises in homeless. In Washington, DC, the number of homeless rose by 28 percent and the number of homeless families went up by 60 percent in the past year. Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and San Francisco, California are as well suffering from the same problem.

Wrong National Priorities

The root of the crisis lies in a nation that is being led by corrupt Washington Presidents, Generals, Congressmen who prostitute themselves to a seemingly endless hog trough of corruption. None excels in this official corruption more than the US Pentagon and its incestuous role with the corrupt military industrial complex.

Russia’s recent military engagement in Syria has raised eyebrows the world over, including in Washington, at the level of precision and sophistication the newly-reorganized Russian military has demonstrated. Weapon after weapon the Russian air forces have deployed seem to outclass its US counterparts. In one area, however, the US has no equal. That is in military contracting corruption.

In 2014 the US Armed Forces paper, Stars and Stripes, reported that, “Nearly three decades after US taxpayers gasped over $640 toilet seats and other Cold War military waste, the Department of Defense remains the last federal department still unable to conduct a financial audit despite laws passed in the 1990s that require the accounting.”

They continued, “In other words, the US military has turned into a black hole, into which billions of taxpayer dollars have disappeared, without any clear evidence on how, when, and to whom the money went. The fact is that the US government now subcontracts almost everything out to private companies (who collectively spend billions lobbying Congress and funding political campaigns), and this is particularly true when it comes to the Pentagon.”

Austrian journalist, Einar Schlereth, in a recent analysis published by Sputnik News, comparing the Russian state military industry system to the private US one, notes that, “Russia’s system of military spending is the diametric opposite of America’s. While the United States has privatized their military industry, in Russia it is in state hands. All profits from arms sales go to the Russian government, not to the makers or the multinationals. The arms manufacturers are [effectively] part of the government.”

“Just like in the US, there is no financial accounting of their operations, but there are financial reports reviewed each year by the defense minister and, moreover, by the president and the prime minister –i.e. by people who are responsible to the electorate, and not only to the aristocracy of large shareholders.”

Recent estimates by the American Society of Civil Engineers put America’s national infrastructure deficit in excess of $3.6 trillions required for building or replacing antiquated water systems, electricity power lines, highways, rail lines, sewer systems. That includes more than 10% of all bridges defective, one third of national highways, airports and runways. In this situation, it would be interesting to see the voter reaction were Donald Trump or any US Presidential candidate to have the courage or sanity to suggest a shift in national economic priorities away from making wars with Russia, China, Syria and turning those over-budget Pentagon “swords” into plowshares. We should have done it in 1990 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist as an adversary.

Such are the travails of a bankrupt hegemon today.

 

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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The woods are full of soldiers who served in the US military and later bitterly realized they had been used. Kyle was certainly not one of them. He never got it. He never realized whose interests he was really serving.

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With Hollywood and TV still serving the same chauvinist trash, another look at this celebrated piece of imperial propaganda is in order

by Mike Kuhlenbeck
[Original iteration: March 6, 2015]

The filmmakers’ defense of “American Sniper” as “apolitical” is belied by the lack of any depth or humanity in its Muslim characters.

The film version of American Sniper has grossed well over $300 million at the US box office, making it the most profitable piece of pro-war propaganda in the history of American cinema.

Since the release of American Sniper, it has either been praised for its patriotic (nationalist) overtones or has been ridiculed for distorting the reality of so-called “War on Terror.” The film is based on the bestselling autobiography of Chris Kyle, a man who had a talent for telling tall tales and bragging about his 160 confirmed kills (though he claimed the death toll was closer to 255). The widespread public support for Kyle’s actions and attitudes reveal how racial prejudices are manipulated in times of war.

Kyle’s autobiography, co-written by Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, was published in 2013. Although the book has been placed under scrutiny by various journalists for its factual accuracy (or lack thereof), it provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a soldier that is quite similar to many others who served in the American military in the Middle East.  He gleefully boasted about his kills, deluding himself to the point where he forgot he was killing human beings. “Just because war is hell,” he writes, “doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.”

The dehumanization of entire populations is used in boosting public support to carry out imperialist objectives. With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, pundits and news networks made stereotypes out of Muslims by portraying them as violent fanatics and suicide-bombers. In the toxic atmosphere created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Americans were conditioned on a daily basis to fear darker-skinned people, especially if they had Arabic names.

Pro-war conservatives in the corridors of power, who often morally justify wars that are not morally justifiable, like to point to such Kyle gems as his self-righteousness take on Islam, “Isn’t religion supposed to teach tolerance?” Passages like this are countered by statements like, “I don’t shoot people with Korans—I’d like to, but I don’t.”

American Sniper filmmakers, particularly lead actor Bradley Cooper and director Clinton Eastwood, have defended the film as “apolitical.” The lack of Muslim characters with depth or humanity in the film demonstrates the contrary. As described by Abed Ayoub and Khaled A Beydoun, writing for Al-Jazeera, “Redeploying age-old Orientalist images, the film’s Iraqis are thinly constructed foes of the democratic and divine – who must be methodically gunned down for both God and country. A belief, in the US today, that is far more fact than fiction.”

Such perceptions were evident with Kyle, in both interviews and in his own writings. “I hate the damn savages,” he writes. “I couldn’t give a flying f**k about the Iraqis.” Although he has been criticized posthumously for his choice of words and general attitude against Iraqis (among other things), it is far from being scarce among US soldiers.

Take the following passage from another American soldier: “The scene reminded me of the shooting of jack-rabbits in Utah, only the rabbits sometimes got away, but the insurgents did not.” This would appear to be written by a current American soldier, maybe one who enjoys hunting, watching action films and going to rodeo shows like Kyle did. But this letter excerpt was written by Fred D. Sweet over 116 years ago.

The letter was published by the Anti-Imperialist League in their 1899 pamphlet entitled Soldiers Letters: Being Materials for a History of a War of Criminal Aggression. This pamphlet contained numerous excerpts from letters written by US soldiers who were stationed in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, which started in 1898.

During US President William McKinley and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection bid in 1900, the campaign against Spain was justified with the following phrase: “The American Flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake.”

US leaders are still declaring wars that are allegedly “for humanity’s sake” but are really for the sake of war profiteers and their allies.

History books, for the most part, have often failed to explore the racist attitudes of McKinley and Roosevelt. Their views were partially based on the theories of early eugenics and Social Darwinism that suited elitists like themselves. They believed that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to all others and its strongest disciples had every right to inherit the world through conquest. This was evident in their ambitions to fly the America Eagle over foreign territories, directing it to dig its talons into these lands and fly away with stolen treasures.

Art is an effective conduit for portraying war as a noble cause to unite the masses in a common struggle. British author Rudyard Kipling is perhaps best-known as “the poet of the British Empire.” He penned “The White Man’s Burden,” a racist poem published in McClure’s magazine in 1899. The poem caused a stir for glorifying America’s involvement in the Philippines. References of “sullen peoples” as “half devil and half-child” fall in line with the stereotypes depicting people in undeveloped parts of the world as “savages.” Kipling writes that it is the duty, nay the “burden,” of white men from “civilized nations” to bring the Filipinos up from their “lowly” status.

Racial hatred combined with military force has been common with every war since the close of the 19th Century. The terms “savages” and “heathens” are used in many of the letters published by the Anti-Imperialist League, reflecting the hostility of troops sent over to the Philippines between 1898 and 1905. The Filipinos were often called “Pacific Negroes” or simply “n***ers.” Journalist H.L. Wells writes, “There is no question that our men do ‘shoot n***ers’ somewhat in the sporting spirit.”

“Most national myths, at their core, are racist,” writes Chris Hedges in his 2002 book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Even though the racist attitudes of the early 20th Century are not as prevalent as they once were in American society, they still exist and US leaders know how to play on fear and ignorance in order to get what they want.

Soldiers are trained to accept these perceptions as true, making their duties easier when confronted with violent situations. This mentality is still alive in the 21st Century. Today such terms would be applied to Muslims and Arabs, including modern terms like “raghead” and “sand n***er.” Once American Sniper hit theaters, some people once again fell under a dark spell, one that never truly lost its power. People flocked to social media outlets and posted statements like “Nice to see a movie where the Arabs are portrayed for who they really are—vermin scum intent on destroying us.” In more extreme cases, some said the film “makes me wanna go shoot some f**kin Arabs.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he epidemic of “yellow journalism” under the control of moguls like William Randolph Hearst was the equivalent of today’s 24-hour cable news networks in whipping up fear and hatred against the people of “enemy nations.” For Hearst, a war against Spain meant selling more newspapers and increasing his personal fortunes. Also, it would give him positive publicity and the image of patriotism that would help fuel his failed political career.

As reported by PBS.org: “Today, historians point to the Spanish-American War as the first press-driven war. Although it may be an exaggeration to claim that Hearst and the other yellow journalists started the war, it is fair to say that the press fueled the public’s passion for war.”

In the early 2000s, Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Fox News Channel, followed the Hearst tradition by supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The network’s slew of cookie-cutter commentators espoused views that democracy would be delivered to these countries along with Christian bibles, ammunition and American flags. Conservative author and frequent Fox News contributor Ann Coulter is the same woman who quipped, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Though not as eloquent as the slogans produced by the administrations of McKinley and Roosevelt, such calls to action are what such declarations of war amount to.

In the Philippines, concentration camps were built to detain Filipino combatants and civilians and the use of torture were implemented by US troops. Even the practice of waterboarding was used by US troops, using canteens and metal cups filled with salt water to simulate drowning. As observed by historian James Bradley in his study The Imperial Cruise, “When the Japanese later waterboarded U.S. personnel in World War II, America tried them for war crimes.” These institutions are no different from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US government-sanctioned torture chamber in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Such atrocities are the natural byproducts of imperialist expansion.

The most intriguing justification for the film is its sympathetic portrayal of soldiers suffering the trauma of war, a problem that has been ignored for too long. The horrific conditions of war have massive physical and psychological effects on soldiers. Instead of blaming their leaders for betraying their trust and sending them to other countries based on false pretenses, they are often desperate enough to blame civilians of occupied nations for why they are there. This seems evident in Kyle’s writings and those belonging to other soldiers. These sentiments were common among soldiers during the Philippine portion of the Spanish-American War.

“The boys are getting sick of fighting these heathens,” writes Tom Crandall of the Nebraska Regiment (1899), “and all say we volunteered to fight Spain, not heathens. Their patriotism is wearing off. We all want to come home very bad. If I ever get out of this army I will never get into another. They will be fighting four hundred years, and then never whip these people, for there are not enough of us to follow them up…The people of the United States ought to raise a howl and have us sent home.”

There are, however, those who are forced into such circumstances and refuse to fall for the propaganda of their governments. Whatever illusions they had before entering these conflicts disappeared when confronting the grim realities of war.

The mainstream media has been ignoring another American sniper named Garett Reppenhagen, who has since left the military and has dedicated himself to the antiwar movement. When he saw the film, he criticized it for what it was: racist agitprop glorifying a man who has been called a borderline psychopath and habitual liar.

In The Acronym Journal, Reppenhagen said:

“You feel like there is this debt that you build for every life that you take. You feel like you owe the world something because you left it without this other person that could have done something amazing. I think about all of these soldiers coming out of the U.S. military and helping them get jobs and education and hearing about what they aspire to do and be in the world. And I wonder about all of the Iraqis, Syrians, Albanians and others that we killed in that country and what they aspired to be.”

There are countless other soldiers like him, who had the intention of protecting their country and liberating an oppressed people but did not see the reality through the dense black fog of war.

In another letter from the Spanish-American War pamphlet, signed by General Reeve: “I deprecate this war, this slaughter of our own boys and of the Filipinos, because it seems to me that we are doing something that is contrary to our principles in the past. Certainly we are doing something that we should have shrunk from not so very long ago.”

Though the locations and populations have changed, the motives behind war hysteria have not.

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