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more than literature.... dos passos' U.S.A. (1937)

One Sunday night during the spring of her last term in highschool Janey was in her room getting undressed. Francie and Ellen were still playing in the backyard. Their voices came in through the open window with a spicy waft of lilacs from the lilacbushes in the next yard. She had just let down her hair and was looking in the mirror imagining how she’d look if she was a peach and had auburn hair, when there was a knock at the door and Joe’s voice outside. There was something funny about his voice. 

“Come in,” she called. “I’m just fixin’ my hair.” 

She first saw his face in the mirror. It was very white and the skin was drawn back tight over the cheekbones and round the mouth. 

“Why, what’s the matter, Joe?” She jumped up and faced him. 

“It’s like this, Janey,” said Joe, drawling his words out painfully. “Alec was killed. He smashed up on his motor-bike. I just come from the hospital. He’s dead, all right.” 

Janey seemed to be writing the words on a white pad in her mind. She couldn’t say anything. 

“He smashed up comin’ home from Chevy Chase . . .  He’d gone out to the ballgame to see me pitch. You oughter seen him all smashed to hell.” 

Janey kept trying to say something. 

“He was your best . . .”

“He was the best guy I’ll ever know,” Joe went on gently. “Well, that’s that, Janey . . . But I wanted to tell you I don’t want to hang round this lousy dump now that Alec’s gone. I’m goin’ to enlist in the navy. You tell the folks, see ... I don’t wanna talk to ’em. That’s it. I’ll join the navy and see the world.” 

“But, Joe . . .”

“I’ll write you, Janey; honest, I will. . . I’ll write you a hell of a lot. You an’ me. . . Well, goodby, Janey.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her awkwardly on the nose and cheek. All she could do was whisper. “Do be careful, Joe”, and stand there in front of the bureau in the gust of lilacs and the yelling of the kids that came through the open window. She heard Joe’s steps light quick down the stairs and heard the front door shut. 

She turned out the light, took off her clothes in the dark, and got into bed. She lay there without crying. 

 

Graduation came and commencement and she and Alice went out to parties and even once with a big crowd on one of the moonlight trips down the river to Indian Head on the steamboat Charles McAhster. The crowd was rougher than Janey and Alice liked. Some of the boys were drinking a good deal and there were couples kissing and hugging in every shadowy....

 

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"DESPITE A CERTAIN INDIFFERENCE OF THE PUBLIC TO-DAY, DOS PASSOS WILL PROBABLY REMAIN ONE OF THE PREDOMINENT FIGURES IN THE LITERARY HISTORY OF THIS CENTURY. HIS NOVELS CONSTITUTE ONE OF THE WIDEST TESTIMONIES TO THE LIFE OF HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIME."

THIS IS THE ASSESSMENT PUBLISHED IN 1963 OF DOS PASSOS, IN ONE OF MY REFERENCE BOOKS. A FEW YEARS AGO (2019), THE NEW YORKER, PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE ABOUT DOS PASSOS VISIONS OF SOCIETY WHICH ARE MAKING HIS WORK MORE RELEVANT TODAY THAN EVER. TO GUS, DOS PASSOS' WORKS REFLECT THE DEMONS, THE PSYCHOS, THE STRUGGLING PERSONS AND THE LOSERS WE ARE IN A FRIGHTENING MIRROR, TODAY.

 

FROM THE NEW YORKER:

 

Writing at a moment of economic dissolution and technological transformation, John Dos Passos hoped to show how Americans of all kinds were responding to the bustling mess of modernity.

 

By Matt Hanson/The New Yorker

 

“U.S.A. is the slice of a continent,” John Dos Passos wrote, in his novel “The 42nd Parallel,” from 1930. “U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” 

The “U.S.A.” trilogy—written by Dos Passos in the late nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, and consisting of “The 42nd Parallel,” “1919,” and “The Big Money”—was an attempt to describe American life in tumult, from top to bottom. Writing at a moment of economic dissolution and technological transformation, Dos Passos hoped to show how Americans of all kinds were responding to the bustling mess of modernity—what his friend Edmund Wilson called “the American jitters.” In its time, the trilogy sold well, and it was highly praised by Jean-Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, and others. But since then its fortunes have been jittery, too. For many decades, the “U.S.A.” novels, often published as a single volume, were a yellowing tome, more respected than read. Dos Passos came to be seen as an also-ran — a secondary character in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers of the Lost Generation. Then, in 1998, a board of luminaries convened by the Modern Library placed the trilogy on its list of the best novels of the twentieth century. In 2013, David Bowie listed “The 42nd Parallel” as one of his favorite books; that same year, George Packer—who has written about Dos Passos for The New Yorker—used the trilogy as a structural inspiration for “The Unwinding,” his nonctional account of twenty-first-century America on the fritz. 

 

John Dos Passos wrote the “U.S.A.” trilogy in the late twenties and thirties.

There’s a reason that Dos Passos’s Depression-era modernism seemed suddenly relevant. The present was coming to look a lot like the past. The novels combined the stylistic innovations of the European modernists, which Dos Passos had used to evoke a shifting media landscape, with fiercely committed leftist politics that were resurgent in the new millennium. He had written a linguistically adventurous national portrait for a precarious age — his, and ours. 

The “U.S.A.” novels follow many characters from different levels of society as they hustle, knowingly or not. A gruff dockworker, a social-climbing actress, an idealistic labor organizer, a cynical advertising man, a patriotic fighter pilot—wisely or foolishly, these characters traverse the grimy and gilded paths of the American class system, sometimes meeting one another, sometimes fading away. Dos Passos’s Balzacian ambition was to paint in detail on a wide social canvas. He succeeded only to a point. His hardboiled tone is one limitation: many readers will only be so interested in the fates of grungy, inarticulate men named Mac. And there are few people of color in the novels — a serious flaw in their grand design. 

It’s in the interludes between the chapters, though, that Dos Passos’s writing feels strangely fresh. There, he breaks into the narrative to conduct prose experiments. The “Newsreel” sections are montages of quotations selected from various media sources. In the “Camera Eye” sections — inspired by the camerawork of the newly popular cinema — the author’s memories appear in a Joycean flow of words and images. (Dos Passos imagined the camera lens as a tool for self-examination, rather than self-display.) Finally, detailed but highly subjective portraits of historical figures appear at intervals, from Presidents and financiers to radical journalists and labor agitators. Collectively, these interstitial experiments show the cumulative effects of history and media on the inner life of an ordinary person. 

In the “Newsreel” sections, text from actual newsreels flows together with snippets from newspaper articles, lines from popular songs, and excerpts from radio broadcasts. These bursts of information seem random but were carefully selected for maximum effect. Hurtling themselves at the reader, they are too brief to be fully explicable, but too portentous to be ignored: 

 

It is difficult to realize the colossal scale upon which Europe will have to borrow in order to make good the destruction of war

BAGS 28 HUNS SINGLEHANDEDLY

Peace Talk Beginning To Have Its Effect On Southern Iron Market 

LOCAL BOY CAPTURES OFFICER

ONE THIRD ALLOTMENTS FRAUDULENT

There are smiles that make us happy
There are smiles that make us blue . . . . 

Today, of course, the “Newsreel” sections evoke the social-media feed — another venue for the associative, sometimes surreal juxtaposition of image, sound, and text. Usually, online randomness doesn’t cohere: video clips and cat memes fit randomly alongside disturbing headlines or worrisome data points. But sometimes sudden, unexpected juxtapositions can speak volumes about the state of the country. The other night, scrolling through Facebook, I saw a clip from James Baldwin’s famous debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1965. Baldwin talks about his place in American history: “I am stating very seriously . . . that I picked the cotton . . . and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing,” he said. The next item in the feed was a Fox News segment urging viewers to call their local schools to inquire about whether students were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. 

In the “Camera Eye” sections, we move from the media to memory. Dos Passos grew up largely in European hotel rooms, as the lonely bastard son of a wealthy Portuguese-American lawyer. (At the time, this status carried real social stigma.) He then attended élite institutions—Choate, Harvard—before volunteering as an ambulance driver in the First World War. The “Camera Eye” interludes make the fleeting bits of information we encounter in the media (“BAGS 28 HUNS SINGLEHANDEDLY”) visceral and real: 

remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of esh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead 

three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt 

No … there must be some way … they taught us Land of the Free conscience … Give me liberty or give me … Well they give us death 

History is always personal in Dos Passos; these poor medics are discovering firsthand the horror that the news omits. Unlike Hemingway, who responded to chaos by carving out clean, simple sentences, Dos Passos portrays his inner life as raw, messy, and ambivalently associative. His style, in its way, suggests how the twenty-first century’s preferred mode of expression and argument — the rant — fits into the larger media ecosystem. Bloggy essays, emotive social-media posts, and even text messages, with their nervous run-on sentences and eccentric punctuation, are a natural response to information overload: a way of channelling and acknowledging the hectic, perpetually uncertain state of the world and the barrage of intense, often contradictory information that is constantly being produced to describe it. Dos Passos arrived at his own, pre- tech version of this style. 

 

His historical portraits, too, reflect a world in which the ground is shifting. Dos Passos presents his eccentric biographical sketches of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt alongside portraits of radicals: the Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, the radical essayist Randolph Bourne, the labor organizer Joe Hill. He gives equal space to those in power and those who spent their lives seeking to break it up. The most moving of all the historical portraits is the eulogy to the Unknown Soldier, which closes “1919.” A sombre depiction of the funeral cortege honoring the fallen, in Arlington National Cemetery, concludes with the observation that “Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies” — an expression of controlled, understated rage. On the one hand, Dos Passos seeks to revise history, just as we now look to reassess the legacies of our “great men.” But his all-encompassing collection of portraits also suggests the limits of such revision: the American narrative is the product of opposing forces that are unlikely to subside. 

The line for which Dos Passos is best known comes from his anguished account, in “The Big Money,” of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial: “All right we are two nations.”The statement’s terse, sleepless tone resonates now as it did then. Dos Passos was writing amid worldwide shock after the execution, in Boston, of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-immigrant anarchists convicted of murder. The conviction, based on flimsy evidence, had been influenced by seething anti-immigrant and anti-Italian sentiment. Dos Passos interviewed Sacco and Vanzetti in their jail cells and was arrested during a demonstration on their behalf, on the Boston Common. 

Appalled as he was by the trial, Dos Passos wasn’t surprised. Over the course of his life, he’d come to see America as a permanently divided country. We’re often told, in hand-wringing tones, about the growing differences between red and blue states, and about our increasingly divisive political and social rhetoric. But, in Dos Passos’s view, division has been the rule in American life, not the exception; he considered it to be authentically American. The “U.S.A.” novels plumbed the depths of our rifts, and explored how they might be widened by a media-saturated age, and by the fragmentation of information and the latent social hysteria that come with it. 

Dos Passos was often an early reader of manuscripts by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other writers; they’ve since gone on to be more famous than he is. Perhaps his peers trusted him because he perceived, with special clarity, the conflicting sociopolitical forces that were shaping modern life and giving it its texture— forces that are still at work in our digitized Gilded Age. 

 

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/what-john-dos-passoss-1919-got-right-about-2019

 

 

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Lot 13 of : 1932-33 rare pre-WPA radical satire magazine, 7 issues

“Americana", 7 issues of rare 1930s left-wing "Magazine of Pictorial Satire” - George Grosz, E.E.Cummings, James Thurber, Nathanael West, et al

 

Date: 1932-33

 

Description:

Alexander King, editor.  9 x 12 ins., approx.30 pp.each. Profusely illustrated with black-and-white cartoons. Seven issues of a remarkable, short-lived magazine of utterly irreverent left-wing caricature: Vol. 1, Nos.1-6 (Nov., Dec. 1932; Jan.-Apr. 1933), plus one incomplete issue (lacking 2 text pages) of an earlier “Vol. 1, No. 1” from Feb. 1932. In addition to the missing pages and detached covers of the 1932 issue, there is also damage to the rear cover of Vol. 1, No. 6.

There were only 17 issues of this irreverent journal, beginning in Feb. 1932, with three more issues irregularly appearing by July, then resuming with a new series issued monthly between Nov. 1932 and Nov. 1933. The contributors’ list of both artists and writers is remarkable:  Majeska, Orozco, George Grosz, Miguel Covarrubias, Art Young, Percy Crosby, John Sloan, Gilbert Seldes, E.E. Cummings, M.R.Werner, Lynd Ward, Al Hirschfeld, William Steig, James Thurber and Nathanael West.

Most of the magazines were taken up with caricatures, but there were also some articles and photographs. No sacred cow was spared – high society grand dames, politicians of all stripes, Blacks and Jews, Gandhi and Einstein, were all fair game for what Gilbert Seldes cheerfully called “unpleasantly sadistic…savagery”. Writing in the issue that followed Franklin Roosevelt’s election, Seldes joked, “I will suggest to the editors of Americana that they reform. No more sadism. Only pretty pictures of sweet communists welcoming Trotsky back from exile; sweet capitalists washing the feet of the ten million unemployed, and sweet editors of liberal magazines smiling broadly at love triumphant.”

 

https://www.pbagalleries.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/376/lot/116458/ldquo-Americana-7-issues-of-rare-1930s-left-wing-Magazine-of-Pictorial-Satire-rdquo-George-Grosz-E-E-Cummings-James-Thurber-Nathanael-West-et-al

 

 

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only suckers still play by the rules......

Decline and fall: how American society unravelled

Thirty years ago, the old deal that held US society together started to unwind, with social cohesion sacrificed to greed. Was it an inevitable process – or was it engineered by self-interested elites?

 

BY George Packer

 

 

In or around 1978, America's character changed. For almost half a century, the United States had been a relatively egalitarian, secure, middle-class democracy, with structures in place that supported the aspirations of ordinary people. You might call it the period of the Roosevelt Republic. Wars, strikes, racial tensions and youth rebellion all roiled national life, but a basic deal among Americans still held, in belief if not always in fact: work hard, follow the rules, educate your children, and you will be rewarded, not just with a decent life and the prospect of a better one for your kids, but with recognition from society, a place at the table.

This unwritten contract came with a series of riders and clauses that left large numbers of Americans – black people and other minorities, women, gay people – out, or only halfway in. But the country had the tools to correct its own flaws, and it used them: healthy democratic institutions such as Congress, courts, churches, schools, news organisations, business-labour partnerships. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a nonviolent mass uprising led by black southerners, but it drew essential support from all of these institutions, which recognised the moral and legal justice of its claims, or, at the very least, the need for social peace. The Roosevelt Republic had plenty of injustice, but it also had the power of self-correction.

Americans were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic. But the institutions of American democracy, stronger than the excesses of individuals, were usually able to contain and channel them to more useful ends. Human nature does not change, but social structures can, and they did.

At the time, the late 1970s felt like shapeless, dreary, forgettable years. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, preaching austerity and public-spiritedness, and hardly anyone was listening. The hideous term "stagflation", which combined the normally opposed economic phenomena of stagnation and inflation, perfectly captured the doldrums of that moment. It is only with the hindsight of a full generation that we can see how many things were beginning to shift across the American landscape, sending the country spinning into a new era.

In Youngstown, Ohio, the steel mills that had been the city's foundation for a century closed, one after another, with breathtaking speed, taking 50,000 jobs from a small industrial river valley, leaving nothing to replace them. In Cupertino, California, the Apple Computer Company released the first popular personal computer, the Apple II. Across California, voters passed Proposition 13, launching a tax revolt that began the erosion of public funding for what had been the country's best school system. In Washington, corporations organised themselves into a powerful lobby that spent millions of dollars to defeat the kind of labour and consumer bills they had once accepted as part of the social contract. Newt Gingrich came to Congress as a conservative Republican with the singular ambition to tear it down and build his own and his party's power on the rubble. On Wall Street, Salomon Brothers pioneered a new financial product called mortgage-backed securities, and then became the first investment bank to go public.

The large currents of the past generation – deindustrialisation, the flattening of average wages, the financialisation of the economy, income inequality, the growth of information technology, the flood of money into Washington, the rise of the political right – all had their origins in the late 70s. The US became more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, more individualistic and less communitarian, more free and less equal, more tolerant and less fair. Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline. It as a period that I call the Unwinding.

In one view, the Unwinding is just a return to the normal state of American life. By this deterministic analysis, the US has always been a wide-open, free-wheeling country, with a high tolerance for big winners and big losers as the price of equal opportunity in a dynamic society. If the US brand of capitalism has rougher edges than that of other democracies, it is worth the trade-off for growth and mobility. There is nothing unusual about the six surviving heirs to the Walmart fortune possessing between them the same wealth as the bottom 42% of Americans – that's the country's default setting. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are the reincarnation of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, Steven Cohen is another JP Morgan, Jay-Z is Jay Gatsby.

The rules and regulations of the Roosevelt Republic were aberrations brought on by accidents of history – depression, world war, the cold war – that induced Americans to surrender a degree of freedom in exchange for security. There would have been no Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial from investment banking, without the bank failures of 1933; no great middle-class boom if the US economy had not been the only one left standing after the second world war; no bargain between business, labour and government without a shared sense of national interest in the face of foreign enemies; no social solidarity without the door to immigrants remaining closed through the middle of the century.

Once American pre-eminence was challenged by international competitors, and the economy hit rough seas in the 70s, and the sense of existential threat from abroad subsided, the deal was off. Globalisation, technology and immigration hurried the Unwinding along, as inexorable as winds and tides. It is sentimental at best, if not ahistorical, to imagine that the social contract could ever have survived – like wanting to hang on to a world of nuclear families and manual typewriters.

This deterministic view is undeniable but incomplete. What it leaves out of the picture is human choice. A fuller explanation of the Unwinding takes into account these large historical influences, but also the way they were exploited by US elites – the leaders of the institutions that have fallen into disrepair. America's postwar responsibilities demanded co-operation between the two parties in Congress, and when the cold war waned, the co-operation was bound to diminish with it. But there was nothing historically determined about the poisonous atmosphere and demonising language that Gingrich and other conservative ideologues spread through US politics. These tactics served their narrow, short-term interests, and when the Gingrich revolution brought Republicans to power in Congress, the tactics were affirmed. Gingrich is now a has-been, but Washington today is as much his city as anyone's.It was impossible for Youngstown's steel companies to withstand global competition and local disinvestment, but there was nothing inevitable about the aftermath – an unmanaged free-for-all in which unemployed workers were left to fend for themselves, while corporate raiders bought the idle hulks of the mills with debt in the form of junk bonds and stripped out the remaining value. It may have been inevitable that the constraints imposed on US banks by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 would start to slip off in the era of global finance. But it was a political choice on the part of Congress and President Bill Clinton to deregulate Wall Street so thoroughly that nothing stood between the big banks and the destruction of the economy.

Much has been written about the effects of globalisation during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing.

Earlier this year, Al Gore made $100m (£64m) in a single month by selling Current TV to al-Jazeera for $70m and cashing in his shares of Apple stock for $30m. Never mind that al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, whose oil exports and views of women and minorities make a mockery of the ideas that Gore propounds in a book or film every other year. Never mind that his Apple stock came with his position on the company's board, a gift to a former presidential contender. Gore used to be a patrician politician whose career seemed inspired by the ideal of public service. Today – not unlike Tony Blair – he has traded on a life in politics to join the rarefied class of the global super-rich.

It is no wonder that more and more Americans believe the game is rigged. It is no wonder that they buy houses they cannot afford and then walk away from the mortgage when they can no longer pay. Once the social contract is shredded, once the deal is off, only suckers still play by the rules.

George Packer's The Unwinding is published by Faber & Faber at £20

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled

Thu 20 Jun 2013

 

AND JOE BIDEN HAS TAKEN AMERICA TO THE PRECIPICE OF "I CAN'T REMEMBER" (so he makes up stories) NEAR OBLIVION. UNFORTUNATELY, ENGLAND AND AUSTRALIA ARE PROPPING UP A SINKING SHIP.

 

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pervasive censorship.....

 

BY Eric Zuesse

 

On 3 May 2017, I headlined “America’s Top Scientists Confirm: U.S. Goal Now Is to Conquer Russia” and opened:

 

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a study, on 1 March 2017, which opened:

The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing — boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

It continues:

Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.

This study was co-authored by America’s top three scientists specializing in analysis of weaponry and especially of the geostrategic balance between nations: Hans Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, and Theodore Postol. Their report continues:

This vast increase in US nuclear targeting capability, which has largely been concealed from the general public, has serious implications for strategic stability and perceptions of US nuclear strategy and intentions.

Russian planners will almost surely see the advance in fuzing capability as empowering an increasingly feasible US preemptive nuclear strike capability — a capability that would require Russia to undertake countermeasures that would further increase the already dangerously high readiness of Russian nuclear forces. Tense nuclear postures based on worst-case planning assumptions already pose the possibility of a nuclear response to false warning of attack. The new kill capability created by super-fuzing increases the tension and the risk that US or Russian nuclear forces will be used in response to early warning of an attack — even when an attack has not occurred.

The authors explain why an accidental start of World War III or global annihilation would be likelier from Russia than from the U.S.:

Russia does not have a functioning space-based infrared early warning system but relies primarily on ground-based early warning radars to detect a US missile attack. Since these radars cannot see over the horizon, Russia has less than half as much early-warning time as the United States. (The United States has about 30 minutes, Russia 15 minutes or less.) …

——

 

 

The United States now clearly has the objective ultimately to get that “15 minutes” down to 5 minutes or less, by stationing its missiles in Ukraine only around 300 miles away from Moscow, in order to be able to blitz-nuke Moscow so fast as to make impossible for Putin to double-check that a missile was launched against him and then for him to launch against the U.S. and its allies its thousands of nuclear weapons in retaliation. The American idea — called “Nuclear Primacy” — is to behead Russia’s military command before retaliation will even be physically possible.

A physicist who had been a friend of mine for nearly 60 years, who no longer communicates with me because he believes U.S. propaganda against Russia and for Ukraine, peremptorily rejected that study, by saying that it wasn’t written by “real” scientists. When I responded that its lead author was America’s most-respected physicist who specializes in the analysis of (most-especially, but not exclusively, nuclear) weapons-systems, MIT’s Dr. Theodore A. Postol, my friend had no response, but said simply that: “Russia is a police state with no pretense of human rights and freedoms. I do not begrudge Europe from being afraid and joining together to strengthen NATO no matter what past agreements were made after the breakup. Those are not police states and share many of the noble values that parts of America strive for. The US is wrong in bullying NATO to oppose a negotiated settlement of the current war. Ukraine is not going to defeat Russia. There is no other alternative except WWIII.”

He ceased communicating with me.

 

On 13 March 2023, Gallup headlined “Americans’ Favorable Rating of Russia Sinks to New Low of 9%”, and reported that the steepest and longest decline in Americans’ acceptance of Russia were from 50% “favorable” in February 2012 — when President Obama (who had actually been planning to grab Ukraine via a coup ever since at least 2011) was promising America’s voters (and privately Putin himself) that in a second term Obama would seek a “reset” away from America’s existing hostility and toward mutually cooperative relations with Russia — down to only 24% “favorable” in February 2015 (exactly a year after Obama’s coup in Ukraine succeeded). Then, during Trump’s four years, this approval-rating stayed essentially flat while America’s President Trump talked warm and cold on Russia and on Ukraine, and hired extreme neoconservatives such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to carry out his self-contradictory actual policies. And, then, during Biden’s Presidency (Obama’s third term), that approval-rating of Russia by Americans declined in a straight line from 28% “favorable” in February 2020, down to only 9% “favorable” in February 2023. What had happened was a very partisan U.S. political split: Democrats’ fear and hatred against Russia (nominally against Putin, but as always the U.S. regime’s urgings for foreign regime-change end up destroying the country and not MERELY its leader) skyrocketed after Trump left office, but this fear and hatred stayed pretty much unchanged among Republicans, on account of the waffling Trump.

Both of America’s political Parties are determined for the U.S. Government to conquer (via invasions, coups, sanctions, subversions, and/or any other way) both Russia and China, but whereas the Democratic Party’s billionaires aim primarily to conquer Russia, the Republican Party’s billionaires aim primarily to conquer China. What both Parties agree on (since all of its billionaires do) is to conquer the world.

On 9 July 2015, the Medill News Service bannered “Now Would Be a Pretty Good Time To Launch a Nuclear Attack on Russia”, and Ezra Kaplan wrote that, because “Russia’s space-based early warning system, designed to alert the nation to an inbound nuclear missile attack, is offline, leaving Moscow partially blind to potential intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attacks,” he and the ‘experts’ he cited concluded that, “‘If you are going to do a first strike, you want be able to take out as much of the Russian nuclear force as you can so that you reduce the prospects of retaliation,’ Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told VICE News. ‘Nobody has the capability to execute that.’ It’s also highly unlikely that the US would be willing to make the first move against the former Soviet republic.” Why did Kaplan say it’s “unlikely” that “no matter how effective the early warning systems, neither Russia nor the United States is capable of defending itself against an all-out missile attack from the other”? Maybe he knew nothing of America’s imminent achievement of super-fuses? However, the entire “Nuclear Primacy” meta-strategy is directed at building that capability — and Mr. Kaplan’s article ignored it, didn’t so much as even just mention it (including the super-fuse technology part).

Honest discussion of such matters in the U.S.-and-allied press is effectively forbidden.

 

On March 21st, I headlined “Reader-Comments at Russia’s RT News, And Censorship in America”, and discussed the much more pervasive censorship of news-reporting in the U.S.-and-allied countries than in Russia. It’s something that I, as a news-person in America, have personally experienced in many different aspects, such as one that I described here (in which a main website that formerly had published many of my submitted articles became forced by agents of the U.S. Government that work in conjunction with Google and other news-filters in order to prevent news-sites from publishing Government-disapproved writers, to ban me and to remove all of my articles from there).

In the reader-comments to that March 21st “Reader-comments …” article, a “JarnoP” attributed The West’s pervasive censorship to what that person assumed to be a stranglehold control by Jews over the news-media, which is a common bigoted trope. I responded to that comment by pointing out that whereas perhaps 30% of the controlling owners of the news-media that are reaching almost all Americans are Jews, all of the controlling owners of the news-media that have any significantly large audience are billionaires, and that what enables these individuals to control and hire and fire the journalists, is that these individuals are billionaires.

What religion (if any) they adhere to is irrelevant to those individuals’ ability (by means of hiring and firing) to filter out of America’s news-reporting and commentary the types of facts and opinions that no billionaire wants the public to have any easy access to. It’s these individuals’ wealth, and not their religion (if any), that enables them to censor-out what is systematically censored-out from America’s news-reporting and analysis. A  certain “charles smith” replied to my reply to “JarnoP” by saying: “the founder of an online publication The Online, Joshua Topolsky, asked Musk: ‘Do you think it’s in the interest of powerful people to A: support a free press that exposes their lies, or B: tear it down so their lies are easier to tell?’ Musk responded: ‘Who do you think *owns* the press? Hello.’ The entrepreneur was non-specific and opted not to answer dozens of follow up questions. Just more of jarno’s sick mind making fallacious associations. Facts don’t matter, only his sickness is important to him.” That comment from him caused me to search to find out whether the billionaire Elon Musk really is such a bigot as that. I found a CNN article dated 27 May 2018, “Elon Musk has more to say about the media”. Not only did it document what “charles smith” had said, but CNN’s reporter promptly then abandonedthe issue in order to go onto other things that had nothing to do with it — thereby seeming to constitute, from CNN, censorship by this Democratic Party news-site. Neither Democratic Party billionaires nor Republican Party billionaires want the public to pay attention to the possibility that the ultimate source and cause of bigotry in any society is the super-rich themselves. However, my latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, devotes its Chapter Two to documenting that it is actually the case: each form of bigotry — against Blacks, Jews, Russians, or any other amorphous mass of people — was created by the given society’s super-rich.

 

Specifically regarding Musk: on 5 August 2022, I headlined “How Bolivia’s 2019 coup exemplified millennia of global history”, and documented that not only was Musk behind the then-recent coup that had occurred in Bolivia, but that he was proud of it. He apparently despised the native-Indian common people of that land, and to feel that he, and people like himself, have a right to steal control over their Government away from them.

Unlike any form of bigotry, this theory of bigotry does NOT attribute evil to any shapeless mere category of persons — such as Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Russians, Blacks, Whites, Chinese, or any other — but instead to a specific small group (under a thousand individuals in any nation, their most super-wealthy), who are small enough actually to be able to intercommunicate with one-another, and rich enough to hire and fire the key agents, including enough lobbyists and news-people, and other operatives, so as to control which politicians will become elected and which ones don’t. This is an empirically confirmable (and now confirmed) theory of how and why the various forms of bigotry become created, and funded, and promoted. Apparently, those super-rich dominate in forming and imposing America’s foreign policies. The evilness results from them — NOT from “the Jews,” “the Blacks,” “the gays,” “Russians,” or any such bigotry-targeted mass.

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

 

READ MORE:

https://theduran.com/the-evilness-of-americas-foreign-policy/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

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