[Peace-discuss] Politics in this country has always felt the way it does now…
C G Estabrook
cgestabrook at gmail.com
Fri Dec 29 11:36:17 UTC 2017
Yes, and the Nixon-Kissinger patronage of Israel had little to do with love of Jews (and the influence of the Israel Lobby) and much to do with China.
Israel was a “stationary aircraft carrier” for US control of the Mideast - and particularly for control of its oil flows, the object of which was what the Pentagon called ‘offshore control’ of the Chinese economy. Retarding Eurasian economic development is the cynosure of US foreign policy since the 19th century.
The US a half-century ago imported only a fraction of its domestic energy needs from the Mideast (most of which came from the Atlantic basin - N & S America & W Africa - and still does), and that from Saudi Arabia. (In 1974, Kissinger arranged that Saudi Arabia should sell its oil only for dollars [“petrodollars”] - and those dollars should be deposited in NY banks.)
Kissinger had attempted to realign geopolitics by an entente with China ( = Nixon’s "secret plan” for ending the Vietnam war - cf. Trump’s plan for ending the N. Korean crisis). In 1972 Nixon went to China, where he met with Chairman Mao Zedong. The US subsequently began to withdraw combat troops from Vietnam, because its conscript army revolted and began ‘fragging’ - killing - its officers, who insisted on gung-ho raids against the Vietnamese: cf. My Lai, where US soldiers killed 350-500 unarmed men, women, and children in March of 1968 - not a unique occurrence.
Neoconservatism arose in the mid-1970s amongst partisans of Israel who feared that Americans’ revulsion at their SE Asian war would extend to SW Asia. The historic task of the Bush family was to scotch that. (After the US ‘Gulf War’ against Iraq in 1991, President Bush I declared, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” - i.e., overcome Americans’ reluctance to go to war for the purposes of the 1%; Bush II subsequently presided over the greatest international crime - so far - of the 21st century, the US invasion of oil-producer Iraq, which killed a million people.).
—CGE
> On Dec 28, 2017, at 11:09 PM, David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> It might be relevant to this discussion to refer to the conflict within the Nixon administration regarding Israel's occupation of the Sinai subsequent to 1967, which led to the 1973 war, oil embargo, etc. The Rogers (State Dept.) peace plan was overridden by Kissinger's (national security advisor) promotion of "stalemate," thus leading to Egypt's attack, of which Sadat had given a clear (if unheeded) warning. I don't know if there is a credible account of how Nixon actually "felt" in relation to these internal conflicts, but obviously Kissinger represented the rising neoconservative perspective in relation to Israel's indispensability to U.S. interests in the region. Nixon's notorious antipathy towards Jews wasn't to much effect in this instance, as U.S. aid to Israel was ramped up to an unprecedented level--and I doubt that Roth opposed that.
>
> DG
> On Thursday, December 28, 2017 09:32:31 PM CST, C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
>
> That’s not quite what I said. The Nixon administration was the culmination of the social democratic tradition that began in the New Deal, ran thru the Johnson administration (Medicare and Medicaid) and continued in Nixon’s. (You mention some examples; there are others.)
>
> Neoliberalism (and neoconservatism) first made inroads in the subsequent Carter administration. (Kennedy’s airline deregulation; Brzezinski’s arming of jihadists in Afghanistan.)
>
> One might note that both Nixon and Carter were personally opposed to the - opposite - directions their administrations took.
>
> Forgive me for struggling for irony in regard to the unhistorical account. It’s important to get the history right.
>
> But we surely make mistakes when we see political crimes as merely a matter of personal peccadilloes (“Trump is just like Nixon, and they’re both bad!”)
>
> If they can get you asking the wrong questions [“How do we get rid of Trump?!"], they don't have to worry about answers.
>
> —CGE
>
>
> > On Dec 28, 2017, at 9:07 PM, David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > Huh ?
> >
> > What you just said makes no sense in relation to what I said specifically referring to your comment that " Nixon was the last liberal President ".
> >
> > David J.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: C G Estabrook [mailto:cgestabrook at gmail.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2017 8:45 PM
> > To: David Johnson
> > Cc: Brussel, Morton K; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…
> >
> > I’m surprised to see you approve of such an unhistorical account, David.
> >
> > Somehow on two occasions, 40 years apart, evil men snuck into the chief magistracy of the land and committed atrocities?
> >
> > We have to drive them out - and then we can go back to business as usual?
> >
> > That as far as I can tell is the present view of the political establishment (“#Resistance”).
> >
> > But I suspect they’re not being entirely candid. —CGE
> >
> >
> >> On Dec 28, 2017, at 1:20 PM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Absolutely Mort !
> >>
> >> What good Nixon did ( EPA, OSHA, etc. ) was because he was forced to by the huge mass revolt in the streets for civil rights, ending the Vietnam war, relatively large number of strikes and questioning capitalism itself.
> >> Like Roosevelt before him, Nixon saw this as a way of somewhat appeasing the masses while maintaining the majority of the system intact.
> >>
> >> David J.
> >>
> >> From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net]
> >> On Behalf Of Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss
> >> Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2017 11:46 AM
> >> To: Estabrook, Carl G
> >> Cc: Peace Discuss
> >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] [New post] Politics in this country has
> >> never felt the way the it does now…
> >>
> >> I don’t get it Carl. Just what do you disagree with about Roth’s description of his own disgust with American policy in the times he talks about? Be specific. All that you reply/comment upon below is beside the point. What I find particularly dismaying is your ambiguous defense of Trump, as if he were a great anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, peace maker. You have truly been fooled—that is a good word— by Trump's hope for a modus vivendi with Russia; now we can see that it was illusory—a US led NATO is on Russia’s borders and sanctions persist. Are you ignoring his military buildup, his threats to use and develop even more nuclear weapons, his crusade against N. Korea, his attack on the environment (EPA ) and anthropogenic climate change, his association with the fossil fuels complex and walking away from the Paris agreement. His continuation of threats against Iran linked to Israeli policies and against Palestinians, his attack on the public school system with his appointment Vos, His overt militarism, his appointment of federal judges of the most reactionary stripe he can find, his catering to violence and racism. I am unable to list all his regressive and dangerous policies, yes, many a continuation of what went before his term in office, like the drone murders and the continuing depredations in Afghanistan and Syria.
> >>
> >> Perhaps you should consult the reflections of your muse Noam Chomsky on all this.
> >>
> >> No, I have not forgotten about how Democrats have also played (many of) these vile games.
> >>
> >> All this reminds me that you have also forgotten about the crassness of Nixon, his subversion of law, his continuation of the Vietnam war, his anticommunist fervor. But yes, he as not all encompassing evil, as you point out.The times were such that he advanced some policies that now would be regarded as “liberal”. And how about his Secretary of State Kissinger, the mastermind of his foreign policy in Chile against Allende, but yes also China.
> >>
> >> As for Trump, he is a personal but consequential nonentity, ignorant, stupid, and amoral beyond measure. The two,Nixon and Trump, are not totally comparable, but Roth’s disgust certainly rhymes with what many of us feel today with the Trump/Republican administration.
> >> —mkb
> >>
> >>
> >> On Dec 27, 2017, at 4:03 PM, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> I disagree: all analogies limp, and Nixon/Trump is particularly spavined. Roth was writing at the high point of the social democratic arc that began with the New Deal.
> >>
> >> Nixon’s was the most liberal US administration since WWII, despite
> >> Nixon’s own views. (Even a guaranteed annual income was proposed by
> >> the administration but defeated by Democrats: see e.g., Daniel Patrick
> >> Moynihan, "The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon
> >> Administration and the Family Assistance Plan" [1973].)
> >>
> >> Neoliberalism, the conscious, calculated construction of American
> >> business, was just getting underway. (See e.g., “The Crisis of
> >> Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies,” a 1975 report written
> >> by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki for the
> >> Trilateral Commission; it says that after ‘the sixties” the problems
> >> of governance in the US "stem from an excess of democracy" and thus
> >> advocates "to restore the prestige and authority of central government
> >> institutions” and the profitability of business.)
> >>
> >> Neoconservatism was being constructed, primarily by partisans of
> >> Israel who feared that the anti-war sentiment engendered by war in SE
> >> Asia would carry over into the Mideast. (By 1969 about 70% of the US
> >> public had come to regard the Vietnam war as “fundamentally wrong and
> >> immoral,” not “a mistake.”)
> >>
> >> Inequality in the US, on the decline since 1929, had reached its low point ca. 1970; the curve turned up, accelerated, and has now reached levels equivalent to those of 1929. For many Americans,”make America great again” means restoring the economic situation and life chances their parents knew in "les trente glorieuses" (1945-75), as Piketty calls those years.
> >>
> >> Trump was the first major party candidate in 40 years to attack the
> >> neoconservative (more war) and neoliberal (more inequality) policies
> >> that dominated all administrations from Carter’s through Obama’s;
> >> that’s in part why he was elected - as an inchoate protest against war
> >> and immiseration - against a pro-war and pro-Wall St. Democratic
> >> candidate. (See e.g.,
> >> <http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/clinton-because-communities/>.) —CGE
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Dec 27, 2017, at 11:12 AM, Brussel, Morton K via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> This needs only a very little updating.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Begin forwarded message:
> >>>
> >>> From: Corey Robin <donotreply at wordpress.com>
> >>> Subject: [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way
> >>> the it does now…
> >>> Date: December 25, 2017 at 6:19:58 PM CST
> >>> To: mkb3 at mac.com
> >>>
> >>> New post on Corey Robin
> >>>
> >>> <image001.jpg>
> >>>
> >>> Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now… by
> >>> Corey Robin "The Vietnam War years were the most 'politicized' of my
> >>> life. I spent my days during this<image002.jpg>
> > as a coercive force, its continuous presence in one's thoughts as far more than just an institutionalized system of regulations and controls. In sharp contrast to Chileans or Czechs, we hadn't personally to fear for our safety and could be as outspoken as we liked, but this did not diminish the sense of living in a country with a government out of control and wholly in business for itself. Reading the morning New York Times and the afternoon New York Post, watching the seven and then the eleven o'clock TV news—all of which I did ritualistically—became for me like living on a steady diet of Dostoevsky. Rather than fearing for the well-being of my own kin and country, I now felt toward America's war mission as I had toward the Axis goals in World War II. One even began to use the word 'America' as though it was the name not of the place where one had been raised to which one had a patriotic attachment, but of a foreign invader that had conquered the country and with whom one refused, to the best of one's strength and ability, to collaborate. Suddenly America had turned into 'them'—and with this sense of dispossession came the virulence of feeling and rhetoric that often characterized the anti-war movement.
> >
> > ...Of course there have been others as venal and lawless [as Richard Nixon] in American politics, but even a Joe McCarthy was more identifiable as human clay than this guy is. The wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the 'human touch' in their leaders. It's strange that someone so unlike the types most admired in the average voter...could have passed himself off to this Saturday Evening Post America as, of all things, an American."
> >
> > —Philip Roth, 1974
> >
> > Corey Robin | December 25, 2017 at 7:19 pm | Tags: Philip Roth, Richard Nixon | Categories: Literature, The Right | URL: https://wp.me/p5IQfX-2nV
> >
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