[Peace-discuss] U.S. continuous wars

[David Green]

Actually Mort, Slotkin did this research on the side from being a nuclear physicist; no, just kidding.


On Fri Jul 28 2017 15:53:36 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time), Brussel, Morton K <brussel at illinois.edu> wrote:

Does one have to read these tomes to come to their conclusions?  But kudos to Slotkin for having studied the issue. If there was time, I’d look them up.—mkb



On Jul 28, 2017, at 12:33 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
Richard Slotkin developed these themes in a trilogy: (from Wikipedia)
Regeneration Through Violence[edit] 

In Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries - including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville - Slotkin traces the full development of this myth into a national myth.

The Fatal Environment[edit] 

In The Fatal Environment: the myth of the frontier in the age of industrialization, 1800-1890, (Atheneum, 1985) Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the "savage" element be permitted to dominate the "civilized," Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.

Gunfighter Nation[edit] 

In Gunfighter nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America (Atheneum, 1992), the concluding volume of his highly acclaimed trilogy, Slotkin draws on a wide range of sources to examine the pervasive influence of Wild West myths on American culture and politics. In the third of a three-volume study in the development of the myth of the frontier in US literary, popular, and political culture from the colonial period to the present, Slotkin covers the expression of the frontier myth in such popular culture phenomena as dime novels, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the formula fiction of 1900-40, and the Hollywood film. Covering historiography, Slotkin also discusses the exploration of the significance of the American frontier experience in Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West and Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History.



On Fri Jul 28 2017 12:27:25 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time), C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com> wrote:

It’s been pointed out that the brutal suppression of the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902) - which Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperilaist League condemned - followed directly on what the US calls ‘the Indian wars’ - and both carried over into Vietnam, where the parts of S. Vietnam that the US military didn’t control were referred to as 'Indian country.’ 
Both of course were bound up with US imperialism in the Asia-Pacific (and Halford Mackinder).

—CGE

On Jul 28, 2017, at 7:39 AM, Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com> wrote:
Do the western expansionist wars against Indigenous Americans count as war?  U.S. has conducted wars (?/battles) against the various tribes since its 18th century inception and before, since the colonial invasions.  I suppose government could be said to have incorporated a war mentality and a war economy, sacrificing its youth as well as foe. 

Midge O'Brien

-----Original Message-----
From: C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com>
To: Francis A Boyle <fboyle at illinois.edu>
Cc: Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com>; David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>; David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; Whitney Rich <richwhitney at frontier.com>; tomasroyer <tomasroyer at gmail.com>; Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga <lupalasaga at gmail.com>; Nick G <Ngoodell42 at gmail.com>; Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com>; Karen Medina <kmedina67 at gmail.com>; Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com>
Sent: Thu, Jul 27, 2017 9:29 am
Subject: Re: AWARE Anti-War Teach In

Even the ‘Hydrocarbon War’ (1990-present) can be seen as just one aspect of US war-making since 1945, a period in which US presidents have killed more than 20 million people to maintain the world economic dominance that the US 1% inherited after World War II, the US being the only undamaged major country in 1945.

US policy-makers since the “Open Door’ (1899) saw the greatest threat to the US economic elite to be the economic integration of Eurasia, under whatever auspices. (That’s what WWII in the Pacific was about.) Here the great gain was the destruction of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (and the atomic intimidation of the USSR at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) - and the great setback was 'the loss of China' in 1949. (That’s what the Vietnam War was about - the maintenance of US economic dominance in Asia-Pacific.)

The Israeli attack on Egypt in 1967 destroyed secular Arab nationalism (and aided the rise of religious resistance - radical Islam - which was encouraged by the US, just as Israel encouraged Hamas against the the secular PLO). Israel's ’Six-Day War,’ in 1967, delivered control of Mideast energy resources ('hydrocarbons’) to the US. Israel, which the US had dismissed in the Suez Crisis a decade earlier, became the leading US client and the “stationary aircraft carrier” for US control of the Mideast.

It’s control of - and not just access to - those hydrocarbons that the US insists upon. The US in fact imports little oil from the Mideast for domestic purposes: most of what the US uses at home comes from the the Atlantic basin - the US itself, Canada, Venezuela, and Nigeria. But control of the greatest source of world energy gives the US government a choke-hold over other economies that do depend on it, from Germany to China. (The Pentagon refers to this situation as “offshore control” of China - although some have suggested that the growth of renewables and the current China-Russia entente substantially reduces that offshore control - and fuels US war provocations against China, especially in the S. China Sea, as well as the TPP, in an alternate attempt to retard Chinese economic development.)

A generation ago, US planners feared that popular revulsion at what the US had done in SE Asia (by 1969, 70% of Americans told pollsters that the US war in Vietnam was “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake”) would prevent US military operations to retard Asian development - the “Vietnam syndrome.” The Hydrocarbon War was also meant to control the only enemy the US ruling class really fears - the US public. After the First Gulf War, President Bush Sr., with his family’s characteristic candor, exclaimed, “...by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” 

America’s WWII hegemony continues to decline relatively, as Eurasia develops and integrates economically. In response, the US political establishment produced the only president ever to be at war throughout two presidential terms: President Obama bombed eight countries and conducted what was correctly called 'The Most Extreme Terrorist Campaign of Modern Times' - his drone assassinations, with which he killed thousands, mostly civilians, including hundreds of children. The goal remained as it had been for more than a century: the world economic dominance of the US economic elite - particularly in regard to Eurasia - for which Mideast hydrocarbons were an instrument - perhaps increasingly ineffective.

—CGE


> On Jul 27, 2017, at 7:47 AM, Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> Actually, we have been at war continuously since Bush Sr.’s War against Iraq to steal Persian Gulf Oil and Gas in 1990-1991—27 years. Thucydides looked at a series of wars on the Greek Peninsula over a period of 27 years and said, no, this is one war, which he called the Peloponnesian War. So what we have seen here for the past 27 years is not a series of wars, but one war: The Hydrocarbon War by the United States to steal the world’s oil and gas. Fab.
> 
> Francis A. Boyle
> Law Building
> 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
> Champaign IL 61820 USA
> 217-333-7954 (phone)
> 217-244-1478 (fax)
> (personal comments only)
> 
> From: Boyle, Francis A 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2017 4:51 PM
> To: Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com>; C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com>; David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>; David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; Whitney Rich <richwhitney at frontier.com>
> Cc: tomasroyer at gmail.com; Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga <lupalasaga at gmail.com>; Nick G <Ngoodell42 at gmail.com>; Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com>; Karen Medina <kmedina67 at gmail.com>; Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com>
> Subject: RE: AWARE Anti-War Teach In
> 
> Maybe we can think of this event as:
> 
> “Light at the End of the Tunnel”
> 
> After 16 years of war.
> 
> Fab
> 
> 


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