[Peace-discuss] NYT gets it wrong, not by accident

[C G Estabrook]

http://www.news-gazette.com/opinion/letters-the-editor/2018-12-07/letter-the-editor-trumps-critics-have-it-backwards.html

Letter to the Editor | Trump's critics have it backwards
Fri, 12/07/2018 - 7:00am | The News-Gazette

The New York Times published the following: "Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won't associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president's orbit — the immoral and the amoral."

This is backwards. The neocons are desperate to prevent Donald Trump's carrying out his campaign proposals for rapprochement with Russia and China — and withdrawal from Barack Obama's wars and war provocations, from Ukraine to the South China Sea.

Since the Open Door Policy (1899), the U.S. government has continually used war and war provocations to constrain the economic integration of Eurasia, which would limit the ability of the U.S. 1 percent to exploit it.

State Department official George Kennan wrote in 1948, "we have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. ... 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."

Since 1945, the U.S. has killed more than 20 million people in wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and elsewhere) designed to "maintain the disparity." The Times' "decent people" are determined today to see that Trump doesn't abandon that policy.


C. G. ESTABROOK

Champaign