[Peace-discuss] Charles Krauthammer

[David Green]

My letter in today's News-Gazette:

Prior and subsequent to the death of columnist Charles Krauthammer, pundits
informed readers of the respect he was accorded from mainstream political
quarters.

This was due to Krauthammer’s facility for deploying academic language to
sanitize aggressive and destructive U.S. foreign interventions, a pattern
that will continue until ordinary Americans are willing to look honestly in
the mirror, as the Germans and Japanese were forced to do after World War
II.

Krauthammer’s doctrine of “democratic realism” provides the most recent
intellectual cover for what has been consistent U.S. foreign policy since
1898. In current practice it means that we have a “God-given” (now both
Christian and Jewish) right to rule the world, by any means necessary.

That policy reflects the ambitions of American corporate, financial,
military, and academic elites to profit by controlling capital, labor, and
resources for the benefit of a small minority, both domestic and global.
Domestically, those chickens have come home to roost during the past four
decades of brutal neoliberal inequality.

In geopolitical terms, it means that if a country or its leadership does
not "cooperate" with U.S.-led global capitalism, it risks subversion,
isolation, and invasion, depending on its level of intransigence and
strategic importance. Thus Cuba, Vietnam, Central America, Venezuela, Iraq,
Libya, etc. Democracy is irrelevant, as is proved by Iran (1953), Chile
(1973), and our alliances with Saudi Arabia, Israel, apartheid South
Africa, etc.

The militarization of our society and media thus enlists part of the
working class in a struggle against its own (and humanity’s) interests.
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