[Peace-discuss] The Labor Hour

[C G Estabrook]

Glad to hear it.

So you’d reject the equation <Israel : Palestinians :: Serbia : Bosniaks/Kosovars>?

—CGE
 

> On Mar 8, 2018, at 10:13 AM, Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
> Clinton’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 was justified, on the R2P
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Baloney! I never suggested that at all! As a matter of fact I have argued to the contrary in my book  Destroying Libya and World Order (Clarity Press: 2013), Chapter 5, "Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Versus International Law," pages 154 to 172, with footnotes. 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)
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: C G Estabrook <cgestabrook at gmail.com> 
> Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 10:08 AM
> To: Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu>
> Cc: David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>; C. G. ESTABROOK <carl at newsfromneptune.com>; Miller, Joseph Thomas <jtmiller at illinois.edu>; Arlene Hickory <a23h23 at yahoo.com>; sherwoodross10 at gmail.com; a-fields at uiuc.edu; Joe Lauria <joelauria at gmail.com>; Szoke, Ron <r-szoke at illinois.edu>; abass10 at gmail.com; mickalideh at gmail.com; Lina Thorne <lina at worldcantwait.net>; chicago at worldcantwait.net; Jay <futureup2us at gmail.com>; David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>; Mildred O'brien <moboct1 at aim.com>; stuartnlevy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com>; Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Labor Hour
> 
> Francis--
> 
> Again, the question is not Morgenthau’s character but US military and foreign policy.
> 
> In your recent talk on Israel/Palestine, you seemed to suggest that Clinton’s attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 was justified, on the R2P propaganda line that’s a staple of US fp in all recent administrations <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia>. 
> 
> —CGE
> 
> 
>> On Mar 8, 2018, at 9:30 AM, Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> As I recently told the retired President of the University of Chicago where Morgenthau spent his career teaching: Morgenthau was a German Jew who had to flee the Nazis and was taken in by this country. As is the case with other Jews I have studied with at the University of Chicago and Harvard who fled the Nazis and were taken in by this country, they are eternally  grateful to the United States of America for taking them in and giving them shelter from the Nazis. So consequently  they are more naïve and idealistic about the United States of America compared to native born Americans  such as Chomsky and me. And I did reference both Chomsky and me to the retired UChicago President. Fab.
>> Louis B. Zimmer’s The Vietnam War Debate: Hans J. Morgenthau and the Attempt to Halt the Drift into Disaster (Lexington Books: 2011).
>> by
>> Professor Francis A. Boyle
>> University of Illinois College of Law
>> 
>> 
>> Hans Morgenthau was my teacher, mentor and friend. He recommended me for my law professorship. It was my great honor and distinct pleasure to have studied with Morgenthau while he was heroically leading the forces of opposition to the genocidal Vietnam War at great personal cost to himself and his family. Morgenthau’s stellar example of brilliance in the service of courage, integrity and principles has inspired and motivated me now for over four decades. After reading Zimmer’s compelling book, Morgenthau will do the same for you. Zimmer vividly brings back to life Morgenthau, his epic battle against the Vietnam War, and those tumultuous and tragic events that shaped my generation and determined the destinies of two nations only now beginning to reconcile -- a volte-face preternaturally predicted by Morgenthau during the darkest days of the wars.  This book is required reading for all those seeking to pursue peace with justice in today’s increasingly troubled and endangered world. Humanity desperately needs more like Morgenthau in order to survive. Zimmer explains why.  A real tour de force of engaged historical research and scholarship.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> From: Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> 
>> Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 8:52 AM
>> To: Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu>
>> Cc: Peace-discuss List (peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net) <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Labor Hour
>> 
>> ISOLATIONISM V. EXCEPTIONALISM: TRUMP V. OBAMA/CLINTON
>> 
>> [The following article by Noam Chomsky appeared in ‘Truthout', October 6, 2013; it challenges the observation by the late Alex Cockburn that the website should be called ‘Truth-left-out’]
>> 
>> The recent [2013] Obama-Putin tiff over American exceptionalism reignited an ongoing debate over the Obama Doctrine: Is the president veering toward isolationism? Or will he proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism?
>> 
>> The debate is narrower than it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality “realist” school of international relations.
>> 
>> Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a “transcendent purpose” that it “must defend and promote” throughout the world: “the establishment of equality in freedom.”
>> 
>> The competing concepts “exceptionalism” and “isolationism” both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application.
>> 
>> One extreme was vigorously defended by President Obama in his Sept. 10 address to the nation: “What makes America different,” he declared, “what makes us exceptional,” is that we are dedicated to act, “with humility, but with resolve,” when we detect violations somewhere.
>> 
>> “For nearly seven decades the United States has been the anchor of global security,” a role that “has meant more than forging international agreements; it has meant enforcing them.”
>> 
>> The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others.
>> 
>> Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages.
>> 
>> At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion — overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery.
>> 
>> To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.”
>> 
>> But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.”
>> 
>> In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively.
>> 
>> Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naivete” can be charged with “moral equivalence” — of claiming that the U.S. is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny.
>> 
>> Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal Diplomatic History, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers.
>> 
>> Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure” — as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses.
>> 
>> The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there — even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.”
>> 
>> Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens.
>> 
>> One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus New York Times columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder.
>> 
>> That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.”
>> 
>> Those still deluded by “abuse of reality” — that is, fact — might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
>> 
>> The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide,” Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response.
>> 
>> She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports.
>> 
>> Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book “A Dangerous Place,” he described with great pride how he rendered the U.N. “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.”
>> 
>> And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt — as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years.
>> 
>> But that is mere abuse of reality.
>> 
>> It is all too easy to continue, but also pointless. Brooks is right to insist that we should go beyond the terrible events before our eyes and reflect about the deeper processes and their lessons.
>> 
>> Among these, no task is more urgent than to free ourselves from the religious doctrines that consign the actual events of history to oblivion and thereby reinforce our basis for further “abuses of reality.” <https://chomsky.info/20131006/>:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mar 8, 2018, at 7:27 AM, Boyle, Francis A <fboyle at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> […]
>> 
>> Saturday the 10th of March, on the “Labor Hour” 
>> WRFU 11:00am - 1:00pm
>> 
>> 
>> “ University of Illinois Law Professor Francis Boyle will be a guest,  discussing the current and historic facts since 9-11 2001 about U.S. military intervention and destabilization. “
>> 
>> It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the line of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy…
>> 
>> Historically this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898.  Then the Republican administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to genocidal conditions.  Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy.   But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the so-called “Pacific” Ocean would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War.  Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched, waged, and menaced by the neoconservative Republican Bush Junior administration then the neoliberal Democratic Obama administration and now the reactionary Trump administration threaten to set off World War III.   
>> 
>> By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Junior administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim States and Peoples of Color living in Central Asia and the Middle East and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against “international terrorism” or “Islamic fundamentalism”; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled humanitarian intervention and its avatar “responsibility to protect” (R2P).  Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:  control and domination of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundaments and energizers of the global economic system – oil and gas.  The Bush Junior/ Obama administrations targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America (e.g., the Pentagon’s reactivization of the U.S. Fourth Fleet in 2008), and Southeast Asia for further conquest and domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation (e.g., Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti).  Today the U.S. Fourth Fleet threatens oil-rich Venezuela and Ecuador for sure along with Cuba.
>> 
>> Toward accomplishing that first objective, in 2007 the neoconservative Bush Junior administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, steal, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species.  In 2011 Libya and the Libyans proved to be the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the neoliberal Obama administration, thus demonstrating the truly bi-partisan and non-partisan nature of U.S. imperial foreign policy decision-making. Let us put aside as beyond the scope of this analysis  the American conquest, extermination, and ethnic cleansing of the Indians from off the face of the continent of North America.  Since America’s instigation of the Spanish-American War in 1898, U.S. foreign policy decision-making has been alternatively conducted by reactionary imperialists, conservative imperialists, and liberal imperialists for the past 119 years and counting.
>> 
>> Trump is just another White Racist Iron Fist for Judeo-Christian U.S. Imperialism and Capitalism smashing all over the world. Trump forthrightly and proudly admitted that the United States is in the Middle East in order to steal their oil. At least he was honest about it. Unlike his predecessors who lied about the matter going back to President George Bush Sr. with his War for Persian Gulf oil against Iraq in 1991. Just recently, President Trump publicly threatened illegal U.S. military intervention against oil-rich Venezuela. Q.E.D.
>> 
>> This world-girdling burst of U.S. imperialism at the start of humankind’s new millennium is what my teacher, mentor, and friend the late, great Professor Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal book Politics Among Nations 52-53 (4th ed. 1968):
>> 
>>            The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind….  
>> 
>> Since September 11, 2001, it is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon, and Hitler who have been in charge of conducting American foreign policy decision-making.  The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
>> 
>> Francis A. Boyle
>