Jan 9, 2023·edited Jan 9, 2023Liked by Bill Astore
I watched a 1959 movie the other night. "On the beach" starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It's kind of a romantic-apocalyptic movie. The plot is that there was a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everybody died, either from the exchange or from the background radiation, which could kill you in a few days. Peck is the captain of a U.S. submarine and goes to Australia, which is temporarily safe because the northern and southern hemispheres are somewhat isolated from each other. Gardner is in Australia and Peck and Gardner have a fling for a couple of months before the radiation finally gets them too. Peck had a line from the movie saying that they never really understood how the war happened....... From Wikipedia: Researcher Andrew Bartlett noted: "The American government complained of Kramer's On the Beach (1959) that it inaccurately presented the threat of extinction from nuclear war because there were not then enough weapons to cause extinction." I would guess there are now though. So is that progress?
"Where are today’s Shoups among the U.S. military brass? Where are the leaders who are against genocidal nuclear war and who are willing to speak out against it? Where are the leaders who reject a new cold war with China and Russia? Where are the leaders with the courage to advocate for peace whenever possible in place of more and more war?"
Where indeed? I'm not sure that Eisenhower belongs on your, or anyone's list, of leaders principled and courageous enough to resist the pressure to threaten, attack, and bully the world through the medium of global militarism. World leaders are not the statesmen they used to be, and in fact they never were, with perhaps very scant exception. But now there is a lock on being able to choose such people as premiers and "lawmakers" (as they are laughingly called). You can't name one that isn't bought and paid for, and you can hardly name one that isn't embarrassingly stupid (that is to say, utterly lacking in phronesis). The voters in the Western version of "democracy" have no chance—and perhaps, in the end, no will, and certainly no skill—to rid themselves of rule by venial, and evil, morons. So that what they get, whether or not happily or under protest. I would say that the quality of "leadership" is at zero, except for the fact that it continues to decline. Can you imagine that in the UK they swapped out the idiot Boris Johnson for . . . Liz Truss. This is, by the way, not a left-right issue. As Mr. Astore has just recently pointed out there is no "left" in the US. And what to "left" and "right" mean today, anyway? But I digress. There are any number of sane people around who would like not to destroy the world and think that the world could be, and should be, a lovelier and more peaceful place than it is—people who (with great effort and sometimes at great cost) speak out. In general, none of those people are really classifiable as being "left" or "right", even though they are are rhetorically classified (and "smeared") as such. But the voices of those people have no effect on the loci of power or mastery of the world. Our "leaders" are devoid of phronsesis, but they are long on low cunning, vanity, greed, hate, ambition, and aggressiveness, and have, in concert, shaped a system that locks out from any position of leadership any individual that is not of their ilk. Principled, sane "mavericks" are not tolerated. So, Mr. Astore, the kind of people that you are looking for are around, but you'll never find them in the Halls of Power, and I think that there is nothing that we can do about it. Chomsky talks about "movements", but the public is inert; ain't gonna happen, so let's go have a beer.
Well folks…. . Nobody will be able to say we weren’t warned by somebody who would know… :
US MILITARY DEEPENS TIES WITH JAPAN AND PHILIPPINES TO PREPARE FOR CHINA THREAT:
Top Marine Corps general James Bierman outlines sweeping reform to adapt force for possible conflict over Taiwan by Kathrin Hille 010823
The US and Japanese armed forces are rapidly integrating their command structure and scaling up combined operations as Washington and its Asian allies prepare for a possible conflict with China such as a war over Taiwan, according to the top Marine Corps general in Japan.
The two militaries have “seen exponential increases . . . just over the last year” in their operations on the territory they would have to defend in case of a war, Lieutenant General James Bierman, commanding general of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan, told the Financial Times in an interview.
Bierman said that THE US AND ITS ALLIES IN ASIA WERE EMULATING THE GROUNDWORK THAT HAD ENABLED WESTERN COUNTRIES TO SUPPORT UKRAINE’S RESISTANCE TO RUSSIA IN PREPARING FOR SCENARIOS SUCH AS A CHINESE INVASION OF TAIWAN.
“WHY HAVE WE ACHIEVED THE LEVEL OF SUCCESS WE’VE ACHIEVED IN UKRAINE? A BIG PART OF THAT HAS BEEN BECAUSE AFTER RUSSIAN AGGRESSION IN 2014 AND 2015, WE EARNESTLY GOT AFTER PREPARING FOR FUTURE CONFLICT: TRAINING FOR THE UKRAINIANS, PRE-POSITIONING OF SUPPLIES, IDENTIFICATION OF SITES FROM WHICH WE COULD OPERATE SUPPORT, SUSTAIN OPERATIONS.
“WE CALL THAT SETTING THE THEATRE. AND WE ARE SETTING THE THEATRE IN JAPAN, IN THE PHILIPPINES, IN OTHER LOCATIONS.”
Bierman’s unusually frank comparison between the Ukraine war and a potential conflict with China comes as Beijing has dramatically increased the scale and sophistication of its military manoeuvres near Taiwan in recent years. Japan and the Philippines are also intensifying defence co-operation with the US in the face of mounting Chinese assertiveness.
Japan and the US are set to discuss strengthening their alliance at security talks between the foreign and defence ministers on Wednesday and a summit between US president Joe Biden and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida on Friday in Washington. The summit comes as Tokyo embarks on a radical security policy shift that will include increasing defence spending and deploying missiles capable of hitting Chinese territory.
In response to Your concluding paragraph, Bill, i’m not sure that “the spell of militarism” is why America no longer produces a Butler or a Shoup [or an Eisenhower, at least in part].
i doubt that there have been or are [or ever will be] too many Veterans of America’s post-WW II Wars who, as You put it, “truly knew war, despised it, and wanted above all to put an end to it,” and then stayed in the military long enough to become a significant leader. Most who came to know war and despise it got out of the military for that very reason. And then some of them subsequently became involved in working toward putting an end to it; particularly during and at least for a while after Vietnam.
And there are others ~ like Butler and Shoup ~ who knew war and began to publicly despise and condemn it and work for its end after they retired with full careers.
In any event, i doubt that America is unique in not producing military leaders who came to despise war and publicly worked to end it. After two World Wars, we had exactly two. Did any other nation in the 20th century have even one?
After all, it took two different World Wars to produce Butler and Shoup, who were ~ as far as i can tell ~ the only significant retired military leaders in the entire 20th century to condemn War in general, and their nations’ wars, in particular.
Today is decidedly different in that are a significant number of Veterans with active internet and social media presence [such as Yourself, Bacevich, Sjursen, Ritter, etc] who are against War and the whole National Security/Surveillance State, and its assorted military/civilian-political/economic relationships and its results: Not a single War has been won in 77+ years at a truly obscenely incalculable cost in American and particularly non-American Blood and Treasure..
The bottom line here is that the only Leaders that are available to lead a WAR AGAINST WAR will not be coming out of America’s current crop of active duty military leaders, but from Veterans with an ability to communicate, like the folks listed in the preceding paragraph.
How would You rate America as far as the current active and growing presence of these Signs and implementation of these Strategies since: first, 9/11; then after the COVID Event; and now since Ukraine? ... :
14 SIGNS OF TOTALITARIANISM and 15 HIGHLY-EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR MASS MANIPULATION by Jon Miltimore 121322 and 011023, respectively
Thank You, Bill. i had never heard of General Shoup until Your article. Looks like a full nite of reading, researching, and reflecting lay ahead.
And i agree completely with mikjall about Eisenhower being nowhere in the league of Generals Butler and Shoup. And not just because of his direct complicity in America's Vietnam adventure as noted in yesterday's blog comments.
It's unfortunate that Ike didn't write his MIC[C] speech for his initial inaugural address; and then did then exactly what he said needed to be done eight years later when he left office with his warning.
More and more I'm thinking the central role of elected government is keeping under control the various parts of the bureaucracy. And it's failing. The Covid pandemic taught us that letting the public health sector run rampant results in lockdown and much economic destruction. The war with Russia via Ukraine is an illustration of letting the government foreign policy apparatus (which now includes the Treasury Department) run foreign policy.
Don't look for Shoups in the military. Their job is to fight, to kill, to destroy; that's what they are trained for, from age 18, women included. Why not try funding, to the tune of 800 billion/year to the State Dept., allied with The United States Institute of Peace, see what they come up with.
Sixty times per day every day of the 50 years after 1945, that bomb which incinerated Hiroshima
and its people was, in effect, recreated and stored in world arsenals, 60 on each of those 18,250
days. Yet another lesson to be learned.
It has become clear that nuclear weapons are only a symptom of a metastasizing malignancy of
the spirit of the world and of adult humankind. Some Japanese have an expression for this
current period of human history; they call it “the era of nuclear madness.” Robert Oppenheimer
warned us, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. "We know this because in
the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the
world—Great Britain and the United States—used atomic weapons against an enemy which was
essentially defeated, . . . it is not thinkable that in any major conflict, where the very life of a
nation may be at stake, these weapons will not be used, they are much too effective for that.
the shoups.and butler would have refused the experimental jabs as well.
the role of the vax mandate was to purge the critical thinkers who would ask ‘what makes the usa so great it should destroy the world if it were losing to the commies?’
and sec def Austin actually said the old nato trash air defenses gifted to Kiev were shooting down 100%!
I watched a 1959 movie the other night. "On the beach" starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It's kind of a romantic-apocalyptic movie. The plot is that there was a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everybody died, either from the exchange or from the background radiation, which could kill you in a few days. Peck is the captain of a U.S. submarine and goes to Australia, which is temporarily safe because the northern and southern hemispheres are somewhat isolated from each other. Gardner is in Australia and Peck and Gardner have a fling for a couple of months before the radiation finally gets them too. Peck had a line from the movie saying that they never really understood how the war happened....... From Wikipedia: Researcher Andrew Bartlett noted: "The American government complained of Kramer's On the Beach (1959) that it inaccurately presented the threat of extinction from nuclear war because there were not then enough weapons to cause extinction." I would guess there are now though. So is that progress?
"Where are today’s Shoups among the U.S. military brass? Where are the leaders who are against genocidal nuclear war and who are willing to speak out against it? Where are the leaders who reject a new cold war with China and Russia? Where are the leaders with the courage to advocate for peace whenever possible in place of more and more war?"
Where indeed? I'm not sure that Eisenhower belongs on your, or anyone's list, of leaders principled and courageous enough to resist the pressure to threaten, attack, and bully the world through the medium of global militarism. World leaders are not the statesmen they used to be, and in fact they never were, with perhaps very scant exception. But now there is a lock on being able to choose such people as premiers and "lawmakers" (as they are laughingly called). You can't name one that isn't bought and paid for, and you can hardly name one that isn't embarrassingly stupid (that is to say, utterly lacking in phronesis). The voters in the Western version of "democracy" have no chance—and perhaps, in the end, no will, and certainly no skill—to rid themselves of rule by venial, and evil, morons. So that what they get, whether or not happily or under protest. I would say that the quality of "leadership" is at zero, except for the fact that it continues to decline. Can you imagine that in the UK they swapped out the idiot Boris Johnson for . . . Liz Truss. This is, by the way, not a left-right issue. As Mr. Astore has just recently pointed out there is no "left" in the US. And what to "left" and "right" mean today, anyway? But I digress. There are any number of sane people around who would like not to destroy the world and think that the world could be, and should be, a lovelier and more peaceful place than it is—people who (with great effort and sometimes at great cost) speak out. In general, none of those people are really classifiable as being "left" or "right", even though they are are rhetorically classified (and "smeared") as such. But the voices of those people have no effect on the loci of power or mastery of the world. Our "leaders" are devoid of phronsesis, but they are long on low cunning, vanity, greed, hate, ambition, and aggressiveness, and have, in concert, shaped a system that locks out from any position of leadership any individual that is not of their ilk. Principled, sane "mavericks" are not tolerated. So, Mr. Astore, the kind of people that you are looking for are around, but you'll never find them in the Halls of Power, and I think that there is nothing that we can do about it. Chomsky talks about "movements", but the public is inert; ain't gonna happen, so let's go have a beer.
They're all waiting to get their twenty in so they can start selling access & influence to the defense industry.
Well folks…. . Nobody will be able to say we weren’t warned by somebody who would know… :
US MILITARY DEEPENS TIES WITH JAPAN AND PHILIPPINES TO PREPARE FOR CHINA THREAT:
Top Marine Corps general James Bierman outlines sweeping reform to adapt force for possible conflict over Taiwan by Kathrin Hille 010823
The US and Japanese armed forces are rapidly integrating their command structure and scaling up combined operations as Washington and its Asian allies prepare for a possible conflict with China such as a war over Taiwan, according to the top Marine Corps general in Japan.
The two militaries have “seen exponential increases . . . just over the last year” in their operations on the territory they would have to defend in case of a war, Lieutenant General James Bierman, commanding general of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF) and of Marine Forces Japan, told the Financial Times in an interview.
Bierman said that THE US AND ITS ALLIES IN ASIA WERE EMULATING THE GROUNDWORK THAT HAD ENABLED WESTERN COUNTRIES TO SUPPORT UKRAINE’S RESISTANCE TO RUSSIA IN PREPARING FOR SCENARIOS SUCH AS A CHINESE INVASION OF TAIWAN.
“WHY HAVE WE ACHIEVED THE LEVEL OF SUCCESS WE’VE ACHIEVED IN UKRAINE? A BIG PART OF THAT HAS BEEN BECAUSE AFTER RUSSIAN AGGRESSION IN 2014 AND 2015, WE EARNESTLY GOT AFTER PREPARING FOR FUTURE CONFLICT: TRAINING FOR THE UKRAINIANS, PRE-POSITIONING OF SUPPLIES, IDENTIFICATION OF SITES FROM WHICH WE COULD OPERATE SUPPORT, SUSTAIN OPERATIONS.
“WE CALL THAT SETTING THE THEATRE. AND WE ARE SETTING THE THEATRE IN JAPAN, IN THE PHILIPPINES, IN OTHER LOCATIONS.”
Bierman’s unusually frank comparison between the Ukraine war and a potential conflict with China comes as Beijing has dramatically increased the scale and sophistication of its military manoeuvres near Taiwan in recent years. Japan and the Philippines are also intensifying defence co-operation with the US in the face of mounting Chinese assertiveness.
Japan and the US are set to discuss strengthening their alliance at security talks between the foreign and defence ministers on Wednesday and a summit between US president Joe Biden and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida on Friday in Washington. The summit comes as Tokyo embarks on a radical security policy shift that will include increasing defence spending and deploying missiles capable of hitting Chinese territory.
Continued at https://www.ft.com/content/bf5362de-60a6-4181-8c2a-56b50be61383 {EMPHASIS added.]
Good article, found it at Global Research. Will be linking it today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
US vs China war simulation:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jan/9/us-defeats-china-simulated-war-over-taiwan-costs-a
In response to Your concluding paragraph, Bill, i’m not sure that “the spell of militarism” is why America no longer produces a Butler or a Shoup [or an Eisenhower, at least in part].
i doubt that there have been or are [or ever will be] too many Veterans of America’s post-WW II Wars who, as You put it, “truly knew war, despised it, and wanted above all to put an end to it,” and then stayed in the military long enough to become a significant leader. Most who came to know war and despise it got out of the military for that very reason. And then some of them subsequently became involved in working toward putting an end to it; particularly during and at least for a while after Vietnam.
And there are others ~ like Butler and Shoup ~ who knew war and began to publicly despise and condemn it and work for its end after they retired with full careers.
In any event, i doubt that America is unique in not producing military leaders who came to despise war and publicly worked to end it. After two World Wars, we had exactly two. Did any other nation in the 20th century have even one?
After all, it took two different World Wars to produce Butler and Shoup, who were ~ as far as i can tell ~ the only significant retired military leaders in the entire 20th century to condemn War in general, and their nations’ wars, in particular.
Today is decidedly different in that are a significant number of Veterans with active internet and social media presence [such as Yourself, Bacevich, Sjursen, Ritter, etc] who are against War and the whole National Security/Surveillance State, and its assorted military/civilian-political/economic relationships and its results: Not a single War has been won in 77+ years at a truly obscenely incalculable cost in American and particularly non-American Blood and Treasure..
The bottom line here is that the only Leaders that are available to lead a WAR AGAINST WAR will not be coming out of America’s current crop of active duty military leaders, but from Veterans with an ability to communicate, like the folks listed in the preceding paragraph.
The incentivization of peace: https://www.iwu.edu/physics/faculty/workable-moral-peace.pdf
How would You rate America as far as the current active and growing presence of these Signs and implementation of these Strategies since: first, 9/11; then after the COVID Event; and now since Ukraine? ... :
14 SIGNS OF TOTALITARIANISM and 15 HIGHLY-EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR MASS MANIPULATION by Jon Miltimore 121322 and 011023, respectively
SIGNS OF TOTALITARIANISM [ https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/14-signs-of-totalitarianism ]
~ 1. Dissent is equated to violence
~ 2. Media is controlled
~ 3. The legal system is co-opted by the state
~ 4. Power is exerted to quash dissent
~ 5. State police protect the regime, not the people
~ 6. Rights—financial, legal, and civil—are contingent on compliance
~ 7. Mass conformity of beliefs and behaviors is demanded
~ 8. Power is concentrated in inner ring of elite institutions and people
~ 9. Semi-organized violence is permitted (in some cases)
~ 10. Propaganda targets enemies of the state regime
~ 11. Entire classes singled out for persecution
~ 12. Extra-legal actions are condoned against internal regime opponents
~ 13. Harsh legal enforcement against unfavored classes
~ 14. Private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state dogmas
HIGHLY-EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR MASS MANIPULATION [ https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/15-highly-effective-strategies-for ]
~ 1. Appeal to emotions. Avoid reason.
~ 2. Reduce idea to slogan. Repeat constantly.
~ 3. Recruit true believers.
~ 4. Disrupt & hijack existing belief structures
~ 5. Take power. Use to spread ideology.
~ 6. Criticize & attack enemies of the state
~ 7. Identify one special enemy for extreme vilification
~ 8. Never show the other side of the argument
~ 9. Use intimidation & fear to accelerate ideological adoption
~ 10. Gain control of media & entertainment channels
~ 11. Subvert educational system
~ 12. Use public spectacle for social pressure
~ 13. Create symbols of loyalty
~ 14. Channel discontent into hatred of specific targets
~ 15. Demand submission, not belief
Thank You, Bill. i had never heard of General Shoup until Your article. Looks like a full nite of reading, researching, and reflecting lay ahead.
And i agree completely with mikjall about Eisenhower being nowhere in the league of Generals Butler and Shoup. And not just because of his direct complicity in America's Vietnam adventure as noted in yesterday's blog comments.
It's unfortunate that Ike didn't write his MIC[C] speech for his initial inaugural address; and then did then exactly what he said needed to be done eight years later when he left office with his warning.
From an old SAC Security Police Buck Sergeant--Its always darkest before eternal nothingness...
More and more I'm thinking the central role of elected government is keeping under control the various parts of the bureaucracy. And it's failing. The Covid pandemic taught us that letting the public health sector run rampant results in lockdown and much economic destruction. The war with Russia via Ukraine is an illustration of letting the government foreign policy apparatus (which now includes the Treasury Department) run foreign policy.
Don't look for Shoups in the military. Their job is to fight, to kill, to destroy; that's what they are trained for, from age 18, women included. Why not try funding, to the tune of 800 billion/year to the State Dept., allied with The United States Institute of Peace, see what they come up with.
Sixty times per day every day of the 50 years after 1945, that bomb which incinerated Hiroshima
and its people was, in effect, recreated and stored in world arsenals, 60 on each of those 18,250
days. Yet another lesson to be learned.
It has become clear that nuclear weapons are only a symptom of a metastasizing malignancy of
the spirit of the world and of adult humankind. Some Japanese have an expression for this
current period of human history; they call it “the era of nuclear madness.” Robert Oppenheimer
warned us, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. "We know this because in
the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the
world—Great Britain and the United States—used atomic weapons against an enemy which was
essentially defeated, . . . it is not thinkable that in any major conflict, where the very life of a
nation may be at stake, these weapons will not be used, they are much too effective for that.
the shoups.and butler would have refused the experimental jabs as well.
the role of the vax mandate was to purge the critical thinkers who would ask ‘what makes the usa so great it should destroy the world if it were losing to the commies?’
and sec def Austin actually said the old nato trash air defenses gifted to Kiev were shooting down 100%!