Hot damn! Nailed it again! I think that the military itself introduced a succinct way of describing the "system" (if I can dignify it with that label) whose heinousness and mendacity you analyze in such illuminating detail: FUBAR, which is the ultimate and inevitable sequel to SNAFU. Thank you for this brilliant piece!
Bill, that is a powerful essay, and I hope it gets printed all over the place! We really need to have people understand what is happening to us (this nation and the people in it). I would also like to comment on your 2020 article on our police ( "Light 'em Up" which you linked to here and which I read. This article needs to be republished so that more can read it. It is indeed one of the most powerful explanations of what has been happening to our police that I have seen. I recently read that the LA police had killed their third person since the start of the new year on Jan 12. Three people killed needlessly in 12 days! "What is wrong with our police? I asked ,and how are they trained, and HOW are they selected to BE police? Are we hiring sociopaths?" I wrote this to friends. Your article does a pretty good job of explaining what is happening. Many more people need to see your article and then maybe we can start stopping the insanity. Please put this out again or have Tom dispatch do it or something so more people can read it and understand. Thanks so much for all your writing!
So ... how much of the $858 billion will go to the "transboundary challenges" of climate change, pandemics, and cyberwar? To quote the newspaper reporter Ned Scott in "The Thing from Another World," the mind boggles.
In addition to listening to and reading Dr Martin Luther King’s speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, “Beyond Vietnam ~ A Time to Break Silence,” three additional ways for every American old enough to think for her or himself to honor Dr King this week after the federal holiday are to:
~ 1. Read this review of William Pepper’s THE PLOT TO KILL KING by Edward Curtin, “ORDERS TO KILL” DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING: THE GOVERNMENT THAT HONORS MLK WITH A NATIONAL HOLIDAY KILLED HIM
Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For almost fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth.
And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the absurd official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of the one man capable of leading a mass movement for revolutionary change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial.
In order to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary book, it is first necessary to dispel a widely accepted falsehood about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. William Pepper does that on the first page:
“To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.”
In other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that HIS VERY EXISTENCE WAS A THREAT TO AN ESTABLISHED ORDER BASED ON VIOLENCE, RACISM, AND ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION. HE WAS A VERY DANGEROUS MAN.
~ 2. Watch the official trailer for “MLK/FBI” ~ a documentary released this month that examines, details, and exposes J Edgar Hoover’s personal and professional war thru his FBI against Dr King at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvfxzht9KUA&t=157s
And read Robert Sheer’s interview with the film’s Director, Sam Pollard, in THE FBI’S CRUSADE AGAINST MLK WAS DARKER THAN YOU THINK:
“You are done. There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
That’s the shocking ending to the infamous letter Civil Rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received in 1964 essentially urging him to commit suicide. The letter and accompanying package containing blackmail were sent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as King quickly caught on. While the full, unredacted letter was finally published by the New York Times in 2014, THE AUDIO RECORDINGS OF AN EXTENSIVE FBI WIRETAPPING OPERATION TARGETING KING HAVE BEEN SEALED UNTIL 2027. With just a few years left before they come to light, director Sam Pollard did a deep dive into the FBI’s surveillance of MLK under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover in his documentary “MLK / FBI,” released by IFC Films earlier this month.
~ 3. Read and reflect upon THE LIBERAL CONTEMPT FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING’S FINAL YEAR by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon [originally published on April 4, 2021]
The MLK tributes are sure to pour on the anniversary of the civil rights hero's death, but don't expect them to acknowledge his anti-militarist ideals.
The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes — including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive — are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.
You could call it evasion by omission.
The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata.
The pattern is positively Orwellian. King explicitly condemned what he called “the madness of militarism.” And by any reasonable standard, that madness can be diagnosed as pervading U.S. foreign policy in 2021. But TODAY, ALMOST ALL POLITICIANS AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA COMMENTATORS ACT AS THOUGH KING NEVER SAID SUCH THINGS, OR IF HE DID THEN THOSE OBSERVATIONS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH TODAY.
BUT THEY HAVE EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE USA NOW IN ITS TWENTIETH YEAR OF CONTINUOUS WARFARE. THE PENTAGON’S CONSTANT BOMBING IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ELSEWHERE IS THE SCARCELY NOTICED WALLPAPER IN THE U.S. MEDIA’S ECHO CHAMBER.
What compounds the madness of militarism in the present day is the silence that stretches eerily and lethally across almost the entire U.S. political spectrum, including the bulk of progressive organizations doing excellent work to challenge economic injustice and institutionalized racism here at home.
But AS FOR THE INSTITUTIONALIZED MILITARISM THAT TERRORIZES, WOUNDS AND KILLS PEOPLE OVERSEAS — OVERWHELMINGLY PEOPLE OF COLOR — A SAD TRUTH IS THAT MOST PROGRESSIVE U.S. ORGANIZATIONS HAVE LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT IT. At the same time, they eagerly and selectively laud King as a visionary and role model.
King didn’t simply oppose the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 speech at New York’s Riverside Church delivered exactly a year before he was assassinated — titled “Beyond Vietnam” — he REFERRED TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AS “THE GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD TODAY” AND BROADLY DENOUNCED THE RACIST AND IMPERIAL UNDERPINNINGS OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY. From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, our country was on the “wrong side of a world revolution” — suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Global South, instead of supporting them.
Mainstream media today pretend that King’s anti-militarism pronouncements were never uttered, but that was not the case in 1967. Condemnation was swift, emphatic and widespread. Life magazine denounced the “Beyond Vietnam” speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The New York Times and Washington Post both published harsh and patronizing editorials…
Cohen and Solomon conclude: “It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing,” Dr. King said as the Vietnam War raged. The massive U.S. military budget still functions the way King described it — “some demonic, destructive suction tube.” Yet the silences across so much of the U.S. political spectrum, including the liberal establishment and a great many progressive groups, persist in contempt of what Martin Luther King stood for during the final year of his life.
As Ray noted on BV-WordPress: William Hartung has provided the perfect follow-on, Bill, to Your Tom Dispatch piece on America’s National “Defense” Strategy with one of his own:
WHAT PRICE “DEFENSE”? AMERICA'S COSTLY, DYSFUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO SECURITY IS MAKING US EVER LESS SAFE
Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country.
The assumption is that when it comes to spending on the military and related activities, more is always better.
There’s certainly no question that one group will benefit in a major way from the new spending surge: the weapons industry. If recent experience is any guide, more than half of that $858 billion will likely go to private firms. The top five contractors alone — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — will split between $150 billion and $200 billion in Pentagon contracts. Meanwhile, they’ll pay their CEOs, on average, more than $20 million a year and engage in billions of dollars in stock buybacks designed to boost their share prices.
Such “investments” are perfectly designed to line the pockets of arms-industry executives and their shareholders. However, they do little or nothing to help defend this country or its allies.
Excessive Spending Doesn’t Align with the Pentagon’s Own Strategy
THE PENTAGON’S LONG-AWAITED NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY, RELEASED LATE LAST YEAR, IS AN OBJECT LESSON IN HOW NOT TO MAKE CHOICES AMONG COMPETING PRIORITIES. IT CALLS FOR PREPARING TO WIN WARS AGAINST RUSSIA or CHINA, ENGAGE IN MILITARY ACTION AGAINST IRAN or NORTH KOREA, AND CONTINUE TO WAGE A GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR THAT INVOLVES STATIONING 200,000 TROOPS OVERSEAS, WHILE TAKING PART IN COUNTERTERROR OPERATIONS IN AT LEAST 85 COUNTRIES, ACCORDING TO FIGURES COMPILED BY THE BROWN UNIVERSITY COSTS OF WAR PROJECT.
Based on the performance of the American military over the last 77+ years since the end of World War II, this nation’s National “Defense” Strategy consists of finding [or creating] “Threats” and “Enemies,” and then starting and having [as opposed to winning] Wars, keeping them going as long as possible, and then using the latest defeat in the last War as the basis for getting ready for the next War by increasing the National “Security” State budget, and giving it more control and authority over what Americans can know about all this Bullshit. And what they can do about it.
btw the economic devastation in some localities of cutting war spending would be severe, even though the 97% of economy not feeding in the trough would be better off.
the melian dialogue!
a better thucydides parable is the incident where an athenian admiral conquers an errant city, and sends a ship back to see if the demos wants all inhabitants put to the sword, first vote demos said 'kill them all' next day demos repents and send second ship out to stop... i do not recall if the second ship arrived in time!
thucydides is why we have a senate and an electroal college.
that said ukraine is the moral high ground we used to put puppet general run south vietnam.
and today MLK's Riverside Church sermon rings true in where usa is.
Hot damn! Nailed it again! I think that the military itself introduced a succinct way of describing the "system" (if I can dignify it with that label) whose heinousness and mendacity you analyze in such illuminating detail: FUBAR, which is the ultimate and inevitable sequel to SNAFU. Thank you for this brilliant piece!
in ww ii they put fumtu in between fubar and snafu.
in my experience on rare occasion we over used fubar!
Bill, that is a powerful essay, and I hope it gets printed all over the place! We really need to have people understand what is happening to us (this nation and the people in it). I would also like to comment on your 2020 article on our police ( "Light 'em Up" which you linked to here and which I read. This article needs to be republished so that more can read it. It is indeed one of the most powerful explanations of what has been happening to our police that I have seen. I recently read that the LA police had killed their third person since the start of the new year on Jan 12. Three people killed needlessly in 12 days! "What is wrong with our police? I asked ,and how are they trained, and HOW are they selected to BE police? Are we hiring sociopaths?" I wrote this to friends. Your article does a pretty good job of explaining what is happening. Many more people need to see your article and then maybe we can start stopping the insanity. Please put this out again or have Tom dispatch do it or something so more people can read it and understand. Thanks so much for all your writing!
Thanks so much, Ranney.
So ... how much of the $858 billion will go to the "transboundary challenges" of climate change, pandemics, and cyberwar? To quote the newspaper reporter Ned Scott in "The Thing from Another World," the mind boggles.
Gotta nuke the pandemic and smoke out climate change. That's our answer to everything.
In addition to listening to and reading Dr Martin Luther King’s speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, “Beyond Vietnam ~ A Time to Break Silence,” three additional ways for every American old enough to think for her or himself to honor Dr King this week after the federal holiday are to:
~ 1. Read this review of William Pepper’s THE PLOT TO KILL KING by Edward Curtin, “ORDERS TO KILL” DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING: THE GOVERNMENT THAT HONORS MLK WITH A NATIONAL HOLIDAY KILLED HIM
Very few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant assassinations, especially JFK’s. For almost fifty years there has been a media blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth.
And few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the absurd official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of the one man capable of leading a mass movement for revolutionary change in the United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial.
In order to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary book, it is first necessary to dispel a widely accepted falsehood about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. William Pepper does that on the first page:
“To understand his death, it is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.”
In other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that HIS VERY EXISTENCE WAS A THREAT TO AN ESTABLISHED ORDER BASED ON VIOLENCE, RACISM, AND ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION. HE WAS A VERY DANGEROUS MAN.
Continued at https://www.globalresearch.ca/orders-to-kill-martin-luther-king-the-government-that-honors-mlk-with-a-national-holiday-killed-him/5559300 [EMPHASIS added.]
[Note: The audio of King’s speech is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQr_e_P-nBA ; and the transcript is at https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm .]
~ 2. Watch the official trailer for “MLK/FBI” ~ a documentary released this month that examines, details, and exposes J Edgar Hoover’s personal and professional war thru his FBI against Dr King at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvfxzht9KUA&t=157s
And read Robert Sheer’s interview with the film’s Director, Sam Pollard, in THE FBI’S CRUSADE AGAINST MLK WAS DARKER THAN YOU THINK:
“You are done. There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
That’s the shocking ending to the infamous letter Civil Rights hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received in 1964 essentially urging him to commit suicide. The letter and accompanying package containing blackmail were sent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as King quickly caught on. While the full, unredacted letter was finally published by the New York Times in 2014, THE AUDIO RECORDINGS OF AN EXTENSIVE FBI WIRETAPPING OPERATION TARGETING KING HAVE BEEN SEALED UNTIL 2027. With just a few years left before they come to light, director Sam Pollard did a deep dive into the FBI’s surveillance of MLK under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover in his documentary “MLK / FBI,” released by IFC Films earlier this month.
Continued at https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/15/rewind-sam-pollard-the-fbis-crusade-against-mlk-was-darker-than-you-think/ [EMPHASIS added.]
~ 3. Read and reflect upon THE LIBERAL CONTEMPT FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING’S FINAL YEAR by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon [originally published on April 4, 2021]
The MLK tributes are sure to pour on the anniversary of the civil rights hero's death, but don't expect them to acknowledge his anti-militarist ideals.
The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes — including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive — are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.
You could call it evasion by omission.
The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata.
The pattern is positively Orwellian. King explicitly condemned what he called “the madness of militarism.” And by any reasonable standard, that madness can be diagnosed as pervading U.S. foreign policy in 2021. But TODAY, ALMOST ALL POLITICIANS AND MAINSTREAM MEDIA COMMENTATORS ACT AS THOUGH KING NEVER SAID SUCH THINGS, OR IF HE DID THEN THOSE OBSERVATIONS HAVE LITTLE TO DO WITH TODAY.
BUT THEY HAVE EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE USA NOW IN ITS TWENTIETH YEAR OF CONTINUOUS WARFARE. THE PENTAGON’S CONSTANT BOMBING IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND ELSEWHERE IS THE SCARCELY NOTICED WALLPAPER IN THE U.S. MEDIA’S ECHO CHAMBER.
What compounds the madness of militarism in the present day is the silence that stretches eerily and lethally across almost the entire U.S. political spectrum, including the bulk of progressive organizations doing excellent work to challenge economic injustice and institutionalized racism here at home.
But AS FOR THE INSTITUTIONALIZED MILITARISM THAT TERRORIZES, WOUNDS AND KILLS PEOPLE OVERSEAS — OVERWHELMINGLY PEOPLE OF COLOR — A SAD TRUTH IS THAT MOST PROGRESSIVE U.S. ORGANIZATIONS HAVE LITTLE TO SAY ABOUT IT. At the same time, they eagerly and selectively laud King as a visionary and role model.
King didn’t simply oppose the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 speech at New York’s Riverside Church delivered exactly a year before he was assassinated — titled “Beyond Vietnam” — he REFERRED TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AS “THE GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD TODAY” AND BROADLY DENOUNCED THE RACIST AND IMPERIAL UNDERPINNINGS OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY. From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, our country was on the “wrong side of a world revolution” — suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Global South, instead of supporting them.
Mainstream media today pretend that King’s anti-militarism pronouncements were never uttered, but that was not the case in 1967. Condemnation was swift, emphatic and widespread. Life magazine denounced the “Beyond Vietnam” speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The New York Times and Washington Post both published harsh and patronizing editorials…
Cohen and Solomon conclude: “It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing,” Dr. King said as the Vietnam War raged. The massive U.S. military budget still functions the way King described it — “some demonic, destructive suction tube.” Yet the silences across so much of the U.S. political spectrum, including the liberal establishment and a great many progressive groups, persist in contempt of what Martin Luther King stood for during the final year of his life.
Full article at https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/15/the-liberal-contempt-for-martin-luther-kings-final-year/ [EMPHASES added.]
As Ray noted on BV-WordPress: William Hartung has provided the perfect follow-on, Bill, to Your Tom Dispatch piece on America’s National “Defense” Strategy with one of his own:
WHAT PRICE “DEFENSE”? AMERICA'S COSTLY, DYSFUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO SECURITY IS MAKING US EVER LESS SAFE
Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country.
The assumption is that when it comes to spending on the military and related activities, more is always better.
There’s certainly no question that one group will benefit in a major way from the new spending surge: the weapons industry. If recent experience is any guide, more than half of that $858 billion will likely go to private firms. The top five contractors alone — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — will split between $150 billion and $200 billion in Pentagon contracts. Meanwhile, they’ll pay their CEOs, on average, more than $20 million a year and engage in billions of dollars in stock buybacks designed to boost their share prices.
Such “investments” are perfectly designed to line the pockets of arms-industry executives and their shareholders. However, they do little or nothing to help defend this country or its allies.
Excessive Spending Doesn’t Align with the Pentagon’s Own Strategy
THE PENTAGON’S LONG-AWAITED NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY, RELEASED LATE LAST YEAR, IS AN OBJECT LESSON IN HOW NOT TO MAKE CHOICES AMONG COMPETING PRIORITIES. IT CALLS FOR PREPARING TO WIN WARS AGAINST RUSSIA or CHINA, ENGAGE IN MILITARY ACTION AGAINST IRAN or NORTH KOREA, AND CONTINUE TO WAGE A GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR THAT INVOLVES STATIONING 200,000 TROOPS OVERSEAS, WHILE TAKING PART IN COUNTERTERROR OPERATIONS IN AT LEAST 85 COUNTRIES, ACCORDING TO FIGURES COMPILED BY THE BROWN UNIVERSITY COSTS OF WAR PROJECT.
Continued at https://tomdispatch.com/what-price-defense-2/ [EMPHASIS added]
War pays very well. Peace? Not so much. Not for the CEOs of Raytheon etc.
Based on the performance of the American military over the last 77+ years since the end of World War II, this nation’s National “Defense” Strategy consists of finding [or creating] “Threats” and “Enemies,” and then starting and having [as opposed to winning] Wars, keeping them going as long as possible, and then using the latest defeat in the last War as the basis for getting ready for the next War by increasing the National “Security” State budget, and giving it more control and authority over what Americans can know about all this Bullshit. And what they can do about it.
Right on the money. Shared to F-Book
btw the economic devastation in some localities of cutting war spending would be severe, even though the 97% of economy not feeding in the trough would be better off.
the melian dialogue!
a better thucydides parable is the incident where an athenian admiral conquers an errant city, and sends a ship back to see if the demos wants all inhabitants put to the sword, first vote demos said 'kill them all' next day demos repents and send second ship out to stop... i do not recall if the second ship arrived in time!
thucydides is why we have a senate and an electroal college.
that said ukraine is the moral high ground we used to put puppet general run south vietnam.
and today MLK's Riverside Church sermon rings true in where usa is.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1967-martin-luther-king-jr-beyond-vietnam-time-break-silence/