syria

War No More : A Book Review

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The Chalice of  War

Recent events with respect to our so-called enemies abroad, including Donald Trump’s

  • fruitless, impeachable knee-jerk bombing of Syria earlier this year, an act whose legal justifications rival the effectiveness and stated objectives in vacuousness,
  • inflammatory posturing toward Iran in an incredibly dangerous perpetuation of Washington’s Iranian foreign policy over the past thirty years, and
  • saber-rattling against North Korea as tensions escalate, virtually ignoring long proposed nuclear freeze proposals articulated by Noam Chomsky, proposals requiring the impossible act of American military retreat in that piece of the world,

underscore the precarious position in which we find ourselves in our 200,000 year run on this planet.  In the midst of these tumultuous times, there exists a specter looming over virtually all mainstream discussion, so far out of mind as to conjure moronic climate change denialism, differing in that most Americans, whether convinced of the overwhelming scientific evidence or not, are at least aware of the debate.  The bias should seem clear, as Trump’s illegal attack on Syria should indicate : articulate opinion virtually fell into lockstep admiration of Trump, for example,  the New York Times remarked,

in launching a military strike
just 77 days into his
administration, President
Trump has the opportunity, but
hardly a guarantee, to change
the perception of disarray in
his administration.

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept pointed out this and many other instances of elite media reversal on Trump the instant bombs begin falling.  There exists a chalice of war, and Americans have been drinking deeply of it since the second world war; the mindset is pervasive, infiltrating our holidays, movies, video games, and most state-sanctioned celebrations of patriotism, whatever that actually happens to be.  Believe it or not, it hasn’t always been this way.  And there are a few voices rising above the rest to remind us.

David Swanson : Today’s Eugene Debs

I first encountered David Swanson’s works in the early days of George W. Bush’s warring administration. I had learned in college about the myriad military misadventures of American presidents, including

  • Harry S Truman’s illegal war of aggression in Korea, events out of which the brutal North Korean regime emerged,
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower’s acts of aggression in Guatemala to combat nationalism,
  • John F. Kennedy’s raving mad stance toward Cuba (to be discussed in an upcoming article in The Spanish Pearl series), and aggressive war against South Vietnam,
  • Lyndon Johnson’s lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to promote war in Vietnam and support of Israel’s illegal invasion of Lebanon,
  • Richard M. Nixon’s aggressive wars in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as the overthrow of Salvator Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973, the first so-called “9/11”,
  • James E. Carter’s support of Indonesian dictator Suharto in committing genocide against the East Timorese,
  • Ronald M. Reagan’s invasions of Grenada (a tiny defenseless island nation), bombing of Libya, drug runs in Columbia, war-making in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and propping up of Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein as a shield against Soviet influence in Iran,
  • George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama and escalation of the Gulf War,
  • William J. Clinton’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 despite warnings of heavy casualties among fleeing refugees,
  • George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter of which Chomsky labels the supreme crime of the 21st century, and
  • Barack Obama’s international drone assassination campaign, killing perhaps thousands of civilians in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya,

and the list could include crimes committed before 1945, though we’d require another article.  Suffice it to say that George Washington’s extermination of the Iroquois, Andrew Jackson’s mass murder of natives, destruction of native food sources by Ulysses S Grant, and the invasion and occupation of the northern half of Mexico by James K. Polk are but a few instances in the legacy of bloodlust the Europeans bore and continue to bear in conquering the western hemisphere.  We’ve mentioned the Spanish American War more recently as a light case study, and with this large body of historical evidence, it seems pretty clear another approach is warranted, especially when considered with respect to the forecast of virtually every credible intelligence agency in the world : violence generates rather than diminishes the threat of what we like to think of as terrorism.

David Swanson has long argued that not only is there an alternative to war, there is no alternative to peace.  A modern day Eugene Debs, this philosopher and activist has traveled the nation and the world to promote an ideology and dialog badly lacking in elite support.  Of interest in this article is his 2013 book War No More : The Case for Abolition.  In it, Swanson adeptly confronts many of the persistent myths, including the inevitability of perpetual war, the humanitarian war, the defensive war, the stabilizing war, and the like.  He also explains, quite effectively, the post-war shift of American culture in his earlier work War Is A Lie.

A Culture Drunk on War

Long before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans often were only very reluctantly conscripted into battle to fight for elite interests, as discussed earlier in the case of the Spanish American War.  We know now that desertion and reluctance to fire weapons at other human beings resulted in colossal ammunition waste in most of the wars through the twentieth century.  The psychology is simple, Swanson explains :

[m]ost human or primate
or mammalian conflicts
within a species involve
threats and bluffs and
restraint.

War is unnatural, he argues, citing further evidence that the grooves left in early human skeletal remains are bite marks from the large land dwelling predators we’ve since extinguished rather than battle scars from tribal skirmishes.  This in fact echoes earlier commentary on the most native violence experienced by Columbus in his expedition : light sparring with sticks and the like, only very rarely resulting in serious injury.  The conquistadors’ violence wrought upon the natives was something else entirely.

In any case, Swanson remarks that since the second world war, the military has become increasingly efficient in indoctrinating soldiers to kill.  A parallel public relations program has glorified war in film, print, and now video games, often with heavy consultation from weapon manufacturers and military personnel.  One need only look at the preponderance of blockbuster films these days to experience the influence.  Further still, military recruiters routinely lie and glorify the military way of life, enticing the poor with a phony carrot rather than the stick of the draft in earlier wars.  As before, the poor fight and die while elites shield themselves from the draft, such as

None of this should come as a surprise, as only a small percentage of human beings can truly stomach killing others.  It’s large enough that in our population we routinely hear of such violence, but, as Swanson often suggests with rhetorically surgical precision, imagine if the news stations spent as much time on nonviolence as they do violence.

Swanson helped me begin to identify the tremendous propaganda toward state violence after I read his comprehensive 2010 book War is a Lie; I had noticed in recent years, something he systematically demonstrates in his works, that a large fraction of cinema previews included a vast array of military tools, soldiers, and their deployment to the “battlefield,” a term Swanson very cleverly disabuses as an archaicism.  He points out that virtually every popular video game on the market features extreme amounts of gun violence and murder; though I am indeed a great fan of the game Skyrim, virtually anyone paying attention to the gameplay mechanics should notice that both men and mer would face imminent extinction with the pervasive, unremitting violence everywhere.  Skyrim isn’t alone, as the most popular video games these days exalt wholesale violence, enabling a broad range of sociopathic choices.  If a player kills virtually all citizens of the realm, who would grow the food, tend the livestock, write the books, etc.?  More broadly, one can note that almost all the holidays we observe in America are tied to violent acts, including, ironically, Easter, Thanksgiving, and the whole of Armistice Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and the like.  Our national anthem celebrates the violence of the Revolutionary War as a boon for freedom, despite the fact that life for 95% of colonists and virtually all natives, slaves, and women changed or worsened under the new management.

In any case, Swanson points out that dissidents are labeled derisively “anti-American” unless they blindly support ongoing wars under the mantra “support the troops,” even after elite sectors themselves disavow wars as unwinnable, strategic blunders.  Chomsky correctly points out that America is the only non-totalitarian state where such a notion of “anti-state” exists; Germans opposing Angela Merkel would never be described idiotically as “anti-German”.

Moreover, Swanson strongly argues the malignant effects of war on troops, rendering the catechismic “support our troops” phrase all the more ridiculous : we must continue the killing to honor the dead, lest we savage their memory.  I’ve witnessed dear friends and family thank troops publicly for their service, despite our military being the basis for human sacrifice : eighteen year-old boys must go die in some foreign land so we can ward off the undefinable, largely imaginary evil forces of tyranny, much like ancient cultures sacrificed humans to appease the gods of harvest.

I’m familiar with many mental health professionals who can confirm the extremely harmful effect of war service on human beings; post-traumatic stress disorder, coupled with loss of limbs, eyes, hearing, and the like mar not just our own soldiers, the only people elite sectors depict as “people,” but wreck nation after nation, killing millions and driving millions more into exile, prostitution, and violence.

The drone strikes themselves have raised a new generation of terrorists; case in point is Farea al-Muslimi, a young Yemeni student who spread good tidings about America back to his village until it was attacked by drones to kill an unarmed man accused of terrorism.  Instantly, a village hates the United States, despite the ease of placing the suspect in custody rather than destroying parts of their village and killing civilians.  This story isn’t unique, and it takes genius not to recognize how these policies further imperil both innocents and ourselves.

Even the non-partisan Brookings Institute recently warned that Trump may have the means, militarily or otherwise, (but not necessarily the mind) to finally

think seriously about
ending North Korea’s
nuclear ambitions by
creating a new order
in Northeast Asia.

Consider this in light of Chomsky’s aforementioned comments from a Democracy Now interview in April :

no matter what attack it
is, even a nuclear attack,
would unleash massive
artillery bombardment of
Seoul, which is the biggest
city in South Korea, right
near the border, which
would wipe it out, including
plenty of American troops.
That doesn’t—I mean, I’m no
technical expert, but as far
as I can—as I read and can
see, there’s no defense
against that.

In other words, stray too far into that dark place in which Kim Jung Un feels no escape, and the human cost could be tremendous.  Is there an alternative?  One need only read history, a sample of which I’ve written here, to know that America typically preaches peace and diplomacy, yet we maintain self-proclaimed nuclear first strike power, occupy over 800 military bases in 80 foreign countries as reported by The Nation in 2015, and have committed the supreme crime of aggressive war innumerable times just since the second world war, generally arguing publicly the desire to sue for peace, to supplicate the needy in humanitarian crises, or, earlier on, simply saying nothing.

Freedom isn’t Free, But War Won’t Buy It

It turns out that war fails to improve our freedom, as we’ve argued repeatedly here echoing the writings of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, and Amy Goodman : dedicated resistance and a cohesive, powerful labor movement have so far proved to be sufficient, if not essential to the civility and freedom we enjoy in the modern era.  Swanson argues, alongside them, that war historically always has the opposite effect, reducing freedom while fomenting unrest and division.  One need only look at the various wars to discover that many dissenters have gone to jail, including Swanson’s historical doppelganger Eugene Debs; Debs encouraged antiwar speech during World War I.  War resisters during the Revolutionary War faced violence, confiscation of property, murder, and expulsion to Canada.

During World War II, the government imprisoned Japanese and German Americans.  My grandparents worked at Camp Howze, a POW camp near my hometown of Gainesville, Texas.  Woodrow Wilson argued during World War I that “disloyal” dissidents

had sacrificed their
right to civil liberties.

We can certainly recall suppression of resistance to Vietnam, and the immediate passage of the fascist PATRIOT Act upon the second 9/11.  The point is, not only does freedom not flourish under war, Swanson argues that it cannot flourish.  Learning the former must precede the latter, and Swanson articulates a very strong argument for both.  So what of the good wars?

Apologists for War

Most rational Americans have come to believe that war is primarily a tool for control.  During the Vietnam and Korean Wars, Americans were conscripted to fight for what the Pentagon Papers revealed to be control of the “tin, oil, and rubber“, among other economic objectives. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), mentioned in earlier posts, was a late twentieth century neo-conservative think tank whose manifesto stumps for conquering Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Iran in order to secure American interests in the region.  Swanson raises the intriguing coincidences of both Iraqi and Libyan leadership electing to deny the dollar preeminence in oil purchases, Hussein opting for the euro and Gaddafi the gold dinar, both immediately preceding our violent intervention; certainly intelligence agencies in America and elsewhere knew very well Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction remaining.  Lost in this is that Saddam offered to exile himself, handing Iraq over to NATO provided he could abscond with one billion dollars; considering the trillion dollars the war has cost, wouldn’t that have made more sense?

Swanson reminds us of Eisenhower’s admonishment of the rise of the military industrial complex, a largely unaccountable cadre of business and military interests hell-bent on self-sustainment in the face of an increasingly peaceful world.  Ironically, as Swanson points out, war doesn’t make market sense, as it would be more efficient to spend the money on renewable energy, infrastructure, education, health, and the like, even aside from the pesky problem of human life.

In any case, PNAC’s manifesto laments that we must

fight and decisively
win multiple, simultaneous
major-theater wars

to preserve the so-called “Pax Americana”, conceding that the American public no longer will tolerate protracted wars.  Despite years of carefully composed propaganda and rhetoric, the political elites have yet to convince the public that war with Iran is necessary.  Trump’s wild approach may prove fatal in this instance, as he, like power-mad elites preceding him, fumes when “enemy” nations comply with sanctions.  Nonetheless this reluctance speaks to the increased civility of society.

On the other hand, Americans continue to support war mythology with the firm belief that at least in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II, we defeated tyranny, slavery, and fascism, respectively.  We’ve already addressed the farce that is the first of the three above.  The Civil War was easily preventable through diplomatic means, though the times were different.  Rather obviously, however, the union states simply could have attempted to purchase the slaves, perhaps to the tune of one billion dollars, as opposed to spending three billion to destroy countless cities and leave a buyer cultural resentment still harming us today (in an upcoming article, I’ll try to address the notion of white privilege and the legacy of slavery.)  If the north had really wanted a peaceful settlement, it could have permitted secession and encouraged slaves to flee into the free states.  The dirty secret is that the north no more wanted freed slaves than did the south.  In any case, Swanson debunks these wars with ease, leaving us with the last ace of the warmonger : the second world war.

Swanson Takes Down the “Good War”

For brevity, I’ll leave most of Swanson’s arguments about the so-called “good war” to the reader.  But suffice it to say that America was already in the war long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, actively cutting off supply lines and providing weapons and equipment to the European allies.  Truman famously quipped on the Senate floor that we should

help the Russians when
the Germans are winning
and the Germans when
the Russians are
winning[... s]o each
may kill off as many
as possible of the other.

Are these the words of a man pursuing peace and freedom?

Swanson further argues means of preventing Hitler’s rise through a less ridiculous settlement than the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of the first world war, deescalation of his militarism through discussion and diplomacy, and rescue of the Jewish refugees initially expelled from Hitler’s caustic, totalitarian empire.  Instead, we, along with Britain and France, isolated Germany, refused to aid the refugees, and in our case sold weapons to Britain and France while strengthening the Pacific navy, cutting off Japanese supplies in Manchuria, and conducting military exercises off the coast of Japan.  Americans actually held a rather favorable view of Hitler, as anti-Semitism was rampant among elite sectors here; both Joseph Kennedy and Prescott Bush, fathers of presidents-to-be, either held business dealings with or openly supported the Nazis even after America officially entered the war.  Fanta became Coca-Cola’s means of remaining in Germany, and Henry Ford placed a portrait of Hitler on his desk.  In fact, when Confessions of a Nazi Spy, a thriller starring Edward G. Robinson, premiered in Milwaukee, pro-Nazis burned the theater to the ground; even the far right Senators of the day wished to investigate Robinson and the film as Jewish propaganda angling for American entry into the war.

Enshrining the Holocaust only became important to the American political class with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1967, an unsolicited but helpful gesture in advancing American hegemony.  Though there’s much to add, suffice to say the one good war killed over seventy million people, or equivalently twenty percent of our current population.  Was that really necessary?  We touched on the atomic bombs dropped in 1945 at the conclusion of the war.  Are we better off for creating them?

A Great Read

Like all of David Swanson’s books and articles I’ve read, he powerfully confronts the folly of pro-war propaganda and the arguments, lofty or low-brow, for the perpetuation of war.  He eloquently rearranges the pieces of the puzzle to expose the idiocy of the arguments advanced by the state in support of violence, such as this gem with respect to our government offering protection to people facing chemical warfare :

[k]illing people to
prevent their being
killed with the wrong
kind of weapons is a
policy that must come
out of some sickness
[... c]all it Pre-
Traumatic Stress 
Disorder.

I highly recommend this and his other works, as he, like the great activists before him, tells the truth.  His words are more prescient than ever before as we confront the problems of the twenty-first century.

 

Trump : Symptom or Cause?

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The major news in recent weeks has featured prominently the ongoing investigation into Russia’s manipulation of last year’s presidential election, the possible complicity of Trump’s campaign in said manipulation, and Trump’s repeated snafus, contradictions, and rather astonishingly public twitter meltdowns. With so much ground to cover, it can be a bit difficult to decide where to begin.

If ever there were an argument against the fitness of a particular holder of the office, we have a collection of problems whose astonishing proliferation parallels the severity:

and the list continues. We have a dangerously unstable man occupying the White House with the power to intimidate, imperil, and harass with minimal Congressional oversight. In fact, the Republican response to each new abuse of power, though glacially warming from their lackluster tepid beginnings, contrasts immensely with mass hysteria among Congressional Republicans during Clinton’s sex scandal or Obama’s healthcare proposals, nicely captured by the analysts at the morally bankrupt Fox news. Certainly it evokes the astonishingly forgiving attitude of arch-conservative faith leaders such as Pat Robertson toward Trump when damning Access Hollywood tapes surfaced, recording his sexual objectification of women as things to abuse at his pleasure.  Robertson, like his high-minded counterparts of the past complicit in the Nazi ascent, offers spiritual cover for Trump even amidst major scandals.

The mainstream media, though largely responsible for placing Trump in the center seat with high-volume, free news coverage throughout 2015 and 2016, somehow found its voice once Trump slithered into the White House with a slight advantage in the obsolete electoral college, no doubt because of his incessant attacks on the press. Nonetheless, what bothers me most about the current state-of-affairs is not the alleged collusion, which I’d easily wager truly did happen (think : Trump entreated Russia to steal Hillary’s emails, not to mention the snowballing investigation mentioned above), nor is it the insanity of Trump himself, a condition so blatantly obvious that mental health professionals around the world, including three university professors who implored Obama to institute a mental fitness test for incoming presidents, and country have drifted from the Goldwater rule, an APA convention designed to depoliticize psychology.

Trump’s shenanigans and abuses of power, together with the ineffective, simpering cronies in Congress, uncover some of the more fearsome deficiencies in the American government. A continuing dialog by CBS with a group of voters tracks the evolution of public viewpoints since the election, revealing a remarkable characteristic among Trump’s most ardent loyalists : they believe law enforcement and government agents should swear an oath not only to uphold the U.S. Constitution, but offer unconditional support to the U.S. President. Though this received very little press coverage, it struck me with great alarm, as I recall learning even as an elementary school student in social studies that the principles of freedom articulated in the Constitution greatly exceeded any one leader in authority; though the transition into adulthood taught me how unfairly protectionist elite sectors happen to be, quite striking for example in the application of austere, lofty market principles to the poor and vulnerable while greedily hiding behind the nanny state to guarantee a good, yet non-market outcome, hearing even lower middle class and perhaps poor people hope for some sort of totalitarian pledge to an office of increasingly diminished constraint frankly frightened. In fact, the cavalier attitude of Trump’s strongest supporters, both in Congress and the population, toward his many abuses of power, incompetence, violations of the emoluments clause, leveraging his position to enrich companies owned by him, his daughter, and his son-in-law, nauseating affection for vicious, murderous dictators such as Putin, Duterte, and Erdogan, and highly suspect entanglements with foreign agencies indicate either deeply entrenched partisanship or discouraging ignorance. An obvious example was in questions lobbed by Senators James Kennedy, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz at Sally Yates about Trump’s ill-fated, first amendment-violating Muslim ban, in defiance of the purpose of her testimony, a discussion of Russian interference into the election, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kennedy mocked her by asking, “Who appointed you to the supreme court?”, blathering rather idiotically that no agent sworn to uphold the Constitution can argue with or overrule a despotic president ordering violations of that same document. It certainly gives one pause to consider that the racist underpinnings of Trump’s bans fly in the face of a multi-hundred billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia, the key source of “Wahabized” Sunnis fueling ISIS, according to regional expert Patrick Coburn. Obama had previously blocked such a sale because of the atrocious Saudi record of human rights violations, something a toady such as Kennedy might not know. Of course, though the ignorance of a petty sycophant in the Senate may be an acute example of the brokenness of the system, it hardly tells the whole story.

The House of Representatives harriedly passed a bastardization of healthcare reform in a desperately rushed, craven attempt to hand Trump some meager legislative victory before the Congress Budget Office could offer a sobering analysis delivered for the first variant of Trumpcare. I watched in utter astonishment as Representative Mark Sanford admitted not reading the entire bill; others confessed they simply wished to punt healthcare to the Senate. Honestly, I’ve often wondered how it was possible that public approval of the branches of the federal government negatively correlates to the democratic quality of the branch; that is, the House is the most hated, followed by the Senate, then the Supreme Court, then the White House. Yet listening to men whose only job is to propose, amend, read, understand, and approve/disapprove legislation affecting the entire country concede that their constitutional oaths to office, purported devotion to constituency, and their juicy six-figure salaries are meaningless in the face of a tantrum-throwing imbecile so set on any victory that slicing the throats of his own supporters with cuts to Medicaid, student loan subsidies, small business subsidies, and elimination of ACA protections seems perfectly reasonable. The worshiped, fabled checks-and-balances of our government, as usual, are only as powerful as the people enforcing them. So far, no success, despite the carefully laid out responsibilities of each branch listed in the Constitution, let alone the more serious constitutional pressure valve of impeachment.

Speaking recently to an educated family member whose devotion to Trump defies imagination, I attempted to outline the case for such an impeachment, suggesting that a narcissistic conman with near unconstrained war-making power and a profound ignorance of climate science can harm not just the vulnerable and the poor, largely unimportant to my relative, but also his own children’s chances of decent survival. His two retorts, utterly stunning, included a dismissal of corruption and abuses of power of both Trump and, appropriately parallel, Nixon as “not really a big deal,” and that all existential threats to humanity are resolvable through “population control.” That is, if there were fewer people on planet earth, nuclear weapons would magically no longer pose a threat. Though the effects on climate from exponential gains in population are noteworthy, it seems almost as ludicrous as simply asking the sun to turn down the heat, as it’s impossible to solve a population problem in the near term without anything short of genocide. I reminded him that the distribution of consumption and massive pollution of militaries and multinationals are more appropriate targets in mitigating ecological disaster. He even proffered population control as a means of ensuring enough employment for everyone, expressing loyalty to an outdated and outmoded economic paradigm derided by former Greenpeace CEO Paul Gilding as unsustainable. Even more astonishing is that my family member receives most of his salary through government safety net programs, seemingly oblivious to the self-inflicted wound supporting Trump’s heartless, destructive budget proposals happens to be, as mentioned above.

Much public discussion of impeachment has appeared in light of more recent revelations, including a courageous act by black Representative Al Green to call for and draw up articles; he has since received threats of murder and lynching, steeped in racial epithets.  Yet despite Trump’s turbulent relationship with media, it isn’t hard to pinpoint the two key weaknesses in the fourth estate’s watchdog role : Trump’s not-so-state-of-the-union address and his unilateral dropping of MOAB in Afghanistan and the bombing of a Syrian airfield. In each of these cases, the media tried, I think genuinely, to support him moments before the eruption of a new scandal. In the case of the former, they seemed excited he was behaving “presidential” by sounding less insane in his speech, demonstrating their societal function of continued subservience to power; in the case of the latter, violent military action tends unfortunately to generate a rally-around-the-flag effect, despite being an obviously impeachable offense. Intriguingly, Obama refused to act unilaterally in Syria because of threats by Congress to impeach him, yet the Republican leadership and mainstream media welcome with euphoria a completely ineffective airstrike which imperils relations with Russia and other players in the region. Also, MOAB, the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever created, devastates anything within a mile of its target, a vicious and malevolent display of aggression against an almost totally destroyed country. Of course, I’d agree if Obama had acted as such, he should have been impeached. In fact, every president since the second world war should have faced impeachment for some military action or another (think the invasion of Iraq, the drone assassination campaign, and so on), raising perhaps one of the most disconcerting developments in the past eighty years.

In the post-war era, Congress and the Supreme Court have increasingly broadened war-making powers of the President under the guise of national defense, offering

"[t]he President shall be Commander in Chief of
the Army and Navy of the United States, and of
the Militia of the several States, when called
into the actual Service of the United States"

as crucial constitutional support. Yet something happened at the conclusion of the second world war unforeseen by the framers: with the beginning of the nuclear age and the Anthropocene epoch, mankind for the first time was uniquely positioned to extinguish itself. The President of the United States, the single most powerful person in the most powerful institution to ever exist, can precipitate terminal nuclear war with the tenuous argument that it is necessary to provide the common defense. Dangers have abounded in the past, including orders by Nixon’s chief of staff Alexander Haig that no last minute nuclear strikes should occur without approval from himself and Henry Kissinger as the Nixon presidency collapsed under Watergate. We’ve discussed near-misses such as the Cuban missile crisis and Operation : Able Archer before, but the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is certainly worth remembering.

Watching as scandal after scandal shreds public institutions further, it again reminds me to ask why we need these institutions in the first place. Obama prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous administrations combined, and Democrats and non-Trump Republicans cheered, such as denouncing Edward Snowden to be a traitor after he revealed a mass surveillance operation leveraged by the NSA against the American population. Now, whistle-blowers from within the so-called “deep state” reveal information almost daily that acquaint us with the desperately precarious position in which we find ourselves, and the media and many Democrats cheer. The fact remains that though one can argue “state secrecy” as justification for concealing any information in the name of security, it again illustrates a fundamental distrust of the population that government representatives and elite media generally share. Leaks have always been an essential feature of elite power systems desperate to self-sustain even at odds with institutional charters, as Carl Bernstein pointed out in a recent op-ed. Certainly the decades-old “state secret” argument dovetails nicely with John Yoo’s doctrine on near constraint-free torture even against children and with white supremacist Stephen Miller’s claim that Trump’s authority “cannot be questioned”

Trump therefore happens to be especially acute in the danger he represents, but the problem persists as systemic; after all, if he’s guilty of abuse of power and obstruction of justice, aren’t all or most of his cabinet, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Devin Nunes, and the like? They too either refuse or offer tepid support to investigate what should be substantive news; admittedly, the U.S. has interfered through violence, subversion, subterfuge, and a host of other mechanisms in elections across the globe throughout are history. It certainly isn’t as fun when someone else does it to us.  Analysts argue back and forth as to whether his obstructions carry the requisite criminal intent, an almost laughable debate considering that quashing an investigation into your own possible criminality is by definition criminal intent.  It’s worth noting that even highly respectable analysts such as Glenn Greenwald suggest the possibility of no smoking gun in the case since Trump would be rather stupid to draw attention to himself in firing Comey; of course, he tacitly ascribes a rationality to Trump obviously missing when one applies even layperson psychology.  So we have a crazy, destructive narcissist running the White House, laying bare frailties of the crumbling public institutions before our very eyes.  How do we fix it?

An apparent strategy, and perhaps not beyond what is achievable in light of the many abuses of the White House, is to substantially curtail the power of the executive, increase the size of both the Supreme Court and Congress, and (with greater difficulty) adjust the Constitution to match the needs of a modern society. Watching as the media and Congress wait with breathless abandon for the president to set the agenda is laughable; why does the White House set the legislative agenda? How can corrupt gerrymanderers in North Carolina who think arguing that partisan advantage justifies racial discrimination garner a single vote from the Supreme Court, let alone those of Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy? How is it that the U.S. Senate can sit idly by while Trump, a serial liar, continues to violate the Constitution and obstruct investigations into his own corruption? If we survive the time Trump is in office (and I’m increasingly convinced that time will be very brief), we should try to solve the serious inadequacies of our system, and that right soon.