Fascism From West Point
By David Swanson
August 31, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
This headline in the Guardian
is completely accurate:
West Point professor calls on US military to target legal critics of
war on terror.But it hardly covers to
content of the 95-page paper being reported on:
see the PDF.
The author makes clear that his motivation is
hatred of Islam. He includes the false myth of origins of Western
Asian violence toward the United States lying in antiquity rather
than in blowback. He includes the lie, now popular on all sides, of
Iran pursuing nuclear weapons.
He announces, after the recent U.S. losses in Iraq
and Afghanistan, that U.S. armies always win. Then he admits that
the U.S. is losing but says this is because of insufficient support
for the wars and for making the wars about an "economic system,
culture, values, morals, and laws."
The key weapon in this war, he says, is
information. U.S. crimes are not the problem; the problem, he
writes, is any information distributed about U.S. crimes -- which
information is only damaging because the United States is the
pinnacle of support for the rule of law. It wouldn't matter if you
spread news about crimes by some more lawless nation. But when you
share news about crimes by the United States it hurts the U.S. cause
which is upholding the rule of law and leading the world to
lawfulness. The United States is the all-time world champion of the
rule of law, we're told, in a 95-page screed that never mentions the
Kellogg-Briand Pact and only belatedly brings up the United Nations
Charter in order to pretend that it permits all U.S. wars.
You can pack a lot of existing lies about U.S.
wars and some new ones into 95 pages. So, for example, Walter
Cronkite lost the Tet Offensive (and by the logic of the rest of
this article, should have been immediately murdered on air). The
mythical liberal media is busy reporting on the U.S. killing of
civilians, and the worst voices in public discourse are those of
treasonous U.S. lawyers. They are the most damaging, again, because
the United States is the preeminent leader of lawibidingness.
The treasonous antiwar lawyers number 40, and the
author hints that he has them on a list. Though whether this is a
real list like Obama's kill list or something more like McCarthy's
is not clear. I lean toward the latter, primarily because the list
of offenses run through to fill up 95 pages includes such an array
that few if any lawyers have been engaged in all of them. The
offenses range from the most modest questioning of particular
atrocities to prosecuting Bush and Cheney in court. Nobody doing the
latter has any voice in U.S. corporate media, and a blacklist for
Congress or for the U.S. Institute of "Peace" would hardly be needed
if created.
The 40 unnamed treasonous scholars are, in this
treatise, given the acronym CLOACA, which in good fascist form of
course means a sewer or an orifice for excreting feces or urine.
Their supposed crimes include:
- failing to concede that violations of the
Laws of Armed Conflict by Muslims permit the waiving of those
laws for the U.S. government;
- interpreting the supposed standards of
"distinction" and "proportionality," which the author admits are
totally open to interpretation, to mean something the author
doesn't like;
- opposing lawless imprisonment and torture;
- opposing murder by drone;
- supporting the supposed duty to warn people
before you kill them;
- counting dead bodies (which is too "macabre"
even though the U.S. is supposedly devoted to "minimizing
civilian casualties" not to mention Western scientific
superiority);
- upholding laws; pointing out facts, laws, or
counterproductive results;
- filing suits in court;
- or criticizing war advocates.
The heart of the matter seems to be this: opposing
war amounts to supporting war by an enemy. And, nonetheless, among
the reasons offered to explain CLOACA joining the enemy are
"anti-militarism," and "pernicious pacifism." So actual opposition
to war drives people to oppose war, which amounts to supporting war
for the enemy. I think I've got it.
The prescriptions to heal this illness center on
waging total war. The author proposes both dropping nuclear bombs
and capturing hearts and minds. No doubt as part of his leading
support for lawfulness, he demands that there be no restraint on
U.S. warmaking against Muslims. That means no limit in time or
place, a rewriting of any laws of war by the U.S. military, and no
trust in the "marketplace of ideas." The U.S. must use PSYOPS, must
impose loyalty oaths, must fire disloyal scholars from their jobs,
must prosecute them for "material support of terrorism" and for
treason, and must proceed to murder them in any time and place.
I suppose that when I point out that this
illustrates the madness of militarism I should breathe a deep sigh
of relief that I have no law degree.
David Swanson is an American activist, blogger
and author. -
http://warisacrime.org