Category: War

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The M26 Pershing Tank

Incidentally:

“In Finland the swastika was used as the official national marking of the Finnish Defense Forces between 1918 and 1945 and also of the Finnish Air Force, anti-aircraft troops as a part of the air force, and tank troops at that time.” Wikipedia.

I had never heard of that before. I wonder if they stop using it after the war.

I can’t tell you how many times, as a kid, I heard my friends and adults speak with awe about the Sherman tank. The Sherman tank won the war. The Sherman tank scared the bejeebers out of the Nazis. Oh my God, it’s a Sherman tank! Run!

If you were a soldier and your commanding officer told you to get into a Sherman tank and get out there and take on those Panthers and Tigers like a good boy — you’d have a right to take a court martial instead. Especially after you found out that your commanding officers, when offered a choice between the Sherman and the heavier M26 Pershing, chose the Sherman. We don’t need a bigger tank. Too expensive, and too heavy! No no, my boys will be just fine in one of those cute little Shermans.

In one battle, 17 of 18 Shermans were knocked out in the first twenty minutes.

The British called them “Ronsons”. Ronson was a lighter company which advertised “lights first time, every time”.

Would Patton have gotten into a Sherman knowing that a Panther was waiting around the corner?

I don’t know where the myths came from. Well, yes I do. There were a lot of generals and manufacturers and corporate executives and politicians invested in the Sherman. And there was no doubt about the fact that they were able to produce a lot of them: 50,000 by the end of the war. (The Soviets were producing about 1,500 T34’s a month at peak production).

The Sherman was lightly armored and fast. The speed didn’t matter: the German Tiger had an 80 or 90% kill rate against the Shermans. A Sherman could only take out a Tiger tank if six or seven of them attacked at the same time and one of them managed to get behind the Tiger. And even then, he better be quick: the other five would have been destroyed by then.

And let’s get to the truth: certain American generals bragging about the maneuverability and speed of the tank was like your best friend saying that the blind date he is trying to arrange is really quite smart and talented. In actual testing, both the allies and the Germans discovered that the Panther and Tiger tanks turned faster, climbed better, and were less likely to get bogged down in the mud.

The Russians weren’t as stupid. By 1943, they were at work on a larger tank to take on the Panthers and Tigers: the T-34, which performed admirably against the Germans, notably in the Battle of Kursk.

General George S. Patton championed the Sherman…. until the battle of Arracourt, a victory for the allies of no strategic importance. The fog and air supremacy favored the allies but it was also clear that the Germans were still capable of formidable opposition with their Panthers. Patton started asking for the Pershings.

The Pershing, astonishingly, employed the same engine as the much lighter Sherman. Who was in charge of this? Who made this decision? Let’s increase the weight by 50% but keep the same engine? The M26 Pershing, not surprisingly, like the German Tigers, tended to break down a lot.

Towards the end of this video, live footage of a battle between a Sherman and a Panzer, and then an M26 Pershing and the same Panzer, dramatize, in grim fashion, the reality.  Would you feel safe in a tank?

Does size matter:

 

Sherman  30 tons.
Panther (Panzerkampfwagen V)  46 tons
M26 Pershing  46 tons.
Tiger II  70 tons.
T34 (Soviets)  26 tons.
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Marinus Van der Lubbe

The Reichstag was set on fire February 27, 1933. June 30 – July 2, 1934: “The Night of the Long Knives”.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party won a fair amount of popular support by 1932– about 33% , the Communists won about 17% of the seats, and other parties, including the “Catholic Center” party (which later joined with the Nazis to approve “The Enabling Act” making Hitler dictator), the rest.

It was not enough to give Hitler absolute power.

Then came the burning of the Reichstag, part, it was alleged, of a plot to overthrow the government, led by Marinus Van der Lubbe.

Was there ever a less impressive threat to national security than this pathetic little whiner, who was actually drummed out of the Communist Party several times because he seemed to have no sense whatsoever? No wonder many historians tried their best to prove that he was never actually involved, that it was actually Goering and his fellow jackboots (Goering joked about being responsible for it at Nuremberg). But history seems to have coalesced around the idea that Van der Lubbe really did do it– handed the Nazis a fabulous excuse to arrest their political opponents. Hitler, a witness reports, seemed genuinely startled and confused by the event.

Was Goering? There’s room for doubt. But I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

One thing is clear: if the Nazis had planned it, it was brilliant.

People are easily frightened. Very easily frightened. Very, very easily frightened. And they are easily deceived. The weakest leaders of all, the most frightened and timid and stupid, are those who panic in a crisis and enact draconian measures. Why “The Enabling Act”, which gave Hitler absolute power? Why the NSA today? Because our leaders are cowards. They are terrified. They don’t know what to do. So they make a great show of doing something, of spending unlimited amounts of taxpayer money on useless security measures, on wars on countries that were not even involved in the original attack, and then they trump up charges against marginal suspects and rigged the court system and march them off to prison, because they are cowards.

Who has wrecked more real havoc on the lives of Americans today than the terrorists? Well, the banks. Drug dealers with the violent gang wars. Energy companies with their coal plants. The medical establishment with their ruinous charges and their end-of-life unnecessary treatments. The government, sending foolish young men overseas to die in wars against the wrong enemy. The chemical – fertilizer industries with their explosions and their fires.

It is a duty of every citizen to take sufficient measures to ensure that his own indifference, ignorance, or complicity does not lead to his fellow citizens becoming subject to tyranny.

Incidentally, the Germans can’t get enough of Marinus Van der Lubbe, the crazy Dutchman who allegedly burned down the Reichstag. After his initial trial before the Reichsgericht (German High Court) in which he was found guilty and beheaded, he was posthumously given an eight-year sentence in 1967, found innocent in 1980, not guilty by reason of insanity in 1981, and pardoned in 2008. Did he actually do it?

Ernst Rohm

The Officer class of the German Reichswehr and Hitler’s industrialist sponsors were notably concerned about the “morals” of the SA (Sturmabteilung — “Storm Battalion”) under Ernst Rohm. They didn’t like the homosexuality, the parties, and the street violence. Once Hitler eliminated Rohm and his cohorts, they were fine with the rest of the Nazi program: genocide, war, totalitarianism. As long as we don’t have any of that icky homosexuality.

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Hannah Arendt

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish People. This is something that is easily said: ‘The Jewish People will be exterminated’, says every party member, ‘this is very obvious, it is in our program — elimination of the Jews, extermination, a small matter.’ And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17.   Heinrich Himmler, October 4, 1943

Some people I know recently saw the film “Hannah Arendt” and reported that they liked the film and that, after all, she was right. I refer, of course, to her comment about “the banality of evil”. I have to admit that I have long misunderstood the comment, and I am glad I did.

What she meant was that people like Adolf Eichmann were not “evil” in the sense that mankind usually imagines evil, as some malevolence that is clearly evident in manners or attitudes or expressions or even body language. In fact, in Arendt’s view, Eichmann was, in a way, not even really evil. We know today that Arendt believed Eichmann when he told the Israeli court that he was merely following orders, when he facilitated the murder of five million Jews, and that he, personally, bore no animus towards them.

It has emerged that Eichmann left some writings that clearly expressed an absolutely savage attitude towards the Jews. He lied to the Israeli court and it is not to Arendt’s credit that she believed him.

It causes me no end of wonder that she believed him.

I’m astonished.

Now, I had misunderstood the phrase “banality of evil”. I had thought that Arendt was telling us that evil often looks banal to us, but it is still evil. That evil is often disguised as good intentions or well-meaning attitudes. But it is still evil. In essence, I thought she was saying that people are extraordinarily talented at casting their own evil impulses as intentions that are noble or admirable in some way, like bringing freedom to Iraq or Viet Nam, or education to Afghani women, or democracy to Cuba. What people believe in these instances is that we should kill people who don’t agree with our ideas about freedom and democracy. But of course, you can’t say that, so you say, we are here to liberate you. With very few exceptions, this attitude is always a lie. We never really ask our brave young men to die for their country, though we say we do, when we hold sacraments and rituals to commemorate it.  No, what we want them to do for our country is kill.   But to say that aloud would be to make the evil in us naked, so we don’t.  Instead, we engage in banal demonstrations of fealty and admiration.

In my view, Eichmann– even if you can believe his protestations at his trial– was actually evil, and we had better understand that most of the evil that occurs in our world is caused by Eichmanns and they do mean it no matter how talented they are at making it all look rational and sad and necessary.

Nazi Germany did not just walk into Poland and announce that they were conquering a nation in order to take their land. The Germans first staged fake attacks on German citizens by fake Polish soldiers, then howled in outrage, and set out to punish the miscreants. Yes, even the Nazis felt a need to put on a face. Himmler’s speech, as quoted above, is remarkably naked, and remarkably true. He observes the amazing capacity of a nation to indulge in utter denial: everyone pretended it was not “extermination”– it was “resettlement”. Goering himself castigated an underling for using the wrong word once. He learned.

Himmler’s purpose, you need to know, was to destroy the possibility of all those present to deny that they knew what was happening, in the face of Germany’s imminent defeat. He didn’t want them all to be able to say, with Eichmann, I didn’t know what the ultimate destination was. I didn’t know they were going to exterminate them.

This is what Hannah Arendt did not get: that people are powerfully able to present themselves as moral and conscientious while they really are selfish and self-interested. In fact, a good portion of popular culture consists of presenting ourselves as selfless and kind and adorable, for the purpose of which we knowingly falsify our own stories. We killed thousands of Viet Namese because we were all able to pretend that it was about democracy and human rights when it was really all about global domination: America was terrified that the communists would end up controlling most of Asia.

And yes, we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for the oil. The fact that this was officially presented and accepted as bringing human rights and democracy to Iraq does not mean that most Americans really believed that, or that they really believed that bringing democracy and human rights to Iraq did not include the oil. If, in fact, America had restored democracy to Iraq and Iraq had elected a government that chose not to sell it’s oil to America, the vast majority of Americans would have been outraged and would have urged the government foment a coup.

 

There is a VERY hot debate going on between partisans of Arendt and critics. Critics claim that Arendt reduced Eichmann to a mere “cog” in the machine, and therefore “less evil” than he really was. Partisans say she did not. But the partisans clearly mean that Arendt didn’t think Eichmann was innocent, which, obviously, is true. So, therefore, she didn’t diminish his culpability. But, in fact, she does, in my opinion, because she asserts that Eichmann’s willingness to be part of a machine, to obey orders, to go along with his friends and family and colleagues and government, is not itself an evil, or at least, not an extraordinary evil. (Borrowing from Martin Heidegger, she suggests that Eichmann wasn’t even a authentic person.)

His unwillingness to decide morally against participation and act on this conviction– is, in my opinion, itself as evil and monstrous as, say, the police in Chicago during the riots of 1968 who saw protesters as weirdoes and freaks, or Joshua Bolton advocating war on Iran, or William Calley, or thousands and millions of others.

As Buffy Ste. Marie would say, “he’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame...” The soldier asserts that he is willing to die for his country. But he knows that he is willing to kill for his country, and that is most authentic thing about him.

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War on Drugs

I am against drug abuse on a deeply personal level, but I am against drug prohibition on every level, personal and political. But it doesn’t matter that I am or that The Wire reflects this, because our political culture cannot and will not produce the selfless courage necessary for a political leader to address the problem honestly. Our political culture only produces politicians and it serves only the relentless ambition of those willing to tell us what we think we want to hear. David Simon, Co-creator of “The Wire”.

Was a war ever fought, for so long, and with such poor results, as the war on drugs?

It was started over 40 years ago by Richard Nixon, as part of his law and order campaign, a successful appeal to middle America, in the belief that more resources and money and manpower could eliminate the scourge of drug addictions. In fact the opposite has happened: drug smuggling, sales, and use are more pervasive than ever before. The initial reduction in the amount of drugs entering the country resulted in increased prices which resulted in increased imports, more dealers, more runners, more robbery and murder, and more addiction. The war on drugs was a compete failure.

Now, in a normal situation, people might look at a program, at it’s goals and methods, and it’s expectations, and decide whether or not it was a success. And if it was a failure, they would abandon that program and try something else.

But the thing about drugs is that America can always imagine that it could be worse. It’s not easy to analyze the drug problem from the point of view of what the untold billions of dollars the war on drugs is costing America could do if they had been spent on treatment instead of interdiction.

As Simon observes, there is almost no politician with the guts to admit that the war on drugs is a complete failure even though, by any reasonable measure, it obviously is. Except, perhaps, for Ron Paul, who has more or less declared that if anyone wants to destroy himself with drugs, why should the government get in the way?

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The Cost of Warfulness

The New York Times has published an update on comments made by President Eisenhower in 1953, in what was known as the “Chance for Peace” speech, an appeal to the Soviet Union to not indulge in an arms race.   He compared the costs of some major pieces of military equipment with the cost of items with peaceful purposes, like roads and schools and asserted that every dollar spent on  weapons robbed the citizens of tangible peacetime benefits.  Yes, this was a Republican ex-General speaking.  Quite a contrast to the current crop of Republicans who have repeatedly insisted on giving the military more money than it asks for.

The U.S. was spending about 14% of GDP on defense in 1953, the height of the Korean War.  Today, that number is 4.3%.   1953 was a mere eight years removed from World War II, and the U.S. was still at war with Korea, so perhaps the numbers are skewed.  Perhaps we literally get better bang for out buck today.

 

Product Cost Equivalence
F84F Thunderstreak Fighter Jet (1953) $769K 170,000 bushels of wheat
F-22 Raptor (2012) $250 million 29,500,000 bushels of wheat
B54 Stratojet Bomber (1953) $1,500K 30 schools, 2 hospitals, 2 power plants, 50 miles of roads,
B2 Stealth Bomber (2012) $1.5 billion 99 schools, 19 Power Plants
6 hospitals
328 miles of roads
destroyer (1953) 8,000 homes
destroyer (2012) $1.5 billion 34,000 homes

It’s interesting to me how much the price of these objects of destruction have gone up.  A car cost about $800 – 1000 in the 1950’s and today it cost about 20 times as much.  But 20 times $1.5 million (Stratojet Bomber) is a hell of a lot less than $15 billion, which is about 1,000 times the 1953 cost.  That car should cost $1,000,000.

I firmly believe that cost escalation is a result of what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”, that incestuous relationship between the government and business, between congressmen and lobbyists, and industries in the home district, that leads to vastly increased costs, including, famously, the defective F-35, which, it appears, will cost an infinite amount of money, and is necessary to defend us against no one.

University costs have climbed in a similar fashion.  I attended Trinity Christian College in 1974-75 to 1978-79 (I took a year off to work and travel Europe).  My cost the first year for tuition, room and board (on campus housing) was about $3100.  My parents were not wealthy so I received grants totaling about $1400 and loans from the Canadian government for about $1500.   My brother, who was a full-time mechanic, earned about $20,000 that year.  A new car cost about $3600, a gallon of gas was .42.

Here’s my table:

tuition/room & board 3100 35000 11 x
car 3500 19000 5.5 x
salary 17000 43000 3 x
gas 42 2.75 6 x
record (single) .99 .99 !
record (album) 4.99 22.00 4.5 x

It’s interesting that we are actually spending less of GDP on defense than we did in the 1950’s.  I believe that it’s not because our values or strategies have changed, though they have, but due to the fact that our society now produces an overwhelming volume of stuff, so that our defense spending is a smaller proportion of overall productivity.    But it leads me to wonder if the aspiration of peaceniks to reduce defense spending is not somewhat misplaced.  I don’t think cutting our military spending will reduce poverty: it will further enrich people who already manage to pay as little tax as possible.

 

Afterthought

The most effective weapon of World War II–on the ground, at least– was the German Tiger I and Tiger II tanks. A Tiger I cost about 800,000 Reichsmarks, and required the labour of 6,000 people working for one week, or the wages of 30,000 people for one week. Which leads one to wonder just how sustainable the 3rd Reich ever was. The V-2 rocket was also extraordinarily expensive. It killed thousands, but at a cost of millions of Reichsmarks per death.

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The Expensive Iranian Hostage

The former U.S. hostages in Iran believe they should be able to sue the government of Iran for compensation for the horrible suffering they experienced during their 444 days of captivity. I don’t know what kind of scale can be applied here but I know that everyone thinks that their specific suffering is more entitled to sympathy and compensation than anyone else’s suffering, and that while it is never, ever about the money, it is always, always about the money.

And advertisers.

ABC Television decided to run a nightly news program called “Nightline” which was primarily a big fat wet kiss to Ronald Reagan: “The Hostage Crisis! Day blah-blah-blah” making it sound like the entire world had come to a stop to wait to see if the American hostages were going to make it home all right. There were ribbon campaigns, lots of speeches, and miserable old Jimmy Carter stewing in the White House incapable of doing anything about it. Other than, of course, the ill-advised rescue attempt.

The hostages were released after the Iranians were sure that Carter had lost re-election (after he stupidly launched a military rescue attempt) and a deal was concluded which, among other things, specified that the hostages could not sue the Government of Iran for damages.

The State Department had no objection to this clause because you can’t sue a sovereign government for damages anyway.

This outraged the hostages. “How dare the U.S. government sign an agreement that keeps us from untold wealth?!”  Did I say it’s not about the money?

They were hoping to go after seized Iranian assets. But you can see the problem, can’t you? The Iranians could turn around, of course, and sue the U.S. and Great Britain for sponsoring the coup that brought the Shah to power in the first place, and allowed him to repress and torture his own citizens for 35 years while looting the country of billions in oil wealth, and hold massive coronation parades for himself, and buying lots and lots of U.S. military equipment to defend Iran against– get this– the communists! Yes, it was a quaint period in our history..

Could native peoples sue our governments for forcing treaties on them and then violating those same treaties anyway? How about the Vietnamese, whose elected government was overthrown by the French, and then the Americans? Or Guatemala or Nicaragua? Why there is no end of tearful stories.

Among all the tearful stories in the world, the Iranian Hostages don’t rank among the teariest. For one thing, they were willing participants in a corrupt government relationship with a dictatorial regime. For another, it was Carter’s stupidity in allowing the Shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment that precipitated the crisis. How kind, to our old friend, the dictator! Just as Thatcher was kind to Pinochet! Our selective kindnesses sometimes do us in.

And finally, the biggest complaint the hostages have about their treatment is that they were held against their wishes and they often feared that something awful was going to happen to them. In general, however, they were not treated too badly. Not nearly as badly as the dissidents the Shah imprisoned and tortured.

So, I’m not against compensation. Let’s add them to the list and indulge in no end of suit and counter-suit and counter-counter-suit.

Afterthought

Part of the story you won’t hear anything about: the families of the victims of the Newtown Connecticut attack are all going to receive big checks from the government.

So, you think, that’s nice. The government stepped in and compensated people who were victims of serious crimes. This required legislation because there is no existing government policy of compensating victims of violent crime.

So when can the mother of Trayvon Martin expect her check?

Oh wait…

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Idiotic Folk Songs

Donovan Leitch, the Scottish folksinger (best known for “Mellow Yellow”) inexplicably recorded an insipid song, “Remember the Alamo” on “What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid”, around 1966 I think. It was always an oddity, released, as it was, in the late 1960’s, amid a plethora of antiwar songs like “Billy, Don’t be a Hero”. As a single, it failed to chart and was withdrawn amid a dispute between record labels. Donovan became the very emblem of 1960’s Flower Child, visiting the Maharishi Yogi, singing about meadows and hurly-gurlies and Jennifer Juniper, who was actually Patti Boyd’s entrancing younger sister.

“Remember the Alamo” repeats the myth of Travis drawing a line in the sand with his sword, challenging his men to fight an overwhelmingly large fast approaching Mexican force.

A hundred and eighty
were challenged by Travis
to die…

Doesn’t that put it eloquently?

This is an unusually perverse myth designed to ameliorate the perception that Travis forced his men to die in an utterly futile battle in order to gratify his own perverse ambition.

If only… sure, if there was ever a situation in which a soldier really gave up his life so that others could live or be free, sure, that would be a hell of an honorable thing to do.

It has almost never been done.

It is believed to be done every time a soldier points his gun at someone.

Soldiers are there to kill for their country– not to die for their country. There is not a general in the world who has any real use for a soldier who would die for his country. Certainly Exxon and Dupont and General Motors don’t need large numbers of young deluded males to travel to a foreign country and kill themselves. They need large numbers of young deluded males to travel to a foreign country to kill other young deluded males and take their oil.

Even suicide bombers need to do it in a crowd.

Fear not little darling of dying
If this world be
sovereign and free
For we’ll fight to the last
for as long as liberty be

What the hell is the point of “sovereign and free” if you are dead? And is that really what you are fighting for?

James Bowie, incidentally, is described in some accounts as, among other things, a “slave-trader”. This doesn’t get mentioned often, if at all, in other accounts of his life.  It doesn’t get mentioned in the song.

 

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Privatizing Abuse

I am not a lawyer. I am a citizen. As a citizen, I vote for a political party at election time hoping that the party I vote for wins. The party that wins has a mandate from the voters to govern. We all generally accept that even if I didn’t vote for the winning party, I will respect the fact that this party has a mandate to govern. In the process of governing, this party can hire individuals to perform certain tasks and functions on behalf of the government. One of those functions is the justice system. The government can hire police who then have the authority to arrest a person if the police have evidence that this person has committed a crime. If convicted of breaking the law, a person may be locked up in a prison and guarded by other individuals hired by the government for that purpose. If you assault a police officer or guard– unless, as is sometimes likely, you have a good reason– you are essentially assaulting a legitimate representative of the government. These representatives of the government have the authority to use physical force if necessary to enforce the law.

They swear to it. And they swear that they will serve the constitution and the laws of the state — not the will of any political party or business or church.

I have never understood why it is believed in some quarters that  such authority can be transferred to a private company. I have never accepted that this can be done, that it can be legitimate in the strict sense of the word, or that we owe the slightest respect to the “authority” supposedly held by any such individual.

In fact, I think I do understand. It is a lie.

In my humble opinion, a private company cannot be given the authority that is normally vested in the government. A private company cannot have the legitimacy to enforce public laws and statutes because a private company is fundamentally exactly what it is: a private company. It does not have a public mandate. It was not elected. It does not swear allegiance to the constitution or to the laws of the nation.

The employees of this company cannot be responsible both to their employer and to the government. They are paid to provide a profit-making service to their employer. They are not paid to “enforce the law”. That is ridiculous– they don’t get fired if the law isn’t enforced. They get fired if they fail to help the company make a profit. They are not accountable to elected representatives of the people: they are accountable to shareholders. If an employee of one of these companies violates the constitution by using force to detain a citizen, he doesn’t get fired; he gets outsourced.

In my opinion, the government cannot contract out it’s own mandate; it cannot sell it’s legitimacy. It cannot attach it’s authority to anybody but itself. No moreso than it can sell the nation out from under your feet to the highest bidder, pay itself huge bonuses, and retire to the Cayman Islands.

A government cannot outsource it’s own constitutional accountability.

Imagine, if you will, that an election is held, and, say, George Bush wins the election. He has a mandate to govern. Suppose he says, now that I’m president, I’m going to appoint James Dobson to the presidency. And then suppose James Dobson goes around issuing orders, raising taxes, dumping people off welfare and Medicare, and appointing justices to the Supreme Court, and ordering the arrest of witches. Would a court uphold a trial of a witch because James Dobson is the president of the United States and has the authority to order the arrest of witches? No. Not, of course, without a good deal of corruption.

In my opinion, anyone imprisoned in a privately owned facility that the government has contracted with to hold prisoners, has a legitimate right to use force against the staff of that prison, for the staff are kidnappers. A prisoner could rightfully say, I will respect the right of a police officer or a duly appointed state official to arrest and detain me. You are not a police officer. You may not use force against me. If you do, I will charge you with assault.

We do “allow” soldiers to kill during wartime. You could argue that that right is dubious as well, but let’s humour the militarists for a moment and accept that there can be a legitimacy to a “war”, like, say Iraq (which was not an act of self-defense). What authority to kill they do have comes solely from the fact that they are representative of a nation that is legally at war with another country. No business entity can be in such a state. There is no legal framework for a business to declare war on a country. If a business did declare war on a country, it’s leaders and owners would be arrested as… .terrorists, actually. At the very least, they would be regarded as criminals.

Do the privately contracted individuals carrying out military duties in Afghanistan have any legitimacy? How can they possibly have the right to kill people when they do not represent the government?

You probably think, I’m sure the top legal minds in the country have had a look at this issue before the government went ahead and started contracting out all these services and functions. You might be wrong. The move to privatize prisons and war and other government functions was largely driven by (corrupt) political ideology. (I say “corrupt” because, over and over again, this outsourcing ends up being a financial bonanza for well-connected private firms and don’t save the taxpayer any money at all– look at Blackwater.)

I would also note that the Supreme Court in the U.S. no longer has much authority itself: it’s dominated by a bunch of hack Republican appointees who virtually never vote against the party line.

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The Department of Murder

When did Obama become the head of Murder Incorporated?

Malcolm X got raked by the media when he commented, in reference to the Kennedy assassination, that “the chickens have come home to roost”. He was referring to the role of the U.S. in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the history of violent racial oppression in the American South.

How exactly does the U.S. condemn murder and assassination when it has adopted– enthusiastically– the exact same policy when dealing with whomever it chooses to define as an enemy?

The U.S. will proclaim loudly to itself– when the chickens once again, inevitably, come home to roost– that it is outraged, outraged, I say, that so-called civilized nations would resort to murder and assassination as tools of foreign policy! How dare they!

And within it’s own borders, Americans will purr contentedly that all of the mayhem they sow in revenge if justified by the angels because we are such a good, virtuous nation….

And the rest of the world will see that for exactly what it is: the rankest hypocrisy. You did it too! You’ve been bombing and droning and murdering for years, and now you’re upset that other nations said, okay, we get the idea.

Does Obama mind? You can’t be a priss, after all. Americans will forgive many things in a leader– fecklessness, moral turpitude, inconsistency– but never that he failed to show a willingness to kill on our behalf, a facility with mayhem, a willingness to converse with unspeakable cruelty, always, always, oh always, with the illusion of moral rectitude.

The fervor with which Americans indulge in patriotic pageants and parades would lead one to believe … what? Not that there’s any courage in it. All it took to get America to give up its treasured civil liberties and the principle of rule by law was one attack in one city. Most of the country went into paranoid hysterics and hasn’t recovered since. George Bush said, if I provide you with the illusion of safety will let me listen in on your phone messages without a warrant, and America said yes, yes, please yes, anything to keep us safe.

Obama said, will you re-elect me if I take it upon myself to kill people who frighten our intelligence agencies, and America said yes! And Romney said, I will save you from the Russians. And so far, America says, what?

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The Eisenhower Memorial

Someone– the Dwight Eisenhower Memorial Commission, to be precise– decided there should be a monument to Dwight D. Eisenhower. This committee met and decided: who the hell needs an architect or sculptor or designer?! We’ll do it ourselves! People will be so impressed. Years from now, they will wonder, “how did they come up with that brilliant design?!” And so it was done.

It was not, of course. Well, why the hell not? Because not one person on this committee has the ability to design a toilet let alone a monument. So they hired Frank Gehry.

The Eisenhower family is not happy. They feel that the dignity of the man has been compromised by a statue of Eisenhower as a young boy, “looking out on his future accomplishments” (in the words of Gehry). They want something more authoritarian and imposing at the center of the memorial complex. How about Dwight holding a bazooka?

Frank Gehry's memorial to Eisenhower is stunning at night - The Washington Post

Gehry must need the money. He is making all the smooching noises you need to make to keep the well paid commission. You want an older Eisenhower? You got it. Want him to be bigger than he was in real life? You got it.

Want me to emphasize the humility and unpretentiousness of the guy? Oh ho! We can make it ten feet tall!

Everyone remembers Ike as the man who warned us about the military-industrial complex. We all took note of this sage advice then devoutly ignored it: the modern military-industrial complex, and the infinite cost of the F-35 Fighter (at a time when the West really has no formidable enemies) is something that Eisenhower could only have imagined in his worst nightmares.

If the Eisenhower Memorial seems monumentally dull, the new Martin Luther King Memorial is positively Stalinesque. In fact, King looks a lot like Chairman Mao emerging from the solid rock…

The King Memorial is positively the most miscalculated, dumbest monument I have ever seen. It’s something you imagine being erected to Kim Jung Il or Ho Chi Minh.

There is no end in usefulness to the famous “Spinal Tap” sequence about the amplifier with a volume settings that go up to 11. You can try to impress people with beauty, subtlety, elegance, and imagination… or you can just make it bigger or louder.