Dear Friend,
It is always inspiring to hear women at Shaheen Bagh as their spirit and energy still is an envy for all. Most of the time a movement more than 65 days old would get tired as the government or the critics of Shaheen Bagh would have thought but to their disappointment, the unity and fraternity at Shaheen Bagh is more inspiring and a great learning for all. This protest movement has created new hope and dynamic leadership where the women are the leaders
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Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
Shaheen Bagh movement is an inspiration to
understand peaceful democratic protests in India
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
It is always inspiring to hear women at Shaheen Bagh as their spirit and energy still is an envy for all. Most of the time a movement more than 65 days old would get tired as the government or the critics of Shaheen Bagh would have thought but to their disappointment, the unity and fraternity at Shaheen Bagh is more inspiring and a great learning for all. This protest movement has created new hope and dynamic leadership where the women are the leaders
Shaheen Bagh means we need to strengthen Fight for public space
by Vidyadhar Date
One aspect ignored regarding the Shaheen Bagh protests on the citizenship issue in Delhi is the issue of denial of public space to people, increasing
restraints on acces to existing such spaces.Civil liberties groups urban planners should seriously study, take up these issues.The Supreme court raised questions on February 10 about protests on roads in Delhi . It would be pertinent to point to an assertion made by poet Mirza Ghalib in the same city . What he said in translation was `neither temple nor mosque, neither door nor threshold, it is the public road we are are sitting on, why should any rival dislodge us ?’
Not Just Communalist: Unpacking India’s New Citizenship Law and its Impact on the Indigenous Northeast
by Maya D. Cheynoux
In Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Manipur, the CAA’s demographic burden is disproportionate: even though northeastern states represent a mere 8% of India’s land mass,they are being asked to bear the weight of more than half of the newly
instated citizens, under the CAA.
Winter 2019-20 was so far the warmest on record in the contiguous U.S.
by Countercurrents Collective
The first two months of meteorological winter (December 2019 – January 2020) were the warmest on record for the contiguous U.S. in data going back to 1895. January 2020 the fifth warmest January on record in all 48 contiguous states. The states saw above- to much-above-average temperatures last month. This was the ninth consecutive January with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average for the month.
January Average Temperature Departures
The first two months of meteorological winter (December 2019 – January 2020) were the warmest on record for the contiguous U.S. in data going back to 1895. January 2020 the fifth warmest January on record in all 48 contiguous states. The states saw above- to much-above-average temperatures last month. This was the ninth consecutive January with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average for the month.
Thirteen states had a top-ten-warmest January, including every New England state except Vermont.
Dozens of cities east of the Mississippi River were reporting one of their warmest winters to date from December 1 through February 17, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. All of the big cities of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, from Boston to Washington, D.C., have seen less snow than usual.
January was also quite damp for the Lower 48 and ranked in the wettest third of the 126-year climate record.
The National Climate Report, January 2020 by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Centers for Climate Information said:
The average January temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 35.5 degrees F (5.4 degrees above the 20th-century average) and ranked fifth warmest in the 126-year record.
January’s precipitation for the contiguous U.S. was 2.70 inches (0.39 of an inch above average), which ranked it in the wettest third of all the Januarys on record. January precipitation extended a rather wet 12-month stretch: February 2019 through January 2020 was the third wettest such period ever recorded, 4.99 inches above average.
Last month, much-above-average wetness was observed across the Pacific Northwest as well as portions of the central and southern U.S.
Washington and Oklahoma
Washington state experienced its fourth-wettest January, while Oklahoma saw its sixth wettest on record.
Great Lakes
Much-above-average temperatures were observed across much of the Great Lakes and Northeast as well as parts of the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, the southern Plains and West.
Michigan Wisconsin Rhode Island
Michigan ranked fifth warmest, while Wisconsin and Rhode Island ranked sixth warmest. No state in the Lower 48 ranked average or below average for the month.
Temperatures during the first part of winter were warm enough across the Great Lakes to keep surface water temperatures above freezing across a large portion of the basin. As a result, lake-effect snow events become possible much later in the season than on average, which can lead to higher seasonal snowfall totals. Basin-wide ice cover spiked briefly at the end of January — approximately 35 percent of average for this time of year. Lake Erie, which averages just over 50 percent ice coverage at the end of January, was only 0.4 percent frozen on January 31.
Alaska, the contrast
In stark contrast to the record warmth experienced during 2019, the Alaska average January temperature was −6.2°F, 8.4°F below the long-term mean. This tied with 1970 as the 13th coldest January on record for the state and the coldest January since 2012.
Daytime highs
The nationally averaged maximum temperature (daytime highs) was warmer than average during January at 45.1°F, 4.6°F above average, ranking as the tenth warmest January in the 126-year record. Parts of the West, High Plains, Great Lakes and Northeast had temperatures, which were much-above-average for the month. Only a small pocket of below-average maximum temperatures was evident across the Four Corners region.
Overnight lows
The nationally averaged minimum temperature (overnight lows) during January was 26.0°F, 6.2°F above average and ranked as the third highest January average in the 126-year record and the warmest overnight low temperatures since the record warm January of 2006. Twenty-eight states ranked much-above-average with Michigan ranking third warmest and Wisconsin, Ohio and Rhode Island ranking fourth warmest minimum temperature for the month. No state ranked below-average for minimum temperatures during January.
Warm outpaced cold
Warm records in January outpaced cold records by a twelve-to-one margin. As of February 6, there were 3,731 warm daily high (1,381) and low (2,350) temperature records tied or broken during January. There were approximately 299 daily cold high (209) and low (90) temperature records set during the month.
Precipitation
The January precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 2.70 inches, 0.39 inch above average, and ranked in the middle third of the 126-year period of record.
During January, much-above-average wetness was observed across the Pacific Northwest as well as portions of the central and southern U.S. The state of Washington ranked fourth wettest while Oklahoma ranked sixth wettest on record.
The Great Lakes continue to be at or near or record water levels during January. A record wet 2019 around the Great Lakes contributed to these high water levels, which are not expected to recede for many months. If precipitation across this region remains above average, it will take even longer for the lake levels to fall. Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron set records for high water level during January.
An NPR report – “How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything” – said on February 18, 2020:
“The cold seasons are warming faster than the warm seasons,” says Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “The colder times of day are warming faster than warmer times of day. And the colder places are warming faster than the warmer places.”
In the U.S., that means winters in both Maine and Alaska are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter on average since the early 1900s. One reason: The snowpack, which is a good reflector of sunlight, is melting earlier in the season. With fewer days of snow cover, sunlight is absorbed into the ground and warms the surrounding area.
The report mentioned some of the changes happening around the U.S.
CALIFORNIA
The nation’s largest economy and largest agricultural industry is heavily reliant on snow that falls high in the Sierra Nevada, which acts like a giant reservoir. The snowpack lasts through the winter and melts in late spring and early summer, sending a steady supply of water to farms and cities when they need it most.
But with warming temperatures, California’s snowpack is shrinking, both because of increased snowmelt and because more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow. Across the West, snowpack has already shrunk by 15% to 30%.
“That can have profound ramifications, west of the Rockies especially, when the timing of snowmelt is really important to how we operate reservoirs and share water with each other,” says Arndt, of NOAA.
With runoff flowing earlier in the year, California’s reservoirs may not be able to capture enough to supply the state during the long dry summer. For one thing, reservoirs cannot be kept completely full during winter because they might be overwhelmed by floodwaters. And when warmer winter storms cause rain to fall on top of California’s snowpack, it dramatically increases the risk of devastating floods.
Warmer winters are also affecting the fruits and vegetables that California sends around the country. The state produces the majority of the country’s supply of almonds, wine grapes, walnuts, pistachios and peaches. But many of those crops require a certain amount of cold weather, what is known as “chill hours.” Without that, pollination can be delayed or incomplete, reducing the crop that farmers get at harvest time.
According to one study, cold temperatures that many orchard crops need could decrease by as much as 60% in California’s Central Valley by 2100. Apples, cherries and pears, which require the longest period of cold weather, could be hit the hardest. That has many in the agricultural industry looking for ways to adapt, whether it is breeding more heat-tolerant trees or finding chemicals that can help trees bloom on a predictable schedule, even when the winter weather is anything but.
SOUTHEAST
For decades, the Southeast actually got cooler while the rest of the country warmed. But now it is warming too, and that includes winters, with the length of the freeze-free season increasing in some places by as much as a week and a half.
That is a problem for farmers, who need cold temperatures for their plants to set fruit. The winter of 2016-2017 was too warm for Georgia peaches, for instance, and about 80% of the crop failed.
Blueberries — a bigger crop in the Peach State than peaches are — also struggle.
“When you talk to blueberry producers and peach producers, they’re definitely looking at new hybrids that are more welcoming to low chill hours and different kinds of weather patterns,” says Pam Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia.
An unusually warm January in Atlanta has also been a headache for beekeepers. If it is not cold enough, honeybees fly out of their hives and queens might start laying eggs. As they expend energy, the bees eat more of the honey they stored for the winter. If their calendar gets too out of whack from the blooms they need for nectar, they risk starvation.
Then there are the mosquitoes that can carry vector-borne diseases. Different species have different needs, but in general, cold winter temperatures kill them or slow down their reproduction cycles.
It is already warm enough in the South for the mosquito species that can carry dengue, chikungunya and Zika. In some parts of Florida, the mosquitoes can be active year-round. According to the latest National Climate Assessment, dengue cases could go up across the Southeast in the summer, and West Nile will likely increase too.
NORTHEAST
In Maine, skiing, snowmobiling and ice fishing are an important part of the winter economy. Greg Sweetser, of the Ski Maine Association, says ski areas are preparing for climate change by expanding into summer businesses, such as mountain biking.
“It’s an insurance policy to some degree,” he says. “The climate is changing, it’s unclear how incremental the change will be, so ski areas are being proactive.”
Ice fishing is already seeing days shaved off its season in southern Maine, because the window for when lakes freeze over is shortening, says Mark Latti of the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. And one of Maine’s largest lakes, Sebago, used to freeze over every other year, he says. “Now it’s once every three years or so.”
Warmer winters have also helped fuel the expansion of a pest that affects outdoor enthusiasts throughout the year: ticks.
Deer ticks transmit several diseases, including Lyme, which has grown from a few hundred cases in Maine more than a decade ago to a high last year of more than 2,100. Cases of another tick-borne disease, anaplasmosis, have also surged in the state to more than 680, up from just single cases in the early 2000s.
Deer ticks first appeared in southern Maine in the mid-1980s, but researchers at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute’s Lyme and Vector-Borne Disease Laboratory say their range now extends to the northern reaches of the state.
Vector ecologist Chuck Lubelczyk says warmer winters also help create a more hospitable climate for other species and the diseases they carry. The lone star tick has already been found in Maine, dropped by migratory birds from the south. Historically, it has not been able to survive the winter, but that is changing.
“This tick is slowly moving its way up the Eastern Seaboard,” Lubelczyk says, and is now established in southeastern Massachusetts. “If it does arrive and gets established in Maine,” he says, it will be “a game-changer, because it is highly aggressive.”
MIDWEST
Generally, warmer Midwest winters have implications from agriculture to recreation.
Freezing stops the microbes in soil from breaking down organic matter. Todey says that this contributes to the quality of Iowa’s dark, rich cropland. Soils father south, where it is warmer, lose organic matter because bacteria, fungi and other critters keep munching through it all winter long.
Todey says another problem is when the temperature warms after a hard frost and then rain falls onto frozen ground. That is bad because it can cause soil to wash away.
A freeze can also help protect future crops.
“There are certain pests and diseases that cannot survive cold temperatures. They simply die off,” says Rick Cruse, a soil scientist at Iowa State University. But “as the temperature warms, there are more of those that survive.”
Warm winters are even worse for certain fruit and nut trees, which require chill hours during the winter. If they do not get enough of those, they will not produce the following season.
Michigan’s cherry trees have struggled with erratic winter weather. And the repeated freeze-thaw cycles of the 2018-2019 winter, among other weather anomalies, destroyed Iowa’s chestnut crop last year.
MOUNTAIN WEST
The most visible impact of warming winters in the Mountain West is on the forests. Millions of trees have died from pine, spruce and pinyon ips bark beetles over the past three decades.
Normally, bark beetles die off in freezing temperatures. “When you have periods of temperature that do not reach the lethal level for the insects, that’s when you start seeing increased survival of the population,” says Jose Negron, a research entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service.
Warmer temperatures and record-low precipitation can also make trees more susceptible to infestation. The most damaged areas are in and around Rocky Mountain National Park and parts of the San Juan Mountains, the West Elk Mountains and the Sawatch Range.
“Forty to 50 percent of the mature spruce in the state has been killed during the epidemic,” says Seth Davis, an assistant professor of forestry at Colorado State University. Davis’ recent study found that warmer winter temperatures meant slightly bigger spruce beetles that emerged earlier and flew around longer.
While beetle outbreaks of this size have happened in the past, warmer temperatures might have an impact on their frequency. The impacts are complex, says Davis, but not necessarily all negative. Fewer trees mean more light reaches the forest floor, where flowers now grow. His research finds this is benefiting bee populations.
Another noticeable impact of warmer winters is on the region’s important ski industry.
Ski areas at lower elevations, as in California, feel these changes the most. “They’re the ones that are going to be seeing, really, a loss of skiing altogether in 50 years or more,” White says.
TEXAS
In recent years, warmer winters have caused Texas’ famed bluebonnet wildflowers to appear months before people expect to see them.
The climate shift also allows migrating monarch butterflies to survive in Texas later than usual.
“In cold winters, they’ll have two or three sightings along the Gulf,” says Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch. In a warm year, “you’ll get butterflies that are sighted from Florida all the way to over to the middle of Texas and even into the San Antonio, Austin area.”
The great migration of monarchs to Mexico already faces many pressures. Taylor thinks that continued warming during their breeding season and migration and over the winter may one day help end it altogether, leaving small “islands” of nonmigrating butterflies around the Gulf Coast.
Then there are the Mexican free-tailed bats that gather each year outside San Antonio, one of the world’s largest bat colonies. They are also a nightly summer tourist attraction in downtown Austin.
“They shouldn’t be here,” says Austin wildlife officer Sarah Whitson. Most bats usually migrate to Mexico or become inactive in the fall, but she says more have stuck around longer the last several winters.
“It’s great if there’s food sources here throughout the winter,” she says. But she worries what could become of the bats if a sudden cold snap kills off the bugs they eat.
Bats play a key role in agriculture, helping to control pests and to fertilize and pollinate some crops. Changing migration patterns could also hurt crops that depend on them, creating what scientists call a “mismatch.”
Researchers are seeing more mismatches as a result of climate change, says Norma Fowler, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “You can get plants that bloom before the pollinators are available,” she says. “You can get birds that come north before the insects are out for them to eat.”
ALASKA
On Alaska’s western coast, thick winter sea ice has long protected remote villages from storms. But that ice cover has been freezing later and shrinking to record lows, allowing strong waves to eat away at land made fragile by thawing permafrost. After years of struggle, the village of Newtok late last year started moving residents to safer ground farther inland.
Inupiat on Alaska’s North Slope use sea ice as a platform from which to hunt bowhead whales and walruses. Diminished ice in the Arctic is making those harvests more difficult.
Poor ice formation is also making it riskier for Alaskans who rely on ice roads, built on some of the state’s rural rivers during winter, to move freight and other goods. In recent years, residents have blamed warm temperatures for the deaths of a number of people whose snowmobiles or all-terrain vehicles fell through thin ice.
The state’s oil industry needs hundreds of miles of ice roads over land for its operations, which are specially designed for freezing conditions. Companies are investing in technology to help them cope with steadily shrinking winters.
Alaska had an unusually cold January this year, but the state is warming twice as fast as the global average. In Anchorage, a city defined by its winters, this means residents are recalibrating their relationship with the coldest season.
Viral Losses: Australian Universities, Coronavirus and Greed
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
This unsustainable system of ceremonial graft has found itself jerked by the recent travel ban imposed by Australia on those coming from
China. In place since February 1, the Covid-19 travel ban has seen a parting of ways between Australia’s universities and the government. Had Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison perhaps reflected on the consequences of such a ban for the tertiary industry, a more measured approach to the virus might have taken place. Instead, Australia faces a potential exodus of students to other markets, leaving its blubbery university sector prime for trimming.
‘The Donald Trump I know’: Abbas’ UN Speech and the Breakdown of Palestinian Politics
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
A precious moment has been squandered, as Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, had the chance to right a historical wrong, by reinstating Palestinian national priorities at the United Nations Security Council on February 11, through a political discourse that is completely independent from
Washington and its allies.
A precious moment has been squandered, as Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, had the chance to right a historical wrong, by reinstating Palestinian national priorities at the United Nations Security Council on February 11, through a political discourse that is completely independent from Washington and its allies.
For a long time, Abbas has been a hostage to the very language that designated him and his Authority as ‘moderates’ in the eyes of Israel and the West. Despite the Palestinian leader’s outward rejection of the US ‘Deal of the Century’ – which practically renders Palestinian national aspirations null and void – Abbas is keen to maintain his ‘moderate’ credentials for as long as possible.
Certainly, Abbas has given many speeches at the UN in the past and, every single time, he has failed to impress Palestinians. This time, however, things were meant to be different. Not only did Washington disown Abbas and the PA, it also scrapped its own political discourse on peace and the two-state solution altogether. More, the Trump administration has now officially given its blessing to Israel to annex nearly a third of the West Bank, taking Jerusalem ‘off the table’ and discarding the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Instead of directly meeting with leaders of the various Palestinian political parties and taking tangible steps to reactivate dormant but central political institutions such as the Palestinian National Council (PNC) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Abbas preferred to meet with former Israeli right-wing Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in New York, and to carry on regurgitating his commitment to a by-gone era.
In his UN speech, Abbas said nothing new which, in this instance, is worse than not saying anything at all.
“This is the outcome of the project that has been introduced to us,” Abbas said, while holding a map of what a Palestinian state would look like under Donald Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’. “And this is the state that they are giving to us,” Abbas added, referring to that future state as a ‘Swiss cheese’, meaning a state fragmented by Jewish settlements, bypass-roads and Israeli military zones.
Even the term ‘Swiss cheese’, which was reported in some media as if a new phrase in this ever-redundant discourse, is actually an old coinage that has been referenced repeatedly by the Palestinian leadership itself, starting with the onset of the so-called peace process, a quarter of a century ago.
Abbas labored to appear exceptionally resolute as he emphasized certain words, like when he equated the Israeli occupation with the system of apartheid. His delivery, however, appeared unconvincing, lacking and, at times, pointless.
Abbas spoke of his great ‘surprise’ when Washington declared Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, subsequently relocating its embassy to the occupied city, as if the writing was not already on the wall and that, in fact, the embassy move was one of Trump’s main pledges to Israel even before his inauguration in January 2017.
“And then they cut off financial aid that was given to us,” Abbas said in a lamenting voice with reference to the US decision to withhold its aid to the PA in August 2018. “$840 million are held from us,” he said. “I don’t know who is giving Trump such horrid advice. Trump is not like this. Trump that I know is not like this,” Abbas exclaimed in a strange interjection as if to send a message to the Trump administration that the PA still has faith in the US President’s judgement.
“I would like to remind everyone that we have participated in the Madrid peace conference, and the Washington negotiations and the Oslo agreement and the Annapolis summit on the basis of international law,” Abbas recounted, signaling that he remains committed to the very political agenda that reaped the Palestinian people no political rewards whatsoever.
Abbas then went on to paint an imagined reality, where his Authority is supposedly building the “national institutions of a law-abiding, modern and democratic state that is constructed on the basis of international values; one that is predicated on transparency, accountability and fighting corruption.”
“Yes,” Abbas emphasized, as he looked at his audience with theatrical seriousness, “We are one of the most important countries (in the world) that is fighting corruption.” The PA leader, then, called on the Security Council to send a commission to investigate allegations of corruption within the PA, a bewildering and unnecessary invitation, considering that it is the Palestinian leadership that should be making demands on the international community to help enforce international law and end the Israeli occupation.
It went on like this, where Abbas vacillated between reading pre-written remarks that introduce no new ideas or strategies and unnecessary rants that reflect the PA’s political bankruptcy and Abbas’ own lack of imagination.
The PA President, of course, made sure to offer his habitual condemnation of Palestinian ‘terrorism’ by promising that Palestinians would not “resort to violence and terrorism regardless of the act of aggression against us.” He assured his audience that his Authority believes in “peace and fighting violence.” Without elaborating, Abbas declared his intention of continuing on the path of “popular and peaceful resistance,” which, in fact, does not exist in any shape or form.
This time around, Abbas’ speech at the UN was particularly inappropriate. Indeed, it was a failure in every possible way. The least, the Palestinian leader could have done is to articulate a powerful and collective Palestinian political discourse. Instead, his statement was merely a sad homage to his own legacy, one that is riddled with disappointments and ineptitude.
Expectedly, Abbas returned to Ramallah to greet his cheering supporters once more, who are always ready and waiting to raise posters of the ageing leader, as if his UN speech had succeeded in fundamentally shifting international political momentum in favor of Palestinians.
It has to be said that the real danger in the ‘Deal of the Century’ is not the actual stipulations of that sinister plan, but the fact that the Palestinian leadership is likely to find a way to co-exist with it, at the expense of the oppressed Palestinian people, as long as donors’ money continues to flow and as long as Abbas continues to call himself a president.
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Why No Retired Generals Oppose America’s Forever Wars
by Danny Sjursen
Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…
There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.
But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”
Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.
Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)
Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.
Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.
Why No Antiwar Generals
When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.
Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.
The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.
Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.
Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.
Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.
But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.
At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.
More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.
One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.
What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?
In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.
That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.
Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.
Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.
Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.
Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”
Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…
Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen
What about Kashmiri Pundits? Three Decades of Exodus
by Ram Puniyani
This January 2020, it is thirty years since the Kashmiri Pundits’ exodus from the Kashmir valley took place. They had suffered grave injustices, violence and humiliation prior to the migration away from the place of their social and cultural roots in Kashmir Valley. The phenomenon of this exodus had been due to the communalization of militancy in Kashmir in the decade of 1980s. While no ruling Government has applied itself enough to ‘solve’ this uprooting of pundits from their roots, there are communal elements who have
been aggressively using ‘what about Kashmiri Pundits?’, every time liberal, human rights defenders talk about the plight of Muslim minority in India. This minority is now facing an overall erosion of their citizenship rights.
IMA Writes To Minister On Worsening Air Quality
Press Release
Indian Medical Association writes to Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, asks to include all non-attainment cities in National Clean Air Programme .IMA has also demanded the ministry to increase the number of monitoring stations across the country
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