53 USA
53.1 (The Lack of) American Ideology
Welsh
The problem with American leaders is that they don’t believe in anything enough to die for it. Oh, they have beliefs, the beliefs of a leech (which is unfair to leeches, which are, unlike ticks, largely beneficial to their hosts.) They really, really believe in neoliberalism, because it has made them filthy rich.
But die for it, except in the sense of “destroy the world for profit?”
No.
The leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran to a lesser extent, have beliefs they are willing to die for, personally, not just send other people to die for.
Further, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian army (especially the Revolutionary Guards) are ideological organizations. From top to bottom, they believe in more or less the same things. You could kill the top 99 leaders of those orgs, and Mr. #100 would not be that much different.
In our society and our organizations, corporate or military or civil service, the people at the top have significantly different beliefs from the people in the middle, who have different beliefs from those at the bottom.
Further, because in our organizations there is vast infighting, because there isn’t any consensus beyond “make money” or “get power”. In organizations where, in fact, everyone isn’t pulling in more or less the same direction (if perhaps fighting a bit over “how to get there) leadership matters. The interests of employees in corps are not the same as executive interests. They don’t want the same things, or benefit from the same policies.
None of this applies significantly to Hezbollah or Hamas, to Ansar Allah (the Houthis) or (to a lesser extent) to the Revolutionary Guard. You could kill Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah tomorrow and it would make very little difference.
Leaders of genuine ideological organizations (we’re going to discuss this more in the future) do not have the calculus of late capitalists “leaders.” They do not think the same way. they do not feel the same way. And the organizations they run have genuine missions that the leaders and followers both believe in.
It’s been so long since we had almost any of that in our society that we don’t get how it works. Even NGOs aren’t like that: I know NGO workers and professional staff: they believe, but the people who run the NGOs don’t, actually, and don’t act in alliance with their values, morals and ethics.
53.2 Kissinger’s Legacy
Ackerman
The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people.
“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”
Ackerman (2023) Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies
Cirincione
Kissinger was uniquely culpable. He not only helped kill the peace talks in 1968 that would have stopped the war, promoted a “secret plan” to end the war that actually extended it and broadened it, but he was the major advocate for the carpet bombing that killed hundreds of thousands in Southeast Asia and radicalized a Cambodian resistance, leading directly to the murderous Pol Pot regime that killed a million more.
And this is just one of his crimes. As others have documented during Kissinger’s life and in the week since he died, Kissinger is directly responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, East Timor, Argentina, Chile and many other countries. He swung U.S. power behind dictators around the world, explicitly endorsing their brutal military campaigns against domestic opponents in the name of preserving American global dominance.
Many intelligent, witty and successful people fall from power. Kissinger never did. The answer may be as simple as the basic motivations that dominate Washington and the upper reaches of American society. People on the rise want to be near those with power, money and prestige. Kissinger offered all that — with the veneer of Harvard scholarship. It is irresistible to those who are, as Shakespeare put it, “seeking the bubble reputation.”
When former Secretary of State George Shultz convinced Kissinger to join him, former Senator Sam Nunn and former Secretary of Defense William Perry in a sweeping vision of “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” published in The Wall Street Journal in January 2007, I was willing to put aside my anger and criticism of Kissinger’s war crimes to use his prestige to advance a breakthrough in nuclear policy. I was happy to spend the next few years promoting their views. It was very powerful to be able to say that four men who had helped build the American nuclear arsenal now concluded that it should be eliminated. Kissinger, the most hardline of the group, gave it the most credibility. Nowhere in my writings or speeches did I note that he was a war criminal with the blood of millions on his hands.
It was simply too useful to leverage Kissinger’s prestige for validation.
While Kissinger enjoyed several major policy successes, including detente with China and the Soviet Union, most of these could have been accomplished by others. Most of his policies failed — at tremendous cost. They brought ruin to millions. They didn’t solve the problems they were supposed to address. The threats they were designed to counter were often exaggerated, making the brutal policies he advocated unnecessary and counter-productive.
It wasn’t Vietnam, for example, that brought down Nixon, it was Watergate. When Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford kept Kissinger as secretary of state. Kissinger gave Ford credibility.
The brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet, that Kissinger brought to power in a violent September 1973 coup, ruled for twenty years with U.S. support, longer than any other leader of Chile, despite having killed, jailed and tortured tens of thousands of his fellow citizens.
Kissinger and Pinochet were wrong. Salvadore Allende, the disposed Socialist president of Chile, didn’t represent a threat to the continent. There never was a genuine Soviet threat to Chile or Latin America. The policies Kissinger advocated and Pinochet implemented were completely unnecessary. But the image of strength, security and determination served both men well.
Let us hope that we do not again see his like.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s carpet bombing of Gaza is a direct descendent of Kissinger’s failed Vietnam strategy.
Imagine a Military Targeting Bot with the Instincts of Henry Kissinger.
53.3 New Confederacy
MacLean
Frustrated by the surprise defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, a group of breathtakingly rich and highly strategic actors on the radical right, including the Koch brothers, quietly launched an ambitious new campaign to lock in their political control once and for all. They had used their immense wealth and institution-building savvy to capture a majority of state legislatures in 2010, so the groundwork was already in place.
This campaign would be spearheaded by a corporate pay-to-play group they had long funded to influence state laws—the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—and a dark money group with deep ties to Charles and the late David Koch (who died in 2019), as well as the Tea Party movement—Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). When legislators arrived at ALEC’s annual meeting in August 2013, they were given detailed instructions and model text to bring back to their statehouses for a resolution demanding the first Constitutional convention since 1787….
In the decade since those first secretive meetings, Meckler’s Convention of States has managed to rack up wins in nineteen states for a convention that would address sweeping proposals to radically curtail the powers of the federal government. ALEC-led groups also claim to have twenty-eight states behind their call for a more limited convention to propose a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Should a convention be convened, what is it that the ultra-rich backers want? Their chosen so-called grassroots leaders mince no words when speaking to friendly audiences. Meckler has declared that the purpose is “to reverse 115 years of progressivism.” In fact, the endgame is even more consequential: to return this nation to its pre-Constitution roots under the Articles of Confederation, with a weak central government and sovereign states….
Indeed, most of what ALEC, CSG, and their billionaire backers want to achieve flies in the face of public opinion. And that’s what makes their plan so devious. “Voters have no role to play in the right’s vision of a Constitutional convention,” a report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) concluded. Delegates would be handpicked by legislative leaders, and here’s the kicker: The votes taken at such a convention would be based not on population but on one vote per state in order to grossly underrepresent the majority of Americans.
In audio obtained by CMD, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, told an ALEC audience in 2021 how this strategy could be used to circumvent what most Americans want. “Because their [Democrats’] population is concentrated and ours isn’t,” Santorum said, “rural voters [Republicans] . . . actually have an outsized power granted under this process.”
He added, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though . . . we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
MacLean (2023) Constitution in the Crosshairs: The Far Right’s Plan for a New Confederacy