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The World’s Most Dangerous Document Hits the Front Pages…

No it didn’t.

By Jan OBERG  | The Transnational | February 2, 2108

The mainstream media are totally irresponsible in their priorities. At the moment of writing, five hours after the world’s most dangerous document was presented, no major Western media has featured it prominently. This means it won’t be. No chance it would go viral. The increasing risk of nuclear war isn’t important.

While people talk about fake, a much larger issue is omission:

What is hidden to you? What world order issues are deliberately down-graded?

What threats to humanity end up at the bottom of page 38 after 10 pages of sports, entertainment and celebrity stories?

Another technique is cover-up, talking about something else such as the ever convenient North Korean “threat” or Russia’s latest evil plot.

It’s not only ignorance. There are media and other power elites who know exactly what to hand out to you and how. And what to fake, omit and cover up instead of covering.

Time to wake up: The dominant Western media are rapidly becoming the largest single obstacles to understanding our world. One proof is this story.

* * *

The Transnational has already posted a few articles about this scary, absurd and anti-ethical document, the Nuclear Posture Review, NPR:

• Huffington Post’s first article based on a leak from January 14, 2018.

• Pentagon advocates nukes against a cyber attack, in the New York Times, January 16, 2018.

• Paul Rogers, Sliding towards nuclear war?

• And in a larger perspective, a world expert on it all – Daniel Ellsberg and his new book, The Doomsday Machine. Confessions of a Nuclear Planner.

* * *

And then tonight happened the Pentagon “rollout” of this formal document on which the U.S. is going to base its nuclear policies in the future.

Watch the whole event here on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist.

Watch and listen carefully to how the Pentagon experts explain and rationalize it all, from within their box: So natural as if talking about pleasant everyday affairs.

And take note of the lame, cliquish questions asked by what must be highly selected media people who, it seems, have never read a book about nuclear policies. Don’t challenge a single underlying assumption or point to dangers.

The central words are ‘the safety of the American people’, the capabilities and it’s all held within the weapons technological framework and blurred security environment and deterrence. Not a single, intellectually defensible argument given.

No questioning of the framework – legal, political, ethical, psychological, civilisational…

* * *

This is not only what the leading US psychiatrist of war, Nazi doctors and sect psychology, Robert Jay Lifton calls ‘psychic numbing’.

Or what Yale psychologist Irving Janis in his classical study called ‘groupthink’.

No, seldom has the Theatre of the Absurd of the MIMAC – the Military-industrial MEDIA-Academic Complex – been performed so well.

In a calm and rational manner, we learn how natural it is to perceive, to talk about – and never question – what is in reality directly and fundamentally related to the unthinkable omnicide – destruction of humanity and the world as we know it.

All in the name, of course, of maintaining the US-based, military-dominated post-1945 world order against America’s beloved enemies. What would it do without them? How would it develop new nukes at trillions of dollars if it did not invent enemies all around. Imagine it had a policy of co-operation with the world instead of dominating it?

It’s well known that one of the defining characteristics of terrorism is the targeting, wounding or killing of innocent people, of people who are in no way fighters or otherwise related to the conflict – like children on a school bus, patients at a hospital.

The Nuclear Posture Review is a plea for mega-terrorism, dwarfing ISIS and everybody else.

It’s about the use of nuclear weapons – NUTs meaning Nuclear Use Theory – not for the deterrence business as usual, or MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.

It is a document that argues in favour of nuclear weapons being usable, for the theory that the US can start, fight and survive a nuclear exchange. In other words, for making the unthinkable not only thinkable but acceptable.

You can’t use nuclear weapons without killing and wounding millions and making life uninhabitable for billions. Every thought about nuclear use is based on a terror philosophy – and practised today only by the United States of America.

The NPR 2018 lowers the psychological threshold and increases the likelihood vastly that nuclear weapons will be used in the future.

This kind of thinking brings huge dangers to the world. There are lots of vested interests that don’t want you to know.

This document should be condemned – as it would have been throughout the homogenised Western mainstream media had it been Russia or China or some other nuclear weapons state that had presented a similarly perversely dangerous and exceptionalist nuclear-use policy.

There is a simple solution to this nuclear madness: Nuclear abolition. That’s what the world’s huge majority wants and has voted for at the UN.

And if you don’t believe that, let’s try a little experiment in democracy – after all that’s what the US is, isn’t it? Get all the nuclear weapons states to hold free and fair referendums asking their citizens whether they want their own countries defended by nuclear weapons.

For the first time in human history. Then we take the struggle for nuclear abolition from there…

February 4, 2018 - Posted by | Environmentalism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes |

1 Comment »

  1. THE DISCOVERY DOCTRINE – BEEN THERE – DONE THAT!

    GENOCIDE OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN

    Why were American Indian lands taken? The easy answer, of course, is that the Europeans wanted land and the Indians had it. But why did the Europeans think they could take it? We are told that the first settlers of America were moral and religious people. Why then did even the first poor and hungry Pilgrims, pious people with no military power whatsoever, believe that they were entitled to dominion over Indians and their lands?

    In thinking about the encounter between American Indians and Euro-Americans, the question is one of means: How were American Indian lands taken? The answer is not, as it turns out, by military force. The wars, massacres, Geronimo and Sitting Bull – all that was really just clean-up. The real conquest was on paper, on maps and in laws. What those maps showed and those laws said was that Indians had been “conquered”
    merely by being “discovered.”

    As put by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in the famous case of Johnson v. McIntosh,

    “[h]owever extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear, if the principle has been asserted in the first instance … if a country has been acquired and held under it; … it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.”

    This Discovery Doctrine was the “idea of it,” as Conrad put it, and it is appropriate that Conrad also spoke of “bowing down before” the idea. For though Johnson v. McIntosh was a judicial decision made by the government of a secular republic committed to the separation of church and state, the Supreme Court’s adoption of the Discovery Doctrine was merely the latest invocation of a concept that had been born at the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the first page of the Bible, in the Book of Genesis. This concept had, long before John Marshall, been used by the Jews, the Catholics and the Protestants to justify the dispossession of indigenous peoples.

    But before getting into the deeper roots of the Discovery Doctrine, what exactly is it that Johnson v. McIntosh says?

    The Johnson case is the foundation of all United States law regarding Indians, and what it says is that by virtue of discovery, the Europeans (and by succession, the Americans) have dominion and sovereignty over Native peoples, lands and governments. The New World, on paper, was legally “vacant” – terra nullius or vacuum domicilium in Latin. Title to all Indian land is thus held by the discoverer, and Indian people are subject to the overriding political sovereignty of the discoverer. How was this justified? In Chief Justice Marshall’s words:

    [T]he character and religion of [the New World’s] inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy. To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness …

    [A]griculturalists, merchants, and manufacturers, have a right, on abstract principles, to expel hunters from [their] territory …

    [E]xcuse, if not justification, [could be found] in the character and habits of the people whose rights ha[d] been wrested from them …

    The potentates of the Old World … made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing upon them civilization and Christianity.

    How is it that in 1823 when Johnson v. McIntosh was written, a time when less than one-quarter to one-third of the United States was settled and hundreds of Indian nations lived free and independent, the Discovery Doctrine was already so firmly entrenched in the western legal tradition that Marshall was merely applying it, not inventing it?

    The answer is because the land of Canaan was inhabited.

    When Abraham began the long march of civilization ever westward, leaving Ur of the Chaldees to go west across the River Jordan to Canaan, he, like Marshall, needed a reason for dispossessing the Canaanites who lived there.

    The reason, according to the Bible, was that God had given the land to Abraham’s people, the Canaanites notwithstanding. As God said through Joshua,

    “I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you dwell therein.” (Joshua 24:13)

    In the TANACH/Bible, wars of extermination were sanctioned against local inhabitants who stood in the way of the “chosen people.” Speaking of Joshua’s war with the city of Hazor, the Bible tells us:

    “They smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword utterly destroying them. There was not any left to breathe and he burnt Hazor with fire.” (Joshua 11:11)

    The Lord’s gift, and the actions taken by the Hebrews to realize it, were justified on the grounds that the indigenous inhabitants were idolaters, cannibals and human sacrificers, neither civilized nor of the true faith.

    Some ancient Hebrew apologists also advanced terra nullius arguments, claiming that Canaan was uninhabited; that is, that the land of Canaan had no Canaanites. Others claimed that the Canaanites had stolen the land from ancestors of the Hebrews, and thus that the Hebrews were the original occupants.

    All of this was by way of legalistic apologetic, for as a matter of faith, according to the Bible, the Jews believed that Canaan was their destiny and, in fact, it was a manifest one. They were the “chosen people,” the inheritors of God’s covenant with Abraham, who had himself inherited God’s promise to Adam, made on the first page of the first Book of the Bible, where God said,

    “Let us make man … and let them have dominion over the … earth … Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion … over every living thing.” (Genesis 1:26 – 28)

    This promise was renewed to Noah after the Flood, with the further provision that:

    “[t]he fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth … upon everything that creeps on the ground … into your hand they are delivered.” (Genesis 9:2)

    Man was given power over God’s creation, and also the right to name God’s creatures:

    “[O]ut of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air … and whatever [Adam] called every living creature, that was its name.”
    (Genesis 2:19)

    Man was thus given the power of the Word, and it is a straight line from Adam’s naming of the animals to Christopher Columbus’ mistakenly naming all the indigenous peoples of two continents as “Indians.”

    The people of Abraham were the “chosen people.” The colonizing religions of the Old World – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – all trace back to Abraham, and through him to Noah and to Adam, in order to inherit this “chosen” status and thus to inherit the earth and dominion over it. Judaism and Christianity trace to Isaac, Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah, whereas Islam traces to Ishmael, Abraham’s son by his servant Hagar. As it is written in the Book of Psalms, God said,

    “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” (Psalms 2:1-11)

    Jesus Christ brought forth a new Covenant, but it was with the old “chosen people,” who needed to accept Christ as the Messiah to remain “chosen.” The early Christian writer Justin Martyr made this clear when he was confronted by a Rabbi who asked,

    “What is this? Are you Israel?”

    Justin Martyr answered, “yes.”

    On the basis of Christ’s Covenant, the medieval Popes formalized and legalized the Church’s jurisdiction over the entire world, Christian and heathen alike. They further undertook to grant and take heathen lands notwithstanding their inhabitation. Various Papal Bulls were issued to Catholic sovereigns, the most notorious being the 1493 Inter Cetera Bull dividing the world between Spain and Portugal and sanctioning their actions to “subdue the said main-lands and islands and their natives and inhabitants, with God’s grace and to bring them to the Catholic faith.”

    The Protestant translation of the Discovery Doctrine was simply that, a translation of the basic doctrine into the language of the Reformation, meaning the repudiation of Papal supremacy. Protestant kings, therefore, ruling by divine right, were in their own minds as free as the Pope to grant and charter new lands, and all Christian nations had a destiny to fulfill God’s covenant and undertake the continuing move westward begun by Abraham.

    In 1492, therefore, when the Christian kings of Europe, in Justice Marshall’s words,

    “conducted some of [their] adventurous sons into this western world,” they believed, as a religious matter, that whatever they found belonged to them as the “chosen people.” The entire Western Hemisphere was terra nullius – “vacant land.”

    If beings were found there who seemed human, but were not Christian, then they were, in the words of one colonial writer, “little superior, in point of Civilization, to the Beasts of the Field,” a formulation neatly tied to the mandate in the Book of Genesis that the sons of Adam shall have dominion over “every beast of the field.” (Genesis 2:19)

    Being practical men, as they could not realize upon their “extravagant and absurd” claims, as Justice Marshall called them, for fear of military defeat by the Indians, and, in their own way, perhaps even concerned for Native people, the Europeans recognized that Native people had some rights to occupy and use their land. But it was nonetheless clear to the Europeans that Native people did not own their land and thus that the Indians had no power to sell it or otherwise to convey title. The land was owned, and title was held, by the Christian king whose explorers “discovered” it.

    The English Crown’s charters to Cabot, Gilbert and Raleigh were nearly identical to the Pope’s Bulls in commissioning expeditions to “heathen and barbarious lands.”

    Pilgrim and Puritan sermons were replete with references to God’s covenant with them, and their divine mission, their “errand into the wilderness,” their “manifest destiny.” Such a belief is all the more remarkable given the Pilgrims’ famous dependence upon Indian peoples for food and the means to farm, celebrated today as Thanksgiving. This was rationalized by the Pilgrims through the belief that Indian hospitality was due not to the Indians but to the workings of the Pilgrims’ God. As historian Wilcomb Washburn noted,

    “[w]e read frequently such statements as ‘God caused the Indians to help us with fish at very cheap rates.’”

    The Puritans called America “Canaan,” meaning the land of promise – God’s promise. Civilization moved west, and with it the Cross, even going out into the Pacific as Hawaii was subdued by the United States Marines. A year later, President McKinley told the nation of how it was revealed to him in prayer that it was America’s responsibility to bring Christianity to the “little brown brothers” of the Philippines.

    Chief Justice Marshall was thus heir to an ancient religious tradition.

    This theory of a God-given dominion over Native peoples’ lands, held by a divine king tracing himself back to Adam, however, sounds a little old-fashioned, even medieval, and by 1823 the United States had overthrown a king and put “We the People” on the throne. But the principle remained:

    The sovereign federal government, as successor to the English Crown, held dominion over, and title to, all Indian lands. Marshall, writing as a secular judge, was careful in enshrining the Discovery Doctrine as the basis for United States Indian law to avoid explicitly endorsing its religious and covenantal roots. But that was all he left out. All the other ideas about vacant land, savagery, lack of civilization, heathenism, nomadic hunters without a conception of property, all were deployed to strip Indians of their rights. Americans were the new “chosen people,” with a “manifest destiny” to own the continent.

    Later Supreme Court decisions were not nearly as careful to hide the roots of federal power over Indians. For example, in 1877 in Beecher v. Wetherby, the Court stated that when dealing with Indians,

    “[i]t is to be presumed that … the United States would be governed by such considerations of justice as would control a Christian people in their treatment of an ignorant and dependent race.”

    Federal Indian Law, therefore, rests on ancient religious ideas about the rights and powers of the chosen people, which principles are so deeply embedded that no one even questions “why” anymore. Congress’ plenary power over Indian people and the United States’ ownership of Indian lands are just seen as givens, and the laws affecting Indians are made without constitutional or judicial restraint.

    Now, will someone tell the Palestinian people about THE DISCOVERY DOCTRINE!
    They too will be victims of GENOCIDE, because the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews invented THE DISCOVERY DOCTRINE.

    Like

    Comment by Buddy Silver | February 5, 2018 | Reply


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