Yesterday I pointed to predictions of the possibility of increased US military engagements. Today I want to recommend some reading that spells out the consequences that wars brought to the US in their aftermaths: Kathleen Belew demonstrates in her compelling new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, how each return of war personell led to a subsequent rise in violent White Supremacy movements.

This from the book review by Patrick Blanchfield, associated faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Justice, attached below:

Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Belew’s book isn’t only a definitive history of white-racist violence in late-20th-century America, but also a rigorous meditation on the relationship between American militarism abroad and extremism at home, with distressing implications for the United States in 2018 and beyond. Two fundamental insights underpin the book: first, that there exists a profound relationship between America’s military violence and domestic right-wing paramilitary organizations, and, second, that the character of that relationship underwent a decisive change in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

https://www.thenation.com/article/declaration-of-war/

Belew argues that the (lost) Vietnam War triggered a shift in the goals of white-racist violence, goals that until then aimed to roll back gains in minority rights and preserving the hierarchical order of American society. Instead, white power, loosely comprising all the varieties of white nationalism, white supremacy or racist right, now pursued radical extremism, with a shared vision of ethnic purges and the establishment of an all-white homeland. 

Here are some numbers (from the review): The sheer size of white-power extremism since Vietnam is frightening. Belew presents credible estimates that white power mobilized some 25,000 “hard-core” supporters in the 1980s, with 150,000 to 175,000 people buying its literature, donating to white-power groups, and attending events. Likewise, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands participated in militias in the 1990s. (“The John Birch Society, in contrast, reached 100,000 members at its 1965 peak,” Belew observes pointedly.) 

Nonetheless, the nature of an organized, criminal movement is publicly played down or denied, and in Belew’s words “largely narrated and prosecuted as scattered actions and inexplicable lone wolf attacks motivated not by ideology but by madness or personal animus.”

Here is a typical instance of the way the violence is down-played:

https://www.propublica.org/article/an-alarming-tip-about-a-neo-nazi-marine-then-an-uncertain-response

https://www.propublica.org/article/vasilios-pistolis-imprisoned-marine-hate-groups

Photographs today are from the Eastern parts of the Pacific Northwest which has a special homeland place in the hearts of militia members:

https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2018/02/oregon_plays_prominent_role_in.html

Language matters, I think we all agree.  And we are alert that terms like infesting, when applied by our president to people instead of vermin, are signifying a parallel to fascistic linguistic practices. We are aware that phrases like separate but equal, when used by our president for his new space military project, express his longing for Jim Crow times. What flew, at least for me, under the radar though, was a seemingly innocuous change in name for one of our military operational forces.

Three weeks ago, the US Pacific Command became the US Indo-Pacific Command, a seemingly innocuous name change declared by General Mattis. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/31/615722120/in-military-name-change-u-s-pacific-command-becomes-u-s-indo-pacific-command

There are those who ague that, “to the Chinese leadership, changing PACOM’s name to the Indo-Pacific Command will just be another signal of Washington’s determination to extend its unprecedented military presence westward from the Pacific around Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean and so further restrain the attainment of what it sees as China’s legitimate destiny.”  In fact, Michael Klare, a professor of  peace and world security studies at Hampshire College (and a man, admittedly, prone to catastrophic thinking) predicts that the US is girding for military confrontation with China.

He points to the fact that Mattis disinvited the Chinese from the world’s largest multinational naval exercise, the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), conducted annually under American auspices. And on June 8th the DoD launched Malabar 2018, a joint Pacific Ocean naval exercise involving forces from India, Japan, and the United States.  Incorporating once neutral India into America’s anti-Chinese “Pacific” alliance system in this and other ways has, in fact, become a major twenty-first-century goal of the Pentagon, posing a significant new threat to China.

The full article is attached below, giving an extensive overview of the changes in policy and military approach to China as US power declines and China’s rises.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176438/tomgram:_michael_klare,_is_a_war_with_china_on_the_horizon/

And officials in the military (or now in the diplomatic corps, like Admiral Harris who has been appointed to become the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea) use this language: “Make no mistake, our 27-year holiday from history is over. Great power competition is back. Freedom and justice hang in the balance and the scale won’t tip of its own accord simply because we wish it would.” Or a senior Pentagon official, Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, director of the Joint Staff, when asked about China’s militarization of the islands in the region and the  U.S. capability to “blow apart” China’s artificial islands and its military installations,  “I would just tell you that the United States military has had a lot of experience in the Western Pacific taking down small islands.”

When asked to clarify his remarks the pentagon official said: “It’s just a fact we had a lot of experience in the Second World War taking down small islands that are isolated, so that’s a core competency of the U.S. military that we’ve done before; shouldn’t read anything more into that than a simple statement of historical fact.”

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3446034

Right; we shouldn’t read anything into anything.  Just let the language flow over us and get its hooks into us and let it settle, preparing the grounds.

A few years ago the idea of a Sino-American war would have sounded like a script for a bad Hollywood movie; so would have the vision that the US would put infants into tender-age prison tents in Texas during temperatures of 106 degree.

PS: https://forward.com/culture/403526/infest-the-ugly-nazi-history-of-trumps-chosen-verb-about-immigrants/

Here is the whole story:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-janitors-collection-of-things-confiscated-from-migrants-in-the-desert

Irrespective of all the lies, explanatory falsehoods, of proud insistence dished out by the various governmental actors in these last days, for me the most difficult fact to live with is this: more than 50% of all Republicans support the internment and separation of children from their parents. In facilities that confine movement, 20 to a cage, with lights on for 24 hours, and a no-touch policy that prohibits workers from touching crying and desolate, disoriented children. With no intention to facilitate reunification at some point. And with referrals to the holocaust that point to the differences which they feel justify their action (Sessions: Well the Nazis didn’t allow the Jews to leave the country.)

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-government-has-no-plan-for-reuniting-the-immigrant-families-it-is-tearing-apart

The core issue among so many Americans in the end boils down, here as in so many other areas, to deeply seated racism. Brown children and their brown parents are so close to animals that they might as well belong in cages. Or cages might as well be used as a deterrent (which turns out not to be working if you look at the factual numbers) to keep the country white.

I refer you back to an article by Adam Serwer from last year that I cited once before:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/

Trumpism emerged from a haze of delusion, denial, pride, and cruelty—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profoundly American phenomenon. This explains both how tens of millions of white Americans could pull the lever for a candidate running on a racist platform and justify doing so, and why a predominantly white political class would search so desperately for an alternative explanation for what it had just seen. To acknowledge the centrality of racial inequality to American democracy is to question its legitimacy—so it must be denied.

Act.

The newly formed German government is about to break apart over the refugee question.  Chancellor Merkel, head of the conservative CDU, is under attack by its sister party, the Bavarian CSU, which is going into state elections and eager to see her head roll. Today saw a tense debate postpone the ultimate decision making process by two weeks, until after the European head of states meet by the end of June.

There is, however, no solution in sight. An increasing number of countries simply refuse to accept refuges despite the previous Dublin accord; Merkel will have to beg individual countries to allow repatriation of incoming immigrants, but has no power to make them agree to this. The Bavarian politicians are simply waiting to close their own borders.

The more progressive parties call the CSU’s approach black mail on the backs of suffering people and wonder if its willingness to push the EU asylum policies in the direction of Victor Orban (Hungary) and Sebastian Kurtz (Austria)   portends the next step of cooperating with the Neonazi German Right. They have threatened to boycott decisions that are unacceptable to them.

The attached article below draws interesting parallels to another historical era where Jews took the place of today’s Muslims as the object of fear mongering. Equally important, it draws out the consequences of a parallel development to xenophobia: namely the patriarchal fears of being on the losing side of history. Misogyny might have contributed to our very own recent election outcome ( speaking of which: Trump this morning inserted himself via tweet in the German debate, claiming yet another lie that recent immigration has increase crime. German media immediately called up the facts.) It certainly rears its ugly head in the form of those involuntary celibates (Incels) who claim to have the right to be satisfied and seek dominance over women. All couched in terms of protecting them against the sexual savages of other creeds and races….

(It says page can’t be found, but if you click on Fortress Europe it does appear…)

Fortress Europe