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 https://scheerpost.com/2021/06/14/celebrating-fifty-years-of-an-individuals-courage-in-an-era-of-apathy/

Celebrating Fifty Years of an Individual’s Courage in an Era of Apathy

He hasn’t gone anywhere, actually. He’s been here all along – poking small holes of decency in sick system, for five-plus decades. At 90, Dan Ellsberg is with us still, and still calling bullshit on a government that couldn’t act right if it tried, to a citizenry that couldn’t care less. Most of it, anyway; reminding me, at least – here at the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers’ publication, and just a month after Dan just dared the Justice Department to indict him for dropping yet another classified truth bomb about US nuclear lunacy – of the indefatigable Tom Joad’s climactic speech from The Grapes of Wrath:

“I’ll be aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere-wherever you look. Wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there…I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.”

If that seems a bit much, a touch hyperbolic, ask yourself: why is it that there are so few Dan Ellsbergs, and so many war-profiting spin-masters, walking around not just Washington, but Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Wichita, Kansas?

One wonders, on such commemorative occasions – amidst two decades-worth of ongoing wars now so (deliberately) abstract as to be almost invisible – what’s appropriate (or left) to say about the whole thing.

My colleague, onetime muse, and – dare I say – friend, Andrew Bacevich was in Vietnam when Ellsberg detonated his tortured truth bomb on a then (relatively) more engaged public. That said, Bacevich – in standard self-deprecating style – admitted in a recent New York Times column that as newly-minted army lieutenant fresh out of West Point, he hadn’t given the Pentagon Papers story much thought. No doubt he had more pressing matters to mull over: like dodging bombs and bullets, whilst maintaining some semblance of “good order and discipline” in one small unit of a big army – which was all-but coming apart there at the tail end of a long war that ought never been fought.

Sometimes talking to Andrew is jarring in it’s own right. He’s four years older than my father, hailing from a whole other spatial and temporal world. Knowing the words to obscure Lovin’ Spoonful songs made me – like comedian John Mulaney – an “off-putting, strange child.” It made Andrew a normal teenager. Normally, we’d otherwise have little in common – probably have no occasion to know, or know of, each other. Yet as fate would have it, we share alma maters, combat stints in worthless wars, and personal paths to eventual doubt and dissent. And just as Andrew once hardly heard the whistles blown about his hopeless war, I’d barely bothered to catch the Cassandra-calls about my own adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until it was too late.

Daniel Ellsberg.

I think about Bacevich – who I began reading during my senior year at the academy – sometimes, when I worry if my own military past might poison the well of my two sons’ future career choices, or on sleepless nights spent wondering whether fighting the antiwar fight is a futile endeavor. After all, that first Bacevich book I read carried the fitting subtitle: “How Americans Are Seduced By War.” Well, I sure was; seduced, that is, way back in 2005, and probably long before – on account of captivating tales told by Greatest Generation grandfathers, and a few too many John Waynes flicks watched once our family finally clawed it’s way to cable-TV (TBS military marathons!)middle class-status.

Frankly, I’m underselling my own level of intellectual awareness – which makes matters all the worse. As kind of a classic “double-kid,” I secretly read my tail off by night, whilst pretending popularity by day. More informed than most would be an understatement. As such, I knew all about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers long before being accepted to West Point – probably prior to my first real kiss. Thing is, it never stuck – the crucial conclusions, the real ramifications, I mean. I doubt they ever had a chance. Militarism, the fetishization of all things martial and violent, is supremely subtle in our society. It seeps in sooner than we think, often before we’re conscious of the concept.

If you’ll forgive the brief foray into pessimism and minor-masochism – the latter, the birthright of my mother’s vaguely Irish Catholic people – this discomfiting visceral and experiential knowledge (and how common it seems for a certain sort of citizen), when combined with America’s present post-draft, obligations-free military-service culture, is enough to engender a defeatism of sorts. Toss in a (confusingly-youthful)-curmudgeon’s take on the navel-gazing narcissistic nature of digital tech and social media, and the gloom gathers.

Still, there stands Daniel Ellsberg – and others like him; living and breathing correctives to any temptation towards apathy. Yet, I’ve sensed the fear of that collective passivity in even some of Ellsberg’s recent remarks – which should sound activist alarm bells from Miami to Mendocino.

In an interview profile in The Nation this past March, Ellsberg admitted he worries that despite some 20-years of almost absurdly obvious failure in the Afghanistan War – during which America repeated many of the mistakes and atrocities of the Vietnam debacle – and laments the comparative lack of widespread public opposition to Washington’s current conflicts. Consider his disturbing and concise summary lament on the post-9/11 era:

“If the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan come out, you could change place names and officials’ names, it wouldn’t make any difference. Same story. And we were lied into a war with Iraq. And Trump could have gotten us into a war with Iran. If you look at Obama in Libya, he wasn’t even willing to use the War Powers Act to inform Congress. It was just war from the air.

We’re seeing near-zero curiosity in the American public as to how many Afghans have been killed in this war in the last 20 years. Not an estimate, no hearings. How about Iraq? There are estimates about 10 to 20 times that of the government estimates. The American people don’t care.”

Incidentally, “the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan” did come out – in the Washington Post in fact, and only 15 months earlier. Heck, that was even the title of my analysis column solicited by The Nation – “We Have Just Been Handed the Pentagon Papers of Our Generation.” But Ellsberg’s basically right – the story seemed big, but ultimately lacked real surprise or staying power. This bombshell proved a dud – a minor embarrassment for a military and government that barely blinks at the negligible annoyance. Certainly the revelation of the should-have-been-obvious – “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” confessed Afghan War “Czar” Lieutenant General Douglas Lute – didn’t galvanize any major public outcry or produce a policy pivot. In fact, a dozen American service-members – and who knows how many locals – have died in the admitted Afghan War hopelessness in the subsequent 19 months.

Hope is hardly lost, and we should hardly quit the good-fight even if it were – but it does make one feel merely an anti-militarism mosquito nibbling a military-industrial complex monstrosity.

Which also raises a rather serious question: when the next Ellsberg releases the next version of The Pentagon Papers – will anyone even notice?

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Comments to article:

" I can’t help but think the absence of response to the Pentagon Papers or Afghanistan Papers is caused by the absence of the tension and ambivalence in the middle class that immediately occurs when your children have been drafted. When there’s no skin in the game, the game becomes easily irrelevant. That, and the relentless corporatization of the American mindset. Where in American life – isn’t the corporation? Its cons, its infotainment, its games, its mean values, its legislative lackeys, its real estate, its blood sucking venality and obsession for exclusive claims to money and power at human and community cost? "

" It’s more than apathy although apathy certainly is a part of it. Another part is ignorance and group think. Another, the endless programming and propaganda that has assaulted the minds of the population starting from birth. Another seems to be the subjugation of empathy and morality, now replaced by greed and the cult of me. This of course has all but erased in the minds of the average citizen all concept of community and unity or the ability to resist.

The people, set upon each other while the tentacles of the vile vampire squid that is the Corporates, the MIC and the Deep State work feverishly to enslave us forever in an Orwellian Corporate Dystopian Nightmare.

It really is that bad. I am not optimistic "

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/17/americas-soup-brained-president-says-the-us-never-interferes-in-other-countries-elections/

America’s Soup-Brained President Says The US Never Interferes In Other Countries’ Elections 

During an astonishingly sycophantic press conference after the Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin, President Biden posited an entirely hypothetical scenario about what the world would think of the United States if it were interfering in foreign elections and everybody knew it.

When AP’s Jonathan Lemire asked the president of the most powerful government in the world what “consequences” he’d threatened the Russian leader with should the Kremlin interfere in US elections going forward, Biden meandered his way through one of his signature not-quite-lucid word salads, and then said the following:

“Let’s get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?  What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in?  It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”

The fact that the entire press corps did not erupt in side-splitting laughter at this ridiculous utterance is in itself proof that western news media is pure propaganda. The United States has directly interfered in scores of foreign elections since it began its ascent to global domination at the end of the second World War, to say nothing of all the coups, color revolutions, proxy conflicts and regime change military invasions it has also participated in during that time. The US openly interfered in Russia’s elections in the nineties, and literally just tried to stage a coup in Bolivia by interfering in its democratic process. The US is far and away the single most egregious offender in the world on this front, which is largely why it is perceived around the world as a greater threat to democracy than any other government.

This is not a secret, internationally or in the United States. Anyone who has done any learning about the US government’s actual behavior on the world stage knows this. Hell, a former CIA director openly joked about it on Fox News a few years ago.

Fox’s Laura Ingraham unsurprisingly introduced former CIA Director James Woolsey as “an old friend” in a 2018 interview about Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 alleged members of a Russian troll farm, in which Woolsey unsurprisingly talked about how dangerous Russian “disinformation” is and Ingraham unsurprisingly said that everyone should actually be afraid of China. What was a bit surprising, though, was what happened at the end of the interview.

“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Ingraham asked in response to Woolsey’s Russia remarks.

“Oh, probably,” Woolsey said with a grin. “But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians we CIA-”

“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”

Woolsey smiled and said said “Well…”, followed by a joking incoherent mumble, adding, “Only for a very good cause.”

And then they both laughed.

The fact that not one person in the press pool questioned or criticized Biden’s outrageous remarks tells you everything you need to know about the western media and what its real function is. This is further illustrated by the rest of the behavior of these odious propagandists during the summit, which was illustrated quite well by the glowing praise of Democratic Party insider Andrea Chalupa on Twitter:

“The winners of #GenevaSummit2021 are the White House press corp,” Chalupa said. “Excellent questions confronting Putin and challenging Biden on holding a summit with a ruthless dictator. And they literally held their ground when shoved by Putin’s security and propagandists.”

That actually says it all. Western reporters are forbidden by their oligarchic owners from ever confronting power in any meaningful way; the closest they’re ever allowed to get to punching up is challenging the leaders of CIA-targeted governments, and demanding to know why their own officials aren’t being more hawkish and aggressive toward those leaders.

As RT’s Murad Gazdiev pointed out, “ABC, NBC, BBC, CNN, and many other Western outlets were invited for Putin’s press conference. No Russian media was invited to Biden’s press conference.” The whole thing was a navel-gazing, masturbatory cold war propaganda orgy where western “journalists” made up fantasies about their soup-brained leader staring down Putin, where they yelled nonsense about Alexei Navalny at the Russian president and then fangirled at Biden’s response.

Real journalists go to Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. Western propagandists ask Putin why he’s such a doodoo dumb dumb poopy head and then dream about Pulitzers all night.

Western news media exists to funnel propaganda into the minds of the public. It is controlled by plutocrats who work in alliance with opaque government agencies to weave narratives about why the US government needs to do the things it had already planned on doing anyway. This gets more obvious by the day.