Deutschland über alles

"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt." So begins the German national anthem, which was used by the Nazis as a declaration of world hegemony. No international laws could hold Germany back. No sense of decency or morality would alter its drive for military dominance.

The same ultra nationalist thinking now controls our own White House. We bomb, we starve, we invade any country that gets in our way. We laugh at the rules that have held us back since World War II. Any world leader who resists will be assassinated or captured. With 800 military bases in the rest of the world, we will crush all dissent both home and abroad.

How did Germany think it could control the world? Racism convinced Hitler that Germany would prevail against all other countries. Also, Hitler ruled by hunches and constantly went against his generals. By the time he invaded Poland, there was nobody in the press, or the courts, or the universities who could stand up against him.

Our own Hitler is busy crushing dissent and destroying our Constitution. HIs billionaire class has bought up all the media. He controls what is taught in our colleges, and simply ignores the courts when they urge caution. Finally, he is deeply racist and has energized the white Christian nationalists.

He is talking about taking a third term, and has ICE as his private Storm Troopers. Unless we stop trump now, we will have to fight him in the streets.

Fred Nagel

Some Sort of Perspective

How can we put America's starvation of Gaza in some sort of perspective? Do we write songs about it? Do we hold up signs? How do we get beyond what our country is capable of doing? Has it always been that way and we didn't notice?

The pictures are already upon us. The skeletal bodies and shrunken eyes. There are 90,000 children under imminent threat of starvation. The trucks are only a few miles away, but Israel, backed by its partner in crime, the United States, has decided not to let them through.

Do you think we live in a humane society? That we follow some sort of moral code? Do we believe in a God that doesn't slaughter children? How did we end up in a country that always puts money and power before its basic humanity?

We the people forced an end to our invasion and occupation of Vietnam. Not in time to save the lives of 58,000 US troops and over two million Vietnamese people. We worked at it, defying the police and the college administrators that kept telling us to shut up and be patriotic. It turned out that the war resisters were the patriots. Those in power were the liars and the murderers.

Today, we must overcome the apartheid state of Israel, a toxic mixture of religious fanaticism and wanton cruelty. We must end our support of this genocide against the Palestinian people. The battle is for the soul of our democracy, just as it was in Vietnam.

Touching the humanity of the American public

Venezuela's president sits in a US jail, having been abducted by a military invasion. There is no doubt that what the US has done violates the UN Charter as well as any number of international laws. How did Trump pull it off?

Maybe he was just being an imperialist like his predecessors. According to research at Boston College, the US has attempted regime change 72 times since World War II. A little less than half were successful. Most notable overthrows include: Iran, Guatemala, Congo, South Vietnam, Brazil, Ghana, Chile, Panama. Haiti, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Honduras, Libya, and Venezuela. Thousands have perished in these assassinations and coups. And millions more have been slaughtered in the decades of human rights abuses that have inevitably followed.

How is it that the citizens of our democracy have let these war crimes go on for 80 years? Is it just ignorance, which our schools, political parties and mass media are only too willing to perpetuate? Our nation's billionaires have bought up most sources of actual information, so we can't expect too much help there.

What may finally shame the US public into action is the blatant genocide our government is waging in Palestine. There is no attempt to hide the 20,000 children who have been murdered. We can see the rest in their makeshift tents, without food, water, or electricity. The US is the driving force behind the worst bloodbath of the 21st century. Maybe that will finally touch the humanity of the American public.

Fred Nagel

Without Ethics or Empathy

Donald Trump has always considered himself above the law. Much of his bravado comes from his mentor and father figure, the infamous lawyer of the McCarthy Era, Roy Cohn. A man without ethics or empathy, Cohn could be counted on to always take the low road. He never admitted to being wrong, and invariably counter attacked when his misconduct was exposed. He worked tirelessly to get gays fired from their government position, all the while being a closeted gay himself. He died of AIDS, after having been disbarred for unethical and unprofessional conduct.

Few international leaders have been influenced by a more conniving person than the likes of Roy Cohn. Only Hitler had a worse gang of sycophants. Goebbels, the Minister of German propaganda, considered lying to the public a form of art. Goring, was notorious in his theft of fine art and jewelry, much of it stolen from his Jewish victims. And Himmler ran the SS, the group responsible for the "Final Solution."

Surrounding oneself with liars, thieves and miscreants makes one vulnerable to making terrible decisions. Hitler tried to conquer the world in a mixture of racism and poor judgement. And it looks like Trump may do the same. He has threatened almost every US ally with military invasions. He has sent his fleet of aircraft carriers around the world to prove his dominance and masculinity. From the genocide of the Palestinian people to the war crime of threatening other sovereign nations, Trump is a clear and present danger to life on Earth.    

Fred Nagel

 

Faster than anyone could have guessed

The US attack on Venezuela takes us back to the 1930s, when a pretentious and histrionic buffoon somehow become the head of the most powerful military in Europe. He claimed that other sovereign nations (Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland) really belonged to him and his Third Reich. Somehow Germany's richest industrialists (Krupp, I.G. Farben, Siemens, BMW, and Volkswagen) were there to fund his dream of making the Germanic race great again.

So is Trump now moving in a similarly dangerous direction? Like many authoritarians, Trump has moved much faster than anyone could have guessed. He has destroyed freedom of speech on most college campuses with his demands that criticism of the genocidal state of Israel is antisemitic. His Billionaire buddies have bought up a great deal of the nations' newspapers and TV stations (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdock, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, and John Henry). He has taken control of ICE, a private army paid for by the public. And Trump has greatly benefited from the weakest and most corrupt of any modern day opposition party. They are all on the same Israeli payroll.

Now the tyrant is making his list of the next countries to attack. He wants the military to increase its budget by half a trillion next year. And ICE has begun shooting protesters and calling them terrorists. We don't really need to understand the rise of fascism in the 30s. The takeover and destruction of our precious democracy is already upon us.

Fred Nagel

Military empires end up destroying their own people.

The United States is in a time of transition, from democracy to imperial rule. Of course, the overthrow of Venezuela was a long time coming. Trump wasn't the only president to shred international law and proclaim that anything the empire wants is fair game. No, our two party, one military industrial complex has been waging illegal wars for years.

Trump's overthrow of yet another country, however, is without the usual nuance or pretense. Perhaps he doesn't have the vocabulary to say things in more than one way. The US wants all the world's oil, so it is willing to destroy the Middle East to get it. Israel is our partner in crime, and no slaughter of the Palestinians is too much. No subterfuge here.

One change in US imperialism is the level of profiteering that our president is willing to take part in. He will be building gambling casinos on the bones of six million Palestinian people. A Gilded Age charnel house.   

Another aspect of this different direction seems even more dramatic. The rest of the world has come to expect naked imperialism from our country, so there is little change in their expectations. The "land of the free" will continue taking what it wants. No, this transition is about who runs the empire once it has committed itself to crimes against humanity. Like various authoritarian regimes in the past, the US will now be run by its billionaire class, freed from all the complexities of representative democracy. Welcome to a fascist America.

 

Planning and waging aggressive war

President Trump's recent threats against Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico and the United States Constitution have us all worried. Even Republicans see the dangers in attacking foreign countries and being subject to endless guerrilla wars. And these military invasions would be against all international law. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, "Planning and waging aggressive war is considered the supreme international crime."

Who would want our country to commit such war crimes? I think we will have to look beyond our two party system to figure out why our country would do such things. It's certainly not the working class, whose children will be asked to fight these wars. It's not the small business owners, whose companies will be hurt. But there is a race of human beings that stands above the rest of us, the county's uber-rich. They live their lives on separate planets, these 900 plus US individuals whose net worth is over a billion dollars.

They buy yachts that are longer than football fields. They have armies of servants as well as an endless cadre of lawyers and accountants to keep them from having to pay taxes. They end up with more than enough money to bribe our Congress and President.

Elon Musk contends that empathy is the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization." He has no empathy, of course, and simply can't feel for anyone besides himself. Our billionaire class are moral monsters, always willing to wage war for profit.

Anyone with more that a billion dollars should be put in jail.

Fred