Showing posts with label humanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humanity. Show all posts
Monday, July 8, 2019
The climate change and its impact on democracy
A good opinion piece. On one end, the developed countries keep screaming that world keeps getting hotter & hotter, & the weather patterns keep getting drastic, which in turn, is throwing everything else out of whack; people's lives & their livelihoods are in severe danger. On the other hand, these same developed countries, while asking developing countries to not use fossil fuels, are using fossil fuels themselves, & have built an economic system, which is globalized, so it affects everyone around the world, & that economic system measures a country's development based on exploitation of earth's limited resources, esp. fossil fuels.
Companies of these developed countries get in contract with developing countries, where they exploit (dig up) these fossil fuels, without any regard to the climate change, due to them being cheaply available, & then export these products around the world & make a handsome profit. All the while, the developing countries, might be showing a good GDP & a positive Current Account figure, but they are also suffering due to those fossil fuels being used abundantly & adversely affecting the climate around the world. Their public is far susceptible to fighting each other for limited amount of healthy food, clean water, & clean air, & in absence of these items, these developing countries are also bear the responsibility of adverse health conditions of their public, due to unavailability of basic necessities of life.
As the author correctly suggests, the world economic system needs to separate itself from this usage & exploitation of fossil fuels. Countries should be measuring exports & current accounts based on export of solar & wind-generated energy, instead of oil & coal, & this change needs to happen now, because we have already crossed the red line, & in some places, weather patterns have drastically changed. Remember, today, it's them; tomorrow, it'll be us, fighting for healthy & clean food, clean water, & clean air.
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Climate change intensifies conflicts and creates mass migrations. Tens of millions of people are displaced owing to climate change, according to the United Nations. Severe droughts and heatwaves in Syria and the Middle East at large preceded the war, leaving people without jobs, food or hope - and migrating for their lives.
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Climate change is a result of the Bretton Woods institutions and their deliberate policy to globalise the world economy based on extensive exports of natural resources from poor nations. This means petroleum, coal and gas, minerals, metals, forest products and meat.
Since their creation in 1945, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization have been based on hyper-exploitation of natural resources that they encouraged and even coerced from poor nations.
Low prices of natural resources have contributed a several fold increase in the wealth gap between the poor and the rich nations since World War II. This was the most successful period of industrialisation the world ever saw. It was based on extensive overconsumption of natural resources, and the direct result is climate change.
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Almost a decade ago, the UN warned that "indigenous people are among the first to face the direct consequences of climate change owning their dependence upon, and close relationship with the environment and its resources." ...
Water is now one of the scarcest resources globally, according to the UN. The story is the same around the entire developing world.
What to do?
We need to replace the Bretton Woods system. They were the first global financial institutions the world ever saw. They fulfilled their mission and now they are dragging the world into an environmental disaster.
New global financial institutions are needed to get things right. We need to limit the exploitation of the planet's atmosphere, its bodies of water and its biodiversity. These are basic needs for human survival: we need clean water, clean air and food without which we cannot survive. All this is possible and must be done.
The limits on resource use can be flexible over time with the creation of equitable and efficient global markets for the global commons.
Limits on the use of water, air and biodiversity is what humanity needs to survive. This parallels the limits on emission of CO2 nation by nation, which was achieved by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and its carbon market that became international law in 2005.
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The recent Paris Agreement - which has no emission limits and no teeth - must be improved. The establishment of a new system that respects our planets' vital resources for life will change the global capitalistic system - as they value the global commons, clean air, clean water and biodiversity. These have no economic value today, but it can be and should be done.
We need to decouple economic progress from fossil fuels if we are to survive as a species. The International Energy Agency recently reported that this is already starting. A detailed footprint and the attendant economic policies must redress economic growth to be harmonious with the world's resources and with the survival of humankind.
Graciela Chichilnisky is a professor of economics and of statistics at Columbia University and the Director of the Columbia Consortium for Risk Management.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)
Great interview. This is only the first part of a three-part interview. There are Jews in the world, as you may know already, who are not Zionist & actively reject Israel's claim, & the resultant brutality & occupation, of Palestine.
I loved the last part of the interview where it shows that the only way a human being discards or reduces the humanity of another human being is through ignoring that there IS that another person who is like me. This ignorance can happen at international level (America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, Russia etc.) & it always happens wartime, e.g. the only way Saudis can bomb Yemenis & keep blockade on, is by thinking of Yemenis as something not human, or American soldiers bombing & firing at Iraqis, all the while laughing & enjoying, can only happen when those soldiers think of those Iraqis as not being living & breathing humans. This attitude of ignorance also takes place domestically when rich elites keep hoarding money & resources while their compatriots are dying of hunger, thirst, unavailability of medical facilities, no education etc., & this also takes place at individual level where a husband treats badly his wife because he thinks she is not a human but something less than a human.
We need to develop empathy & conscience to think & see as the other person as a human being with the similar needs & wants as ourselves. A Palestinian or Kashmiri or Chechen or a Yemeni or an Afghani needs & wants as an Israeli or an Indian or a Russia or a Saudi or an American; food, water, freedom, education, medical facilities, job, safety for his family & future etc.
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LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: I was born in the Soviet Union, in the former Soviet Union, in Kiev. And then, when I was six, we moved to Israel. We moved to the heart of the West Bank, into a settlement called Ariel, the same year that the Oslo Accords were signed. So, while the global community was getting involved in our conflict and trying to divide the two halves of the land into two states, we moved into the middle of what would become the Palestinian state, into a settlement that used the guise of all of these negotiations to double the numbers and then triple the numbers.
And that’s really the story of the failed peace process. While America was busy shuffling envoys back and forth between Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, we were growing as a settlement movement, getting more and more empowered by the total impunity.
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And the reason why we moved there is because my mother wanted to contribute back to Zionism, because my family is from the Soviet Union. As Jews, we’ve encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. Also, members of our family died in gulags. Most of the family was killed in the Holocaust in World War II fighting the Nazis. So all of this history is very prominent in our identity. And so we moved to Israel. And after 31 years of Soviet anti-Semitism, my mother is basically being told, it’s your turn to serve Zionism, to serve the Jewish national homeland. And so she says, what can I do? The settlements? Let’s do it. So we move to the settlements. And that’s where I grew up ...
... I was the only Jew in my kindergarten in the Soviet Union. That’s what to me is a Jew is my kindergarten teacher hated Jews. She made sure everybody knew that I was the Jew. And as the only Jew–and in Russia, it’s a visible minority. So, visibly, looking at me, they would know I’m not a Russian, I’m a Jew. ... And in Israel-Palestine, ... we are the powerful, but we identify ourselves as the not that, not the local.
And that’s particularly poignant when you look at the majority of Israelis, who are Mizrahi Jews, Mizrahi meaning Orientals. But Mizrahi Jews are basically Jews that came from Spain in 1492 and settled in North Africa, as well as Jews that have been living in the Middle East and in Yemen and in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. And so, for them, they moved to Israel in the first years of the state. They come from the Arab world. They speak Arabic. A lot of their traditions are inspired by Arabic culture. And within a few years, they’re Ashkenized, they’re Europeanized. And their kids don’t speak Arabic, their grandkids don’t speak Arabic, they don’t identify as Arabs, and they identify very strongly with Israel. All of a sudden, the falafel becomes the Israeli food, you know, hummus becomes houmous.
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Yeah. That was amazing. But, I mean, I moved to Israel when I was six. I was more preoccupied with the fact that three months after we moved there, the first Gulf War started, and we spent the first months–my first memories of Israel are sitting under sirens in a gas mask waiting for Saddam to bomb us with gas. Like, these are the things I remember. I remember being–because in Israel, yes, I was now a Jew amongst Jews, but Israel is a very racist society. So, from being the stinking Jew in the Soviet Union, I became the stinking Russian in a Jewish state.
So these are my memories. I mean, as a child, you don’t have an analysis of your identity or of politics. So, for me, what I cared about is my relationship with people my age. And in Ariel, everybody was a Russian, or a lot of the people who lived there were Russians, so you immediately felt like you were part of something. Plus, being part of a closed, gated community in the middle of the Palestinian West Bank, it’s another layer of segregation and insularism. And being in a country that is a Jewish Europe style country in the middle of the Middle East, in the middle of Arab countries, is another layer of that. And so Israel is a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble, and inside of all of that is the settlement right-wing movement.
And so those years in the settlements were the happiest years of my life, because I finally felt like I belonged to something, I was a part of something. And I never thought in bigger terms.
And, in fact, the first time I was ever called a settler, I was in my 20s. I was studying in university in Canada, and a Middle East correspondent called Jon Elmer came to speak on my campus, and I thought that he was very biased, and I was going to teach him what it’s all about, and asked him some kind of really ignorant question, and he just said, I’m so sick of you settlers coming to my talks and telling me I’m wrong. You go to Gaza. And I said to myself, what do you mean I’m a settler? I’m not a settler. And that’s when I started digging what does the settler mean.
I’ll tell you, one thing that is characteristic of ethnocracies, and particularly colonial ethnocracies that we see a lot in Israel, is a number of very strong contradictions. So Israeli identity is a mixture of the strong, the invincible, the strongest among the nations, we are the strongest army in the region and one of the strongest armies in the world, coupled with we are persecuted, we are hated, we are victims. Now, both of those things are true, and both of them work off of each other, and both of them are absolutely necessary for the ethnocratic project.
And what’s more important to me is not the colonialism that Israel perpetrates in the West Bank and in Gaza; what’s more important to me is the ethnocratic regime inside of Israel, because ethnocracies such as Israel, such as the former Balkan states, such as Sri Lanka and Macedonia used to be and South Africa used to be, are–this is the frontier of the global laboratory of how to deal with globalization. And this is why there is a rise of fascistic and extreme-right movements in the United States and in Europe and a lot of these Western places where they want globalized capital without globalized migration. And Israel is a laboratory for a lot of that, as well as weapons, but also a lot of those ideas. And that’s what I stay up at night worrying about.
And for that identity, for that national identity, you need a number of things. You need the justification for endless war. That’s where the victim identity comes from. You also need to inspire people. You need a story of success, of heroism. And this has been the story of Israeli military conquests throughout the last 67 years, to the point where if you ask an Israeli which war did Israel lose, they would say none. Maybe ’73, but none. No, we always win wars.
That’s complete bullshit. We have lost most of our wars, definitely in the last 20 years. We lost Lebanon I, we definitely lost Lebanon II, we lost the intifadas and these perpetual conflicts. Even this last summer attack–I was covering it for you, and I was out there on the ground every day covering what was happening all around us–Hamas didn’t just shock the Israeli military establishment in its ingenuous ways of combating this giant military machine with the tunnels, with the sneaking in through the sea, with rockets, with smuggling weapons from Libya after the 2011 civil war, and so on, and the number of things that they did that they pulled out of their hat of tricks that surprise us, but they forced us–and this nobody–nobody could have predicted this–they forced mighty Israeli into a negotiation with Hamas, a terrorist nothing group that was on its knees before the war started, was falling apart before the war started. And today, while everyone on the street was against Hamas before the war started, you won’t find a single person critical of Hamas. My point is we are perpetual war losers, and yet we have to perpetuate this identity that we are invincible.
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: It may be that–I mean, it depends what you consider winning, because it wasn’t clear the objective was to get rid of Hamas, ’cause I think Israel feared what the alternative would be. But in terms of the relationship of Israel and the Israeli state to the Palestinians, right now they’re winners. I mean, the occupation looks like it’s endless.
TARACHANSKY: It’s true. Let me explain what I mean by win and lose. As I’m sure you know, since World War II, we haven’t had many wars where you have a clear winner and a clear loser. And Israel is not fighting an army. And so there isn’t never going to be a checkmark–you won and you lost. We’re fighting a civilian, largely civilian population.
I’m talking about Israeli public identity, this point at which you can get to the Israeli public, average Israeli thinks, we won that war. And the average Israeli today thinks, we’ve lost the last 12 years of war. And that’s incredibly important, because, yes, on the ground we have the West Bank, we can bomb Syria if we want to, we can bomb Lebanon if we want to, we can do anything we want.
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... At this point, my intellectual identity was already very much questioning of the Zionist project. But to physically be there surrounded by these Palestinian villages is completely different than to understand something from watching the news and so on and so forth. And to physically be in that space and to realize that I had grown up here, I’d spent my happiest years here, and here comes “Allāhu Akbar”, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m hearing the sound that I had somehow–and the call to prayer happens five times a day. Israel is surrounded by villages whose names I didn’t even know, all around, each village, five times a day, the call to prayer, and I somehow didn’t even register hearing the sound. And when I turned around to point out to you what is a settlement and what’s a Palestinian village and what’s a settlement, what’s a Palestinian village, I was naming them to you, but in my mind I was thinking, I don’t even remember them being there.
You’re so busy constructing your identity, you’re not even paying attention to what’s right in front of you. And that is in essence the representation of collective denial. That is what Stanley Cohen, on whose work I did my documentary, exactly what he describes. What do two people looking at the same object, how can it be that they see two different things? And what do they do to that knowledge? And what does that knowledge do to them? For me, that changed my life, and I know that for the rest of my life I’m going to have to fight not just the Zionistic idea of Jewish exclusivity to the land, but I’m going to have to stand up against what’s going on in Israel-Palestine until there is justice for the rest of my life. And it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life; it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my free time. This is my responsibility, just like it is the responsibility of every person in America to stop police brutality against the largely people of color minority. It is your responsibility. It’s not about right and wrong. You have to do this. You don’t have a choice.
And that’s what I realized in that moment is that implicated in my own guilt for having enjoyed colonialism on this land, this land that does not belong to just one group, it is now my responsibility to fight it forever. And this is the effect that this seeing and hearing for the first time had on me.
And I have to tell you the truth. Since have been the best years of my adult life, understanding that, having the clarity of thought to finally lay out not just the historical narrative, but also understand so many things that I was afraid to ask questions about, to finally look beyond my fear and go to the West Bank and have friends in Gaza and sit on the phone with them as they were being bombed by, supposedly, my army, and hear each other’s humanity, and have them tell me, Lia, I know this is not you, I know you’re in solidarity; I’m here with you, I’m sorry that there’s people sending rockets at you, it’s not my intention. My privilege to be able to see across these walls, it was a direct result of being able to have that moment.
And I wish for everyone in my country, I wish for all my people to have that moment, because it’s only once we look past these walls that we can see the humanity of the other and we can move out of this collective trauma.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Monday, December 26, 2016
"Subsidized Housing" by Mike Luckovich
"Subsidized Housing" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
A real nation would not let this happen
A great opinion piece from last year when election campaign in Canada was all the noise (& news) in the media.
We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.
But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.
Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.
The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?
Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?
Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.
Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.
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If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
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Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
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The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.
We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.
We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.
But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.
I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.
We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.
But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.
Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.
The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?
Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?
Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.
Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.
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If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
...
Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
...
The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.
We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.
We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.
But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.
I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
"Abandoning Religion" by Mike Luckovich
"Abandoning Religion" - Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta, GA, US
Friday, September 23, 2016
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
"Jupiter Ascending" quote
Time is definitely the most precious commodity in the universe. As the famous idiom goes, "time and tide stops for no man," & everyone is also equal before it. Time doesn't discriminate among people based on financial, racial, linguistic, ethnicity, or geographic factors. Everyone is competing with another for nothing else, but essentially, for more time; time to add to their lives. Since, everyone wants more time than the next guy & no one can have more time regardless of how beautiful or rich or talented or influential connections he / she has, it becomes the most precious item in the whole universe.
Monday, June 6, 2016
If We Remain Predators, the Planet Will Cast Us Off - Lawrence Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself
A good discussion on how the leaders of our world have to find common grounds (& we all have many common grounds than a few differences) to find & implement solutions for much much bigger problems in all our lives. These problems of climate change, hunger, thirst, fatal diseases etc. are only increasing in the absence of a true & honest leadership, who is willing to work together towards a common goal, instead of creating more opportunities to fight one another.
As Larry Wilkerson says near the end of the interview that if we keep being predators (i.e. if we keep fighting each other & always looking to take more than share equally), then "let's just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century."
This world needs the leadership who is willing to improve humanity's condition in several ways on many fronts. Will the world ever see such kind of leadership?
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So there seems to be kind of two parallel processes going on. And I'm talking about--I mean, it relates to U.S. foreign policy almost with all countries, but right now I'm interested and I think everyone's interested in relations with China, even though the heat is with Russia right now. Certainly President Obama's Asian pivot in the long-term strategic thinking of the United States is: how do you manage the relationship with China?
And what I mean by two different processes. There's a tremendous amount of economic integration. China holds more U.S. Treasury bills, I think, than anyone--any single place on earth. They have massive amounts of U.S. cash, tremendous integration in terms of the labor, Chinese labor providing commodities for the American market, and so on and so on, a great deal of economic integration, you can say even codependence on each other. On the other hand, over here there's the Asian pivot on the American side. There's the strategy--what most people call an encirclement of China. ... Well, hedging on both sides is pretty massive, the buildup of the American military and the buildup of the Chinese military. ... And if this Cold War with the Russians gets even hotter and the sanctions start to really threaten Russia's ability to export its energy, the obvious thing is we'll sell it all to China.
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But in terms of the danger of war, which process is kind of more dominant? 'Cause it each has its own logic. You would think the commercial integrations logic would trump that there ever really would be that kind of confrontation. On the other hand, when you have these enormous military buildups, the logic is somehow, someday, something happens.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think you're right, and it's something to watch very carefully and something to try to form policies to prevent, I think. Hedging strategies can get out of hand on both sides. China's almost preposterous, grandiose claims in the South China Sea can get out of hand. These sorts of things have their own momentum, and before you know it, you're staring at something that looks like you can't get out of it, whether it's over Taiwan, the most likely fire point, or whether it's over something else we can't even see now, like, for example, Filipino occupying a rock in the South China Sea. It's not a situation that I would say is fraught with danger and potential for danger right now, but it could be easily. It doesn't have the in-your-face aspect of Ukraine, this sort of great-power standoff, Russia or Moscow and Washington, but it has, I think, a much longer term ability to ruin not only U.S.-China relations, ultimately, but to impact the entire globe.
JAY: And how much is this driven by a real concern that this rivalry with China over ... markets, over raw materials, and such and such really requires a military alternative versus how much is this driven by what you were saying in the first segment, oligarchs (on both sides, really, but I would say here it's more the American side) who just need another place to have a military buildup, because everybody makes a killing out of this?
WILKERSON: Yeah, well, the president of China right now is having a hard time trying to go after some of his oligarchs, who are just too corrupt for his own liking. And this is reaching a point where it may be destabilizing for the Communist Party in and for China ultimately. So I'm watching that very closely.
But at the same time, you have a situation here that's ripe for a great-state relationship. What do I mean by a great-state relationship? Well, you sort of had that in 1648 with Westphalia, which sort of set the road for monarchs and their peoples to be sovereign and to exercise some tolerance and so forth, a state system you could argue we're still operating under. You had the Atlantic Charter, too. The Atlantic Charter was--here's the greatest empire in the world, receding, to be sure, and the nascent empire meeting and saying, we're going to get together and have a great-state relationship to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And it worked. And the world had sort of a Pax Americana for half a century, virtually.
We need some sort of relationship like that between Washington and Beijing today, I think. And I do not mean in any way that we should rule the world together. What I mean is the challenges that we're going to confront in the 21st century, challenges that could be existential, challenges like climate change, challenges like enough water to drink, enough food to eat, and so forth--I've seen some projections that say--by climatologists whose views I respect, that say by the end of this century we could have only arable land and water enough for some half-billion people. What we do with the other 9 billion? Where do we bury them, even? How do we deal with that kind of massive change in human relationships with this planet? So these are huge challenges. So what I'm saying is you need this kind of great-power relationship, this great-state relationship to begin to lead the way for others to follow, others who are already doing a good job of it, like Germany, for example, to meet these challenges which are much bigger than whether or not Taiwan is a part of China or whether or not Ukraine is a part of Russia. These are tactical skirmishes on the fringes of challenges that may have major impact on human life on this planet, and yet we don't seem to be able to get the leadership to move to face and confront these challenges.
JAY: ... I guess the question came down to is capitalism as we know it out of these kinds of answers and not capable of producing this kind of leadership. This concentration of ownership, and so much in the hands of a section of capital that's essentially parasitical, betting on derivatives markets and just gambling with no interest in really strengthening the real economy of the United States and taking advantage, wherever they can, around the world, the politics that reflects that, I mean, to get to what you're talking about, that kind of relationship between states that will face up to climate change and, I think, a looming, very deep economic crisis that's going to hit that's going to be, you know, 1930s styles or worse--.
...
So in terms of the discussion, discourse that ordinary people need to start getting their heads around, I mean, does it not--you have to start talking about who owns stuff, who has power in the United States, and what to do about it.
WILKERSON: Adam Smith's invisible hand in Wealth of Nations is now not an invisible hand. It's the hand of oligarchs. So if you want a succinct answer, if capitalism is going to help--going to be the economic, philosophical engine of this, meeting these challenges, it's going to have to return to Adam Smith, but not just in Wealth of Nations, but also in his moral sentiments. You've got to have a different version of capitalism. It cannot be predatory capitalism, which both China and the United States are exemplifying massively today, China like the U.S. did in the 1890s, 1880s, 1890s, and the United States in this new form of collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of these financial innovations that do nothing but make the rich richer and the poor poorer. So it's got to be a different brand of capitalism or it's got to be a new economic system.
JAY: Yeah. And do we not have to then jettison all the baggage and shadow of the Cold War rhetoric--McCarthyism, House un-American activities committees, all the stuff that has such weight to stop you from discussing a new economic system?
WILKERSON: This is the huge component of a great-state relationship that would have to be--it would have to manifest itself and it would have to do so before you get into the challenges and the way you're going to meet them. And what do I mean by that? I mean what Malcolm Byrne and John Tirman--at MIT, Malcolm at George Washington--have called empathy: you have to understand the other person's side. Think of the Ukraine today. Think of Iran today. You have to crawl into the other person's shoes and understand their side. And that means you have to recognize their culture. You have to, to certain extent, honor the right they have to have that culture. You have to honor the right they have to design their own political system and so forth, and quit this messianic desire to bring these people down, those people down 'cause they're evil and contemptible. You have to eliminate the politics of fear as much as possible. And you have to work together. You have to genuinely work together.
That doesn't mean--Admiral Locklear said this recently, United States commander in the Pacific, probably the most influential man in terms of immediate U.S.-China policy, U.S.-Asia policy: he said China and the United States have more in common than they do have differences. It's not a large majority, but it's a majority. The problem we have, the challenge we have is to deal with the friction created by that minority of issues where we don't agree. Well, that's what a great-state pact does. It says, we are going to push those issues aside, work on them if we can in the corridors, and try to fix what we can. But we've got to have a relationship that basically begins together (because you can't do it alone; you can't; no country can do it alone), meets the challenges that we're confronting in this century, which are huge.
JAY: But is part of the problem is that the people that are making policy here in the United States, they do put themselves in the other shoes, in this sense? They look at themselves and they said, well, you know, we're predatory, so they are too, so let's just do worst-case scenarios dealing with predatory supposed allies that we know eventually--like we did with with the Germans, we may have economic integration, we may trade with them, but we're also ready to go to war with them because we're all really predators and that's what predators do.
WILKERSON: If that's the case, then let's just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century.
In this century, in my grandchildren's lifespan, major, major impacts will begin to occur, indeed may already be occurring. Pacific nations, for example, like Palau understand they're going to be underwater and they have to relocate their whole populations. These kinds of things are going to happen with a frequency and a drama that is going to convince everyone. But is it going to be too late?
As Larry Wilkerson says near the end of the interview that if we keep being predators (i.e. if we keep fighting each other & always looking to take more than share equally), then "let's just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century."
This world needs the leadership who is willing to improve humanity's condition in several ways on many fronts. Will the world ever see such kind of leadership?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So there seems to be kind of two parallel processes going on. And I'm talking about--I mean, it relates to U.S. foreign policy almost with all countries, but right now I'm interested and I think everyone's interested in relations with China, even though the heat is with Russia right now. Certainly President Obama's Asian pivot in the long-term strategic thinking of the United States is: how do you manage the relationship with China?
And what I mean by two different processes. There's a tremendous amount of economic integration. China holds more U.S. Treasury bills, I think, than anyone--any single place on earth. They have massive amounts of U.S. cash, tremendous integration in terms of the labor, Chinese labor providing commodities for the American market, and so on and so on, a great deal of economic integration, you can say even codependence on each other. On the other hand, over here there's the Asian pivot on the American side. There's the strategy--what most people call an encirclement of China. ... Well, hedging on both sides is pretty massive, the buildup of the American military and the buildup of the Chinese military. ... And if this Cold War with the Russians gets even hotter and the sanctions start to really threaten Russia's ability to export its energy, the obvious thing is we'll sell it all to China.
...
But in terms of the danger of war, which process is kind of more dominant? 'Cause it each has its own logic. You would think the commercial integrations logic would trump that there ever really would be that kind of confrontation. On the other hand, when you have these enormous military buildups, the logic is somehow, someday, something happens.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think you're right, and it's something to watch very carefully and something to try to form policies to prevent, I think. Hedging strategies can get out of hand on both sides. China's almost preposterous, grandiose claims in the South China Sea can get out of hand. These sorts of things have their own momentum, and before you know it, you're staring at something that looks like you can't get out of it, whether it's over Taiwan, the most likely fire point, or whether it's over something else we can't even see now, like, for example, Filipino occupying a rock in the South China Sea. It's not a situation that I would say is fraught with danger and potential for danger right now, but it could be easily. It doesn't have the in-your-face aspect of Ukraine, this sort of great-power standoff, Russia or Moscow and Washington, but it has, I think, a much longer term ability to ruin not only U.S.-China relations, ultimately, but to impact the entire globe.
JAY: And how much is this driven by a real concern that this rivalry with China over ... markets, over raw materials, and such and such really requires a military alternative versus how much is this driven by what you were saying in the first segment, oligarchs (on both sides, really, but I would say here it's more the American side) who just need another place to have a military buildup, because everybody makes a killing out of this?
WILKERSON: Yeah, well, the president of China right now is having a hard time trying to go after some of his oligarchs, who are just too corrupt for his own liking. And this is reaching a point where it may be destabilizing for the Communist Party in and for China ultimately. So I'm watching that very closely.
But at the same time, you have a situation here that's ripe for a great-state relationship. What do I mean by a great-state relationship? Well, you sort of had that in 1648 with Westphalia, which sort of set the road for monarchs and their peoples to be sovereign and to exercise some tolerance and so forth, a state system you could argue we're still operating under. You had the Atlantic Charter, too. The Atlantic Charter was--here's the greatest empire in the world, receding, to be sure, and the nascent empire meeting and saying, we're going to get together and have a great-state relationship to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And it worked. And the world had sort of a Pax Americana for half a century, virtually.
We need some sort of relationship like that between Washington and Beijing today, I think. And I do not mean in any way that we should rule the world together. What I mean is the challenges that we're going to confront in the 21st century, challenges that could be existential, challenges like climate change, challenges like enough water to drink, enough food to eat, and so forth--I've seen some projections that say--by climatologists whose views I respect, that say by the end of this century we could have only arable land and water enough for some half-billion people. What we do with the other 9 billion? Where do we bury them, even? How do we deal with that kind of massive change in human relationships with this planet? So these are huge challenges. So what I'm saying is you need this kind of great-power relationship, this great-state relationship to begin to lead the way for others to follow, others who are already doing a good job of it, like Germany, for example, to meet these challenges which are much bigger than whether or not Taiwan is a part of China or whether or not Ukraine is a part of Russia. These are tactical skirmishes on the fringes of challenges that may have major impact on human life on this planet, and yet we don't seem to be able to get the leadership to move to face and confront these challenges.
JAY: ... I guess the question came down to is capitalism as we know it out of these kinds of answers and not capable of producing this kind of leadership. This concentration of ownership, and so much in the hands of a section of capital that's essentially parasitical, betting on derivatives markets and just gambling with no interest in really strengthening the real economy of the United States and taking advantage, wherever they can, around the world, the politics that reflects that, I mean, to get to what you're talking about, that kind of relationship between states that will face up to climate change and, I think, a looming, very deep economic crisis that's going to hit that's going to be, you know, 1930s styles or worse--.
...
So in terms of the discussion, discourse that ordinary people need to start getting their heads around, I mean, does it not--you have to start talking about who owns stuff, who has power in the United States, and what to do about it.
WILKERSON: Adam Smith's invisible hand in Wealth of Nations is now not an invisible hand. It's the hand of oligarchs. So if you want a succinct answer, if capitalism is going to help--going to be the economic, philosophical engine of this, meeting these challenges, it's going to have to return to Adam Smith, but not just in Wealth of Nations, but also in his moral sentiments. You've got to have a different version of capitalism. It cannot be predatory capitalism, which both China and the United States are exemplifying massively today, China like the U.S. did in the 1890s, 1880s, 1890s, and the United States in this new form of collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of these financial innovations that do nothing but make the rich richer and the poor poorer. So it's got to be a different brand of capitalism or it's got to be a new economic system.
JAY: Yeah. And do we not have to then jettison all the baggage and shadow of the Cold War rhetoric--McCarthyism, House un-American activities committees, all the stuff that has such weight to stop you from discussing a new economic system?
WILKERSON: This is the huge component of a great-state relationship that would have to be--it would have to manifest itself and it would have to do so before you get into the challenges and the way you're going to meet them. And what do I mean by that? I mean what Malcolm Byrne and John Tirman--at MIT, Malcolm at George Washington--have called empathy: you have to understand the other person's side. Think of the Ukraine today. Think of Iran today. You have to crawl into the other person's shoes and understand their side. And that means you have to recognize their culture. You have to, to certain extent, honor the right they have to have that culture. You have to honor the right they have to design their own political system and so forth, and quit this messianic desire to bring these people down, those people down 'cause they're evil and contemptible. You have to eliminate the politics of fear as much as possible. And you have to work together. You have to genuinely work together.
That doesn't mean--Admiral Locklear said this recently, United States commander in the Pacific, probably the most influential man in terms of immediate U.S.-China policy, U.S.-Asia policy: he said China and the United States have more in common than they do have differences. It's not a large majority, but it's a majority. The problem we have, the challenge we have is to deal with the friction created by that minority of issues where we don't agree. Well, that's what a great-state pact does. It says, we are going to push those issues aside, work on them if we can in the corridors, and try to fix what we can. But we've got to have a relationship that basically begins together (because you can't do it alone; you can't; no country can do it alone), meets the challenges that we're confronting in this century, which are huge.
JAY: But is part of the problem is that the people that are making policy here in the United States, they do put themselves in the other shoes, in this sense? They look at themselves and they said, well, you know, we're predatory, so they are too, so let's just do worst-case scenarios dealing with predatory supposed allies that we know eventually--like we did with with the Germans, we may have economic integration, we may trade with them, but we're also ready to go to war with them because we're all really predators and that's what predators do.
WILKERSON: If that's the case, then let's just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century.
In this century, in my grandchildren's lifespan, major, major impacts will begin to occur, indeed may already be occurring. Pacific nations, for example, like Palau understand they're going to be underwater and they have to relocate their whole populations. These kinds of things are going to happen with a frequency and a drama that is going to convince everyone. But is it going to be too late?
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Kissinger forever
I really can't say much on this story, since it might be considered overtly anti-American & then who wants to deal with its "consequences". But, this is still a great opinion piece on one of the most powerful men in the world. Reading this piece reminded me of a piece Canadian Business magazine did back in August 2013 in which it showed that Henry Kissinger is the only man in the world who is a member in all of the 3 most powerful & elitist organizations in the world (World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, & Trilateral Commission).
Henry Kissinger is also the one who said that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." In my personal experience, whoever loves power so much, he/she will certainly abuse it & will hurt a lot of people in the process. This piece made me think that the way this man thinks, he has done & will still do anything to achieve what he wants more, which is, power. We try to teach our children that "with great power comes great responsibility," but, as this piece suggests, Kissinger's hunger for power almost makes him a sociopath.
As the piece below states how Kissinger supported prolonging the Vietnam war & the secret Cambodian war, in which hundreds of thousands people died. His powerful actions in the hallowed halls of government irreversibly changed the lives of millions around the world, from Latin America to North America to Asia. He apparently loved to attack other countries to show American military prowess. He loved more violence, government secrecy, militarism & ruling with the classic dictatorial "divide & conquer."
The piece ends with an excellent, & rather unfortunate, line that the world's humanity still has dark days ahead, since, his methods are still being employed by the American government & he is still deeply involved with the foreign policies of US governments.
But, hey, he will not be tried, for his actions, in the International Criminal Court (ICC) or any other court of justice in this world. Per my last quote picture of Criminal Minds here, the society is definitely not taking the place of thousands of victims & on their behalf demanding any atonement for Kissinger's push for military actions against innocent people around the world. At least dictators like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe, & several others from Latin America, Africa, or Asia killed innocent people of their own country. Henry Kissinger's actions made the life hell for thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Panama & who knows wherever else. So who is the bigger dictator here? Where is the justice coming from the largest self-anointed "just" & "fair" country of the world?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1950, Henry Kissinger - who would go on to serve as an inordinately powerful US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - wrote that "life is suffering, birth involves death".
As historian Greg Grandin documents in his just-released book "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman", the man's "existentialism laid the foundation for how he would defend his later policies". In Kissinger's view, Grandin explains, life's inherently tragic nature means that "there isn't much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are".
Of course, the victims of Kissinger-sanctioned military escapades and other forms of inflicted suffering might beg to differ. Among the countless casualties are the dead and maimed of the Vietnam War - a disaster Kissinger fought to prolong despite recognising that it was unwinnable - and the secret US war that was launched on neutral Cambodia in 1969.
'Power for power's sake'
A pet project of Kissinger and then-President Richard Nixon, the bombing of that country killed more than 100,000 civilians in four years, according to Ben Kiernan, the director of Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program.
To this day, the cluster bombs with which the US saturated sections of southeast Asia continue to wreak deadly havoc.
And from Chile to Panama to Iraq to Angola to East Timor, there's no dearth of evidence linking increased earthly suffering to Kissingerian policy & tradition, which still exert a preponderant influence over the US political establishment. (Complaints could even be filed by impoverished victims of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Kissinger unofficially helped negotiate years after leaving office.)
As Grandin notes, Kissinger had an "outsized role… in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course".
Embracing the pursuit of "power for power's sake", Kissinger advocated for war in order to "show that action is possible", Grandin writes, and to thus maintain American power - the purpose of which "is to create American purpose". With such an approach to existence, it's perhaps no wonder the former statesman found the whole phenomenon to be rather dismal.
Campaign against history
Grandin details Kissinger's contributions to the "rehabilitation of the national security state" in the US around a "restored imperial presidency", which, he contends, was based on "ever more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarisation for political advantage".
A key aspect of Kissinger's own dominant role in contemporary history is his philosophy of history itself, which Grandin summarises as follows: "For Kissinger, the past was nothing but 'a series of meaningless incidents'". According to this mindset, under no circumstances must history be seen as a collection of causal relationships capable of guiding current policy choices.
The concept of blowback, for example, is conveniently disappeared - such that Kissinger, for one, is excused from having to acknowledge the reality that US military aggression against Cambodia in fact helped propel the Khmer Rouge to power. Instead, further US military aggression was deemed to be the proper antidote to the new state of affairs.
Two and two
The forcible severing of cause from effect has also come in handy in places like Afghanistan, a country whose history is often reduced to one date: September 11, 2001. But go a bit further back in time, as Grandin does, and you'll find that the conversion of the country into a base for transnational jihad was in no small part an effect of policies put into place by - who else? - Kissinger.
These included facilitating destabilising behaviour vis-a-vis Afghanistan by the shah of Iran, Pakistani intelligence, and Saudi Arabia, and encouraging the flow of weapons to radical Islamists.
Naturally, none of this history prompted an internal questioning of US qualifications to spearhead the post-9/11 war on terror. Now, nearly 14 years and trillions of dollars later, it might be a good time to start putting two and two together - particularly given the expansion of the war to encompass the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an entity the US helped create in the first place.
Dark days
In an interview last year with radio host Todd Zwillich, Kissinger defended his infamous bombing of Cambodia on the following grounds: "The current administration is doing it in Pakistan, Somalia". The "it" apparently refers to Barack Obama's covert drone strikes on countries with which the US is not at war.
But as Grandin points out, this retroactive justification fails to account for the fact that "what [Kissinger] did nearly half a century ago created the conditions for today’s endless wars". In Cambodia and elsewhere, he "institutionalised a self-fulfilling logic of intervention", whereby US "action led to reaction [and] reaction demanded more action".
Of course, if power depends on the constant proof that "action is possible", this seems like a pretty logical - if sociopathic - arrangement.
As for Kissinger's shadow, it doesn't appear to be budging anytime soon - portending many a dark day ahead for humanity.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
Henry Kissinger is also the one who said that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." In my personal experience, whoever loves power so much, he/she will certainly abuse it & will hurt a lot of people in the process. This piece made me think that the way this man thinks, he has done & will still do anything to achieve what he wants more, which is, power. We try to teach our children that "with great power comes great responsibility," but, as this piece suggests, Kissinger's hunger for power almost makes him a sociopath.
As the piece below states how Kissinger supported prolonging the Vietnam war & the secret Cambodian war, in which hundreds of thousands people died. His powerful actions in the hallowed halls of government irreversibly changed the lives of millions around the world, from Latin America to North America to Asia. He apparently loved to attack other countries to show American military prowess. He loved more violence, government secrecy, militarism & ruling with the classic dictatorial "divide & conquer."
The piece ends with an excellent, & rather unfortunate, line that the world's humanity still has dark days ahead, since, his methods are still being employed by the American government & he is still deeply involved with the foreign policies of US governments.
But, hey, he will not be tried, for his actions, in the International Criminal Court (ICC) or any other court of justice in this world. Per my last quote picture of Criminal Minds here, the society is definitely not taking the place of thousands of victims & on their behalf demanding any atonement for Kissinger's push for military actions against innocent people around the world. At least dictators like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe, & several others from Latin America, Africa, or Asia killed innocent people of their own country. Henry Kissinger's actions made the life hell for thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Panama & who knows wherever else. So who is the bigger dictator here? Where is the justice coming from the largest self-anointed "just" & "fair" country of the world?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1950, Henry Kissinger - who would go on to serve as an inordinately powerful US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - wrote that "life is suffering, birth involves death".
As historian Greg Grandin documents in his just-released book "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman", the man's "existentialism laid the foundation for how he would defend his later policies". In Kissinger's view, Grandin explains, life's inherently tragic nature means that "there isn't much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are".
Of course, the victims of Kissinger-sanctioned military escapades and other forms of inflicted suffering might beg to differ. Among the countless casualties are the dead and maimed of the Vietnam War - a disaster Kissinger fought to prolong despite recognising that it was unwinnable - and the secret US war that was launched on neutral Cambodia in 1969.
'Power for power's sake'
A pet project of Kissinger and then-President Richard Nixon, the bombing of that country killed more than 100,000 civilians in four years, according to Ben Kiernan, the director of Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program.
To this day, the cluster bombs with which the US saturated sections of southeast Asia continue to wreak deadly havoc.
And from Chile to Panama to Iraq to Angola to East Timor, there's no dearth of evidence linking increased earthly suffering to Kissingerian policy & tradition, which still exert a preponderant influence over the US political establishment. (Complaints could even be filed by impoverished victims of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Kissinger unofficially helped negotiate years after leaving office.)
As Grandin notes, Kissinger had an "outsized role… in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course".
Embracing the pursuit of "power for power's sake", Kissinger advocated for war in order to "show that action is possible", Grandin writes, and to thus maintain American power - the purpose of which "is to create American purpose". With such an approach to existence, it's perhaps no wonder the former statesman found the whole phenomenon to be rather dismal.
Campaign against history
Grandin details Kissinger's contributions to the "rehabilitation of the national security state" in the US around a "restored imperial presidency", which, he contends, was based on "ever more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarisation for political advantage".
A key aspect of Kissinger's own dominant role in contemporary history is his philosophy of history itself, which Grandin summarises as follows: "For Kissinger, the past was nothing but 'a series of meaningless incidents'". According to this mindset, under no circumstances must history be seen as a collection of causal relationships capable of guiding current policy choices.
The concept of blowback, for example, is conveniently disappeared - such that Kissinger, for one, is excused from having to acknowledge the reality that US military aggression against Cambodia in fact helped propel the Khmer Rouge to power. Instead, further US military aggression was deemed to be the proper antidote to the new state of affairs.
Two and two
The forcible severing of cause from effect has also come in handy in places like Afghanistan, a country whose history is often reduced to one date: September 11, 2001. But go a bit further back in time, as Grandin does, and you'll find that the conversion of the country into a base for transnational jihad was in no small part an effect of policies put into place by - who else? - Kissinger.
These included facilitating destabilising behaviour vis-a-vis Afghanistan by the shah of Iran, Pakistani intelligence, and Saudi Arabia, and encouraging the flow of weapons to radical Islamists.
Naturally, none of this history prompted an internal questioning of US qualifications to spearhead the post-9/11 war on terror. Now, nearly 14 years and trillions of dollars later, it might be a good time to start putting two and two together - particularly given the expansion of the war to encompass the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an entity the US helped create in the first place.
Dark days
In an interview last year with radio host Todd Zwillich, Kissinger defended his infamous bombing of Cambodia on the following grounds: "The current administration is doing it in Pakistan, Somalia". The "it" apparently refers to Barack Obama's covert drone strikes on countries with which the US is not at war.
But as Grandin points out, this retroactive justification fails to account for the fact that "what [Kissinger] did nearly half a century ago created the conditions for today’s endless wars". In Cambodia and elsewhere, he "institutionalised a self-fulfilling logic of intervention", whereby US "action led to reaction [and] reaction demanded more action".
Of course, if power depends on the constant proof that "action is possible", this seems like a pretty logical - if sociopathic - arrangement.
As for Kissinger's shadow, it doesn't appear to be budging anytime soon - portending many a dark day ahead for humanity.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Criminal Minds, S1E17 quote
now, what if the party which injures (murderer) is a government official / diplomat / a government administration / any powerful figure (police force) & the murder itself happens to take place in a foreign place where thousands unnecessarily died [Japan, China, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yemen, Colombia, India, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine (Crimea), Rwanda, Bosnia, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Congo, Sudan, Canada, US etc.]. Where's the atonement for all those unnecessary deaths?
Sunday, February 28, 2016
When it comes to war in space, US has the edge
This article gives us a little taste of how the world's major powers, financially & militarily, are in a race to spend trillions upon trillions to conquer their global rivals in space & show to the world how they "won" the race. Ironically, those trillions are coming from people taxes; the same taxes people of a country pay, voluntarily or involuntarily, to receive basic necessities to fulfill their basic human needs.
Trillions of those taxes are being spent on something which most of the world's population will never use. All these space military hardware is not helping anyone improve billions of lives right here on Earth.
We humans want to take a giant leap towards Moon settlement & Mars colonization, but we forget very easily that billions of humans are living a miserable & wretched life right in our backyard, right here on this very planet.
Our fellow humans are dying of thirst because water is becoming a shortage, but trillions are not being spent to come up with cheap technologies to solve this impending crisis.
Our fellow humans are dying of hunger or suffering from eating unhealthy foods because feeding everyone in the world a healthy diet would require billions in funding, but billions are not being spent on research to improve agriculture & food accessibility for billions of poor.
Our fellow humans are living without a roof over their heads & homelessness is only increasing. But billions are not being spent on building affordable housing to provide a decent living space to our own fellow human beings.
Similarly, there are thousands more issues where trillions can be spent easily to improve human & animal lives; fatal diseases, climate change, animal welfare, sustainable energy etc. & make our little planet a living utopia for all. But, instead of improving lives for billions on this little planet of ours, trillions are being spent, of people's own money, on advancing technologies to destroy more lives & wreck more havoc on this little planet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quietly & without most people noticing, the world’s leading space powers — the US, China & Russia — have been deploying new & more sophisticated weaponry in space.
Earth’s orbit is looking more & more like the planet’s surface — heavily armed & primed for war. A growing number of “inspection” satellites lurk in orbit, possibly awaiting commands to sneak up on & disable or destroy other satellites. Down on the surface, more & more warships & ground installations pack powerful rockets that, with accurate guidance, could reach into orbit to destroy enemy spacecraft.
A war in orbit could wreck the delicate satellite constellations that the world relies on for navigation, communication, scientific research & military surveillance. Widespread orbital destruction could send humanity through a technological time warp. “You go back to World War Two,” Air Force General John Hyten, in charge of US Space Command, told 60 Minutes. “You go back to the Industrial Age.”
It’s hard to say exactly how many weapons are in orbit. That’s because many spacecraft are “dual use.” They have peaceful functions & potential military applications. With the proverbial flip of a switch, an inspection satellite, ostensibly configured for orbital repair work, could become a robotic assassin capable of taking out other satellites with lasers, explosives or mechanical claws. Until the moment it attacks, however, the assassin spacecraft might appear to be harmless. And its dual use gives its operators political cover. The US possesses more space weaponry than any other country, yet denies that any of its satellites warrant the term.
When 60 Minutes asked the Air Force secretary whether the United States has weapons in space, Secretary Deborah Lee James answered simply: “No, we do not.”
Still, it’s possible to count at least some of the systems that could disable or destroy other satellites. Some of the surface-based weaponry is far less ambiguous & so easier to tally. Even taking into account the difficulty of accurately counting space weaponry, one thing is clear: The US is, by far, the world’s most heavily armed space power.
But not for a lack of trying on the part of other countries.
New Cold War in space
Earth’s orbit wasn’t always such a dangerous place. The Soviet Union destroyed a satellite for the last time in an experiment in 1982. The US tested its last Cold War anti-satellite missile, launched by a vertically flying F-15 fighter, in 1985.
For the next 3 decades, both countries refrained from deploying weapons in space. The “unofficial moratorium,” as Laura Grego, a space expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, described it, put the brakes on the militarization of space.
Then in 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew the US from a treaty with Russia prohibiting the development of antiballistic-missile weapons. The move cleared the way for Bush to deploy interceptor missiles that administration officials claimed would protect the US from nuclear attack by “rogue” states such as North Korea. But withdrawing from the treaty also undermined the consensus on the strictly peaceful use of space.
5 years later, in January 2007, China struck one of its own old satellites with a ground-launched rocket as part of a test of a rudimentary anti-satellite system. This scattered thousands of potentially dangerous pieces of debris across low orbit. Beijing’s anti-satellite test accelerated the militarization of space. The US, in particular, seized the opportunity to greatly expand its orbital arsenal.
US companies & government agencies have at least 500 satellites — roughly as many as the rest of the world combined. At least 100 of them are primarily military in nature. Most are for communication or surveillance. In other words, they’re oriented downward, toward Earth.
But a few patrol space itself. The US military’s Advanced Technology Risk Reduction spacecraft, launched into an 800-mile-high orbit in 2009, is basically a sensitive infrared camera that can detect the heat plumes from rocket launches &, presumably, maneuvering spacecraft. It then can beam detailed tracking data to human operators on the ground.
The risk-reduction satellite works in conjunction with other spacecraft & Earth-based sensors to keep track of Earth’s approximately 1,000 active satellites. The telescope-like Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite, launched in 2010, “has a clear and unobstructed view,” according to an Air Force fact sheet, “of resident space objects orbiting Earth from its 390-mile-altitude orbit.”
“Resident space object” is military speak for satellites.
A network of around 30 ground radars & telescopes complements the orbital sensors. Together, these systems make “380,000 to 420,000 observations each day,” Space Command explains on its Website.
Observing & tracking other countries’ satellites is a passive & essentially peaceful affair. But the US military also possesses at least 6 spacecraft that can maneuver close to enemy satellites & inspect or even damage them.
In 2010, the Air Force launched its first X-37B space plane. A quarter-size, robotic version of the old Space Shuttle, the X-37B boosts into low orbit — around 250 miles high — atop a rocket but lands back on Earth like an airplane.
The two X-37Bs take turns spending a year or more in orbit. Officially, the Air Force describes the maneuverable mini-shuttles as being part of “an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform.” But they could also attack other spacecraft.
The X-37Bs “could be used to rendezvous and inspect satellites, either friendly or adversarial, and potentially grab and de-orbit satellites,” the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, pointed out. The group stressed that the feasibility of the X-37Bs as weapons is low because the mini-shuttles are limited to low orbits & because the US operates at least 4 other maneuverable satellites that are probably far better at stalking & tearing up enemy spacecraft.
These include 2 Microsatellite Technology Experiment satellites that the military boosted into low orbit in 2006. The MiTEx satellites are small, weighing just 500 pounds each. This makes them harder for enemy sensors to detect — giving them the advantage of surprise in wartime.
The two Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program satellites are much bigger & higher up. From their stationary positions 22,000 miles above Earth, these spacecraft — in orbit since July 2014 — monitor other satellites & can, according to the Air Force, “maneuver near a resident space object of interest, enabling characterization for anomaly resolution and enhanced surveillance.”
Maneuverable space planes & satellites are one way of attacking enemy spacecraft. But there’s an older, less subtle method — blasting them out of space with a rocket.
In late 2006, an US spy satellite malfunctioned shortly after reaching low orbit. In early February 2008, the Pentagon announced it would shoot down the dead spacecraft. Officially, Washington insisted that the anti-satellite operation was a safety measure, to prevent the defunct craft’s toxic fuel from harming someone when the satellite’s orbit decayed & it tumbled to Earth.
But it appeared to more than one observer that China’s 2007 anti-satellite test motivated Washington’s own satellite shoot-down. A new Cold War was underway, this time in space.
On Feb. 20, 2008, the Navy cruiser Lake Erie, equipped with a high-tech Aegis radar, launched a specially modified SM-3 antiballistic-missile interceptor. The rocket struck the malfunctioning satellite at an estimated speed of 22,000 miles an hour, destroying it.
Today, the US has dozens of Aegis-equipped warships carrying hundreds of SM-3 missiles, more than enough to quickly wipe out the approximately 50 satellites apiece that Russia & China keep in low orbit.
“Aegis ships could be positioned optimally,” Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a 2011 paper, “ to stage a ‘sweep’ attack on a set of satellites nearly at once.”
As an anti-satellite backup, the US Army & the Missile Defense Agency also operate 2 types of ground-launched missile interceptors that have the power to reach low orbit — & the accuracy to strike spacecraft.
Against this huge arsenal, Russia & China possess few counterweights. China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, & a similar trial in early 2013, proved that Beijing can hit a low satellite with a rocket. In 2010, the Chinese space agency launched a cluster of small space vehicles, including 2 named SJ-6F & SJ-12, that slammed into each other in orbit, seemingly on purpose. In July 2013, China deployed a small inspection spacecraft, designated SY-7, in low orbit.
Like the US fleet of maneuverable inspection spacecraft, the tiny SY-7 with its remote-controlled claw could be orbital repair or inspection vehicle — or it could be a weapon.
“One could dream up,” Brian Weeden, a technical & space adviser at the Secure World Foundation, told the War Is Boring Website in 2013, “a whole bunch of dastardly things that could be done with a robotic arm in close proximity.”
But China lacks the space- & ground-based sensors to accurately steer these weapons toward their targets. Compared to the US space-awareness system, with its scores of radars & telescopes, China possesses a relatively paltry system — one consequence of Beijing’s diplomatic isolation.
Where the US can count on allies to host parts of a global sensor network, China has few formal allies & can only deploy space-awareness systems inside its own borders, on ships at sea or in space. The Chinese military can watch the skies over East Asia, but is mostly blind elsewhere.
By contrast, Russia inherited an impressive space-awareness network from the Soviet Union. Russia’s allies in Europe — in particular, the former Soviet & Eastern Bloc states — extend the network’s field of view. As a result, Moscow possesses “a relatively complete catalog of space objects,” the Secure World Foundation concluded.
But Russia is still far behind the US & China as far as space weaponry is concerned. There was a 31-year gap between the Soviet Union’s last anti-satellite test & Russia’s first post-Soviet orbital-weapon experiment. On Christmas Day in 2013, Russia quietly launched a small, maneuverable inspection spacecraft into low orbit, hiding the tiny spacecraft among a cluster of communications satellites.
2 more space inspectors followed, one in May 2014 & another in March 2015. Moscow hasn’t said much about them, but amateur satellite spotters have tracked the vehicles performing the kinds of maneuvers consistent with orbital attack craft. “You can probably equip them with lasers,” Anatoly Zak, the author of Russia in Space: Past Explained, Future Explored, said of the Russian craft. “Maybe put some explosives on them.”
They join a growing number of space weapons guided by expanding networks of Earth-based & orbital sensors on a new, distant battlefront of a so far bloodless neo-Cold War.
Trillions of those taxes are being spent on something which most of the world's population will never use. All these space military hardware is not helping anyone improve billions of lives right here on Earth.
We humans want to take a giant leap towards Moon settlement & Mars colonization, but we forget very easily that billions of humans are living a miserable & wretched life right in our backyard, right here on this very planet.
Our fellow humans are dying of thirst because water is becoming a shortage, but trillions are not being spent to come up with cheap technologies to solve this impending crisis.
Our fellow humans are dying of hunger or suffering from eating unhealthy foods because feeding everyone in the world a healthy diet would require billions in funding, but billions are not being spent on research to improve agriculture & food accessibility for billions of poor.
Our fellow humans are living without a roof over their heads & homelessness is only increasing. But billions are not being spent on building affordable housing to provide a decent living space to our own fellow human beings.
Similarly, there are thousands more issues where trillions can be spent easily to improve human & animal lives; fatal diseases, climate change, animal welfare, sustainable energy etc. & make our little planet a living utopia for all. But, instead of improving lives for billions on this little planet of ours, trillions are being spent, of people's own money, on advancing technologies to destroy more lives & wreck more havoc on this little planet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quietly & without most people noticing, the world’s leading space powers — the US, China & Russia — have been deploying new & more sophisticated weaponry in space.
Earth’s orbit is looking more & more like the planet’s surface — heavily armed & primed for war. A growing number of “inspection” satellites lurk in orbit, possibly awaiting commands to sneak up on & disable or destroy other satellites. Down on the surface, more & more warships & ground installations pack powerful rockets that, with accurate guidance, could reach into orbit to destroy enemy spacecraft.
A war in orbit could wreck the delicate satellite constellations that the world relies on for navigation, communication, scientific research & military surveillance. Widespread orbital destruction could send humanity through a technological time warp. “You go back to World War Two,” Air Force General John Hyten, in charge of US Space Command, told 60 Minutes. “You go back to the Industrial Age.”
It’s hard to say exactly how many weapons are in orbit. That’s because many spacecraft are “dual use.” They have peaceful functions & potential military applications. With the proverbial flip of a switch, an inspection satellite, ostensibly configured for orbital repair work, could become a robotic assassin capable of taking out other satellites with lasers, explosives or mechanical claws. Until the moment it attacks, however, the assassin spacecraft might appear to be harmless. And its dual use gives its operators political cover. The US possesses more space weaponry than any other country, yet denies that any of its satellites warrant the term.
When 60 Minutes asked the Air Force secretary whether the United States has weapons in space, Secretary Deborah Lee James answered simply: “No, we do not.”
Still, it’s possible to count at least some of the systems that could disable or destroy other satellites. Some of the surface-based weaponry is far less ambiguous & so easier to tally. Even taking into account the difficulty of accurately counting space weaponry, one thing is clear: The US is, by far, the world’s most heavily armed space power.
But not for a lack of trying on the part of other countries.
New Cold War in space
Earth’s orbit wasn’t always such a dangerous place. The Soviet Union destroyed a satellite for the last time in an experiment in 1982. The US tested its last Cold War anti-satellite missile, launched by a vertically flying F-15 fighter, in 1985.
For the next 3 decades, both countries refrained from deploying weapons in space. The “unofficial moratorium,” as Laura Grego, a space expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, described it, put the brakes on the militarization of space.
Then in 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew the US from a treaty with Russia prohibiting the development of antiballistic-missile weapons. The move cleared the way for Bush to deploy interceptor missiles that administration officials claimed would protect the US from nuclear attack by “rogue” states such as North Korea. But withdrawing from the treaty also undermined the consensus on the strictly peaceful use of space.
5 years later, in January 2007, China struck one of its own old satellites with a ground-launched rocket as part of a test of a rudimentary anti-satellite system. This scattered thousands of potentially dangerous pieces of debris across low orbit. Beijing’s anti-satellite test accelerated the militarization of space. The US, in particular, seized the opportunity to greatly expand its orbital arsenal.
US companies & government agencies have at least 500 satellites — roughly as many as the rest of the world combined. At least 100 of them are primarily military in nature. Most are for communication or surveillance. In other words, they’re oriented downward, toward Earth.
But a few patrol space itself. The US military’s Advanced Technology Risk Reduction spacecraft, launched into an 800-mile-high orbit in 2009, is basically a sensitive infrared camera that can detect the heat plumes from rocket launches &, presumably, maneuvering spacecraft. It then can beam detailed tracking data to human operators on the ground.
The risk-reduction satellite works in conjunction with other spacecraft & Earth-based sensors to keep track of Earth’s approximately 1,000 active satellites. The telescope-like Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite, launched in 2010, “has a clear and unobstructed view,” according to an Air Force fact sheet, “of resident space objects orbiting Earth from its 390-mile-altitude orbit.”
“Resident space object” is military speak for satellites.
A network of around 30 ground radars & telescopes complements the orbital sensors. Together, these systems make “380,000 to 420,000 observations each day,” Space Command explains on its Website.
Observing & tracking other countries’ satellites is a passive & essentially peaceful affair. But the US military also possesses at least 6 spacecraft that can maneuver close to enemy satellites & inspect or even damage them.
In 2010, the Air Force launched its first X-37B space plane. A quarter-size, robotic version of the old Space Shuttle, the X-37B boosts into low orbit — around 250 miles high — atop a rocket but lands back on Earth like an airplane.
The two X-37Bs take turns spending a year or more in orbit. Officially, the Air Force describes the maneuverable mini-shuttles as being part of “an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform.” But they could also attack other spacecraft.
The X-37Bs “could be used to rendezvous and inspect satellites, either friendly or adversarial, and potentially grab and de-orbit satellites,” the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, pointed out. The group stressed that the feasibility of the X-37Bs as weapons is low because the mini-shuttles are limited to low orbits & because the US operates at least 4 other maneuverable satellites that are probably far better at stalking & tearing up enemy spacecraft.
These include 2 Microsatellite Technology Experiment satellites that the military boosted into low orbit in 2006. The MiTEx satellites are small, weighing just 500 pounds each. This makes them harder for enemy sensors to detect — giving them the advantage of surprise in wartime.
The two Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program satellites are much bigger & higher up. From their stationary positions 22,000 miles above Earth, these spacecraft — in orbit since July 2014 — monitor other satellites & can, according to the Air Force, “maneuver near a resident space object of interest, enabling characterization for anomaly resolution and enhanced surveillance.”
Maneuverable space planes & satellites are one way of attacking enemy spacecraft. But there’s an older, less subtle method — blasting them out of space with a rocket.
In late 2006, an US spy satellite malfunctioned shortly after reaching low orbit. In early February 2008, the Pentagon announced it would shoot down the dead spacecraft. Officially, Washington insisted that the anti-satellite operation was a safety measure, to prevent the defunct craft’s toxic fuel from harming someone when the satellite’s orbit decayed & it tumbled to Earth.
But it appeared to more than one observer that China’s 2007 anti-satellite test motivated Washington’s own satellite shoot-down. A new Cold War was underway, this time in space.
On Feb. 20, 2008, the Navy cruiser Lake Erie, equipped with a high-tech Aegis radar, launched a specially modified SM-3 antiballistic-missile interceptor. The rocket struck the malfunctioning satellite at an estimated speed of 22,000 miles an hour, destroying it.
Today, the US has dozens of Aegis-equipped warships carrying hundreds of SM-3 missiles, more than enough to quickly wipe out the approximately 50 satellites apiece that Russia & China keep in low orbit.
“Aegis ships could be positioned optimally,” Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a 2011 paper, “ to stage a ‘sweep’ attack on a set of satellites nearly at once.”
As an anti-satellite backup, the US Army & the Missile Defense Agency also operate 2 types of ground-launched missile interceptors that have the power to reach low orbit — & the accuracy to strike spacecraft.
Against this huge arsenal, Russia & China possess few counterweights. China’s 2007 anti-satellite test, & a similar trial in early 2013, proved that Beijing can hit a low satellite with a rocket. In 2010, the Chinese space agency launched a cluster of small space vehicles, including 2 named SJ-6F & SJ-12, that slammed into each other in orbit, seemingly on purpose. In July 2013, China deployed a small inspection spacecraft, designated SY-7, in low orbit.
Like the US fleet of maneuverable inspection spacecraft, the tiny SY-7 with its remote-controlled claw could be orbital repair or inspection vehicle — or it could be a weapon.
“One could dream up,” Brian Weeden, a technical & space adviser at the Secure World Foundation, told the War Is Boring Website in 2013, “a whole bunch of dastardly things that could be done with a robotic arm in close proximity.”
But China lacks the space- & ground-based sensors to accurately steer these weapons toward their targets. Compared to the US space-awareness system, with its scores of radars & telescopes, China possesses a relatively paltry system — one consequence of Beijing’s diplomatic isolation.
Where the US can count on allies to host parts of a global sensor network, China has few formal allies & can only deploy space-awareness systems inside its own borders, on ships at sea or in space. The Chinese military can watch the skies over East Asia, but is mostly blind elsewhere.
By contrast, Russia inherited an impressive space-awareness network from the Soviet Union. Russia’s allies in Europe — in particular, the former Soviet & Eastern Bloc states — extend the network’s field of view. As a result, Moscow possesses “a relatively complete catalog of space objects,” the Secure World Foundation concluded.
But Russia is still far behind the US & China as far as space weaponry is concerned. There was a 31-year gap between the Soviet Union’s last anti-satellite test & Russia’s first post-Soviet orbital-weapon experiment. On Christmas Day in 2013, Russia quietly launched a small, maneuverable inspection spacecraft into low orbit, hiding the tiny spacecraft among a cluster of communications satellites.
2 more space inspectors followed, one in May 2014 & another in March 2015. Moscow hasn’t said much about them, but amateur satellite spotters have tracked the vehicles performing the kinds of maneuvers consistent with orbital attack craft. “You can probably equip them with lasers,” Anatoly Zak, the author of Russia in Space: Past Explained, Future Explored, said of the Russian craft. “Maybe put some explosives on them.”
They join a growing number of space weapons guided by expanding networks of Earth-based & orbital sensors on a new, distant battlefront of a so far bloodless neo-Cold War.
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