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John Feffer, Why Liberals Will Give Two Cheers for Trump

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In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris lost Democratic voters, including in Black and Hispanic communities. As a result, we now face a four-year replay of Trumpmania. Worse yet, only recently, Joe Biden lent The Donald a distinct hand by pardoning his own son (and so, in a sense, himself) in just about every imaginable way. In doing so, he set the stage for about-to-be-President-(again) Donald Trump, whose election victory was a pardon for him, to do the same for those who took part in what was essentially an attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2020. In the process, it’s obvious that Biden also prepared the ground — or do I mean the graveyard? — for Trump to someday do the same for himself and his family. (Of course, he beat Biden to the punch in December 2020 by pardoning his father-in-law Charles Kushner, who had pled guilty years earlier to tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations, and only recently — a surefire topper — appointing him ambassador to France!)

Yes, we couldn’t be in a stranger world… or… gulp… could we?

It’s hard for Americans to remember the novelty of the decades after World War II when, for the first time in history, a single power (the United States, of course) largely controlled the globe economically speaking, as well as in other ways. Today, as we await a second round of the man who already Made America Grapes Again (whoops, my mistake, Great Again) and is now planning to take this country down in an even fiercer fashion, it’s worth thinking about those Democrats he managed to pull into his camp in the last election season.

Worse yet, as TomDispatch regular John Feffer (whose weekly column at Foreign Policy in Focus is a must-read affair) points out today, there were those liberals who, in some strange fashion, however quietly, admired and supported specific policies of his (on a one-by-one basis) in his first term in office. If, as Feffer suggests, the same were to happen the second time around, the phrase of the moment, it seems to me, wouldn’t be morning in America, but mourning in America. Tom

Everyone (Sort of) Loves a Disrupter

Time to Boycott the US?

Liberals hate Trump, no question about it. He’s the definition of illiberal: authoritarian, racist, sexist, and downright nasty. Not only that, he’s a living repudiation of the liberal delusion that America runs on meritocracy.

But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats, and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.

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Andrea Mazzarino, Broken Heart Syndrome in Trump’s America

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Yes, in October 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan began. It would, after a fashion, prove to be a disastrous repeat of the Soviet war there in the 1980s (which the CIA did so much to make far worse). And from that moment on, this country’s war-making only ramped up horrifically for what seemed like endless years.

It’s a story that TomDispatch has covered since it first began in 2001 in response to the American bombing of Afghanistan. Eighteen years later, Andrea Mazzarino — co-founder of the remarkable Costs of War Project to put America’s twenty-first-century wars, their costs, and their casualties, on the record and in much-needed (if grim) perspective — wrote her first piece for TomDispatch. As a co-founder of that site and a military spouse, she focused then on a video that continued to haunt her “of a screaming young Iraqi child with open burn wounds covering his face and body, a relative clutching him in her arms as they hustled through a crowd.” Today, with her 42nd piece for this site, she remains in some fashion haunted (as are so many of us) by those all-American wars that, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, came to be cumulatively (and grimly) known as the Global War on Terror.

In fact, it almost couldn’t be stranger that, after 20-odd years of disastrous war-making across significant parts of the planet, Americans don’t seem to blink at the nearly trillion tax dollars that “we” continue to pour yearly into our vast military establishment. Given the circumstances in this century, that certainly continues to display what Mazzarino might call “a remarkable lack of restraint” — and now, as she reminds us, we (or at least almost 50% of us) have voted into the presidency (again) a man who gives “a remarkable lack of restraint” new meaning.

Consider us all, whether we know it or not, whether we recognize it or not, “haunted” by the devastation we’ve caused on this planet of ours in these years and let Mazzarino return to the subject of the way war has indeed made it back to “the home front” with — yes — Donald Trump and what continues to haunt her (as well it should). Tom

The Return of War to the Home Front

Don’t Look for Restraint from Donald Trump’s Military

In the early 1990s, doctors in Hiroshima, Japan, discovered a stress-induced syndrome they called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome” -- a condition in which the heart’s left ventricle, responsible for pumping blood, loses its capacity in response to extreme stressors like war, natural disaster, and the loss of loved ones. Prevalent among older women, that acute condition involves heart attack-like symptoms, including chest pain and pressure, light-headedness, and dread.

More recently, Israeli doctors in Tel Aviv noted a spike in the condition after the October 7, 2023, attack by the militant group Hamas and Israel’s subsequent incursion into (and devastation of) Gaza in response. The mothers of Israeli soldiers in particular have been affected, as have many who didn’t directly experience or witness the ravages of October 7th against that country’s civilians. (Undoubtedly, something similar has been happening in Gaza, too, but given the disastrous situation of the medical profession there, we have no way of knowing.)

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Noam Chomsky, The Eve of Destruction

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I have to admit that the thought of Noam Chomsky’s voice no longer being part of our world depresses me. He’s made such sense out of our distinctly embattled planet in a way no one else I can think of has. Today, I’m posting a 2013 piece he did for TomDispatch on how humanity had put itself at what he called “the eve of destruction” and, more than a decade ago, he already had climate change in mind as well as — you won’t be surprised to learn — nuclear weapons.

I only recently read what is likely to be his last book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, which he co-wrote with the young Nathan J. Robinson. As ever, Chomsky’s work remains eye-opening. Even his historical memory in this latest book remains remarkable. More than remarkable, actually. Who today remembers (or even knew) that, in the Vietnam War era, the U.S. at one point informally offered France two atomic bombs to help defeat the Vietnamese (an offer that, fortunately, was never taken up); or that, in those years, the U.S. dropped 2,093,100 tons (and no, that is not a misprint) of ordnance on Laos, a ton for every person living in that landlocked country the size of Pennsylvania, making it the most bombed nation in history?

As he writes toward the end of the book, “It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and restrain the violence of the state. It is cheap and easy to deplore the crimes of others, while dismissing or justifying our own. An honest person will choose a different course.” How true and how particularly apt, given the next Trump era to come! As far as I’m concerned, Chomsky has always been a must-read. Get your hands on a copy of his new book if you can.

And while I’m at it, let me also recommend a different book. I only recently began rereading a volume that, in another life in the 1990s, I actually edited: John Dower’s remarkable history of the end of World War II in the Pacific, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. All these years later, it remains a one-of-a-kind, utterly absorbing tale. I can think of nothing else like it. I couldn’t recommend it more highly either!

And now, check out my intro and Chomsky’s piece from more than a decade ago — and if the mood strikes you, as 2024 is coming to an end, visit the TomDispatch donation page and see what you can do to keep TD’s world spinning just a little longer. Tom]

It didn’t take long. In the immediate aftermath of the dropping of the “victory weapon,” the atomic bomb, on two Japanese cities in August 1945, American fears and fantasies ran wild.  Almost immediately, Americans began to reconceive themselves as potential victims of the bomb.  In the scenarios of destruction that would populate newspapers, magazines, radio shows, and private imaginations, our cities were ringed with concentric circles of destruction and up to 10 million people in the U.S. and tens of millions elsewhere died horribly in a few days of imagined battle.  Even victory, when it came in those first post-war years of futuristic dreams of destruction, had the look of defeat.  And the two wartime American stories — of triumphalism beyond imagining and ashes — turned out to be incapable of cohabiting in the same forms.  So the bomb fled the war movie (where it essentially never made an appearance) for the sci-fi flick in which stand-ins of every sort — alien superweapons and radioactive reptilian and other mutant monsters — destroyed the planet, endangered humanity, and pursued the young into every drive-in movie theater in the country.

As late as 1995, those two stories, the triumphalist end of “the Good War” and the disastrous beginning of the atomic age, still couldn’t inhabit the same space.  In that 50th anniversary year, a planned exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum that was supposed to pair the gleaming fuselage of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that carried the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima, with the caramelized remains of a schoolchild’s lunchbox (“No trace of Reiko Watanabe was ever found”) would be canceled. The outrage from veterans’ groups and the Republican right was just too much, the discomfort still too strong.

Until 1945, of course, the apocalypse had been the property of the Bible, and “end times” the province of God (and perhaps a budding branch of pulp lit called science fiction), but not of humanity.  Since then, it’s been ours, and as it turned out, we were acting apocalyptically in ways that weren’t apparent in 1945, that weren’t attached to a single wonder weapon, and that remain difficult to grasp and even deal with now.  With that in mind, and with thanks to Javier Navarro, we have adapted a video interview done with TomDispatch regular Noam Chomsky by What, the association Navarro helped to found.  Reworked by Chomsky himself, it offers his thoughts on a perilous future that is distinctly in our hands. Tom

Humanity Imperiled

The Path to Disaster

What is the future likely to bring?  A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside.  So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re a historian 100 years from now -- assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious -- and you’re looking back at what’s happening today.  You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.  That’s been true since 1945.  It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

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