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The post The 9/11 Files: The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong appeared first on LewRockwell.

The renaming of the Defense Department should have surprised no one. Donald Trump is an incipient fascist doing what such figures do. Surrounded by a coterie of illiberal ideologues and careerist sycophants, he and his top aides have dispensed with pretense and precedent, moving at breakneck speed to demolish what remains of the battered façade of American democracy.

In eight months, his second administration has unleashed a shock-and-awe assault on norms and institutions, civil liberties, human rights, and history itself. But fascism never respects borders. Fascists don’t recognize the rule of law. They consider themselves the law. Expansion and the glorification of war are their lifeblood. Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini put it all too bluntly: the fascist “believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace… war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it.”

Pete Hegseth is now equally blunt. From the Pentagon, he’s boasting of restoring a “warrior ethos” to the armed forces, while forging an offensive military that prizes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.” The message couldn’t be clearer: when the U.S. loses wars, as it has done consistently despite commanding the most powerful military in history, it’s not due to imperial overreach, political arrogance, or popular resistance. Rather, defeat stems from that military having gone “woke,” a euphemism for failing to kill enough people.

The recent rechristening of the Department of Defense as the Department of War was certainly a culture-war stunt like Trump’s demand that the Gulf of Mexico be renamed the Gulf of America. But it also signaled something more insidious: a blunt escalation of the criminal logic that has long underwritten U.S. militarism. That logic sustained both the Cold War of the last century and the War on Terror of this one, destroying millions of lives.

When Hegseth defended the recent summary executions of 11 alleged Venezuelan drug smugglers on a boat in the Caribbean, he boasted that Washington possesses “absolute and complete authority” to kill anywhere without Congressional approval or evidence of a wrong and in open defiance of international law. The next day, in responding on X to a user who called what had been done a war crime, Vance wrote, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” It was the starkest admission since the Iraq War that Washington no longer pretends to operate internationally under the rule of law but under the rule of force, where might quite simply makes right.

While such an escalation of verbiage — the brazen confession of an imperial power that believes itself immune from accountability — should alarm us, it’s neither unprecedented nor unexpected. Peace, after all, has never been the profession of the U.S. military. The Department of Defense has always been the Department of War.

American Imperialism and “Star-Spangled Fascism”

The U.S. has long denied being an empire. From its founding, imperialism was cast as the antithesis of American values. This nation, after all, was born in revolt against the tyranny of foreign rule. Yet for a country so insistent on not being an empire, Washington has followed a trajectory nearly indistinguishable from its imperial predecessors. Its history was defined by settler conquest, the violent elimination of Indigenous peoples, and a long record of covert and overt interventions to topple governments unwilling to yield to American political or economic domination.

The record is unmistakable. As Noam Chomsky once put it, “Talking about American imperialism is like talking about triangular triangles.” And he was hardly the first to suggest such a thing. In the 1930s, General Smedley Butler, reflecting with searing candor on his years of military service in Latin America, described himself as “a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests… I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.”

Historically, imperialism and fascism went hand in hand. As Aimé Césaire argued in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, fascism is imperialism turned inward. The violence inherent in colonial domination can, in the end, never be confined to the colonies, which means that what we’re now witnessing in the Trumpian era is a reckoning. The chickens are indeed coming home to roost or, as Noura Erakat recently observed, “The boomerang comes back.”

In their insatiable projection of power and pursuit of profit, Washington and Wall Street ignored what European empires had long revealed: that colonization “works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him… to degrade him.” English novelist Joseph Conrad recognized this in his classic nineteenth-century work of fiction, Heart of Darkness, concluding that it wasn’t the Congo River but the Thames River in Great Britain that “led into the heart of an immense darkness.”

Imperialism incubates fascism, a dynamic evident in the carnage of World War I, rooted, as W.E.B. DuBois observed at the time, in colonial competition that laid the foundations for World War II. In that conflict, Césaire argued, the Nazis applied to Europe the methods and attitudes that until then were reserved for colonized peoples, unleashing them on Europeans with similarly genocidal effect.

War is Peace

In the postwar years, the United States emerged from the ruins of Europe as the unrivaled global hegemon. With some six percent of the world’s population, it commanded nearly half of the global gross domestic product. Anchored by up to 2,000 military bases across the globe (still at 800 today), it became the new imperial power on which the sun never set. Yet Washington ignored the fundamental lesson inherent in Europe’s self-cannibalization. Rather than dismantle the machinery of empire, it embraced renewed militarism. Rather than demobilize, it placed itself on a permanent global war footing, both anticipating and accelerating the Cold War with that other great power of the period, the Soviet Union.

The United States was, however, a superpower defined as much by paranoia and insecurity as by military and economic strength. It was in such a climate that American officials moved to abandon the title of the Department of War in 1947, rebranding it as the Department of Defense two years later. The renaming sought to reassure the world that, despite every sign the U.S. had assumed the mantle of European colonialism, its intentions were benign and defensive in nature.

That rhetorical shift would prove inseparable from a broader ideological transformation as the Cold War froze geopolitics into rigid Manichean camps. President Harry Truman’s March 1947 address to Congress marked the start of a new global confrontation. In that speech, the president proclaimed the United States the guardian of freedom and democracy everywhere. Leftist movements were cast as Soviet proxies and struggles for national liberation in the former colonial world were framed not in the language of decolonization and self-determination but as nefarious threats to American interests and international peace and security.

In Europe at the time, a civil war raged in Greece, while decisive elections loomed in Italy. Determined not to “lose” such countries to communism, Washington moved to undermine democracy under the guise of saving it. In Greece, it would channel $300 million to right-wing forces, many staffed by former fascists and Nazi collaborators, in the name of defending freedom. In Western Europe, Washington used its position as the world’s banker to manipulate electoral outcomes. In the wake of the 1947 National Security Act that created the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA (the same bill that renamed the War Department), the agency launched its first large-scale covert operation. In 1948, the U.S. would funnel millions of dollars into Italy and unleashed a torrent of propaganda to ensure that leftist parties would not prevail.

Across the Third World, the CIA perfected that template for covert interventions aimed at toppling democratic governments and installing pliant authoritarians. The overthrow of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 marked the beginning of a series of regime-change operations. More assassinations and coups followed, including of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The utter contempt for democracy inherent in such actions was embodied in National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s remark: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

In the aftermath of each intervention, Washington installed anticommunist dictators who had one thing in common: they murdered their own citizens, and often those of other countries as well, dismantled democratic institutions, and siphoned national wealth into personal fortunes and the coffers of multinational corporations.

By the 1980s, the CIA was bankrolling proxy wars spanning the globe. Billions of dollars were being funneled to the Afghan mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. In both Afghanistan and Nicaragua, those U.S.-backed “freedom fighters” (or, as President Ronald Reagan termed the Contras, the “moral equals of our founding fathers”) deployed tactics that amounted to scaled-up terrorism. The mask occasionally slipped. As historian Greg Grandin has noted, one adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff described the Contras as “the strangest national liberation organization in the world.” In truth, he conceded, they were “just a bunch of killers.”

“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence”

As with the CIA, the not-so-aptly-renamed “Defense Department” would oversee a succession of catastrophic wars that did nothing to make Americans safer and had little to do with the protection of democratic values. Within a year of its renaming, the U.S. was at war in Korea. When the North invaded the South in 1950, seeking to reunify a peninsula divided by foreign powers, Washington rushed to intervene, branding it a “police action,” the first of many Orwellian linguistic maneuvers to sidestep the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war.

The official narrative that the communists launched the war to topple a democratically elected government in the South obscured its deeper origins. After World War II, Washington installed Syngman Rhee, an exile who had spent decades in the United States, as South Korea’s leader. He commanded little popular legitimacy but proved a staunch ally for American officials determined to secure an anticommunist foothold on the peninsula. Far from embodying liberal democracy, his regime presided over a repressive police state.

In 1948, two years before the war, an uprising against Rhee’s corrupt rule broke out on Jeju Island. With Washington’s blessing, his security forces launched a brutal counterinsurgency that left as many as 80,000 dead. Far from an aberration, Jeju epitomized Washington’s emerging Cold War policy: not the cultivation of democracies responsive to their citizenry (with the uncertainty that entailed), but the defense of authoritarian regimes as reliable bulwarks against communism.

The Korean War also marked a growing reliance on air power. Carpet bombing and the widespread use of napalm would reduce the North to rubble, destroying some 85% of its infrastructure and killing two million civilians. As future Secretary of State Dean Rusk would later admit, the U.S. bombed “everything that moved in North Korea.” The only “restraint” exercised was the decision not to deploy atomic bombs, despite the insistence of Air Force General Curtis LeMay who would reflect unapologetically, “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off… 20 percent of the population.”

A remarkably similar pattern unfolded in Vietnam. As revealed in the Pentagon Papers, the United States initially backed France in its attempt after World War II to reimpose colonial rule over Indochina. After the French forces were defeated in 1954, the partition of the country ensued. Elections to reunify Vietnam were scheduled for 1956, but U.S. intelligence concluded that the North’s communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would win in a landslide, so the elections were cancelled. Once again, Washington placed its support behind the unpopular, repressive South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, chosen not for his legitimacy but for his reliability in the eyes of American policymakers.

The result was a futile slaughter. The U.S. would kill well over three million people in Southeast Asia and drop more than three and a half times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as were used in all of World War II. That orgy of violence would lead Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967, to denounce the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The same has held true for nearly the entire span of the past 80 years.

Empire or Democracy

The human toll of the Cold War exceeded 20 million lives. As historian Paul Chamberlin calculated, that amounted to some 1,200 deaths every day for 45 years. To call such an era “cold” was not only misleading but obscene. It was, in truth, a period of relentless and bloody global conflict, much of it instigated, enabled, or prolonged by the United States. And its wars also produced the blowback that would later be rebranded as the “War on Terror.”

The names of America’s adversaries may have changed over the years from Hitler to Stalin, Kim Il-Sung to Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein to Xi Jinping, but the principle has remained constant. Washington reserves for itself the unilateral right to intervene, violently and antidemocratically, in the affairs of other nations to secure what it considers its interests. The reversion of the Defense Department to the War Department should be seen less as a rupture than a revelation. It strips away a euphemism to make far plainer what has long been the reality of our world.

We now face a choice. As historian Christian Appy has reminded us, “The institutions that sustain empire destroy democracy.” That truth is unfolding before our eyes. As the Pentagon budget tops one trillion dollars and the machinery of war only expands in Donald Trump’s America, the country also seems to be turning further inward. Only recently, President Trump threatened to use Chicago to demonstrate “why it is called the Department of War.” Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or ICE, is set to become among the most well-funded domestic “military” forces on the planet and potentially the private paramilitary of an aspiring autocrat.

If there is any hope of salvaging this country’s (not to speak of this planet’s) future, then this history has to be faced, and we must recover — or perhaps discover — our moral bearings. That will require not prolonging the death throes of American hegemony, but dismantling imperial America before it collapses on itself and takes us all with it.

This article was originally published on TomDispatch.com.

The post What’s in a Name? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some two decades ago, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a major Islamic conference.  Instead of uttering the usual platitudes about Muslim unity, I rebuked the Muslim World for doing nothing to prevent the massacre of Bosnians by Serb forces and the mass rape of Bosnian Muslim women.

The only Muslim nations who had done anything to help Bosnia’s terrorized Muslims were Iran and Albania.  Then military-ruled Turkey, the second largest power in Europe, did almost nothing to help Bosnia.  If Jews were being raped or murdered, Israel’s armed forces would have gone into action to rescue them, I asserted.

Not surprisingly I was never invited back to address another Islamic gathering – except for one proud moment last year when I was made a member of Afghanistan’s Pashtun Bangash tribe.  A taxi driver refused to take money from me last week and said, ‘you are now an Afghan.’  For me, that is a badge of honor.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a possibly important accord this week.  Possibly, I say, because recent history is replete with empty security agreements between the Saudis and Pakistan.

Israel’s recent air attacks on Doha have clearly jolted the Saudis into fearing they might face more Israeli attacks similar to the ones recently suffered by Iran.  Israel appears determined to crush the feeble Arab powers of the region and impose its pax Judaica there.  To many in the Mideast, the power-drunk Trump administration appears to have become an arm of Israel’s extreme right-wing government.

The immensely rich but militarily feeble Saudis are clearly taking shelter with the terribly poor but militarily powerful, nuclear armed Pakistan – which they should have done long ago. Looking back, we recall when the late President Zia ul-Haq (whom I wrote about last week) commanded a division of crack Pakistani troops tasked with protecting Saudi Arabia’s royal family.

This should happen again. There is a small force of Pakistani troops in Saudi Arabia, and more across the Arab World.  Pakistan’s military numbers over 600,000 men.

The question remains: will Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella be used to cover Saudi Arabia? That seems unlikely for now because Saudi Royal, with its seas of money and many airbases, remains a pillar of US government power.  US arms sales to Saudi are a keystone of US military production and directly influence the rich but powerless Gulf states.  Egypt, the only Arab power worthy of note, remains subservient to US demands.

But if Israel advances its interests in the Arab World, the Saudis might invoke support from Pakistan.  But Pakistan might develop its own appetite for Arabian oil, as will surely Israel.  So too could Turkey, which appears to have taken over much of Syria and deeply hungers for oil, of which it has none.  There is also the huge question of India-Pakistan nuclear rivalry.

The post Important New Alliances Forming in the Mideast appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Intellectual Conservative

The post ICE is Allegedly ‘Racially Profiling,’ So Why is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Under Court Monitoring for the Same? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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John Leake

The post Who Bought the Put Options on Airline Stocks Shortly Before 9/11? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

WLT Report

The post Candace Owens Releases New, Unseen Photo of Alleged Kirk Assassin At Dairy Queen After the Shooting appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The Reload

The post DC Police Withholding Full Details About Gun Seizures During Federal Takeover… For Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The Reload

The post FBI Director Says ‘Assault Weapon Ban’ Could ‘Prevent Future Attacks’ in Some Instances, Declines to Endorse Legislation appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The post US college students increasingly favoring socialism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The Duran: America First Revival and NATO Provocations w/ Robert Barnes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hoppe wrote:

Zero Hedge

The post Argentine Assets Soar As Bessent Offers Milei A Lifeline’s appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Some good news for all the mothers with autistic children who persisted and persuaded RFK Jr. to start investigating the link between autism and vaccines. RFK, Jr. and President Trump held a press conference where they announced the HHS will be studying all possible causes of autism including vaccines. My favorite part was when they said the Amish don’t have autism because they don’t take vaccines. 

See here.

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John Leake

The post Pulling Back the Curtain on America’s Tawdry Wizards appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.

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Brandon Campbell

The post Complete List of 800 FEMA Concentration Camps appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Roger Stone, an expert on assassinations, weighs in on suspect Tyler Robinson. Link.

The post Roger Stone on Charlie Kirk Murder Suspect: Lone Nut or Patsy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Lew,

I read Tom Woods’ article on the drop in birth rates with interest. I’ve followed this demographic trend online for years. Some of my friends, like me, believe the human race will go extinct when a baby’s cry is never heard.

Kevin Dolan is an optimist. He has six kids. Like Tom Woods, who has five daughters, or is it six? These two men want the human race to reproduce so that their own children can have thriving lives.

That is understandable. But there are a lot of boomers like me. I have a son and daughter now in their late forties. They have never been married, no kids, no cars, no house. My daughter told me last month, “You’d have to be crazy to have a kid today.”

So, as the man said, “I have no skin in the game.” My children have no skin in the game. Whether the human race survives or not makes no difference to my gene pool. It’s a dead end. And yet, many of the “leaders” in Europe and the world have no children. Why would humans want them as leaders? They have no skin in the game of human survival. 

The human race is always only 40 years away from extinction. No kids. No humans.

The post Re: Guess Who Isn’t Having Babies: Tom Woods appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Patrick Foy:

Well here’s a welcomed straw in the wind. Supposedly, reportedly, the long trumpeted “pivot to Asia” is off. It must have finally occurred to someone in Washington that the declared target, the “great enemy” China, cannot be bullied. And that the U.S. Treasury cannot in any event afford such a grandiose adventure, another crusade to nowhere. 

The internationalist and globalist Financial Times is my source. Specifically, the Grand Poobah of “Swamp Notes”, one Rana Foroohar. According to her, Washington strategists have concluded, “…the U.S. simply does not have enough military capacity to protect the world anymore.” So a reimagined “Monroe Doctrine” is in the cards. South America is more amenable to being kicked around.

The non-pivot to Asia must be a bitter sweet pill for Rana. She sees risks for an “isolationist” comeback. Anytime common sense is applied to U.S. foreign policy, self-satisfied establishment commentators scream, “isolationism!”  It’s like when anyone objects to the slavish U.S. relationship with Israel. Must of course be “anti-semitism!” In short, common sense be damned!

See this.

The post Trump’s U-Turn on China? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

President Trump and Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika both affirmed the official narrative by stating suspect Tyler Robinson, who hasn’t yet been convicted in a court of law, is Charlie’s killer. Tucker cryptically deviates from that perspective by citing his favorite biblical story where Christ is telling the truth and men conspire to kill him. Link.

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