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Letitia James has announced she is seeking to dissolve the NRA after an investigation by her office uncovered what she called ‘years of self-dealing and illegal conduct’. James accused the NRA’s CEO, Wayne LaPierre, of using the group’s funds to finance a luxury lifestyle for his family.
‘The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse,’ James said. ‘Which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organisation is above the law.’
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In the early morning on July 2, Corey Hurren, a 46-year-old military reservist from Manitoba, rammed his pickup truck through the front gate of the grounds at Rideau Hall, which houses the official residence of the governor general of Canada and Rideau Cottage, the temporary residence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family. Armed with four weapons — a revolver, two shotguns, and a newly-banned Norinco M14 rifle — Hurren was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada’s federal police corps) after a 90-minute stand-off. Hurren currently faces 22 charges, including “knowingly utter[ing] a threat to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”
Hurren’s motives remain somewhat unclear. In a handwritten two-page letter found on his person, he expressed a litany of grievances, including fears over the suspension of Parliament due to the ongoing pandemic and the possibility that the country, under Trudeau’s leadership, was on its way to a communist dictatorship. Such a list sits alongside what has been described in the Canadian press as a mixture of “personal despair and financial distress.”
The Far Right Has a History of Infiltrating the British Army
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Hurren’s exact motivation for this act remains somewhat nebulous. He has a long history of being drawn to conspiracy theories, including QAnon, a radical-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed plot by an alleged deep state against US President Donald Trump and his supporters. The incident itself took place in the immediate aftermath of a protest on Parliament Hill, which saw a few hundred of far-right protesters descending on Ottawa to call for the prime minister to be prosecuted for diverse alleged crimes. These factors have led some analysts, including myself, to wonder whether this represented yet another incident of Canadian military personnel being in ideological alignment with radical-right groups.
The Threat
The threat posed by the presence of military personnel in radical-right groups is a growing concern across NATO member countries, but the full extent of the problem remains unclear. Over the past few months, Ondrej Hajn and I have so far identified 213 individual cases of military personnel from the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and the United States discharged or prosecuted for their participation in radical-right groups since 2010. Only a fraction of cases involving soldiers discharged or prosecuted for harboring links to the radical right is available through open source information.
While these numbers may at first glance seem insignificant compared to the overall size of these nations’ armed forces, two factors are worth bearing in mind. Firstly, publicly available information about individual military personnel involved in radical-right groups is extremely hard to come by. In fact, while our dataset records 14 cases in Canada, an internal document from the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF) Military Police Criminal Intelligence Program found that 53 CAF personnel were identified as being part of hate groups between January 2014 and November 2018. This indicates that our dataset only represents the tip of the iceberg.
Daniel Koehler’s fantastic report on the issue paints a much grimmer picture but stops short of identifying individual cases, as we have sought to do. In fact, in the majority of cases, the information was not disclosed by the military itself but instead comes from media outlets, internet sleuths and law enforcement. Secondly, history has shown us the potentially disastrous consequences of letting such radical-right ideologies fester within the ranks of NATO militaries, giving succor to violent, racist ideologies that might lead to vigilante-style attacks.
The threat posed by military personnel in radical-right groups became apparent in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Timothy McVeigh, a US Army veteran radicalized by anti-government rhetoric and interactions with members of radical-right militias, killed 168 people with a truck bomb. However, the events of September 11 and the resultant global war on terror largely sidelined concerns about extremism within military ranks. In 2008, the FBI warned that radical-right groups were “making a concerted effort to recruit active-duty soldiers and recent combat veterans.” The report further highlighted that “military experience is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement as the result of recruitment campaigns by extremist groups and self-recruitment by veterans sympathetic to white supremacist causes.”
These warnings would prove to be prophetic, and the intersection of individuals aligned with radical-right groups and the military appear to have plagued almost every NATO member country, where radical-right groups have deliberately attempted to recruit individuals with military experience to “exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”
Hateful Conduct
Despite clear indication that the presence of military personnel among radical-right groups poses both a serious security threat and can be a detriment to unit readiness and successful deployment, Western militaries have been generally tight-lipped about their efforts to root out such individuals. A notable exception is the German Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), which recently released its first publicly available report on extremism within the German federal defense forces, the Bundeswehr. (An English overview of this report can be found here.)
Another positive step is last month’s unveiling of the new Canadian Armed Forces policy on hateful conduct. The policy provides a formal definition of hateful conduct as “an act or conduct, including the display or communication of words, symbols or images, by a CAF member, that they knew or ought reasonably to have known would constitute, encourage, justify or promote violence or hatred against a person or persons of an identifiable group, based on their national or ethnic origin, race, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics or disability.”
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Prior to the unveiling of this policy, defining hateful conduct was a task which had previously proven difficult for military brass. Members found to have violated the policy can face administrative or disciplinary action that can range from mandatory education, counselling and treatment to having their cases investigated by military police.
Along with the new policy, the Canadian Armed Forces announced that it will be implementing a new system to help monitor and track any suspected incidents of hateful conduct within its ranks. While details about this new system remain scarce, it has been reported that it will resemble the system created to monitor sexual misconduct in the ranks.
While this new policy and the monitoring mechanism are clearly a step in the right direction that acknowledges the severity of the problem and the importance of addressing it in order to make the Canadian Armed Forces a more inclusive organization, it nonetheless falls short on several points. First, the new policy could be seen as a way of potentially decriminalizing hateful conduct within the CAF’s ranks. As argued by Colonel Michel Drapeau, “Under the new policy, the CAF has distanced itself from the Criminal Code, inviting commanding officers and members of the chain of command to treat any such wilful hateful conduct as an administrative, disciplinary matter.”
Secondly, cases of hateful misconduct will continue to be dealt with behind closed doors, which makes it particularly hard for journalists, scholars and concerned members of the public to examine the full extent of the phenomenon. Without direct access to this data, scholars and the public will have to continue relying on open source data, which only paints a partial picture. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, while this new policy and the recent report from the German MAD are encouraging, the phenomenon has yet to be examined and tackled in a comparative way across all NATO countries, signaling a lack of efforts to coordinate practices and lessons learned amongst NATO member states concerning an increasingly transnational terror issue.
*[The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right is a partner institution of Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
To determine whether China can deliver a better Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we must first ask whether Beijing is first of all capable of delivering a better BRI? Accusations of practicing debt-trap diplomacy and new forms of colonialism have had some impact on Beijing’s thinking, resulting in its pivot in 2018 to commit to a new, greener BRI, but the foundation of its “grand plan” for implementing the BRI basically remains similar to when it started in 2013.
Beijing’s BRI Hubris Comes at a Price
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President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CCP) have put some good-looking window dressing on the basic package, but so far, many BRI host country governments would say not all that much has changed since 2018, when Xi announced a pivot. Beijing is very good at saying one thing and doing another, as numerous governments around the world have learned. As a result, BRI host nations will inevitably believe that Beijing has had a real change of heart when they see it.
Deaf Ear
Part of Beijing’s problem is that it does not appear to be attuned to what the world is thinking. Perhaps it does not care. Reading Chinese media reports on the subject leaves one with the impression that the world is in unison and harmony with Beijing, its vision for the world and its performance thus far with the BRI. For example, according to the CCP’s primary media outlet, the China Daily, a 2018 survey of 8,500 people in 17 BRI countries determined that “more than 70% agreed with the concepts of the “Chinese Dream,” the Belt and Road and “a community with a shared future for mankind.” But even this Chinese government-sponsored survey admitted that 64% of respondents believed that the BRI will confront many difficulties and challenges in the future.
That concern was echoed by a 2019 survey by Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, which polled more than 1,000 respondents in the government sector, the business community, civil society, academia and the media from across all 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It found that fewer than 10% of respondents viewed China as “a benign and benevolent power,” 64% had little or no confidence that Beijing’s revised approach to the BRI will result in a fairer deal for their respective countries, and nearly 50% responded that they believed that Beijing possessed an intent to turn Southeast Asia into its own sphere of influence. That does not sound like a particularly inspiring foundation from which to try to turn things around.
Beijing knows it has a long road ahead. To its credit, it has issued regulations intended to better monitor the conduct of state-owned enterprises and private Chinese businesses, mandating that they should pay more attention to environmental, social, integrity, financial and other risk factors. If a particular host nation’s laws are weak, these entities have been advised to ensure compliance with Chinese law, international treaties and conventions, and industry best practices. Reporting requirements, capital controls, and the regulation of overseas finance and investment have been tightened, which has contributed to the notable decline in new Chinese overseas loans and investments since 2017.
Outside the Norm
That said, Beijing has generally been reluctant to apply its laws to the activities of its entities overseas. In fact, State Council guidance requiring extensive disclosure of contracts for major construction projects expressly exempts overseas investment and foreign aid projects. Laws criminalizing the bribery of foreign officials have never been enforced. Although Chinese courts have heard cases related specifically to the BRI, unless a project contract contains explicit obligations for which performance is sought, enforcement of Chinese laws for overseas actions almost never occurs. Beijing appears to be banking on the fact that a great many of the BRI’s host governments have worse transparency and corruption ratings than China, which presumably makes their willingness to pursue Chinese entities engaged in corruption less likely in the first place.
As long as Beijing continues to insist that only Chinese entities will provide financing for BRI projects, there is no way for external organizations to monitor transparency, corruption or adherence to international standards. That will, by itself, ensure that tension remains between Beijing, BRI host nations and the West, and signals to the world that Beijing is not in fact serious about reforming fundamental aspects of the initiative. Greater emphasis can be placed on taking some care not to blatantly violate national laws and international norms, allowing Beijing to proclaim that progress is being made, but that will continue to be on a relative scale.
If practices were previously wholly outside the norm of internationally acceptable behavior but they are improved, they can remain outside the norm of acceptable behavior even though they have improved. More than minor tweaks are required to demonstrate that a true pivot has occurred. Beijing certainly has the ability to implement meaningful wholesale change to the BRI if it chooses to, but it has yet to do so. Based on its prior history of performance regarding its flagship initiative, such changes stand little chance of being implemented.
*[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
Earlier this year, Kosovo elected Albin Kurti as prime minister. Progressive, pro-American, pro-justice and anti-corruption, Kurti was precisely the kind of politician Americans would ordinarily wish to see in power in the region. And yet the US has orchestrated what Kurti has called “a parliamentary coup d’etat” to replace him with Avdullah Hoti, who, as soon as he was installed, reversed the measures Kurti had taken to promote reciprocal sovereign relations between Serbia and Kosovo.
Emerging out of the protests in Kosovo against the failures by the EU and the UN to address the massive corruption and pro-Serbian bias undermining peace negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina, Kurti had staunchly refused American requests that Kosovo remove the import tariffs it had imposed on Serbia’s goods for its refusal to recognize Kosovo as an independent state. But if Kurti wanted to garner the same respect for Kosovo that Serbia was getting from the West, and the Trump administration in particular, his recalcitrance soon proved costly.
Will Bosnia and Herzegovina Ever Rise Above Its Ethnic Divisions?
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Congressional Republicans, with Trump’s blessing, threatened Kosovo with the loss of $49 million in US support, along with US peacekeepers still deployed in the country. And so, after less than two months in power, Kurti was labeled anti-American and swiftly ousted in a vote of no confidence. Unsurprisingly, Hoti, as Kosovo’s new prime minister, made immediate concessions to Serbia under the guise of aiding peace negotiations.
Ad Hoc Border Redrawing
A few weeks ago, an ad hoc White House summit between Serbia and Kosovo intended to promote the idea of land swaps within the region was abruptly canceled after a special prosecutor in The Hague hijacked the US plan with a surprising move by indicting, on June 24, Kosovo’s president, Hashim Thaci, for war crimes in the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office even before the pre-trial judge’s confirmation of the charges. This indictment may or may not prove legitimate according to due process, but it did achieve the immediate result of removing the one remaining obstacle to a rushed peace treaty from which Kosovo was unlikely to benefit.
Thaci’s role as president is largely ceremonial, but his early leadership of Kosovo’s liberation from Serbia and his standing as one of the country’s most prominent politicians of the last 20 years would have made him a formidable peace negotiator.
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The conspicuous timing of this indictment, then, was entirely to the advantage of Serbia and, by extension, Russia. The peace negotiations will go on with Kosovo’s delegation being limited to Hoti, a bit player likely to agree to whatever is put on the table. Serbia, on the other hand, is led by a rising authoritarian, Aleksandar Vucic, whose party has just won a parliamentary majority in an election the integrity of which has been broadly questioned by the country’s opposition.
Serbia’s minister of information in the late 1990s, Vucic, is credited with banning foreign media and any criticism of the government. Equally sacrosanct is his relationship with Russia. Vucic recently hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Belgrade, gifting him, perhaps symbolically, with yet another puppy. In return for this kind of clearly demonstrated loyalty, Putin has been good to Serbia, delivering anti-aircraft weapons but also actively arming Bosnian Serb police and training paramilitary units to strengthen the voices of separatists in the region.
Putin has similarly turned Milorad Dodik, the current representative of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (Bosnia) tripartite presidency, into a political puppet. Emboldened by Trump’s deference to Putin, Dodik has undermined all of Bosnia’s efforts to join the NATO alliance. He has even promised to Bosnian Serbs that he would break up Bosnia and annex nearly half of its land to Serbia, which Serbia — along with Bosnian Serbs — has already ethnically cleansed of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) during the 1990s genocide. Dodik’s continued destabilization of his own country reflects the extent to which Putin dominates the region. To bolster Dodik’s power, in April of this year, Putin stunned Bosnia and Herzegovina’s government by sending Russia’s military units into the country, uninvited.
If it was not already clear enough, it is now: Putin has successfully enlisted Donald Trump as a pawn in Russia’s long-term geopolitical game in Europe. And with an unfettered Russia free to make such moves as Putin chooses, we may soon be witnessing another round of serious bloodshed in the Balkans. The threat has not gone unnoticed.
European Concerns
Europe saw Thaci’s indictment as an opening to inject itself into the peace talks between Kosovo and Serbia. Only a day later, the president of the European Council met with Kosovo’s prime minister; the “1st physical visit since coronavirus” by the president of the European Commission was also with Hoti. Having now been summoned by the EU and perhaps overwhelmed by the pressure brought to bear by his western neighbors, Hoti agreed to participate in new Europe-led peace talks with Vucic that would take the place of that canceled White House summit.
The EU was rightly concerned with the direction of the peace talks led by Trump’s envoy, Richard Grenell, and the consequent violence that might have ensued had the peace agreement legitimized the idea of land swaps, as Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, has now confirmed were being discussed. As far as Bolton is concerned, “This happens in history, that’s just something you have to live with.”
But Europe is far less indifferent to the kind of bloodshed such land swaps might trigger in the Balkans. The EU, after all, now includes Croatia, a country bordering Serbia, which, if drawn into a conflict, would undermine the long-term viability of the already weakened transnational organization. In short, a peace treaty endorsing the land swaps would open a Pandora’s Box of tensions reigniting Serbs’ old claims over territories in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and beyond. Violence of this kind in the Balkans will assure Putin’s ultimate goal of destabilizing Europe. Once again, Russia will have a point of reentry into Eastern Europe, through its own backdoor — the Balkans.
Under the malign neglect of Trump’s presidency, Vladimir Putin has crafted for himself a unique window of opportunity within which to instigate violence in the Balkans, capitalizing on likely Serb secession from the handful of nations born out of the fall of Yugoslavia. Serbs in Montenegro, Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs in Croatia and Serbs in Kosovo have long hoped to join into a Greater Serbia, an ethnically cleansed and imagined nation void of religious diversity. It was this same Serb ambition of ethnic purity that led to several wars and the unforgettable genocide against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s.
The Bells of Hate
Today, the bells of hate chime more widely yet, drawing upon white supremacy throughout the West. Aided by Russia and a half-witting Trump, an authoritarian-led Serbia is entirely capable of initiating bloodshed as relentlessly and dangerously as it did in the 1990s — perhaps even more so.
Setting aside Trump’s own race and religion-based sympathies for Serbian nationalism, American national interests in no way align with Serbia’s agenda of redrawing borders in the Balkans. But with Putin pushing for it, Trump has been in a hurry to help out however he can. And why wouldn’t he be, just ahead of a November election in which his Russian friend may once more be able to play a critical role?
So while Europe and the US continue to trip over each other, this is the perfect opportunity for Putin to legitimize the idea of redrawn borders. Serbia and Kosovo are one thing, after all, but validating the concept for implementation elsewhere? This would really be something, taking geopolitics back to a mode in which military conquest and ethnic cleansing, rather than aspirations to democracy, human rights and social justice, are what shape the fortunes of nations.
Putin is a long-term strategist who, while no one was watching, has actively planted the seeds of the EU’s demise in the Balkans. And make no mistake: Neither a canceled meeting in the White House nor another summit hosted by Europeans this summer is going to stop him. In the wake of Richard Grenell’s White House summit debacle and the EU leaders’ evident panic for what comes next, the only thing meaningfully standing in Putin’s way is the tiny NATO-protected country of Montenegro. Last year, Russian military intelligence agents were convicted for their role in a 2016 coup d’état aimed at thwarting Montenegro’s attempt to join NATO. Though the attempt failed, Putin didn’t stop there.
In 2018, only three days after the infamous off-the-record meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki that shocked the world, President Trump stunned us all yet again when he proclaimed that NATO’s insistence on protecting this newly admitted member, Montenegro, would trigger a war of global proportions. Few were inclined to take this seriously at the time, but watching Trump’s hastened interest in appeasing Russia with the peace treaty between Kosovo and Serbia, America’s indifference toward the rise of Putin’s control over Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the recently announced costly withdrawal of American troops from Germany in the midst of America’s own national crisis shines a light not only on Washington’s shifting alliances but also new dangers on the horizon.
While the US president insists on enabling serious mischief in the Balkans, Europe can only watch in fear, too weak to stop what may be coming next. Bearing in mind the fact that it was Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by a secret Serb military organization that triggered the First World War, we would do well right now not to look the other way.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
The Trump administration has floated the idea of sanctioning Chinese officials and members of the Communist party of China. Before we ask whether this is a good idea, let’s ask how Sino-US relations got to this stage.The US cold war with the Soviet Union was over ideology, but today’s standoff with China is different. The Chinese state has no ideology, no religion, no moral agenda. It continues wearing socialist garb but only as a face-saving pretence. It has, in fact, become a state-capitalist dictatorship. What the world sees today is a contest between the US system of free-market capitalism and Chinese state capitalism. How should we read this chessboard?The post-Mao dictatorship in China has lived by the principle of “repress at home and be open to the world”. It has imported knowhow from abroad. There are an estimated 360,000 Chinese students currently enrolled who have come through America’s open door. Over 40 years, at least a million have returned to China and fed their new technical knowledge into the existing authoritarian structures that have built the dictatorship. It might be the most momentous personnel transfer in history. When I applied to study in the US in the 1980s, I filled out a questionnaire that asked if I had ever been a member of the Communist party. The point of the question was presumably to avoid ideological risks. But it is beyond doubt that the Chinese students coming in with me included many party members who were headed to some of the US’s finest schools, often with scholarships. Americans generally assumed that these students would feel the appeal of liberal values, which they would then take back to China. What happened more often, though, was that Chinese students were quick to see the cultural differences between the two countries, and to draw the very logical conclusion that American values are fine for America but would never work in the Chinese system.If those US hopes for the exportation of values had panned out, much of China would have been won over by now. But what has actually happened? Returnees are now leaders in much of Chinese business and industry, but anti-American expression in China is as strong today as it has been since the Mao era.Washington bears much of the responsibility for what has happened. In the years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, administrations of both parties touted the absurd theory that the best plan was to let China get rich and then watch as freedom and democracy evolved as byproducts of capitalist development.But did capitalist competition, that ravenous machine that can chew up anything, change China? The regime’s politics did not change a whit. What did change was the US, whose business leaders now approached the Chinese dictatorship with obsequious smiles. Here, after all, was an exciting new business partner: master of a realm in which there were virtually no labour rights or health and safety regulations, no frustrating delays because of squabbles between political parties, no criticism from free media, and no danger of judgment by independent courts. For European and US companies doing manufacture for export, it was a dream come true.Money rained down on parts of China, it is true. But the price was to mortgage the country’s future. Society fell into a moral swamp, devoid of humanity and difficult to escape. Meanwhile, the west made their adjustments. They stopped talking about liberal values and gave a pass to the dictatorship, in which Deng Xiaoping’s advice of “don’t confront” and Jiang Zemin’s of “lie low and make big bucks” made fast economic growth possible.European and American business thrived in the early stages of the China boom. They sat in a sedan chair carried up the mountain by their Chinese partners. And a fine journey it was – crisp air, bright sun – as they reached the mountain’s midpoint. But then the chair-carriers laid down their poles and began demanding a shift. They, too, sought the top position. The signal from the political centre in China changed from “don’t pick fights” to “go for it”. Now what could the western capitalists do? Walk back down the mountain? They hardly knew the way.Covid-19 has jolted the US into semi-awareness of the crisis it faces. The disease has become a political issue for its two major political parties to tussle over, but the real crisis is that the western system itself has been challenged. The US model appears to others as a bureaucratic jumble of competing interests that lacks long-term vision and historical aspiration, that omits ideals, that runs on short-term pragmatism, and that in the end is hostage to corporate capital.Are sanctions the way to go? A foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing recently remarked words to the effect that the US and China are so economically interlocked that they would amount to self-sanctions. The US, moreover, would be no match for China in its ability to endure suffering. And there he was correct: in dictatorships, sacrifices are not borne by the rulers. In the 1960s Mao said: “Cut us off? Go ahead – eight years, 10 years, China has everything.” A few years later Mao had nuclear weapons and was not afraid of anyone.The west needs to reconsider its systems, its political and cultural prospects, and rediscover its humanitarianism. These challenges are not only political, they are intellectual. It is time to abandon the old thinking and the vocabulary that controls it. Without new vocabulary, new thinking cannot be born. In the current struggle in Hong Kong, for example, the theory is simple and the faith is pure. The new political generation in Hong Kong deserves careful respect from the west, and new vocabulary to talk about it.“Sanctions” is a cold war term that names an old policy. If the US can’t think beyond them, the primacy of its position in this changing world will disappear. More
As Americans once again struggle with the very idea of having a history, let alone reflecting on its significance, an article in The Nation originally published in 2015 marks the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It offers its readers a reminder of an event that no one has forgotten but whose monumental significance has been consistently distorted, if not denied.
Japan’s surrender in 1945 officially ended World War II. It marked a glorious moment in history for the United States. But most serious historians agree on one fact that everyone has insisted on forgetting. The war would have ended without the demonstration of American scientific and military prowess carried out at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives.
Interactive: The Story of World War II
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If history has any meaning, humanity should have applied to August 6, 1945, the very words President Franklin D. Roosevelt used at the beginning of America’s war with Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. More than Pearl Harbor, August 6, 1945, should be remembered as “a date which will live in infamy.”
In the article originally published to mark the 70th anniversary of the events that led to the end of World War II, the author, Gar Alperovitz, reminds us that almost every US military leader at the time counseled against dropping the bomb. It cites the testimony of Admiral William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief of staff; Henry “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Forces; Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet; and Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., commander of the US Third Fleet.
All these senior officers agreed that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment.” Even Major General Curtis LeMay, who nearly 30 years later tried to push John F. Kennedy into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, agreed that “the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
General Dwight Eisenhower, the future president, also believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” But Eisenhower added this consideration of profound geopolitical importance, which directly contradicts the official pretext given by the government and repeated in the official narrative, that thousands of American soldiers would die in the final assault on Japan. “I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” he said.
Here is today’s 3D definition:
World opinion:
The understanding people across the globe have of how a hegemonic power works for or against their interests, a phenomenon that hegemonic powers learn to ignore as soon as they become convinced of the stability and durability of their hegemony
Contextual Note
World War II marked a sea-change in geopolitics. It literally ushered in the era of technological rather than purely military and economic hegemony. The real point of the bomb was to provide a graphic demonstration of how technological superiority rather than mere economic and military clout would define hegemony in the decades to come. That’s why the US has been able to consistently lose wars but dominate the global economy.
“President Truman’s closest advisers viewed the bomb as a diplomatic and not simply a military weapon,” Alperovitz writes. It wasn’t just about ending the war but modeling the future. Truman’s secretary of state, James Byrnes, “believed that the use of atomic weapons would help the United States more strongly dominate the postwar era.” He seemed to have in mind the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower would later denounce.
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Eisenhower’s prediction about world opinion in the aftermath of the nuking of Japan was apparently wrong. Polls taken in 1945 showed that only 4% of Americans said they would not have used the bomb. Relieved to see the war over, the media and governments across the globe made no attempt to mobilize world opinion against a manifest war crime.
On the basis of the letters to the editor of The Times, one researcher nevertheless reached the conclusion that, in the UK, a majority of “civilians were outraged at the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” This probably reflects opinion across most of Europe. The Vatican roundly condemned the use of nuclear weapons, even two years before the bombing of Japan and then again after the war, but it had little impact on public opinion.
Focused on the drama of the Nuremberg trials rather than the mass destruction in Japan, the nations of the world very quickly adjusted to the fatality of living with the continued presence of nuclear bombs. They even accepted the bomb as a stabilizing norm in what quickly became the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. After all, the idea of mutuality in the strategy of mutually assured destruction seemed to keep things in some sort of precarious balance.
With history effectively rewritten in a manner agreeable to the hegemony-minded governments of the US, American soft diplomacy — spearheaded to a large extent by Hollywood — did the rest. The American way of life almost immediately became a global ideal, only peripherally troubled by Godzilla and other disturbing radioactive mutants.
Takeshi Matsuda explained in a 2008 article in the Asia-Pacific Journal: “By the end of World War II, the U.S. government had recognized how important a cultural dimension of foreign policy was to accomplishing its broad national objectives.” Those “national objectives” had clearly become nothing less than global hegemony.
Historical Note
Post-World War II history contains a cruel irony. An inhuman nuclear attack on Japanese civilians became perceived as the starting point of a new world order under the leadership of the nation that perpetrated that attack. The new world order has ever since been described as the “rule of law.”
Because the new order relied on the continued development of nuclear weapons, it might be more accurate to call it a “rule of managed terror.” It was built on the notion of fear. Over the following decades, the vaunted rule became increasingly dependent on a combination of expanding military might, mass surveillance, technological sophistication and the capacity of operational weapons to strike anywhere with great precision but without human intervention.
In his article, Gar Alperovitz quotes a pertinent remark in 1946 of Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., who called “the first atomic bomb … an unnecessary experiment. … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” But Halsey was mistaken. The scientists didn’t drop the bombs. The politicians — especially Harry Truman, with whom the buck was destined to stop — ordered it. And bomber pilots did the dropping. But Halsey’s intuition about the rise of technology as the key to hegemony was correct.
Whether Truman understood what was happening, or whether he was an unwitting tool of a group of American Dr. Strangeloves (the former Nazis were already being recruited), no historian has been able to determine. Fox News journalist Chris Wallace, in his book on Truman and the bomb, claims that the president “agonized over it,” as well he should have.
The problem that remains for those who seek to understand the significance of our global history is that once the deed was done, Truman’s and everyone else’s agonizing ended. Shakespeare’s Macbeth famously “murdered sleep,” but America’s official historians, in the years following Hiroshima, succeeded in putting the world’s moral sense to sleep.
Humanity is still on the verge of nuclear annihilation. Some of the bellicose discourse we hear today may be bluff. But the US military has elaborated concrete plans for a nuclear war with China, and preparations for that war are already taking place. As journalist John Pilger points out, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been pushing hard to foment a war mentality among the American public, partly because it is part of Trump’s reelection strategy and partly because Pompeo is “an evangelical fanatic who believes in the ‘rapture of the End.’”
World opinion, if our democracies knew how to consult it, would undoubtedly prefer the plain and simple annihilation of our nuclear capacity. But the dream of a democracy of humanity, in the place of competing nation-states, dwells only in an obscure political and psychological limbo, existing as something between an empty promise and wishful thinking.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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