Stop Attacking Our Woke Masters of War!

It's time once again to rev up the official outrage machine. Libertarian Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has gone on the air and called America's top general Mark Milley "a stupid pig". This insult was not, unfortunately, because of Milley's leadership roles in the stupid, swinish perma-wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was for taking the liberal side in the stupid, swinish culture wars. Milley had the absolute effrontery to appear before Congress and defend the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as part of an elective philosophy course offered at the US Military Academy.

So, from the Washington Post's resident neocon Max Boot to the New York Times' liberal Paul Krugman, the pundits of the Duopoly are not only castigating Carlson, they are in lockstep sanctifying Milley and the entire bloated military establishment in the process.

It was only a year ago that the media were piling on in the opposite direction, rightly castigating Milley for his stupid role marching right beside Donald Trump to that infamous church photo-op as federal troops fired teargas canisters at peaceful protesters demonstrating against the George Floyd murder at a park across the street from the White House.

 Since Milley did later apologize for taking part in that swinish bit of political theater, all was forgiven. His career and his reputation were saved and he became openly Woke, embracing diversity training and other putative anti-racism reforms within the ranks, while still maintaining that he finds it very offensive to be called Woke.

Ostentatiously capitalizing the word "white" to, perhaps, virtue-signal its own devotion to racial fairness in its ratings-intensive lucrative culture wars coverage. CNN reported on Milley's retort to GOP provocateur Rep. Mike Walz:

"I want to understand White rage.(said Milley.) And I'm White. And I want to understand it."

Tying the question to the January insurrection, Milley asked: "What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here."

Milley then humble-bragged that reading Marx and Lenin and Chairman Mao did not lead him to Communism. He studied leftist theory merely to obtain "situational understanding" of the Enemy.... apparently in much the same way that the military has co-opted anthropology to glean "total situational awareness" of countries and populations which they invade and occupy.

Over at the New York Times, Krugman, who once upon a time was one of the few pundits critical of the invasion of Iraq, nodded approvingly, unfavorably comparing the swinish cult of Republican ignorance to the enlightened trillion-dollar war machine, now so cozily aligned with the war-happy Democrats, who are once again pretending to feebly challenge Joe Biden's decision to drop more of those high-IQ megaton bombs on Syria and Iraq in supposed defense of the occupying American forces.

All you need to be a good upstanding liberal is to recognize scientific facts. "To be a Republican in good standing," Krugman writes, "one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. " 

So it's not enough to criticize Tucker Carlson for criticizing Milley's loyal allegiance to Biden's new anti-terrorism manifesto, which stupidly and swinishly lumps white supremacists in with what it calls "extremist"  critics of capitalism and globalization. You also have to diss leftists and glorify endless war if you want to remain members in good standing of the Club. You must remember that the only racism that counts in this particular narrative is the racism within the military. It does not apply to the racism inherent in the endless wars of aggression against non-Americans in foreign lands.

As Jodi Melamed of Marquette University explains in Represent and Destroy, it is precisely the official civil rights statutes on the American books as well as the mass media's shallow embrace of "diversity" and multiculturalism -- along with corporate-funded academia's complicit production of an elite black managerial-political class -- that paradoxically gives cover to the global racist predations of the American Imperium. The US political system has been able to "capture" the energy of 60s and 70s social movements and then cynically put it to work for capitalism and international conquest. This policy is most recently manifest in an infamous CIA recruitment video, which celebrates feminism and diversity within the unaccountable surveillance/regime change state.

As long as the military starts leaning Democrat and diversified, no war can be unjustified. Writes Krugman: 

"The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars."

My published response to his column:

Since the leadership of the modern armed forces is now so full of open-minded intellectuals, I'm waiting for them to also testify publicly that since the US military is the biggest single polluter in the history of the world, we should begin shutting down the 800-plus bases around the globe.

Climate change reversal should include divesting ourselves of the tanks, aircraft, nukes, incendiary bombs and ships of our "defense" industry and our forever-wars - which, by the way, we are still not "winning." Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the modern, open-minded masters of war are embracing critical race theory. Now let's hear the Best & the Brightest also acknowledge that throughout American history, our wars have had a distinctly racist component going all the way back to the Puritans. Before George Washington was a general and a president, he was a real estate speculator who thought that Britain's treaties with Indian populations were a pretty dumb idea, and best ignored. Tucker Carlson and his ilk certainly do come from a long line of landed aristocrats. US regime change wars also have been disproportionately targeted at countries with majority black and brown and Asian populations. You simply can't claim to be woke and still continue bombing innocent people ("collateral damage"). The generals should also read Judith Butler's great essays on violence, and wake up to the fact that our leaders consider that some lives simply aren't worth enough to be grievable.

Killing the Antiwar Message Along With the Messenger

It's better to hate Tucker Carlson than to hate war.

That's the theme of Frank Bruni's latest New York Times column, in which he accuses naive peace-loving progressives of developing a crush on the Fox News personality for his audacious antiwar messaging and his critique of Donald Trump's assassination of Quassim Soleimani.

Suddenly you’re digging him. At least a little bit. I know, I’ve seen the tweets, read the commentary, heard the chatter, detected the barely suppressed cheer: Hurrah for Tucker Carlson. If only we had more brave, principled Republicans like him.
Right out of the gate, he protested President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander, noting that it didn’t square with the president’s determination not to get bogged down in the Middle East and warning of the possibility and horror of full-blown war. Your pulse quickened. You perked up.

Never mind the lack of brave, principled Democrats, whose own opposition to Trump's actions was limited to a nonbinding resolution that only pretends to limit his war powers. Because Fox News regularly and unfairly blasts the Democratic Party, it behooves us to defend establishment Democrats even when the criticism "from the other side" is valid. Therefore, Bruni gushes that Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposed the Iraq invasion but only very grudgingly admits that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer voted for it.

Instead of writing an antiwar column of his own, from a more humanistic point of view, Bruni chooses instead to highlight Tucker Carlson's history of racism and Trump-worship, thereby giving both the liberal interventionists and the neocons a complete pass and tainting antiwar sentiment across the board.

As Matt Gertz of Media Matters perceptively noted, Carlson’s antiwar stance “is not a break from his past support for Trump or his channeling of white nationalist tropes, but a direct a result of both.” Gertz explained that in the mind-set of Carlson and many of his fans on the far right, energy spent on missions in another hemisphere is energy not spent on our southern border. It’s no accident that, in regard to the Middle East, he and (White nationalist Richard) Spencer are on the same page.

See how subtly Bruni simultaneously gaslights and indirectly smears by association the leftist antiwar movement? I'm only surprised he didn't pounce, as other pro-war establishment Democrats have done, on the appearances of Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard on Tucker Carlson's show to offer their own more leftist critiques of US imperialism and militarism. 

Bruni's column succeeds in completely changing the subject. It also ticks off the requisite "shoot the messenger" box. If you still think Tucker Carlson might have something valid to say, the warning is, then you'd better think again. You don't want to get caught inadvertently quoting him and then risk getting called a racist or a closet Trumpist by your friends, do you?

  Since Tucker Carlson holds such loathsome views on many social issues, the implicit message is, then it must naturally follow that liberals make up for wars' destruction by being more inclusive and diverse and sincere and well-meaning. All Bruni is saying by omission is, give war a chance. And never mind that the bipartisan bombs dropped in the past two decades on at least eight different countries in Africa and the Middle East are almost exclusively killing and maiming black and brown-skinned people. War and imperialism and colonialism are racist in both thought and in deed. The "good side" of the oligarchic duopoly simply stifles the racist rhetoric more adeptly than the "bad side" does.

My published comment on Bruni's column:

With CNN and MSNBC stuffed to the gills with CIA and Pentagon analysts. it should come as no surprise that one of the few antiwar pundits left standing will attract a certain amount of squeamish liberal enthusiasm.

 Does anybody remember when MSNBC summarily fired Phil Donahue for his own antiwar sentiment during the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Follow the weapons industry/fossil fuel/corporate sponsor money!

An overlap between liberalism and libertarianism is nothing new. Ron Paul, for instance, attracts a fair number of lefties for his opposition to the war/surveillance state despite his connections to the racist John Birch Society and his opposition to government health and welfare programs.

One of the best antiwar analysts writing today is Andrew Bacevich, who contributes regularly to The American Conservative. and who has criticized US wars of aggression from Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. His latest book, "The Age of Illusions," chronicles how the end of the Cold War unleashed a rampage of neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative militarism which have become the subversive new definitions of democracy. It also helped usher in the Trump presidency.

 Of course, Trump himself will likely never read this book or any other book for that matter. So if it disturbs you that a racist antiwar poser like Carlson occasionally stays the itchy trigger finger of our Fox News addict of a president, that's a clue that we need many more progressive antiwar voices in the media.