OMNI
CAUSES AND PREVENTION
OF WARS, NEWSLETTER #6, May 19,
2015.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace.
(#1 Feb. 1, 2011; #2 March 26, 2011; #3
Oct. 15, 2012; #4 Sept. 8, 2013; #5 Nov. 30, 2014).
Thanks to Marc Quigley for steadfast
technical support.
What’s at stake:
My
blog:
War
Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
Index:
See: OMNI ecology warming wars.doc, US military
industrial complex, Douglas Fry, The
Human Potential for Peace, The Seville Statement, War prevention, MORE
These newsletters are divided only very generally
into Causes and Prevention because most authors examine the two subjects
together. Clear identification of the causes of wars is a significant step toward
preventing them. See War
Prevention and Related Newsletters.
#5 at end
Contents of Causes of War
Newsletter #6
A
Taxonomy
Underlying
Causes of Violence and War
Pilisuk
and Rountree, Who Benefits from Global
Violence and War
Two
Books on the US
Scott,
The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big
Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy
Ahmad, Road to Iraq: The Making of a
Neoconservative War
Media
Control of Information
James
R. Bennett (Dick), Control of
Information in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography.
Meckler, 1987.
Meckler, 1987.
Two
Articles on US Corporate/Mainstream Media and Iran
Naureckas,
Inciting War with Iran in the Washington
Post and the NYT
Johnson,
FBI Simulated ISIS Threat Enhanced by Media vs. Reality
Polk,
History of Syrian Civil War
Escapism
explains why the US Public Is Passive or Even Pro-War?
Google
Search
A
TAXONOMY
web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/war-overview.pdf
Stanford
University
- Cited by 51 - Related articles
In this chapter we provide
a critical overview of the theory of war. In particular, we provide not just a taxonomy of causes of conflict, but
also some insight into the necessity of and interrelation between different
factors that lead to war.
See
Newsletter on Gene Sharp: http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/564756/21406263/1356993249557/2012-12-31.pdf?token=ufpbBATjV%2Bfx1%2FcABxExP9SYjKA%3D
UNDERLYING SOURCES OF VIOLENCE AND WAR
The Hidden Structure of Violence
Who Benefits from Global Violence and War
by Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer
Rountree
304 pages May 2015
e-book available!
Acts of violence assume many
forms: they may travel by the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an
economic policy, and they may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved
child. The all-pervasive occurrence of violence makes it seem like an
unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible, aspect of the human world,
particularly in a modern era. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc
Pilisuk and Jen Rountree demonstrate otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the
underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by
patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of
the powerful.
The Hidden Structure of Violence marshals
vast amounts of evidence to examine the costs of direct violence, including
military preparedness and the social reverberations of war, alongside the costs
of structural violence, expressed as poverty and chronic illness. It also
documents the relatively small number of people and corporations responsible
for facilitating the violent status quo, whether by setting the range of
permissible discussion or benefiting directly as financiers and manufacturers.
The result is a stunning indictment of our violent world and a powerful
critique of the ways through which violence is reproduced on a daily basis,
whether at the highest levels of the state or in the deepest recesses of the
mind.
Because of its inter-disciplinary
approach, The Hidden Structure of
Violence will be valuable for scholars and students in a range of fields,
but especially psychology, macro-economics, sociology, international relations,
history, journalism, peace studies, military science, community development,
and social change.
An encyclopedic and yet highly
focused analysis of the causes and consequences of violence and wars … This is
a sober book that nonetheless leaves us with hope for future generations.
—G. William Domhoff, author, Who Rules America?
One of the most comprehensive—and
programmatic—discussions of the sources and nature of global violence in years.
—Tom Hayden, author, Inspiring
Participatory Democracy
Marc Pilisuk teaches at Saybrook
University and is Professor Emeritus of Human and Community Development at the
University of California at Davis. He is a former president of the Society for
the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence and a steering committee member of
Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He has published ten books and more
than 140 articles over an academic career spanning five decades.
Jennifer Rountree is research
manager at the National Indian Child Welfare Association in Portland, Oregon.
She has a PhD in psychology from Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
in San Francisco, California, and supports American Indian/Alaska Native tribes
and urban Indian communities in community based participatory research.
FacebookRedditTwitterEmailPrintFriendlyShare http://monthlyreview.org/books/pb5427/
MONTHLY REVIEW
Subscriptions Store/Account » Press »
Browse » Contact » About »
Sunday March 22nd, 2015, 11:50 am
(EDT)
The
American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy by Peter Dale Scott. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.
Pages: 336
Series: War and Peace Library
This
provocative book makes a compelling case for a hidden “deep state” that
influences and often opposes official U.S. policies. Prominent political
analyst Peter Dale Scott begins by tracing America’s increasing militarization,
restrictions on constitutional rights, and income disparity since the Vietnam
War. He argues that a significant role in this historic reversal was the
intervention of a series of structural deep events, ranging from the
assassination of President Kennedy to 9/11. He does not attempt to resolve the
controversies surrounding these events, but he shows their significant points
in common, ranging from overlapping personnel and modes of operation to shared
sources of funding. Behind all of these commonalities is what Scott calls the
deep state: a second order of government, behind the public or constitutional
state, that has grown considerably stronger since World War II. He marshals
convincing evidence that the deep state is partly institutionalized in
non-accountable intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, but it also
includes private corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC, to which 70
percent of intelligence budgets are outsourced. Behind these public and private
institutions is the traditional influence of Wall Street bankers and lawyers,
allied with international oil companies beyond the reach of domestic law. With
the importance of Gulf states like Saudi Arabia to oil markets, American
defense companies, and Wall Street itself, this essential book shows that there
is now a supranational deep state, sometimes demonstrably opposed to both White
House policies and the American public interest.
 |
|
|||||||
|
A rigorous investigation into the
socio-political milieu that produced the Iraq war
Despite all that has been written on
it, the Iraq war – its causes, agency and execution – has been shrouded in an
ideological mist. Now, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad dispels the myths surrounding
the war, taking a sociological approach to establish the war’s causes, identify its agents and describe how
it was sold.
Ahmad presents a social history of the
war’s leading agents – the neoconservatives – and shows how this
ideologically coherent group of determined political agents used the
contingency of 9/11 to overwhelm a sceptical foreign policy establishment,
military brass and intelligence apparatus, propelling the US into a war that
a significant portion of the public opposed. The book includes an historical
exploration of American militarism and of the increased post-WWII US role in
the Middle East, as well as a reconsideration of the debates that John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt sparked after the publication of The Israel
lobby and US Foreign Policy.
|
MEDIA COMPLICIT IN INFORMATION CONTROL AND THEY INFLAME AND INCITE THE
PEOPLE
James R. Bennett, Control
of Information in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. Meckler, 1987.
Many of the 2943 entries deal with the mainstream media and
how they are used and abused by corporations, government, the presidency (public
relations, secrecy, censorship, disinformation, cover-up), and how the media
initiate abuse independently or in complicity. For example, the section “Washington Press
Corps” gives 22 entries showing in varying degrees how the mainstream media in
matters of war and peace function as a department of government. The section on the Pentagon provides 193
entries on four areas of information control:
militarism; public relations, media, recruiting; education and research;
and secrecy, censorship, disinformation, cover-up.
Mar30, 2015
Leading Papers Incite ‘Supreme
International Crime’
By Jim
Naureckas 11 Comments [Appeared in Extra! (May 2015) as “Op-Ed Calls for War Are Incitements to a Terrible
Crime. –Dick]
Op-eds in the Washington Post (left) and New
York Timescalled for unprovoked military attacks on Iran.
After
the New York Timesprinted John Bolton’s “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb
Iran” (3/26/15; FAIR Blog, 3/26/15),
following theWashington Postpublishing Joshua Muravchik’s “War With Iran
Is Probably Our Best Option” (3/13/15), veteran investigative reporter
Robert Parry made an excellent point (Consortium News, 3/28/15):
If two
major newspapers in, say, Russia published major articles openly advocating the
unprovoked bombing of a country, say, Israel, the US government and news media
would be aflame with denunciations about “aggression,” “criminality,” “madness”
and “behavior not fitting the 21st century.”
But when
the newspapers are American – the New York Times and the Washington
Post – and the target country is Iran, no one in the US government and
media bats an eye. These inflammatory articles – these incitements
to murder and violation of international law – are considered just normal
discussion in the Land of Exceptionalism.
Advocating
for war is not like advocating for most other policies because, as peace
activist David Swanson points out, war
is a crime. It was outlawed in 1928 by the Kellogg-Briand
Pact, in which the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain,
Germany, France, Japan and 55 other
nations “condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of
international controversies, and renounce[d] it, as an instrument of national
policy in their relations with one another.”
Defendants at Nuremberg were found guilty and hanged for
carrying out the policies advocated by the Washington Post andNew
York Times op-ed pages.
Kellogg-Briand
was the basis for the “crimes against peace”
indictment at the Nuremberg Trials for Nazi leaders, several of whom were hanged for
“planning, preparation, initiation, or waging a war of aggression.” At
Nuremberg, chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson declared:
To
initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it
is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that
it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
The
spirit of Kellogg-Briand was embodied in the formation of the United Nations,
whose charter commits
its signers to renouncing war and the threat of war:
All
Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use
of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any
state.
So to
advocate for war, as the Washington Post and New York
Times op-ed pages have done, is to incite a crime–“the supreme
international crime,” as Jackson noted. How would we react if leading papers
were to run articles suggesting that genocide was the best solution to an
international conflict–or that lynching is the answer to domestic problems?
Calling for an unprovoked military attack against another nation is in the same
category of argument.
The Washington
Post can be reached at letters@washpost.com or viaTwitter @washingtonpost.
The New York Times‘ email is :letters@nytimes.com and Twitter account
is @nytimes.
Remember that respectful communication is most effective.
·
HOME
·
ABOUT
·
EXTRA!
·
FAIR
TV
·
STORE
·
CONTACT
Apr 012015
Media Inflate Threat With ‘ISIS Plots’
That Don’t Actually Involve ISIS.
[The print version of this article is entitled “Media Now Offering ‘ISIS
Plots’ That Are 100% ISIS-Free!,” Extra! (May
2015). –Dick]
Actually, the suspects were accused of conspiring to
support ISIS–a significantly different legal charge.
Last Friday, the FBI announced another harrowing,
11th-hour capture of Americans plotting to join “ISIS” and launch attack within
the United States. The case of two Illinois men, Army National Guard Specialist
Hasan Edmonds and his cousin Jonas Edmonds, ostensibly involved the former
going to Syria to join ISIS there while the latter stayed in the US, plotting
to attack “scores” at a military base.
Right on cue, the American
media publish dressed-up FBI press releases about the “disrupted” plot,
complete with balaclava-wearing stock photos: “FBI Disrupts Plot to Kill
Scores at Military Base on Behalf of Islamic State” was theWashington Post‘s
headline (3/26/15).
These outlets, as usual,
omitted the rather awkward fact that this “ISIS plot” did not actually
involve anyone in ISIS: At no point was there any material contact between
anyone in ISIS and the Edmond cousins. There was, as thecriminal complaint lays out,
lots of contact between the Edmond cousins and what they thought was
ISIS, but at no point was there any contact with ISIS–the designated terror
organization that the US is currently launching airstrikes against.
This distinction may seem
like semantics, but it’s actually quite important when trying to accurately
inform the public–only 40 percent of whom read past the
headlines–about the reality of the ISIS
threat vs. the fear-inducing media spectacle that so
often inflates it.
MSNBC reports an “ISIS plot” that never was.
While less sensational
press like the Washington Postand the New York Timesare
careful to avoid calling the sting operations “ISIS plots,” many outlets turn
misdirection to explicit misrepresentation: ThisMSNBC headline (3/26/15) is fairly typical of how the
reader is misled into thinking ISIS is actually involved in these arrests:
National Guard Soldier,
Cousin Charged With ISIS Plot
The Edmond cousins weren’t
actually charged with an ISIS plot. They were charged with attempting to
hatch an ISIS plot, but they are not accused of having any contact with ISIS
whatsoever.
In a political environment
where only a slight majority (54 percent)
currently support the ongoing war effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria–and soonpotentially dozens of other
countries–this sleight-of-hand has subtle but tremendous propaganda value. The
specter of ISIS constantly trying to enlist dozens of Americans, often for
attacks on US soil, is a crucial element in maintaining the current war effort.
The media’s inability to point out that these “plots” are almost always
entirely of the FBI’s making helps perpetuate the illusion and inflate
perceived risk.
John Knefel noted recently in the New
Republic (3/24/15) the gap between our perception of
the ISIS threat and the reality:
The likelihood of Al Qaeda
or ISIS launching a massive attack inside the United States is
“infinitesimal,” according to the Washington
Post, yet a recent poll found 86 percent of Americans now see ISIS as a threat to U.S.
security.
That perception, however,
is based largely on a myth. The Triangle Center’sreport states that publicly available
information does “not indicate widespread recruitment of Muslim-Americans by
transnational terrorist organizations to engage in attacks in the United
States, or sophisticated planning by the handful of individuals who have
self-radicalized.”
Contrary to Fox News, these suspects were not lured
by ISIS, but by the FBI.
This trope is also present
when reporting on the much-hyped “ISIS social media” army. In a piece
headlined “The Lure of ISIS,” Fox News (12/16/14) used two cases, that of Abdella
Tounisi and Basit Javed Sheikh, as evidence of Syrian jihadists’ social media
appeal–without mentioning that fact that both men, according to the FBI’s own
complaints, interfaced almost entirely with FBI-created “jihadi” social media:
The cases involve
individuals from all across the country, from Florida to Minnesota to Colorado.
They underscore the challenge US law enforcement continue to face, as well as
the global reach of recruiters and propagandists from ISIS and other groups.
But the case of Tounisi
and Sheikh cannot “underscore the global reach of ISIS recruiters and
propagandists,” since the only recruiters and propagandists these men met
online were the FBI’s “OCE”–Online Covert Employees. In the case of Abdella
Tounisi, the FBI went so far as to create an entire fake Al-Nusra website,
complete with a fake Al-Nusra training video and a fake Al-Nusra email list, as
the DOJ’s complaint explained.
Basit Javed Sheikh, the
29-year-old North Carolina man, was duped using an FBI-created “Al-Nusra” Facebook page
set up by a female FBI employee posing as an “Al-Nusra nurse” in Syria. The
“nurse” persona would have other social media accounts, as well as an “Al-Nusra” Facebook page
complete with extremist messages, videos, pictures and content–all created by the FBI.
Would Tounisi and Sheikh
have sought other “recruiters” online? It’s impossible to say. (Also important
to note that Sheikh had fallen in love with the “Al-Nusra nurse” FBI persona,
who allegedly promised him marriage in Syria.) But what is clear is that
FBI-created extremist social media isn’t evidence that extremist social media
is helping recruit Americans for ISIS or Al-Nusra. But media treat FBI ruses that simulate terrorist activities as evidence
that the crimes the FBI is ostensibly seeking to prevent are actually
happening.
The New York Daily
News (3/9/15) would take this perverse logic to
a comical extreme last month with this goofy headline:
ISIS was not, of course, in Brooklyn. FBI
agents posing as ISIS were.
This isn’t a matter of emphasis–it’s a matter of reality.
Adam
Johnson, a freelance journalist, was a founder of the hardware startup
Brightbox. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
HISTORY AND CONTEXTS OF SYRIAN
CIVIL WAR
How drought, foreign
meddling, and long-festering religious tensions created the tragically
splintered Syria we know today.
www.theatlantic.com/international/.../12/...war.../281989/ - The Atlantic
TUAN AND EVANS, TWO BOOKS ON
ESCAPISM by Dick Bennett
A great achievement
of the human brain is its capacity to compare, to think proportionately, to
prioritize, estimate and foresee, and eventually to choose and act. Two recent books on escapism forget this, or
are strangely indifferent to it. Y-Fu
Tuan’s Escapism is particularly
disabled by its topsy-turvy, random discussion of the subject. It’s a collection of tid-bits, knickknacks of
escapism as though he died before assessing his raw material, and some
enterprising publisher saw it would sell to the apparently boundless,
hopelessly escapist consumers. He never
asks what’s important, which requires asking: what are the urgent issues facing
his readers and the world? The book is
not even arranged in useful encyclopedic alphabetical order. Tuan is like your neighbor who, when the
neighborhood is already on fire from a raging forest fire, and the fire
department is already overwhelmed, gathers up his stamp collection. Ironically, the book is a supreme example of
escapism.
A more thoughtful
book is This Virtual Life, Escapism and
Simulation in Our Media World by Andrew Evans, but like Tuan, Evans makes
little effort to evaluate and distinguish the trivial from the significant, and
in that effete or feckless spirit his book also becomes escape.
We don’t have the
luxury of endless escapist pat-a-cake. At least older people, adults, must ask, and
must act: What are the most crucial, urgent matters for our civilization, for
humanity and all species, for our planet?
Surely a list of the top five would include under the topic of war: imperialism, militarism, and above all
nuclear weapons. Evans’ Index doesn’t
even mention them. War is discussed in
his brief section on Catch-22, but it
just illustrates again the randomness of his book, when the US has invaded or
intervened unnecessarily and illegally in over 50 countries since WWII, and in the
process killed tens of millions of people, and continues to fine tune its
nuclear arsenal.
And that top five
list would surely include global warming and climate change as #1, even in
2001, when his book was published, after two reports from the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
By then the overwhelming majority of scientists and national science
centers had affirmed the fact of anthropogenic C02 increases causing warming
and climate change. Yet Evans barely
mentions the catastrophes rushing toward us (or our rapid population increases
rushing us to embrace them). He does
acknowledge the CIA’s dire 2001 forecast for 2015, which includes the
consequences of global warming—“water shortages and even wars” (227). But the recognition is only a detail in
another subject. We have to ask, what
was really important to Evans that would turn merely recreational into
meaningful, significant reading?
Escapism, well yes, but which, which should we concentrate on if we are
to prevent the worst. Thomas Hardy
wrote in a poem: “…if better there be/it exacts a look at the worst.” But Evans’ bric-a-brac approach doesn’t help
us identify either present or future catastrophes and their escapisms.
At a public
discussion of Tuan and Evans’ book, several in the audience repeatedly pointed
out the obvious dysfunctions of our society and the ways people avoided doing
anything about them. They were wringing their
hands. If Tuan and Evans had done their
job properly (and the audience had read the books), the audience would have
attended in the spirit of Mother Jones, the great labor organizer, who
declared, “Don’t mourn, organize!”
Of course I mean, if
the authors had written their books with political purpose, with the idea of
changing the dysfunctional structures of our society making wars and warming
(and other chief catastrophes). But
their purpose was not political but psychological—telling us the many ways
people, we in the discussion, distract ourselves or are distracted from the
crucial world problems. In this they
were successful. I reached home that
afternoon with a keener awareness of my various disempowering choices and
habits. And just perhaps that awareness will
lead from futile hand-wringing to changing the system.
CAUSES OF WARS, Google Search, May 19, 2015
https://www.hawaii.edu/.../WPP.CHAP16.HTM
University
of Hawaii
War arises because of the
changing relations of numerous variables--technological, psychic, social, and
intellectual. There is no single cause of war. Peace is ...
www.amazon.com/The-Causes-War.../0029035910
Amazon.com,
Inc.
Rating: 4.4 - 5
reviews
Blainey, a conservative social
historian, writes one of the best non-ideological, empirically based analyses
of why nation-states go to war -- and peace. Logically, the causes for going to war should be mirrored
in the reasons why nations make peace at the end of war.
web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/war-overview.pdf
Stanford
University
In this chapter we provide
a critical overview of the theory of war. In particular, we provide not just a taxonomy of causes of conflict, but
also some insight into the necessity of and interrelation between different
factors that lead to war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Causes_of_war
Wikipedia
Pages in category "Causes of war". The following 36
pages are in this category, out of 36 total. This list may not reflect recent
changes (learn more).
www.rgs.org/.../The+causes+of+conflict.htm
Royal
Geographical Society
Having said this, some
conflicts tend to lean towards some causes more than others. The current war in Afghanistan is
predominantly a result of conflicting ...
Adwww.webcrawler.com/
Search multiple engines
for causes
of war essay
Searches
related to causes of war
Causes of Wars
FCNL,
Repeal Authorization for Use of Military Force
Jimmy
Carter, US Perceived as the Leading War-Monger
Michael
Payne, Oil, Root Cause of Wars and Warming
Hadley
Cantril and Otto Klineberg, Tensions Causing Wars of Nationalistic Aggression
Richard
Payne, Tensions of Cultural and Ideological Values among Distant Cultures
Koenigsberg
and Epstein, Preserving Our Civilization
Koenigsberg,
Psychological Study of Culture
TomDispatch
Presents Beverly Gologorsky and Her New Anti-War Novel, Stop Here
Leonard
Goodman, War Profiteers
Recent
OMNI Newsletters
Previous
War Causes/Prevention Newsletters
END CAUSES OF WAR NEWSLETTER #6
No comments:
Post a Comment