OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #172, APRIL 10, 2024.

 

OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #172, APRIL 10, 2024.  Compiled by Dick Bennett 

Joel Kovel.  Red Hunting in the Promised Land.

TOM ENGELHARDT.   “A Slow-Motion World War III?”

 

(Sovietphobia.)  Joel Kovel.  Red Hunting in the Promised Land.

In the wake of the Cold War, an eminent social critic examines the roots of America’s anticommunist frenzy.   IWW.
“The most original and revealing study of the fear-and-loathing obsession–anticommunism–that has driven [America] loony for most of this century. Every aspect of our lives, public and private, has been debased by this plague. Kovel’s book, in brilliantly showing cause, may offer some sort of cure as we approach a new and hopefully sane century.”–Studs Terkel, author of Working.

“The United States, by comparative standards, has been an unusually free society, but with powerful repressive strains that are deeply rooted in its intellectual and political culture. Joel Kovel’s thoughtful and enlightening exploration of these crucial themes helps us not only to understand our past but also to shape a better future.”–Noam Chomsky, author of Consequences of Capitalism.

“Kovel, a psychiatrist and professor of social studies at Bard College, traces the evolution of anticommunism in this country from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the collapse of the ‘evil empire’ in the age of Reagan and Bush. How, Kovel wonders, did the United States, ‘of all the capitalist powers the least threatened by Communism,’ come to be ‘the most floridly anticommunist?’ He offers psychoportraits of such leading ideologues as Father Charles Coughlin, George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joe McCarthy to demonstrate ‘how Communist-hating is used opportunistically as an instrument to secure power and wealth.’” Thomas Appleton Jr., Kentucky Historical Soc., Frankfort

TOM ENGELHARDT.   “A Slow-Motion World War III?” MARCH 27, 2024.      FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Image by UX Gun.

I’ve been describing this world of ours, such as it is, for almost 23 years at TomDispatch. I’ve written my way through three-and-a-half presidencies — god save us, it could be four in November! I’ve viewed from a grave (and I mean that word!) distance America’s endlessly disastrous wars of this century. I’ve watched the latest military budget hit almost $900 billion, undoubtedly on its way toward a cool trillion in the years to come, while years ago the whole “national security” budget (though “insecurity” would be a better word) soared to well over the trillion-dollar mark.

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day. . . .   MORE click on title

[The most curious aspect of this pathology is the transformation of Sovietphobia—plausibly explained by its imagined threat to US capitalism—into Russophobia, with Russia, like the US, a capitalist oligarchy.  –Dick]