You Can’t Be An Anti-Racist If You Are Not An Anti-Imperialist – Racism isn’t prejudice but the Justification for Colonialism

Starmer should have gone down on both knees – to ask for forgiveness for his support for Zionism & Apartheid - you can’t pick & choose which victims of racism you support

Keir Starmer’s Statement – apologies for the poor quality which is beyond my control. The original can be seen here

Whatever his other faults, Jeremy Corbyn was a dedicated opponent of Apartheid in South Africa.  He even got arrested picketing the South Africa High Commission.

Starmer is completely different.  He was elected as Leader having accepted the Board of Deputies’s 10 Commandments (Pledges) drawn up by the Board of Deputies whose constitution commits it to defend Israel right or wrong.

Starmer was quoted in the Times of Israel has saying that ‘I support Zionism without qualification.” He then goes on to say ‘“If the definition of ‘Zionist’ is someone who believes in the state of Israel, in that sense I’m a Zionist.”

This means that Starmer, who fully understands the implications of what Zionism and a ‘Jewish’ state means, is a fully-paid up racist. He knows fully well that an ethno-nationalist Jewish state cannot be other than a state that relegates non-Jews to a guest status.

A Zionist is not someone who believes in the State of Israel in the abstract. It’s someone who supports Israel, as a Jewish state as opposed to a state of its own citizens.  As Netanyahu has often repeated, Israel is not a state of its own citizens but only of its Jewish citizens.  That is Apartheid.

That is why you get the phenomenon of what happened in Afula, a nearly 100% Jewish city in Israel.  Last summer, hundreds of Israelis in Afula demonstrated against the sale of a single house to an Arab.  The demonstrations included the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Afula.  This is what a Jewish state means in practice and it is this that the wretched Starmer and his useless deputy, Angela Rayner support.

Netanyahu has made it clear that when and if Israel annexes 30% of the West Bank including the Jordan Valley, it will only be annexing the land.  The people or rather the Palestinian people will not be granted Israeli citizenship. This is not just the policy of Netanyahu but of the whole Israeli government, including the Israeli Labor Party.

Palestinians in ‘enclaves’ will continue to live under military law.  This is what is called Apartheid but maybe the wretched Starmer has another word for it?  Zionism?

The Jewish Labour Movement  describe the ILP as their ‘sister’ party. Since the ILP has signed up to Netanyahu’s vision of legally entrenched Apartheid I look forward to them disaffiliating from them!

The JLM has been waging the ‘anti-Semitism’ war in the Labour Party with the full blessing of Starmer. On March 16 Starmer met with the JLM and they handed him a list of activists, especially Jewish activists, to target for expusion.

If we are to take Starmer at his word, he opposes the racist violence of the United States Police whilst supporting the Israeli state’s violence against Palestinian people.

In August 2016 Black Lives Matter caused a storm amongst the Zionists when, after sending a delegation to Israel/Palestine they adopted a policy which termed Israel an Apartheid state.  They also supported BDS and accused Israel of waging a genocidal war against the Palestinians.

Why?  Because Black people are the best able to recognise and understand the similarities between their experiences and that of the Palestinians. Of course White Liberals were outraged. None more so than Zionists who believed that their ‘support’ for BLM could, as has historically been the case with the leaders of America’s Black community, be exchanged for support for Israel.

BLM have refused to engage in this game of bartering support in exchange for betraying the Palestinians. That is why the Zionists have for the last 4 years been doing their best to undermine BLM. 

The present mass movement in the United States coupled with the historic support of America’s Jews for the Democrats, something reinforced by the naked anti-Semitism of Trump’s Christian Zionism, means American Jews have been even more repelled by the Republicans. America’s Jews know that racism against Black people is waged by the same people that would like to see them under the racist thumb.

That is one more reason why support for Israel is against the interests of America’s Jews. Israel is supported by the most racist elements in the USA.

But for Starmer to take the knee when he has openly come out in support of the Zionist state is the purest hypocrisy.

I watched Starmer’s video statement with growing disbelief. Starmer can’t help the fact that he is a a wooden version of a human being. What he can help though is engaging in a piece of political theatre. His statement oozed with insincerity.

 ‘I was shocked and angered at the killing of George Floyd’ he began. Does anyone seriously believe this for a moment? As James Smith wrote last January ‘In 2009 and 2010, Starmer refused to prosecute the police officers accused of killing Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson (although in the latter case, he changed his mind in 2011 when new evidence came to light).’

In the Tomlinson case there was a Metropolitan Police and Independent Police Complaints Committee cover-up with a first post-mortem conducted by a dishonest and incompetent pathologist, who even the Met had reported to the Home Office in 2005.  He repeatedly failed to record bruises to the body in victims.  A trick he repeated with Tomlinson. Something which wasn’t helped by the fact the police had asked him to "rule out any assault or crush injuries associated with public order".

Whenever the Police were given an opportunity they lied.  Until video evidence surfaced they alleged the Police had tried to save Tomlinson but that they came under a hail of missiles.  When film emerged, there were no missiles nor any attempt to save Tomlinson.

In all this the IPCC and the Met colluded. Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions refused until a jury reached a verdict of unlawful killing to prosecute the policeman, Simon Harwood, who had a string of complaints against him.  In the end the jury acquitted him after a half-hearted prosecution.

Five days after George Floyd was murdered Palestinian Iyak Hallak, a 32 autistic man, was mowed down like a cornered animal, by the Israeli Border Police. The final 3 bullets killed him cowering in a garbage hut whilst his carer screamed to them that he was disabled.

In Israel none of the police have been arrested still less charged.  Starmer, who professes to be moved by the killing of George Floyd has said nothing.  Why? Because Starmer has declared he is a Zionist which means that he supports a Jewish supremacist state. 

Israel - Where the technique of knee on neck was first invented

Zionism aims to keep the Israeli state as Jewish as possible which is why ‘Jewish settlement’ is a national virtue written into the Jewish Nation State Law. It is why ‘demography’ i.e. the number of Arabs in the state is a national obsession.

 Jewish settlement means settlement at the expense of the Palestinians.  Within 1948 Israel it means Judaising the Negev, Galilee or Jerusalem. It is about displacing the indigenous population, which is why half Israel’s Arab villages are unrecognised, liable to be demolished at any time.

Netanyahu has introduced a raft of racist legislation in the Knesset as part of his belief in the ‘Zionist dream’.  Legislation such as the 2011 Admissions Committee Law which allows Jewish communities to legally bar Arabs, thus getting around an earlier court ruling in the case of Kadan which stated that Arabs could not be prevented from renting or leasing the 93% of Israeli land held for the ‘Jewish People’

Starmer, who is determined to appease Labour’s Zionist lobby, spoke of how ‘... the last week has shone a spotlight on the racism...’ He even had the audacity to quote Martin Luther King’s saying that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’. You would look in vain for Starmer saying anything about the injustices against the Palestinians. His wife’s family lives there.  We can only conclude that Starmer is a conscious racist

In his statement Starmer went on to

‘reflect on injustices in our own country... we must face to and understand and redress the systemic racial discrimination that exists in our own communities... the Labour Party stands with Black communities in our country and across the world because Black Lives Matter.’

This is the man who as DPP ensured that people caught over claiming their benefit, a minor problem compared to the billions lost in tax avoidance, could receive up to 10 years in prison.

When we read that

“Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and deputy Angela Rayner have taken the knee in solidarity with “all those opposing anti-black racism”.

It is clearly a cynical attempt to cash in on public support for BLM. Starmer as DPP he was supremely unconcerned about Black deaths in custody

When Starmer says that George Floyd: “must not become just another name. His death must be a catalyst for change.” the insincerity of this pale, white stiff representative of the British Establishment is clear to all.  Starmer is the epitome of the Establishment’s opposition to change.  That was why he was their chosen candidate to replace Jeremy Corbyn.

It is six years since the deaths of Eric Garner in New York from a chokehold in which he shouted ‘I can’t breathe’ and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

On 2^nd August the Movement for Black Lives issued a policy document which stated that

‘The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place.’

It described Israel as an Apartheid state and supported BDS.

According to CNN its Vision for Black Lives included ‘dozens of thoughtful policy recommendations designed to promote concrete, real-world solutions to racial and economic inequality.’ Unfortunately the Platform has disappeared from the Internet.

However it sparked a four year war by Zionist groups against BLM. In the The Tablet of 5 August 2016 Jonathan Greenblatt, Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League, labeled the genocide slur “repellent”:

Prime amongst the Zionist groups attacking BLM was the right-wing Zionist Organisation of America. When Trump came to power, the Z ZOA invited Steve Bannon to be its guest of honour at its annual gala dinners in 2016 and 2017.  In 2016 a Jewish demonstration led by IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace led to Bannon not turning up. 

In 2017 he did brave the Jewish mob accompanied by another Trump advisor, a genuine 24 carat neo-Nazi, Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka, a member of the fascist Vitenzi Rend with links to other anti-Semitic Hungarian groups.  [See EXCLUSIVE: Senior Trump Aide Forged Key Ties To Anti-Semitic Groups In Hungary, Forward, 24.2.17.] and Anti-Semites feted by Zionist Organization of America Electronic Intifada 15.11.17.]

Unfortunately the ZOA, led by far-Right bigot Mort Klein, has no tactical sense. So when it began criticising BLM at the very moment it was leading a mass movement, other Zionist groups and organisations took fright. The Jerusalem Post reported that

‘A coalition of Jewish and pro-Israel groups have called for Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, to be expelled from Jewish umbrella groups, accusing him of "bigotry" and "hatred" following a number of tweets by Klein in which he accused Black Lives Matter (BLM) of antisemitism and promoting violence.’

On 6 June Klein had urged the Southern Poverty Law Center to put BLM on their list of hate groups, tweeting:

"BLM is a Jew hating, White hating, Israel hating, conservative Black hating, violence promoting, dangerous Soros funded extremist group of haters."

Klein mixes anti-Black racism with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving George Soros as the all-powerful Jewish financier.

These Zionist groups, which have sat with the ZOA for years, tolerating Klein’s anti-Arab racism and bigotry, have suddenly woken up.  As the Times of Israel put it on 10^th June ‘At time of racial strife, US Jewish groups call to expel ZOA from umbrella org’

It wasn’t always like this.  In April 2018 Ha’aretz reported that a range of Zionist groups in the United States ‘condemn Black Lives Matter Platform for Accusing 'Apartheid' Israel of 'Genocide' ‘. According to Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council,

“We cannot and will not align ourselves with organizations that falsely and maliciously assert that Israel is committing ‘genocide,’”

a statement from the group read.

“We reject participation in any coalition that seeks to isolate and demonize Israel singularly amongst the nations of the world.”

In December 2016 Fox News’s report told how

‘an investigation conducted by the Haym Salomon Center reveals the group’s embrace of anti-Semitism and collaboration with a State Department-designated terror group.’ 

What led to this?

‘In August, Black Lives Matter singled out Israel for condemnation, declaring it an “apartheid” state engaged in “genocide.” These accusations angered Jewish leaders, many of whom had steadfastly supported the BLM cause.  Nonetheless, despite what can only be described as a total lack of relevance to its own agenda, BLM did not back down.’

The Zionists decided that opposition to apartheid in Israel was totally irrelevant to the fight for racial justice in the United States. That is what is called White Privilege.

Not backing down is indeed a sin in the eyes of Zionist groups accustomed to getting their way with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn. Their particular target was the Dream Defenders, who represent young migrants to America who are under most threat especially since Trump has removed the immunity from deportation.

Their offence was to proclaim solidarity with Palestinians. Fox explained that

‘DD claims that the black community in America, together with Palestinians in the “occupied” territories of Israel, are all victims of state-sanctioned violence. As such, the two causes are related and should learn “resistance” from each other.’

This was a result of a joint trip to the Palestinian territories in January 2015 by BLM and DD, the latter of which devoted‘an entire page’ of the DD web site is devoted to Palestinian solidarity. Unfortunately the web page is also missing.

The ADL, which calls itself an anti-racist organisation, has also been heavily involved in funding and organizing the trips of American Police to Israel to learn the latest techniques in repression, including the neck hold which Israel patented. The ADL in years gone by undertook spying on the anti-apartheid movement at the behest of South Africa’s secret police BOSS.

When Starbucks staff called the police after accusing Black customers of ‘loitering’ in April 2018, they set up a training day in racism awareness for their staff, which included the ADL. After protests from BLM Starbucks dropped the ADL from its ‘bias training’. Politico described how

‘Bowing to pressure from African-American activists, Starbucks excluded the Anti-Defamation League from an upcoming daylong anti-bias training session.... Almost immediately after the April 17 announcement, activists attacked Starbucks over the ADL's involvement, citing the ADL's support for Israel and its arms-length relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement.’

The activists described how

“The ADL is CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people. This is a sign that they are tone deaf and not committed to addressing the concerns of black folk.”

As Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, told ABC News

"You can't be a piece of an anti-bias training when you openly support a racist, oppressive and brutal colonization of Palestine."

The Washington chapter of Black Lives Matter, meanwhile, tweeted that the ADL was "ultra pro-cop," and cited a 2016 letter in which Greenblatt said

"ADL has not endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement" because "a small minority of [its] leaders ... supported anti-Israel — and at times anti-Semitic — positions."

In Co-opting Black Lives Matter to target Israel,  Israel’s largest freesheet (owned by Sheldon Adelson) quoted Mark Greendorfer, president of the Zachor Legal Group attacking

"The cynical use of the Black Lives Matter by groups backed and controlled by foreign terror movements is nothing less than a repeat of the many other times that terror groups have used human shields to push their violence and hate,",

If Starmer is sincere in his support of BLM then he will have to drop his support for Zionism . But we know that he is anything but sincere.  When the statue of Edward Colsten was  thrown into Bristol’s harbour Starmer condemned the demonstrators.  You have to obey the law however unjust it is.  Martin Luther King’s take on this was slightly different. In Letter from Birmingham Jail he wrote

"How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."

Starmer would, if he’d been around at the time, told Anne Frank off for breaking the law by hiding from the Gestapo. As for the Suffragettes and Emily Davidson bringing down the King’s horse at the Derby, he would have been besides himself with rage. After all, the law must be obeyed, come hell or high water.

If you are going to quote Martin Luther King you can’t pick and choose which bits you like and which bits to ignore.  What MLK said came as part of a whole.

Meanwhile, as Canary shows, the attempts to demonise BLM, on both sides of the Atlantic proceed apace.

Tony Greenstein

The Chomsky Challenge for Americans

Why do they hate us?

This was the iconic photo of the Vietnam War of a naked 9 year girl running, having been napalmed.  Her younger brother is to her left in the background and the US sponsored South Vietnamese troops are in the rear.  Today Kim Phuc lives in Canada, having been granted asylum there

 Below is an excellent article which gives a background to the North Korean crisis and much else surrounding American imperialism.  As you read it you may come to see why it is anything but far-fetched to suggest that the 'antisemitism' campaign in the Labour Party is merely one manifestation of the way in which the United States and its protege, Israel, seeks to manipulate and control the political process in much of the world.

It is indeed a testament to the power of the BBC and the foreign policy establishment, that the United States is still seen by most people, Donald Trump notwithstanding, as a democratic country rather than a capitalist state with a sugar coating of democracy  beneath which is the mailed fist of US imperialism.  Black people in the United States and campaigns such as Black Lives Matter understand this, however white liberals still see Trump as some kind of aberration rather than a remarkably honest politician who, unlike Barak Obama, doesn't say one thing and do another.

Tony Greenstein

Scholar and activist Noam Chomsky in 2012. (Hatem Moussa / AP)

It’s no wonder that most Americans are clueless about why “their” country is feared and hated the world over. It remains unthinkable to this day, for example, that any respectable “mainstream” U.S. media outlet would tell the truth about why the United States atom-bombed the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Gar Alperovitz and other historians have shown, Washington knew that Japan was defeated and ready to surrender at the end of World War II. The ghastly atomic attacks were meant to send a signal to Soviet Russia about the post-WWII world: “We run the world. What we say goes.”

Montage of images from the Korean War. Clockwise from top: U.S. Marines retreating during the Battle of the Chosin Resevoir, U.N. landing at Incheon, Korean refugees in front of an American M-26 tank, U.S. Marines, led by First Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, landing at Incheon, and an American F-86 Sabre fighter jet.

However, as far as most Americans who even care to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, the Japanese cities were nuked to save American lives certain to be lost in a U.S. invasion required to force Japan’s surrender. This false rationalization was reproduced in the “The War,” the widely viewed 2007 PBS miniseries on World War II from celebrated liberal documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

An early challenge to Uncle Sam’s purported right to manage postwar world affairs from the banks of the Potomac came in 1950. Korean forces, joined by Chinese troops, pushed back against the United States’ invasion of North Korea. Washington responded with a merciless bombing campaign that flattened all of North Korea’s cities and towns. U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay boasted that “we burned down every town in North Korea” and proudly guessed that Uncle Sam’s gruesome air campaign, replete with napalm and chemical weapons, murdered 20 percent of North Korea’s population. This and more was recounted without a hint of shame—with pride, in fact—in the leading public U.S. military journals of the time. As Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading intellectual, explained five years ago, the U.S. was not content just to demolish the country’s urban zones:

Since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water supply—a war crime for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals … talk[ed] excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys and the ‘Asians’ scurrying around trying to survive. The journals exulted in what this meant to those Asians—horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation. How magnificent!

The United States’ monstrous massive crimes against North Korea during the early 1950s went down George Orwell’s “memory hole” even as they took place. To the American public they never occurred—and therefore hold no relevance to current U.S.-North Korean tensions and negotiations as far as most good Americans know.

Image from the 2009 military coup in Honduras which Hilary Clinton sponsored

Things are different in North Korea, where every schoolchild learns about the epic, mass-murderous wrongdoings of the U.S. “imperialist aggressor” from the early 1950s.

Clinton's Colombian Death Squads

“Just imagine ourselves in their position,” Chomsky writes. “Imagine what it meant … for your country to be totally levelled—everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.”

That ugly history rarely makes its way into the “mainstream” U.S. understanding of why North Korea behaves in “bizarre” and “paranoid” ways toward the U.S.

Outside the “radical” margins where people read left critics and chroniclers of “U.S. foreign policy” (a mild euphemism for American imperialism), Americans still can’t grapple with the monumental and arch-imperialist crime that was “the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s term at the time) between 1962 and 1975.

Contrary to the conventional U.S. wisdom, there was no “Vietnam War.” What really occurred was a U.S. War on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—a giant and prolonged, multi-pronged and imperial assault that murdered 5 million southeast Asians along with 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Just one U.S. torture program alone—the CIA’s Operation Phoenix—killed more than two-thirds as many Vietnamese as the total U.S. body count. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the widely publicized My Lai atrocity was just one of countless mass racist killings of Vietnamese villagers carried out by U.S. troops during the crucifixion. Vietnam struggles with an epidemic of birth defects created by U.S. chemical warfare to this day.

All in a day's work - the gruesome toll of the death squads

America’s savage saturation bombing of Cambodia (meant to cut off supply lines to Vietnamese independence fighters) created the devastation out of which arose the mass-exterminating Khmer Rouge regime, which Washington later backed against Vietnam.

As far as most Americans who care to think about the “Vietnam War” know from “mainstream” U.S. media, however, the war’s real tragedy is about what it did to Americans, not Southeast Asians. With no small help from Burns and Novick’s instantly celebrated documentary on, well, “The Vietnam War” last year, we are still stuck in the ethical oblivion of then U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s morally idiotic 1977 statement that no U.S. reparations or apologies were due to Vietnam since “the destruction was mutual” in the “Vietnam War.” As if fearsome fleets of Vietnamese bombers had wreaked havoc on major U.S. cities and pulverized and poisoned U.S. fields and farms during the 1960s and 1970s. As if legions of Vietnamese killers had descended from attack helicopters to murder U.S. citizens in their homes while Vietnamese gunships destroyed U.S. schools and hospitals. Did the Vietnamese mine U.S. harbors? Did naked American children run down streets in flight from Vietnamese napalm attacks?

The colossal crimes committed run contrary to Cold War claims that Washington was fighting the spread of Soviet-directed communism. The U.S. wanted to prevent Vietnam from becoming a good example of Third World social revolution and national independence. The truth is remembered in Vietnam, where national museums exhibit artifacts from Uncle Sam’s noble effort to “bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age” and tell stories of Vietnamese soldiers’ heroic resistance to the “imperialist aggressors.”

One American who made the moral decision to put himself in “our” supposed “enemy’s” position was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The people of Indochina, King mused in 1967, “must find Americans to be strange liberators” as we “destroy their families, villages, land” and send them “wander[ing] into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them—mostly children.” Further:

They languish under our bombs and consider us—not their fellow Vietnamese—the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. … They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. … They wander into the towns and see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers.

Observing that the U.S. had become the world’s “leading purveyor of violence,” King asked Americans to develop the maturity to “learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the [Vietnamese] brothers who are called the opposition.”

All good Americans were naturally horrified by the 9/11/2001 jetliner attacks—the first serious foreign attack on the U.S. since the War of 1812. Where was their humanitarian revulsion as U.S.-led economic sanctions killed 500,000 innocent Iraqi children (what Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, went on CBS to call “a price worth paying”) during the first half of the 1990s? “Mainstream” U.S. media had little to say about this terrible toll.

How many good Americans who understandably wept as they watched the World Trade Center towers collapse had ever heard about the grisly slaughter the U.S. armed forces arch-criminally inflicted on surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait in February 1991? Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. … On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre. …

Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring would have been impressed.

Imagine the imprint this senseless war crime must have left behind on Iraqis.

Thanks to its poor fit with American exceptionalist doctrine—according to which Uncle Sam always tries to do the morally right thing, even if it sometimes goes too far in overzealous pursuits of its consistently good intentions—this gruesome imperial crime was only a minor story in U.S. “mainstream” media. The same was true three years earlier when the American battleship USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians on a clearly marked commercial jet in Iranian air space over the Persian Gulf. (Two years later, the Vincennes’ commander and his chief air-war artillery officer were given medals for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during this heroic slaughter of harmless innocents.)

Imagine the U.S. response if, say, a Chinese navy ship had shot down an American Airlines flight in U.S. airspace over San Francisco Bay.

The U.S. shootdown of Flight 655 is well remembered in Iran. Not so in the United States of Imperial Amnesia, where official doctrine holds that, in Albright’s words, “The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”

“ ‘Tis too much proved,” William Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet,” “that with devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.”

The tenacious hold of pious U.S.-exceptionalist dogma leads to soul-numbing two-facedness. In May 2009, a U.S. airstrike killed more than 10 dozen civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. As The New York Times somewhat surprisingly reported: “In a phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to … the Afghan Parliament, the governor of Farah Province, Rohul Amin, said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed, according to a legislator, Mohammad Naim Farahi. … The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred. … Everyone was crying … watching that shocking scene. Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including … many women and children.”

The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this horrific incident—one among many mass U.S. aerial civilian killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning in the fall of 2001—was to blame the deaths on “Taliban grenades.” Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressed “regret,” but the administration refused to issue an apology or to acknowledge U.S. responsibility.

By telling contrast, Barack Obama had just offered a full apology and fired a White House official for scaring New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people there of 9/11.

The disparity was remarkable: Frightening New Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians required no apology. No one had to be fired. And the Pentagon was permitted to advance preposterous claims about how the civilians perished—stories U.S. corporate media took seriously.

“Why, oh why, do they hate us?” So runs the plaintive American cry, as if Washington hasn’t directly and indirectly (through blood-soaked proxies like the Indonesia dictator Suharto and the death-squad regimes of Central America during the 1970s and 1980s) killed untold millions and overthrown dozens of governments the world over since 1945. As if the U.S. doesn’t account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s military spending to maintain at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 “sovereign” nations.

Maybe it has to do with a U.S. media that wrings its hands for months over the deaths of four U.S. soldiers trapped on an imperial mission in Niger but can’t muster so much as a tear for the thousands of innocents regularly killed (victims of what Chomsky has called “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”) by U.S. drone attacks across the Middle East, Southwest Asia and North Africa. Imagine what it is like to live in constant dread of annihilation launched from invisible and unmanned aerial killing machines. The tens of thousands of Yemenis killed and maimed by U.S-backed and U.S.-equipped Saudi Arabian airs raids get no sympathy from most American media. Nor do the more than 1 million Iraqis who died prematurely thanks to Washington’s arch-criminal 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was sold on thoroughly and openly false pretexts and provided essential context for the rise of the Islamic State.

Maybe it’s also about the “good friends” that “we” (our “foreign policy” imperial masters) keep around the world in the names of “freedom” and “democracy.”

These partners in global virtue include:

● Thirty-six nations receiving U.S. military assistance despite being identified as “dictatorships” in 2016 by the right-wing U.S. organization Freedom House.

● The Saudi regime, the leading source and funder of extremist Sunni jihadism and the most reactionary government on earth, currently using U.S. military hardware and ordnance to bomb Yemen into an epic humanitarian crisis.

● The openly racist occupation and apartheid state of Israel, which has sickened the morally sentient world this spring by systemically sniper-killing dozens of young, unarmed Palestinians who have had the audacity to protest their sadistic U.S.-backed siege in the miserable open-air prison that is Gaza.

● Honduras, home to a violently repressive right-wing government installed through a U.S.-backed military coup in June 2009.

● The Philippines, headed by a thuggish brute who boasts of killing thousands of drug users and dealers with death squads.

● Rwanda, a semi-totalitarian state enlisted in the U.S.-backed multinational rape of the Congo, where 5 million people have been killed by imperially sponsored starvation, disease and civil war since 2008.

● Ukraine, where a right-wing government that includes and relies on paramilitary neo-Nazis was installed in a U.S.-assisted coup four years ago.

You don’t have to be a leftist to have the elementary moral decency to do the Chomsky exercise of imagining yourself in other nations’ shoes—on the wrong side of the Pax Americana and its dutiful, consent-manufacturing “mainstream” media. Four years ago, the University of Chicago’s “realist” U.S. foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer had the all-too-uncommon decency (at least among U.S. “foreign affairs” specialists) to reflect on the Ukraine crisis and the New Cold War as seen from Russian eyes.

“The taproot of the crisis,” Mearsheimer wrote in the nation’s top establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, “is [U.S.-led] NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrated into the West,” something Vladimir Putin quite naturally saw as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.” And “who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asked, adding that grasping the reasons for Putin’s hostility ought to have been easy since the “United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”

“We need not ask,” Chomsky reflects, “how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hints of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been ‘terminated with extreme prejudice,’ to adopt CIA lingo.”

You never heard about Mearsheimer’s take, much less Chomsky’s, even (or especially) in liberal media outposts like MSNBC and CNN, where progressives learn to love the CIA and the FBI.

The dominant U.S. media now is warning us about the great and resurgent danger of Iran developing a single nuclear weapon. U.S. talking heads and pundits also are leading the charge for the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula [of North Korea].”

It is unthinkable that anyone in the reigning American exceptionalist U.S. media-politics-and-culture complex would raise the question of the denuclearization of the United States. It’s no small matter. The world’s only superpower, the only nation to ever attack civilians with nuclear weapons, is embarking on a super-expensive top-to-bottom overhaul of a U.S. nuclear arsenal that already houses 5,500 weapons with enough menacing power between them to blow the world up five times over. This $1.7 trillion rebuild includes the creation of provocative new first-strike weapons systems likely to escalate the risks of nuclear exchanges with Russia and/or China. Everyday Americans could have opportunities to more than just imagine what the innocents of Nagasaki experienced in August 1945.

But don’t blame Donald Trump. Our current reality was initiated under Obama, leader of a party that is positioning itself as the real and anti-Russian and CIA-backed party of empire in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.

This extraordinarily costly retooling heightens prospects for human self-extermination in a world in dire need of public investment to end poverty (half the world’s population “lives” on less than $2.50 a day), to replace fossil fuels with clean energy (we are marching to the fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per atmospheric million by 2050—if not sooner), and to clean up the titanic environmental mess we’ve made of our planet.

The perverted national priorities reflected in such appalling, Darth Vader-esque “public investment”—a giant windfall for the high-tech U.S. weapons-industrial complex—are symptoms of the moral collapse that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned the United States about in the famous anti-war speech he gave one year to the day before his assassination (or execution). “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King said, “is approaching spiritual death.”

That spiritual death is well underway. Material and physical death for the species is not far off on America’s eco- and nuclear-exterminating path, led in no small part by a dominant U.S. media that obsesses over everything Trump and Russia while the underlying bipartisan institutions of imperial U.S. oligarchy lead humanity over the cliff. Americans might want to learn how to take Chomsky’s challenge—imagine ourselves in others’ situation—before it’s too late to imagine anything at all.

Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…