1. “Happy Birthday Randolph Bourne
Today is the 123rd birthday of Randolph Bourne, the antiwar writer and intellectual for whom the Randolph Bourne Institute, which operates Antiwar.com, is named.
Bourne was a major opponent of the First World War, and died during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic at the young age of 32. Despite his short life he managed to leave us with a considerable collection of memorable writings, and the motto – as important now as it was in his age, that “war is the health of the state.”
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The problem was that what Casey Blake calls “Bourne’s insight that total war had made all modern nations increasingly totalitarian” neither won him friends nor influenced much of anyone to look kindly on his contributions to the public prints. Worse yet, according to Ben Reiner, Bourne “vehemently opposed all restrictions on dissent, bringing him into sharp conflict with the rising pro-war hysteria that preceded America’s entry into World War One. Bourne viewed Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality as a sham,” and he was also, as Charles Molesworth notes, openly contemptuous of “the weak logic of those who had to change their principles in order to justify joining the national call to arms.”
In the words of Christopher Phelps, Bourne was an “elegant refuter of ‘pragmatic’ pretensions in those who believed that the state, even in a time of unleashed militarism, could be tamed simply by their own moral presence in the corridors of power.” And he “held fast to principle as his erstwhile colleagues at The New Republic accommodated the imperialist carnage of the First World War.” His principled stand cost him dearly, “for few 20th-century American dissenters have … suffered the wrath of their targets as greatly as Bourne did. By 1917, The New Republic stopped publishing his political pieces.
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Robert Westbrook put the matter as memorably and eloquently as anyone when he said that “Bourne disturbed the peace of John Dewey and other intellectuals supporting Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for democracy, and they made him pay for it.”
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/05/30/happy-birthday-randolph-bourne/
2. ““The Sexual Humiliation Of Iraqi Prisoners…Was Not An Invention Of Maverick Guards, But Part Of A SYSTEM Of Ill-Treatment And Degradation”
Government apologists are still trying to blame the torture and rape which occurred at Abu Ghraib on “a couple of bad apples”.
However, as the Guardian wrote in 2004:
The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
The techniques devised in the system, called R2I – resistance to interrogation – match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.
One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said … British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques…
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Since Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, General Miller and other top Bush administration military and civillian officials created a program in which sexual humiliation and sexual degradation were mandated as part of a systemic program, they had the legal obligation to ensure that things did not spiral even further out of control.
It is a long-established legal doctrine that people can be held liable for failing to properly supervise agents and employees, or for using U.S. personnel who they knew or should have known were dangerous, or for failing to conduct adequate background checks.
Indeed, the above-linked Guardian article said that the chance of someone being driven crazy from the normal application of the SERE sexual humiliation techniques was high.
If “bad apples” committed rape without express authorization, the officials who created the SERE torture program are – at the very least – guilty of criminal negligence in failing to place anyone but the most highly-trained, stable and disciplined personnel available.
Put another way, whether or not Cheney and the boys specifically ordered rape, they are war criminals for creating the environment in which it could occur.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/05/sexual-humiliation-of-iraqi.html
3. “The role of the media in manufacturing consent is very well documented. The phrase, incidentally, is not mine. It is taken from the essays on democracy by Walter Lippmann, the leading American public intellectual of the 20th century, a Wilson- Roosevelt progressive. Lippmann described the “manufacture of consent” as an innovation in the “art of democracy”. He recommended these methods. They should be used, he wrote, to control the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” — the general population — whose “function” in a democracy is to be “spectators”, not “participants” in making and implementing decisions. That is a standard theme among elite intellectuals from widely varying sociopolitical systems.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13785
4. “Jeffrey Rosen vows never to “blog” again
NPR has a thorough examination today of the controversy surrounding Jeffrey Rosen’s New Republic anonymity-driven smear attack on Sonia Sotomayor’s intellect and character. The audio news report, for which I was interviewed at length, will be posted online at NPR later today.
The one trait that defines establishment pundits more than any other is a pathological inability ever to accept blame or admit error. That’s because they work in the most accountability-free profession in America, where people like Bill Kristol (with a record like this) and Jeffrey Goldberg (with a record like this) get promoted despite no retractions or remorse, and establishment media stars in general can pretend that they bear no responsibility for enabling the abuses and crimes of the Bush years. And all of that is simply an extension of the prevailing ethos that political, financial and media elites should be immunized from accountability in general — which is why the Beltway elite class collectively scoffs at the very notion that there should be any consequences at all when our highest political leaders commit the most serious crimes.
In that grand accountability-free tradition, Rosen blames everyone but himself for what he did, but then melodramatically announces that he will no longer “blog” — as though it’s the medium, rather than his own standards and choices, that are to blame for what he did
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How absurd is that? Let us count the ways. First, even when the most establishment “journalists” such as Rosen get caught engaging in patently irresponsible behavior, they still find a way to blame blogs rather than themselves (I thought I was just blogging, and reckless gossip is what bloggers do).
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Most important, countless people who write blogs every day — all year long — give ample thought before “hitting the send button,” and do so without descending into irresponsible gossip-mongering and what The New York Times Editorial Page called “character assassination” and “uninformed and mean-spirited chattering” driven by “anonymous detractors” that was “beyond the pale of reasonable debate.” Despite his efforts to blame “blogging” for what he did, Rosen didn’t use journalistically reckless methods to smear Sotomayor’s intellect because of some inherent attribute of the medium. Instead, he did that because — as Andrew Sullivan noted in defending Rosen from the charge that he did nothing but pass on “gossip” — that’s how the establishment media typically functions: “background reporting from people with various axes to grind, i.e. standard Washington reporting.”
Rosen can give up blogging and every other perceived vice all he wants. But until he renounces the defining practices of what Sullivan calls “standard Washington reporting” — indiscriminately granting anonymity and thus producing accountability-free claims — he’ll still be the same Jeffrey Rosen producing the same sorts of reckless pieces. The effort to depict Sonia Sotomayor as “dumb and obnoxious” was notable only because of how extreme it was. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about it. To the contrary, as Sullivan says, the unreliable, misleading methods it used were perfectly common for blogging Washington “reporting.”
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Isn’t it amazing — and extremely revealing — that even as recently as five years ago, the Jeffrey Rosens and TNRs of the world could do things like this, and routinely did them, without any meaningful response or check of any kind? Is it really hard to see why so many establishment media figures harbor such disdain for “bloggers” and blame them for most of their woes? If you enjoyed a monopoly on controlling political discourse and were free to spout the most irresponsible claims without any consequence, wouldn’t you also deeply resent whatever it was or whoever it was that put an end to that?”
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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