The Rise of Trump Predicted by Henry Wallace in 1944

Henry Wallace and FDR

The May 12 New York Times ran an op-ed by Henry Scott Wallace,  “American Fascism, in 1944 and Today”  , that deserves a closer look.  Wallace is the grandson of FDR’s Vice-President  Henry Wallace.  His op-ed uses an article his grandfather wrote,  “The Danger of American Fascism“, to shed light on the current phenomenon of Mr. Trump.  As the younger Wallace puts it, his grandfather, “described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears, but is really interested only in protecting his own wealth and privilege.”  In doing so, he predicted Donald Trump.

Here’s more of the op-ed:

“My grandfather warned about hucksters spouting populist themes but manipulating people and institutions to achieve the opposite. They pretend to be on the side of ordinary working people — ‘paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare,’ he wrote. But at the same time, they ‘distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity.’

They invariably put ‘money and power ahead of human beings,’ he continued. ‘They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.’ They also ‘claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.’

They bloviate about putting America first, but it’s just a cover. ‘They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.’

They need scapegoats and harbor ‘an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations.'”

In short, Vice-President Wallace warned against the rise of the American Right, the phenomenon that, in our time, would characterize Fox News,  Breitbart, Bannon, and Trump.   The Vice-President and grandson carry their respective analyses much further and each has its gems.   Here again, for example, is the op-ed:

“[The American Fascists] use lies strategically, to promote civic division, which then justifies authoritarian crackdowns. Through ‘deliberate perversion of truth and fact … their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity.’

Thus might lying about unprecedented high crime rates legitimize a police state. Lying about immigrants being rapists and terrorists might justify a huge border wall, mass expulsions and religion-based immigration bans. Lying about millions of illegal votes might excuse suppression of voting by disfavored groups.”

Where the Wallaces are particularly clear-headed is in understanding that there is no easy cure for the rise of fascism.  The op-ed again:

“The antidote? For my grandfather, it lay in that phrase the ‘common man.’ In 1942, he famously rebutted conservatives calling for an ‘American Century’ after the war — America, the greatest country on earth, dominating the world.

Nonsense, my grandfather said in that speech: We Americans ‘are no more a master race than the Nazis.’ He called for a ‘century of the common man’ — ordinary people, standing up and fighting for their rights, with decent jobs, organized (into unions), demanding accountable government committed to the ‘general welfare’ rather than the privilege of the few, and decent schools for their kids (teaching ‘truths of the real world’). Democracy, he said in his 1944 essay, must ‘put human beings first and dollars second.'”

Vice-President Wallace, himself, became an early victim of the American Right, being ignominiously dumped from Roosevelt’s ticket in 1944 in favor of Harry Truman to appease right-wing democrats.  His legacy would itself be tarred by the coming era of McCarthyism – it’s a legacy that deserves to be better known, understood, and appreciated.   And it’s a sad lesson that to be right and prescient is not necessarily to win.  Still, we could do worse than to value the wisdom of the Wallaces.   What a novel concept, to put human beings first.

David Remnick on Trump

David Remnick’s article in The New Yorker, “A Hundred Days of Trump“, provides an excellent overview of the Alice in Wonderland nature of Trump World as Trump pulls us into his rat hole.  Remnick is a must read – the breadth of what is going is unprecedented and extraordinarily difficult to follow.  Trump, in fact, is deliberately giving us a full court press – well aware that the public and the media can not effectively defend on all fronts.  Where indeed should we focus?  But Remnick provides a base, a summary, a perspective; read him to learn what you missed, to connect the dots, to understand that some of it is mindless or meaningless or both.

Here are three excerpts, taken almost at random – the article must be read as a whole but you might find a taste interesting:

“Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world. In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. ‘Give them the old Trump bullshit,’ he said. ‘Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.’”

and this:

“Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged.  Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, is a ‘good person,’ blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment.  A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over ‘the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.’

The danger:

“In 1814, John Adams evoked the Aristotelian notion that democracy will inevitably lapse into anarchy.  ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long,’ he wrote to John Taylor, a former U.S. senator from Virginia, in 1814.  ‘It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.’  As President, Donald Trump, with his nativist and purely transactional view of politics, threatens to be democracy’s most reckless caretaker, and a fulfillment of Adams’s dark prophecy.”

Remnick is writing to us as a warning.  Our democracy has been failing.  Nothing in the American disease of “exceptionalism” protects our institutions against a concerted attack by wealthy oligarchs and corporate enterprises who wish only for stable government slanted to protect their wealth and business interests.  The 2016 election represented a major body blow.  It is up to us to respond, to demand a restoration to the elevation of public interest.

Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian Connects Dots on Trump-Russia

Alec Guinness as George Smiley

If, like me, you smell the rot coming from the Trump, Mercer, Putin cabal, and the apparent global efforts to undermine the integrity of democracies, read this article by Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian, “When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange”.   Her article revolves around a meeting between Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit campaign and Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks,  on March 9,  2017 at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The meeting was discovered by accident by a passerby who spotted Farage entering the embassy,  As Cawalladr puts it, “And that was how the world found out, by accident, that the founder of WikiLeaks, the organisation which published Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails – a decisive advantage for Donald Trump’s campaign – and Farage, a friend of Donald Trump, were mutually acquainted.”

She writes further, “What did or didn’t happen on 9 March may perhaps reveal clues to understanding this. To unravelling the links between WikiLeaks, the UK and the Trump administration – an administration embroiled in ever deeper connections to the Russian state. Between Trump – whose campaign was funded by Mercer and who came to power with the help of the same analytics firm now under investigation for its work with Leave.EU – and Brexit.”

The point is that the meeting threw into the open the fact that channels and communications existed between like minded conspirators in the US, Britain, and Russia, all focused on hacking the internet and manipulating social media to control and undermine the integrity of democratic processes.

Cadwalladr’s article continues:

“David Golumbia, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US who has studied WikiLeaks, describes it as ‘the moment when the lines suddenly become visible’. He says: ‘It was like the picture suddenly came into focus. There is this worldwide, rightwing, nationalistic movement that is counter to the EU, and this is present in the US and Europe and Russia, and we are just starting to understand how they do all seem to be in communication and co-ordination with each other.’

In many ways, it wasn’t a surprise. There are clear ideological similarities between Assange and Farage. They have both been regulars on RT, Russia’s state-sponsored news channel. They have both been paid – indirectly by the Russian state – to appear on it. Ben Nimmo, a defence analyst with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, points out that Farage has voted systematically in favour of Russian interests in the European parliament. ‘There is very, very strong support for the Kremlin among the far right in Europe. And Farage is squarely in that bloc with the likes of the Front National in France and Jobbik in Hungary.'”

And so the proverbial noose tightens on Mr. Trump, who loved Wikileaks and invoked the assistance of Russia to find and release the 30,000 Clinton emails.  As Cadwalladr states, we don’t yet know the full details.  How could we?  Trump was not going to publicly confess to his illegal Treasonous conspiracy with foreign powers to assist in his election.  But if the details remain blurred, the fact of the conspiracy has been established, not just by Cadwalladr’s expose, but by the known pattern of contacts between Trump and his aides, Russian officials, and Julian Assange.  The longer that Paul Ryan and the Republicans refuse to seriously investigate and act, the clearer it appears that they too have known and been complicit.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Science in America” – Let There be Light

Discharge from a Tesla coil

In 2002, Jenny Uglow, an English scholar and biographer, wrote The Lunar Men, following the 1760s exploits of a small group of men – the Lunar Society of Birmingham.  The book details a slice of the English 18th Century Enlightenment, a period when the intelligentsia of England were discovering the power of science.  This is from the book jacket, “Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame, the potter Josiah Wedgwood; and the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor, and the theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles).  Later came Joseph Priestley, fighting radical and discoverer of oxygen….  Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals, launched balloons; named plants, gases, and minerals; changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms; and plotted to revolutionize its soul.”  Subtitled “Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World”, The Lunar Men is a testament to the power of curiosity and scientific method.  It’s a great read if you are curious about the history of science – about how the amazing tools we use came to be.

I had the privilege to grow up in a family where science and knowledge were core values.  My dad worked on the design of our nuclear submarines.  My older brother was building radio receivers at 10 or 11 out in the workshop while I squandered Saturday mornings watching Cowboy shows.  But enough of it rubbed off on me so that I and several other members of the family have amateur radio licenses.   The night before last I talked with my brother 100 miles away over our own rigs – mine hooked up to a jury-rigged dipole antenna strung out in the back yard.  What is fascinating is that it works, that we actually know how to do it, and, at least in a descriptive way, can tell you how it works.  Because real science is power and because there is only one objective reality – a set of truths that one can discover and use.

Noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently released a four minute video podcast on the subject “Science in America”.   Tyson’s video is a warning to us, a wake up call that too many of us take the science for granted, are smug in our own ignorance even as to what science means or how it works.   Hence we have a puzzling juxtaposition.   Right-wing Trump supporters believe blatant lies and deny the established science.   The head of the EPA denies the science of global-warming,  Mr. Pence argues that evolution should be taught as only a “theory”.  Those same people benefit every minute from the products of modern science; they tweet on their IPhones, heat their bagels in microwaves, and head out to work in their BMWs.  Logically these alternate realities should not coexist.   But they do.  And now Trump and his allies are dismantling the government protections of the Environmental Protection Agency and the impetus toward renewable resources, all the while publicly pondering whether Nuclear Weapons should be kept on the shelf or might not be so dangerous after all.

In short, we face an existential threat because, not only is the science real, but because ignorance of it, ignorance of what is true, can have consequences.  If you haven’t seen it yet, also take a look at this Wally Shawn interview with Noam Chomsky; find the link at my blog My Dinner with Noam.   Am I being too intolerant to suggest that willful ignorance deserves  public contempt?

Mainstream Acknowledges the Trump-Cohn Axis

Machiavelli

American mainstream media, Time, in an opinion article by James D. Zirin,  “The Man Who First Fueled Donald Trump’s Paranoid Politics“,  has finally pointed out the connection of Trump to red-baiting mob lawyer, Roy Cohn, the evil genius behind Joe McCarthy and consigliere to New York crime families.  Publicizing Trump’s origins would have been useful during the primary campaigns and presidential election.  Instead, public ignorance about Trump and Cohn enabled the current unfathomable reality where the country installed a crime family in the White House.

A couple excerpts from Zirin: “…I don’t mean to suggest that Trump, is a certifiable lunatic. This would be beyond my expertise. I would only argue that his political approach of demonizing his enemies; fabricating claims out of whole cloth; relying on conspiracy theories; expressing suspicion that others are out to get him, including the intelligence agencies, the FBI, Obama (with unsupported allegations of wiretapping), and the media; pandering to anger and fear in the populace; gross exaggeration, and distortion; xenophobia, racism, and let’s not forget misogyny, resonates with a paranoid style sadly seen all too often in American history.

In modern times, besides Trump, leading exponents of the paranoid model have been Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. All these men did political battle in a paranoid style. And connecting the dots between these complicated men was a corrupt lawyer named Roy Marcus Cohn, who never held elective office, but was close to all of them.”

And further on, “As McCarthy’s consigliere, Cohn mastered the art of the smear, the lie, and the counterattack.  Cohn, a willing handmaiden, sat at McCarthy’s side at the nationally televised Senate hearings.  He rocketed to national prominence just as Trump did with The Apprentice.  As Cohn later wrote, ‘people are bored; they want entertainment.’ Entertainment would prove to be the vehicle for both men to achieve political power.”

For more on the Cohn connection, see among my other blogs, Donald Trump and Organized Crime and Sidney Blumenthal’s Short History of the Trump Family.   Note also that Trump’s oldest key operatives, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Arthur J. Finkelstein, were also associates of Cohn, schooled in the arts of political manipulation.

We need to do more than bemoan the present.  The election of Trump exposed serious weaknesses in the American democratic model.  Trump was elected with a minority of the votes, pursuant to a media campaign of slander and innuendo, supported by the intervention of a foreign power.  He is so contemptuous of our democratic processes that on Monday he phoned Turkish President Erdogan to congratulate him on a referendum vote that gave Erdogan uncontested power for life – in a country that a decade ago was a model for the establishment of democracy in the Middle East.

The short of it is that when we finally rid ourselves of the curse of Trump, serious reforms are necessary – to get money out of politics, to ensure election by majority vote, and to find ways to provide objective information to an educated voting public.  We must not settle for less.

 

The Root of all Evil

Cohn and McCarthy

Those of you following my blog know that I trace Trump and the core of his evil back to Joe McCarthy’s Red-Baiting assistant and consiglere to mob families, New York lawyer Roy Cohn.  Simplified, Cohn who was ultimately disbarred before dying of AIDS, taught Trump everything he knows about manipulating the press and the judiciary and using misinformation, smear, and innuendo to win in the game of life.  As Cohn taught, a willingness to ruthlessly jettison all principles gave one an important edge.  See my earlier pieces at Donald Trump and Organized Crime and Blumenthal’s Short History of the Trump Family.  More recently, I have noted that Trump’s original core of loyalists,  Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, were also members of the Roy Cohn sphere.  See Leave No Stone Unturned.   And in yesterday’s blog, I link to an article by Andras Gollner, showing how Trump’s collusion with Putin and the Russians appears to have been routed through the “back door” of Budapest where both Trump operative Arthur J. Finkelstein and the Eastern European offices of the modern Russian KGB – Putin’s FSB – are located.  See Andras Gollner exposes Trump.  Gollner links Finkelstein to the early Trump-Cohn  days.

So I thought it only reasonable to also provide you with the link to this April 14 New Yorker article by Marcus Baram, “EAVESDROPPING ON ROY COHN AND DONALD TRUMP.”  Baram interestingly also links Fox TV oligarch Rupert Murdoch to the Trump-Roy Cohn days.  Here’s an excerpt for the sort of stuff you will miss if you don’t check out Baram: 

“[Former Cohn employee Christine] Seymour also describes some of Cohn’s political dirty tricks, including that he had researched Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with the assistance of Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. (‘Roger Stone—worked with Roy very heavily before and after elections. Was the one with Roy to find out the dirt on the Ferraros.]) Stone, who first met Trump through Cohn, initially did not think much of the brash young real-estate developer, Seymour’s notes indicate. ‘Roger did not like Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he would, too,’ she writes. When I recently asked Stone about this, he said the “notes make no sense,” adding, ‘I was very impressed with Donald Trump when I met him.'”

Read on and you will find that Christine Seymour, who was profiled in a column titled “Savvy Chris Spills the Beans on Roy Cohn”  and who, five months later, was on the verge of publishing a Roy Cohn tell-all, died suddenly on October 20, 1994,when her car crashed head-on with a tractor-trailer.  

Check it out if you were entertaining doubts about the nature of the swamp from which Trump arose.  Or for the entertainment if you are so inclined.

Andras Gollner exposes Trump in “The Budapest Bridge”

The following article in The Hungarian Free Press by Andras Gollner in two parts,  “The Budapest Bridge: Hungary’s Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service” and “The Budapest Bridge Part 2″, provides missing links on the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.   Gollner’s information fits the Trump modus operandi; he cites early Trump New Yorker friend, Arthur J. Finkelstein, a fellow Roy Cohn associate, as instrumental in the behind the scenes shenanigans of electoral manipulation.  Finkelstein, with Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, constitute a key Trump base of loyalists with links back to Cohn.   Gollner even provides a possible role for Trump’s office Nazi Sebastian Gorka.   Gollner introduces his articles as follows:

“Our investigation has uncovered ‘the smoking gun’ about the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. It shows that the connection between the Russian secret services and the Trump campaign is not a direct one. It did not run through the Russian embassy in the US or through the spies that have been expelled by Obama. It did not run through New York City or Moscow, or in conversations between campaign staff and the Russian ambassador to the US. It ran through Budapest, which is the European Headquarters of Putin’s FSB. Budapest was the ‘bridge’ between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret service.

Some of our evidence is well known. It is known, for example, that the Russians and the Trump campaign had identical strategic interests. They both wanted to position Hillary Clinton as a ‘crooked and untrustworthy’ candidate. What has not been known, up to now is, that the unacknowledged architect of this grand strategy was the notoriously secretive Arthur J. Finkelstein, a long time New York associate of Donald Trump, going back to the Roy Cohen days.

Finkelstein is perhaps the most bitter opponent of Hillary Clinton amongst a small circle of pro-Republican campaign gurus, and a frequent flyer to many of the capitals where Putin is seen as a hero. Finkelstein introduced Paul Manafort years ago to Putin’s pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs, who use their corporate hats, to advance Putin’s fortunes abroad.  Finkelstein also had a big hand in Manafort’s addition to the Trump team. Finkelstein has also served as chief political strategist for the past 10 years, to Putin’s most loyal follower in the Western alliance – the Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán. Finkie, as Orbán is fond to call him, also works for some of the most notorious autocrats of the former Soviet Republics, and always indirectly, so his pay-masters can’t be easily identified – a skill that he passed on to Trump’s ex-campaign chairman, Manafort.

As Steven Bannon confessed to the Hollywood Reporter, after the elections, polling and visceral messaging, a Finkelstein specialty, played a critical part in the Trump campaign.  It is not a coincidence, that the campaign’s senior pollster was Tony Fabrizio, who learned his craft on Finkelstein’s knees. Virtually the entire top tier of the Trump campaign, including Roger Ailes and Roger Stone, have close personal ties to the man, who is known worldwide, as ‘The Merchant of Venom’.”

Gollner names names and suggests further avenues of investigation.   All of this fits well with other information developed on Trump, such as that on the Azerbaijan Trump hotel detailed in Adam Davidson’s New Yorker article “Trump’s Worst Deal.”  We need an independent prosecutor to follow up this line of evidence along with the other indicia of collusion.

The article sets out a brief bio of Gollner as follows:   “András B. Göllner split his time between Budapest and Montreal from 1990 until 2010, as a senior political-economic advisor, on governmental transparency. He organized the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán’s first visit to Canada, and learned, through close personal contact, about many of his corrupt practices. He conducted the first and only study (financed by USAID) that looked inside the operations of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, which today, works arm in arm with Russia’s secret services. He is an internationally recognized expert on Central European politics, has a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, published 3 books, and dozens of articles, in such well known English language media as The LA Times, The Huffington Post, The National Post, or the Montreal Gazette, to name just a few. He is a regular contributor to the Hungarian Free Press. His current status is Professor Emeritus, at Montreal’s Concordia University.”

Concordia is a prominent Canadian university with an international reputation, particularly in business.  A brief google of Gollner shows that he has been active in efforts against a slide of the Hungarian state toward despotism.

My Dinner with Noam

My recommendation today is that you watch this Wallace Shawn interview of Noam Chomsky at the New York Public Library –  “My Dinner with Noam”  was the comment of some internet wags.  Chomsky is always interesting and important to listen to  – Wally Shawn gives the interview some sparkle.  If you don’t know Chomsky, you owe it to yourself to watch.  The interview doesn’t start until about 16 minutes in.  Lasts a little over an hour.  Just forward the play to get started.  If you know Chomsky, it’s still good.  Sobering discussion of the doomsday clock though.  Is a species’ chance for survival inverse to intelligence?   Does that mean, with the election of Trump, that we are Okay?

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson calls out Trump

War, huh, good god / What is it good for / Absolutely nothing, listen to me – Edwin Starr Lyrics by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong

Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, in a recent interview with Paul Jay of The Real News Network , discusses the state of intelligence concerning the chemicals used in the Syrian incident and the manipulation of the incident by Trump for domestic policy purposes.  See this link: “Trump Attack on Syria Driven by Domestic Politics“.   Wilkerson bluntly points out that the actual source of the chemicals and nature of the chemical attack are in doubt – some sources suggest that a rebel stockpile of chemical weapons was hit by conventional Syrian bombs.  Understanding what happened would require a proper forensic examination of the site.  But whatever actually happened, in Wilkerson’s view, the Trump administration was only concerned that the incident provided Trump with an excuse to stage the American raid.  As Wilkerson notes, the number of deaths  were not at all out of the ordinary in this war – more civilians have died recently to American bombs in Mosul.  But the chemical nature of the injuries and the horrific nature of the photos made the incident a ready-made Tonkin Gulf and an opportunity to show muscle and distract from growing media scrutiny of Trump’s ties with Russia.

Wilkerson’s analysis is astute, sober, and spot on.  It is a must see both because he calls out the Trump administration for its self-evident manipulation of events and because he describes in detail the way in which Trump and his advisers behind the scene are militarizing  foreign policy.   As he describes it, the current “force first” policies may result in us all “going out with a bang”.  My summary can’t do Wilkerson justice,  so please follow the link.

As I write, the Trump administration is positioning our military for aggressive actions around the globe, not just in the Middle East, in Syria, and Iraq, but in Asia, off the coast of Korea, and in venues like Libya and the Sudan in Northern Africa.  Mainstream media sees out military posturing in a favorable light, sometimes even fawning over the imperial expression of American might.  Not enough of us point out that American aggression may be a losing game, that millions of lives are at stake, and that the sort of mistakes made in escalating conflicts don’t allow for do-overs.  If you are not actively speaking out against this madness, there’s no time like the present.

 

If you don’t want war, don’t go looking for it

Unless you are looking for a fight, don’t put your navy in Harm’s Way.  See this article by Matthew Rozsa in Salon, “When the nuclear apocalypse happens, point to Donald Trump putting nukes in South Korea as a key moment“.

This is  Rozsa:    “On Saturday, U.S. Pacific Command announced that it was redirecting the Carl Vinson carrier strike group to the Korean peninsula. The strike group’s warfare capacity includes early warning radars, electronic-warfare technology, more than 300 missile tubes, and Hornets.

National security adviser H. R. McMaster told “Fox News Sunday” on Sunday that “the president has asked to be prepared to give him a full range of options to remove that threat to the American people and to our allies and partners in the region.”  McMaster added that, during Trump’s weekend summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, that both world leaders were concerned about North Korea’s rise as a nuclear power and that ‘President Xi and President Trump agreed that that is unacceptable, that what must happen is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.’”

So Trump is sending a carrier task force to the penisula and has determined that the Korean Penisula must be “denuclearized.”  What could go wrong?

 Here’s an example of what happens when you strut your stuff.  On February 15, 1898, the United States Battleship Maine exploded in the harbor in Havana, Cuba, bringing the United States into the Spanish-American War.  The Maine had been sent provocatively to Havana, ostensibly to protect American interests during a Cuban rebellion against Spain.  At the time, Americans such as Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge, and assorted journalists, including William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, were actively lobbying for war.  From their point of view, any war would do – they had pushed hard for war against England in 1895 over a border dispute in South America.  By 1898, they had successfully raised tensions against the Spanish, and the Maine was sent to Cuba to “send a message”.

Her sinking, probably from an uncontained coal fire reaching her magazine, became the pretext for a global conflict in which the U. S. flexed its muscles and stole Cuba and the Philippines from the Spain.  The rest of that story, not often told in the US, is that the Philippines did not receive the right to govern themselves until after World War II and American actions against Filipinos led to a minimum of tens of thousands of combat deaths of Filipino natives.  The natives in Cuba lived for the early part of the 20th Century under  an assortment of unstable regimes, periodic American interventions, and growing Mob influence until the Cuban revolution leading to Fidel Castro.   Teddy Roosevelt declared it all a great success and rode his charge at San Juan Hill to fame and fortune, but any objective view puts the US in the light of a venal bully out to gratify egos and pad pockets.  Anyone like that come to mind?

Which brings us to Trump’s order to the Vinson carrier strike force to proceed to the Korean Peninsula.  If Trump is sending the task force with the intent of starting a war, then he should seek authorization from Congress.  If Trump is “sending a message” to North Korea, that message may provoke, and may be intended to provoke, a North Korean response.  Maybe Trump thinks the North Koreans will roll over for us.  History suggests that events rarely comply with such facile expectations.  So what could go wrong?  How bad could it get?  Worse.  Much worse.