Cornel West on Obama

West is a brave voice, and he was right on.

There is no excuse for Obama’s expansion of Bush’s drone strikes, or his GWOT. Thing is, Trump has greatly expanded it even more, and he’s removed the already too weak “rules of engagement” meant to curb at least some of the carnage:

Trump is ordering airstrikes at 5 times the pace Obama did Christopher Woody Apr. 4, 2017, 1:59 PM

Excerpt:

All told, Trump has ordered 75 drone strikes or raids in non-battlefield settings during his first 74 days in office, according to Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

By Zenko’s tally, Obama signed off on 542 such strikes during the eight years — or 2,920 days — he spent in office.

Obama’s total works out to about one strike every 5.4 days, the first two strikes coming on January 23, 2009, in Waziristan, Pakistan, and thought to have killed as many as 20 civilians.

In comparison, since Trump took office, he has overseen about one strike a day on average.

It never seems to end. It only gets worse.

War crimes. America is an empire. It committed them to become one, and commits them to maintain empire. We’ve talked about it before, but I think this country can’t justify more than perhaps two wars in its entire history as a nation:

1812 and WWII.

And within those wars we committed war crimes. Even in the “good wars” we did.

War is obscene, always. Empire requires wars. Empires are obscene.

wv wrote:

Well if every modern US President is a War-Criminal, and most Senators and House members are war criminals…….what big questions does that raise about America, Americans, and Life on Earth ?

w
v

I still think most humans are “good.” Or, at least, “innocent” until taught to be bad. I think they’re taught to be bad by a very small fraction of society, which actually does have pathologies of sadism, obscene cruelty, selfishness, etc. We inherit the societies they develop, because those societies benefit them on so many levels. And the message we get from them is that everyone is this way, when it’s really just the fraction in charge.

The first step, IMO, out of this morass, is to reject the idea that “human nature” is essentially evil from Day One. We can thank (among others) organized, early Christianity and its take on the story of Adam and Eve for a good bit of that, but mostly Augustine (with the help of the Roman Empire), whose reading of the story altered our ideas of “original sin” for centuries. This is the essential “conservative” worldview. That mankind is born in sin, from sin, and can’t escape from it, so we need ruthless authoritarians to keep us forever in check. Augustine, to Hobbes and his war of all against all, to Burke and his hatred for people’s revolutions, on up through today’s evangelicals, loving strongmen types who bring down the hammer on minorities and women. Humankind’s fear of ourselves leads us to cede our own autonomy over to authoritarians to protect us from the Other.

Until we radically shift away from this view, this idea that we must always fear each other, and that we’re locked in a battle for survival, a competitive, not cooperative battle for survival . . . I don’t know how we’ll going to change the loop of endless war/empire/corruption . . . and Arendt’s “banality of evil.”