American Exception

Wow.

As Blade said in the eponymous movie, “The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping. There is another world beneath it—the real world.”

American Exception is about the real world.

It is deeply researched, coherently presented, cogently argued. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll wonder how you ever could have believed that things are what they seem or are how the powers that be present them.

Stay-behind operations in Europe. The Kennedy and MLK assassinations. CIA heroin smuggling. Nixon and the CIA having the goods on each other re JFK’s murder and Nixon’s interference in Johnson’s peace talks with North Vietnam. It’s all in here, and much more, all of it run by a tripartite structure, as Good describes it, consisting of the public state (politicians, bureaucrats, the sugar-coated topping); the security state (CIA, FBI, Pentagon, etc); and the deep state (Wall Street, think tanks, establishment media, and the unaccountable factions that exercise power alongside and beyond visible power).

Considering the amount of money and power at stake, it would be borderline delusional to believe that the powerful play by any set of rules other than “How much can I get away with?” I think what causes people to resist this obvious dark truth is emotional discomfort. We ordinary people are powerless, and it’s painful to acknowledge not only that mommy and daddy don’t love us, but that they look at us as something akin to food. It hurts to realize, as George Carlin said of our “owners,” that “They don’t care about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all.”

But there is some inherent satisfaction in clarity. And hope, too. Because if you can correctly understand the nature of things, your chances of improving them are dramatically better.

For that reason alone, I hope American Exception will be widely read. It deserves to be, and then some.

Trump's True Sin Isn't What He Does. It's What He Is

I think the primary reason Trump provokes such strong revulsion in some quarters is that he represents the id of the America empire—the hideous, capering truth that so much of our culture is designed to obscure.

A few examples:

“You’re going to take Gaza under what authority?”

“Under the US authority.”

This sounds terrible… but how is it different, really, from American Exceptionalism? To me it differs the way “Where’s the crapper?” differs from “Pardon me, would you be kind enough to direct me to the restroom?”

A few days ago, Trump said with regard to Ukraine, “I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth…Otherwise, we’re stupid...We have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money.”

Trump’s take upset German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who responded, “Ukraine is under attack and we are helping it, without asking to be paid in return. This should be everyone's position.”

Ah, everyone’s position should be that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to this completely insane and unnecessary war NATO provoked is the essence of altruism. But is the position the truth?

Remember when O’Reilly said to Trump, “But Putin’s a killer?”

Trump responded, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

Even Trump’s mere suggestion here, the equivalent of, “You don’t think water is wet?” caused an orgy of pearl-clutching among establishment media, which tried to twist Trump’s response into a defense of Putin. Why? Because what Trump said was untrue? Or because acknowledging the brutal truth of American power is understood to be indecorous and not the done thing?

And think of how Al Gore is supposed to have said regarding rendition, “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

(Consider too why the government calls these things renditions rather than kidnappings; why our invasions are interventions, our election meddling is civil society assistance, and on and on. For more, see Orwell on The Politics of English Language.

Think of what McCain said about Obama in their first presidential debate:

“[Obama] said he would launch military strikes into Pakistan. Now, you don’t do that. You don’t say that out loud. If you have to do things, you have to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government.”

You don’t say that out loud! It’s impolite, it spoils the mood!

Etc.

The more obviously damning the truth is, the more elaborate the mechanisms for obscuring it (why do we call them cows when they’re alive, but they become meat, beef, and steak when we go to eat them?). And accordingly, the greater the professed horror of, and punishments meted out to, anyone who transgresses by ignoring or undermining those mechanisms.

In his novel Watership Down, Richard Adams compellingly depicts in Cowslip’s warren a culture built on denial, and the penalties for anyone who pierces that denial.

(I’m a big believer in fiction’s power to depict not facts, but truth.)

In Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote:

“Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. We have noted that self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings. It is the tribute which morality pays to immorality, or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised. One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may be usually the case, it deceives the self. Naturally this defect in individuals becomes more apparent in the less moral life of nations. Yet it might be supposed that nations, of whom so much less is expected, would not be under the necessity of making moral pretensions for their actions. There was probably a time when they were under no such necessity. Their hypocrisy is both a tribute to the growing rationality of man and a proof of the ease with which rational demands may be circumvented.”

Think of the levels of self-deception that America—which Martin Luther King noted over a half century ago is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—requires to behave in the world as it does.

Trump’s unique sin isn’t that behavior. His unique sin is in failing to obey the agreed-upon norms and protocols our rulers engage in to conceal and distort the true nature of that behavior. His sin lies in exposing the engine, the foundation, the id that our culture insists we remain blind to. He is the embodiment of the thing we’re taught all our lives doesn’t even exist—at least not here in righteous, beneficent, altruistic America.

Amazon Seems Not To Like Reviews of The Putin Interviews

UPDATE: A friend at Amazon saw this post, looked into it, and informed me that the whole thing was a mistake: my second review did indeed post; I shouldn’t have received the first email, requiring revisions; I certainly shouldn’t have received the second email, mistakenly informing me that even my revised review wouldn’t do. They’re reviewing what went wrong and will try to fix it.

I figured this was a glitch (as I’ve said in comments, there are 200+ other reviews of the book and of course the book is itself for sale, so suppressing my review would be a pretty shaky means of suppression).

Anyway kudos to Amazon for trying to figure out what went wrong and for trying to fix it.

And again: The Putin Interviews is extremely illuminating and highly recommended.

************

I’ve now tried twice to post an Amazon customer review of Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews.

In response to the first attempt, I received an email from Amazon telling me I would have to edit the review because it violated community guidelines, but with no specific information on what guidelines I might have violated.

The only thing I could imagine was my review’s mention of “Hitler.” I tried deleting that reference—along with the first three paragraphs of five—and in response received another email from Amazon:

One or more of your posts were found to be outside our guidelines. In order to help our customers make informed choices, we encourage them to review the product and contribute information about it. However, Community content that violate our guidelines or Conditions of Use will be removed. 

Please consider this a first warning. 

Before submitting your next post, please refer to our Customer Guidelines: 

http://business.amazon.com/abredir/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_508088_bid_1594471?nodeId=508088

Failure to comply with our policies may result in your account being banned from taking part in Community features. 

Thanks for your understanding in this matter.

The Customer Guidelines in question provide in relevant part:

You may post reviews, comments, photos, videos, and other content; send e-cards and other communications; and submit suggestions, ideas, comments, questions, or other information, so long as the content is not illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights (including publicity rights), or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable, and does not consist of or contain software viruses, political campaigning, commercial solicitation, chain letters, mass mailings, or any form of "spam" or unsolicited commercial electronic messages. You may not use a false e-mail address, impersonate any person or entity, or otherwise mislead as to the origin of a card or other content.

The only possible applicable prohibition in that paragraph would seem to be “objectionable,” which of course could mean anything because after all, anything could be objectionable to someone.

In addition to posting many book reviews on Amazon over the years, I’ve also published most of my own books and short stories with Amazon Publishing, and have never had a problem like this. I could speculate about why there’s so much sensitivity to a positive review of a book that’s essentially a series of conversations with Russia’s president, but I’ll leave that to others. Instead, I’ll just post the review here and hope it’ll lead more people to read (or listen to, as I did) this outstanding book:

Is it “appeasement” to acknowledge that other nations have legitimate security interests? Is it wise to ignore those interests? America certainly has such interests—see for example The Monroe Doctrine. For what happens when great powers ignore each other’s security interests, see The Cuban Missile Crisis.

The entire western establishment wants the world to believe the war in Ukraine was forced on NATO because Putin, “unprovoked,” started it out of an insane desire to reconstitute the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, to undermine the “Rules Based Order,” etc…

But before our rulers blow up the world in the service of the foregoing talking points, it might be worth hearing the actual words of the person we are relentlessly told is the New New Hitler.

What emerges from these conversations is an impressively knowledgable, thoughtful, seemingly rational and at times even wryly funny leader. Maybe it’s all an act; maybe Putin’s articulated worldview is pure BS. But why let the New York Times and the White House filter your information when you can listen to the source itself?

Sun Tzu said “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.” If (as we are relentlessly told) Russia really is America’s enemy, shouldn’t we get to know Russia a little better than the comic-book caricature peddled by establishment media? Such an opportunity is right here in this excellent book.