Monthly Archives: September 2017

Puerto Rico: Climate Change on the Margins of Empire

Right now Puerto Rico, an American island of over 3.4 million people, is in ruins thanks to the rampage of two major hurricanes, Irma and Maria respectively. Most are facing months without electricity, many are homeless, more face poor access to fresh drinking water, farms have been razed, and the specter of disease looms over flooded towns and toxic industrial and military superfund sites. Officials on the island have described the situation as “apocalyptic.” Now a dam is dangerously close to bursting. This is our climate changed present and future. But if you pay attention to the corporate media you might never know these facts or what they mean.

Puerto Rico seldom gets much coverage in the US mainland press because it lies in the grey zone of Empire. In fact, polling has demonstrated that most Americans do not even realize it is part of the US. But it was one of the first victims of American global expansion and hegemony following Spanish colonialism and served as a base of operations for the US military in its forays throughout the Caribbean and Central America. It was never granted statehood thanks in part to many Puerto Ricans who resisted American occupation, but also due to elites in Washington for its geopolitical advantage to the US. As a result of this marginalized status its residents cannot vote in national elections, and it has scant control over internal issues when it comes to neoliberal austerity measures, US military installations and environmental protections.

In recent years it has been put in the vice grip of debt by vultures on Wall Street, much like Greece, Spain and Argentina. And with increasing swaths of the planet engulfed in climate chaos it has been ensnared in a widening circle of “sacrifice zones“ where residents of impoverished neighbourhoods, cities or regions are largely left to fend for themselves when faced with pollution, climate change related disasters and ecological destruction. This has disproportionately effected immigrants, indigenous peoples and people of colour, but the lines are also being drawn based upon class.

Puerto Rico is another early example of the world to come. In truth, most of the world’s population already lives in some form of this dystopia; but it is the future for the rest of us thanks to the current course of unrestrained production and consumption of fossil fuels and the corruption, greed and apathy of the global elite. They aren’t slouches when it comes to protecting their interests and saving their own hides either. In articles from CNN to The New Yorker, tales of the sprawling estates and luxury bunkers being bought or built by them show how seriously they take the coming shocks to civilization.

So how will the powerful respond to a future of disasters and chaos for essentially anyone who isn’t part of the wealthy elite? The answer can perhaps be gleaned from a tweet President Trump sent out Monday, his first response to the devastation in Puerto Rico a full five days after the hurricane made landfall. He began by saying the island had “massive debt” that is “owed to Wall Street and the banks” and which “must be dealt with.” This was the first priority given, not the welfare of the people or the environment but how much the beleaguered people of Puerto Rico owe to vulture capitalists and the extortionists on Wall Street.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Kenn Orphan 2017

The Chronicles of “Nambia”

Bogeymen and the Enemies We Dare Not Call Out

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The celebrated American actor Morgan Freeman’s recent “We Are At War With Russia” stint is one of the most bizarre examples of recent propaganda since Joe McCarthy tore through Hollywood. Funded in part by director Rob Reiner of TVland “meathead” notoriety and Max Boot, the neocon who advised war criminal John McCain and who currently advises the US military, this unintended burlesque exudes an all too familiar toxic strain of American exceptionalism along with a dangerously insular view of the world.

In the short video Freeman encourages the viewer to imagine a scenario where Russian president Vladimir Putin has some kind of decades long grudge against the United States because of the collapse of his “motherland.” I am no fan of Putin. I oppose his militarism, his abysmal treatment of opponents and dissidents, and his KGB-esque authoritarianism. And many Russians continue to challenge their government in protests across their country. But does Freeman really think Putin is carrying out some vendetta like the plot of some cheesy Hollywood movie? He goes on to say that he is “undermining democracies around the world” via social media and the internet. All of this is said without even the slightest hint of irony. Could he be that ignorant of his own nation’s history or the role the CIA and DoD has had (and still does) in subverting the democratic process in virtually every region on earth? Does he really not know about Iran? or Chile? or Indonesia? or Congo?

Freeman then announces that he has requested Congress and the intelligence community to “use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation determine exactly how this happened.” Does he really think this “intelligence community,” the same one that went after Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and scores of antiwar, LGBT, Civil Rights and feminist activists or that lied to the public about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq is trustworthy and capable of rising above their long legacy of mendacity and corruption? And is he really reducing the phenomenon of the rise of the idiot Trump solely to alleged Russian interference in American elections? By declaring a figurative war against them, it appears so.

The video ends with risible lies about the American Empire being “a shining example to the world” and predictable platitudes regarding the US military supposedly“defending” democracy and keeping the nation safe against foreign enemies. It is nationalism at its most foul.

What is perhaps the saddest part of this absurd spectacle is that it courts the most aggressive and reactionary forces within the US political, intelligence and military establishment in an effort to depose Trump, a pea-brained, narcissistic megalomaniac. It dances on the edge of all out global war without a bit of foreboding as to what that war might actually look like for billions of people. It eagerly seeks to depose a fascist goon by getting into bed with fascist goons.

Unsurprisingly, Freeman’s strange call to arms has been lauded by many Americans. But when it comes to their nation’s short history, or the enormous role their government has played in destroying democracy around the world, or the blatant flaws endemic to their own system riddled with corruption, too many of them are willfully obtuse. And this is how Hollywood dutifully plays its role in pumping out propaganda which obscures the truth about American Empire, magnifies a dangerous, parochial myth of supremacy, and manufactures external bogeymen for the public to project all of their fears, animus and failings at.

They dare not call out their true enemies. They dare not speak of the wealthy elite and their organized crime of corporate capitalism. Or millionaire politicians. Or the judiciary and police forces drenched in institutional and violent racism. Or a blind and bloated military industrial complex. Or industry executives profiting from the plunder of the earth’s biosphere and decimation of the climate, or any of the actual, existential threats they face. Heaven forbid. Because doing so might reveal what so many already know deep inside. As the American naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry once said “we have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

~ Kenn Orphan 2017

The Storytellers of Empire

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The nature of Empire is inherently duplicitous. It lies as much to the world as it does to itself, laboriously weaving myths of its supposed virtue in order to shroud the mass grave it sits upon. This makes it incapable of any meaningful reflection when it comes to its crimes. After all, such an exercise would ultimately be its undoing. And even though there are many examples of pseudo contrition the insatiable impulse for self-glorification is interwoven through its fabric. War is what Empire lies about the most; and the American Empire is not “exceptional” in this regard. On the contrary. It has become an expert at its execution.

Since its founding the United States has manufactured threats to hackneyed and meaningless concepts like “liberty” or “freedom” to justify aggressive expansion, domination and exploitation. Its founding mythology rooted in the supremacist lie of “Manifest Destiny” has excused its unending militarism as a supposedly noble response to a “barbaric” world that needs to be “civilized.” And the war against Vietnam is perhaps one of the greatest examples of that imperial overreach. It claimed millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives. Millions more were maimed or displaced and at least 58,000 US troops lost their lives with many more coming home with broken bodies and lifelong psychic wounds. Today millions still suffer from the lasting effects of Agent Orange.

But in the years since this catastrophic war the American Empire has struggled to rebrand itself as the benevolent giant. Unending forays into South and Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and beyond have also made this task next to impossible. Enter the professional obscurantist. To make this self delusion possible they are essential and there are few as adept at it than Ken Burns. In his new PBS documentary series entitled “The Vietnam War;” the “many sides” narrative is being peddled again. And in an era where a sitting US president makes the “many sides” argument to defend the violence of white supremacists against anti-fascists, this worldview is more than troubling.

“The Vietnam War” is, unsurprisingly, a project funded by the Bank of America and billionaire reactionary David Koch. And it relies heavily upon former CIA agents and military generals for “perspective.” This is what makes a series like this so insidious. They ultimately serve a way of thinking that make past imperialistic wars not only forgivable, but current and future ones appear almost palatable and even inevitable.

The real Vietnam War should be revisited, but it should not be cast as an intervention with noble intentions to assist one side in a civil war. South Vietnam was an invention of French colonialism and, later, US election rigging as they understood that communist candidate Hồ Chí Minh was likely to win. None of this is to absolve the Viet Cong of the atrocities they committed; but they should be understood in the context of an indigenous group fighting against a foreign invader who possessed far more military might. And for the war to make sense to us today it must be looked at in this light, as the deliberate result of blatant and brutal imperialism.

The storytellers of Empire ultimately serve one purpose, to extol the glory of the Empire. This might at times take on the veneer of humanization or even remorse, but at their core these are stories that absolve its crimes by portraying an even playing field where there was none. The real story of this war is written in innocent blood that indicts the powerful of their savagery. Nothing less will suffice.

Kenn Orphan 2017

An accurate record by novelist Robert Gore of the American Empire’s war on Vietnam follows:

“Between 1965 and 1972, the US and South Vietnam air forces flew 3.4 million combat sorties, the plurality over South Vietnam. Their bombing was the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, and South Vietnam got the brunt of it. The provincial capital district of Quang Tri, the northernmost South Vietnamese province, received 3,000 bombs per square kilometer. Between 1965 and 1973, the US Strategic Air Command launched at least 126,615 B-52 bomber sorties, again the majority of them targeted to South Vietnam.

In 1969, US units fired 10 million artillery rounds, and over the course of the war they expended almost 15 billions pounds of artillery shells. By the end of the war, formerly scenic South Vietnam featured an estimated 21 million craters, which wreaked havoc on the landscape and largely destroyed its agricultural-based economy. Keep in mind South Vietnam was the US’s ally. North Vietnam, the enemy, also sustained massive casualties and destruction.

Bombs and munitions weren’t the US’s only weapons. An estimated 400,000 tons of napalm, a jellied incendiary designed to stick to clothes and skin and burn, were dropped in Southeast Asia. Thirty-five percent of victims die within fifteen to twenty minutes. White phosphorus, another incendiary, burns when exposed to air and keeps burning, often through an entire body, until oxygen is cut off. The US Air Force bought more than 3 million white phosphorus rockets during the war, and the military bought 379 million M-34 white phosphorus grenades in 1969 alone. The US also sprayed more than 70 million tons of herbicide, usually Agent Orange, further decimating indigenous agriculture and destroying the countryside.

A “pineapple” cluster bomblet was a small container filled with 250 steel pellets. One B-52 could drop 1,000 pineapples across a 400-yard area, spewing 250,000 pellets. “Guava” cluster bombs were loaded with 640 to 670 bomblets, each with 300 steel pellets, so a single guava sent over 200,000 steel fragments in all directions when it hit the ground. Pineapples and guavas were designed to maim, to tax the enemy’s medical and support systems. Between 1964 and 1971, the US military ordered 37 million pineapples. From 1966 to 1971, it ordered 285 million guavas, or seven each for every man woman and child in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia combined.

No other conclusion is possible: the US waged unrestricted (other than not using nuclear weapons) industrial war against the far less well-armed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army.

Most Americans think the My Lai massacre was an unfortunate anomaly. That delusion is a lingering tragedy of Vietnam. Plenty of villages were burned and leveled, farm animals and crops destroyed, and unarmed and visibly helpless women, children, and old people—generally counted as VC in the often meretricious statistics—murdered. Some of the villages contained Viet Cong, some did not, and that was often not the first concern or even a cited justification for US troops. The slaughter was frequently wanton, or indiscriminate vengeance for American troops killed or wounded, not to fight the enemy.”

Title artwork is Napalm Girl Vietnam by Brian Howell.

The Real World

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“You must love nature,” she said as she passed; a stranger noticing me picking up the careless refuse dropped by another who apparently doesn’t. Her comment strikes me as a somewhat absurd but common sentiment, and it stays with me throughout my hike. Industrial society seems to easily compartmentalize nature as just another interest or a hobby.

I smile at her as I hastily stuff the discarded plastic water bottles and chip bags into a sack I keep in my back pack, while thinking of the engorged body of a dead seabird I saw dissected by a meticulous biologist right in front of me. Its stomach contents revealing human detritus of all manner, plastic lighters, bottle caps, pens, even a spoon. There are likely hundreds of millions like this one. It was a surreal sight only later matched in intensity and horror when watching a video of the dissection of a deceased whale whose belly was bursting with tons of plastic bags and other hard synthetic polymers, or the sight of a deformed tortoise whose shell was strangulated throughout its life by a plastic beverage holder.

My enthusiastic, if not misguided, eco-warrior friend chides me. “We’re gonna clean up the oceans,” he says. If only it were up to him. But my mind drifts to the scale of the problem. It lingers on the seemingly unstoppable production of plastics, the enduring legacy of this Age of Petroleum and an enormous fount of wealth for the industries that harvest the earth’s primordial blood. Its not true that plastic lasts forever, but it persists, it morphs into other insidious forms, and as it breaks down it releases its copious stores of toxicity like a trillion, tiny, slow moving oil spills.

I wander further catching a glimpse of a dragonfly bouncing on the air between the suns waning rays. Her iridescent wings so thin they appear gossamer. The wind picks up and she is gone, adrift on the cooling late summer breeze. I think of my friend and his tenacity. I utter a silent prayer to the ether for there to be more like him, but as I wander on I come across another heap of styrofoam fast food containers and beer cans, the residue of effortless revelry, stuffed into the crevice of an ancient rock overlooking the ocean. And the truth of our cultural apathy, born of privilege and convenience, caves in my chest.

Perhaps we have evolved to this disconnection. Perhaps the only possible outcome of industrial civilization is estrangement from the natural world from which we emanate. The character of industrialization is, after all, defined by the brutal rape of the natural world. And like all rapists, this one has only contempt and loathing for his victim. She is the constant reminder of his violent crime. But in some deep recess of his mind he knows that she is in no way dependent on him, quite the contrary. The opposite is true. And the limits of her beneficence are being recklessly pushed.

I stumble through the gathering orange and rose hued light of the evening to the trailhead. I think about rising seas and the land borne plastics and chemicals that will find their way to the ocean after relentless storms and flooding. I remember a recent study projecting more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. I think about the Sixth Mass Extinction already well underway. About the human warmed world with acidic oceans, dead zones, algae blooms, blighted forests, collapsing ecosystems and besieged biota of all kind. And I realize even the language we use serves to alienate us from the imperiled world we live in.
The real world is not the world of constructed oblivion where enormous towers of glass and steel conquer nature. It isn’t even “responsible growth” or “sustainability.” Those terms only reinforce a culture of estrangement that obscures the living earth in self serving euphemisms that perpetuate mass delusion and self destruction. The real world is that of beetles, and bats, and mice, and moths, and mold, and trees, and birds, and grass, and sharks, and coyotes, and frogs, and coral, and worms, and moss, and salmon, and ferns, and snakes, and every other imaginable species now threatened with extinction, including our own. It is of obstructed rivers and polluted streams. Of molested mountaintops, developed coastlines, and felled forests. The moon begins to silently hum in its detached, pellucid presence above me. Field mice scurry across my path. Crickets begin their nightly serenades of solicitation unconcerned by my intrusion. Mosquitoes make clandestine landfalls on my exposed arms and head, foolishly underestimating the racket their wings make in such close proximity to my ear drums. I think once again about what she said, that passerby on the trail. “You must love nature.”

I breathe deeply, sigh, and make my way home through the gathering darkness.

~ Kenn Orphan 2017

Trailhead near Prospect, Nova Scotia, by Kenn Orphan:

Getting Out ain’t that Easy

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Yesterday the Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, delivered an ominous warning. He said that Hurricane Irma was “the most catastrophic storm the state has ever seen.” He went on to tell the residents of areas in its crosshairs to “get out.” Ironically, this is the same man who forbade the mention of the term “climate change” in his administration. He has also made no effort to fund projects to make the state more capable of dealing with climate change disasters like sea level rise, drought and stronger storms.

Telling people to “get out” is easy. It has also become terribly easy to ridicule or judge those who do not “get out.” We saw this during Hurricane Katrina when poor, mostly people of colour, were castigated for not “heeding” the warnings given by local officials. And we are seeing it once again. Hurricane Irma is behemoth at 400 miles across. The length of the state is a mere 400 miles or so. Bigger and stronger than any hurricane recorded in the Atlantic. In addition to this there has been little to nothing done by the state (or the federal government) to assist people or adequately address the looming catastrophes associated with human caused global warming.

It’s true that there are wealthy people in this region. The media informed us about some of the sprawling island estates owned by billionaires that have been decimated already. But as is the case of many of the Caribbean islands, most of the residents of Florida are not rich by any stretch. I know this state. My parents had lived in Florida for 20 years. I have a brother and his family and several friends who are there now. They work hard, have bills to pay and don’t have second homes to flee to or mansions that can be simply written off.

Many are elderly, many are working people, many are immigrants or undocumented people escaping dire circumstances, some are homeless, some are disabled, some are mentally ill, many have children, beloved pets they won’t abandon, and most have enormous debt and little to no healthcare or financial resources. Bearing this in mind, with gas stations closed, supermarkets empty, and the two main arteries in and out of the state clogged, where should they go? Where would they stay if they did? How would they pay for all of it? And who will reimburse them? They remember (as we all should) how badly things went after Hurricane Katrina and Sandy. Most of those people are still putting their lives back together with little help from the government services supposedly set up to address the aftermath, all while disaster capitalists profited off the misery.

It should go without saying that these people deserve our assistance and solidarity, not self righteous judgement or ridicule. This is especially true for the coming months when the focus of attention will shift from this storm to the next disaster or spectacle. In the coming years to decades most of us will find ourselves in similar situations, as victims of the convergence of a system infested with corporate greed and political corruption and facing the harsh realities of a militarized, resource depleted, climate changed world.

Whether we accept it or not, we are all facing this frightening new world. And I think its time we face it together.

Kenn Orphan 2017

While Rome Burns…

Fanatics, Dogma and Disarray

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Recently, I had an interesting (see disturbing) back and forth with a self-described Stalinist who told me that if it were up to him I would be “sent to the gulag” for my “bourgeois brand of Trotseyist socialism.” I had a hearty laugh at the time, but he wasn’t kidding. Later I thought about the historic, real world implications of that comment. After all, is a gulag any different than a concentration camp? And is it somehow okay or even funny to suggest sending a human being you dislike or disagree with to a warehouse of misery, torture and death? Apparently, in the minds of many ideologues, it is.

This person represents a certain mindset. Despite his protestations, when it came down to tactics and ultimate goals he bore very little discernible difference from a Nazi or a fascist. In fact the course of our “discussion” took on the same tone. Given the current social and political climate I do not think it is hyperbolic to be concerned by this attitude. And the previous century is certainly a cautionary tale on the dangers inherent to purist ideas and “isms.”

Human history has been drenched in oceans of blood shed for the sake of purist dogma and buried under mountains of corpses for the supposed righteousness of an idea. All manner of atrocities have been justified and, in many cases, celebrated for the sake of religious beliefs, “national security interests,” greed and material profit, to “protect” the public or society from a perceived menace, or for political ideologies which purport to be the answer to all our problems.

Being a human being in community, however, is a messy business. It requires patience, a willingness to listen, and the arduous bridge building work of solidarity. But the fervid ideologue cannot countenance such disarray, at least not for very long. To them it is not about cooperation, movement building, or respecting the inherent worth of all human beings. It is about achieving an end. And, ultimately, about control and power.

We are entering a troubled age of rapidly dwindling resources, chaotic and catastrophic weather, and an imperiled biosphere coupled with seemingly perpetual militaristic aggression, corporate greed and a growing global police state. Now more than ever we need radical ideas and a massive paradigm shift in the way we see the world and live in it. But this makes the discomfort of fanatics even more troubling. It isn’t simply these monumental challenges we all face or the change that is needed that bothers them, but the flawed, fragile and tangled nature of being human itself. As a result they are often drawn toward despots and their savage solutions.

But a dire warning to all who encounter or who may be swayed by such zealots: Be cautious of the utopia they promise. Because it may very well be built upon a mass grave that will one day contain your bones.