AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA ---- Episode 11

               WE SHOULD PROTECT THINGS THAT ARE 
          SHARED 

   There was a period during the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 when a bumper sticker that read NO BLOOD FOR OIL started appearing on American cars. Implicit in the slogan was the assumption that the Iraq invasion was over oil, but the central irony of putting such a message on a machine THAT RUNS ON OIL seemed lost on most people. There is virtually no source of oil that does not incur enormous damage to either the local population or the environment, and driving a car means that you're unavoidably contributing to that damage. There were many valid reasons to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the anti-invasion rhetoric around the topic of oil by people who continued to use it to fuel their cars betrayed a larger hypocrisy that extended across the political spectrum. The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction --- all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them most. 
   As great a sacrifice as soldiers make, American workers make a greater one. Far more Americans lose their lives every year doing dangerous jobs than died during the entire Afghan War.  In 2014, for example, 4,679 workers lost their lives on the job. More than 90 percent of those deaths were of young men working in industries that have a mortality rate equivalent to most units in the US military. Jobs that are directly observable to the public, like construction, tend to be less respected and less well paid than jobs that happen behind closed doors, like real estate or finance. And yet it is exactly those jobs that provide society's immediate physical needs. Construction workers are more important to everyday life than stockbrokers and yet are far lower down the social and financial ladder. 
   This fundamental lack of connectedness allows people to act in trivial but incredibly selfish ways. Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. "It's a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you're in it alone, that there isn't a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared," she has written. "It's the embodiment of every man for himself. It's the opposite of the military." 
   In this sense, littering is an exceedingly petty version of claiming a billion-dollar bank bailout or fraudulently claiming disability payments. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in. And when you fraudulently claim money from the government, you are ultimately stealing from your friends, family, and neighbors---or somebody else's friends, family, and neighbors. That diminishes you morally far more than it diminishes your country financially. A man named Ellis was once asked by a troubled young boy whether there was any compelling reason for him not to pull the legs off a spider. Ellis said that there was. 
   "Well, spiders don't feel any pain," the boy retorted. 
   "It's not the spider I'm worried about," Ellis said. 
   

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA --- Episode 10

    THERE'S NO SENSE OF COMMUNITY IN THE UNITED

    STATES

   Israel is arguably the only modern country that retains a sufficient sense of community to mitigate the effects of combat on a mass scale. Despite decades of intermittent war, the Israel Defense Forces have by some measures a PTSD rate as low as 1 percent. Two of the foremost reasons may have to do with the proximity of the combat --- the war is virtually on their doorstep --- and national military service. "Being in the military is something that most people have done," wrote Dr. Arieh Shalev, who has devoted the last twenty years to studying PTSD. "Those who come back from combat are reintegrated into a society where those experiences are very well understood. We did a study of seventeen -year-olds who had lost their father in the military, compared to those who had lost their fathers to accidents. The ones whose fathers died in combat did much better than those whose fathers hadn't." 

   According to Shalev, the closer the public is to the actual combat, the better the war will be understood and the less difficulty soldiers will have when they come home. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, many Israeli soldiers were fighting on the Golan Heights with their homes at their backs. Of the 1,323 soldiers who were wounded in that war and referred for psychiatric evaluation, only around 20 percent were diagnosed with PTSD, and less than 2 percent retained that diagnosis three decades later. The Israelis are benefiting from what the author and ethicist Austin Dacey describes as a "shared public meaning" of the war. Shared public meaning gives soldiers a context for their losses and their sacrifice that is acknowledged by most of society. That helps keep at bay the sense of futility and rage that can develop among soldiers during a war that doesn't seem to end. 
   Such public meaning is probably not generated by the kinds of formulaic phrases such as "Than you for your service," that many Americans now feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets. Neither is it generated by honoring vets at sporting events, allowing them to board planes first, or giving them minor discounts at stores. If anything, those token acts only deepen the chasm between the military and civilian populations by highlighting the fact that some people serve their country but the vast majority don't. In Israel, where around half of the population serves in the military, reflexively thanking someone for their service makes as little sense as thanking them for paying their taxes. It doesn't cross anyone's mind. 

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA ----Episode 9

    MILITARY PERSONNEL EXPERIENCE A TRIBAL-LIKE

  SOCIETY 

   Any discussion of veterans and their common experience of alienation must address the fact that so many soldiers find themselves missing war when it's over. That troubling fact can be found in written accounts from war after war, country after country, century after century. As awkward as it is to say part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up. "For the first time in our lives. . . we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear," a former gunner in the 62nd Coast Artillery named Win Stracke told oral historian Studs Terkel for his book The Good War. [ Stracke was also a well-known folk singer and labor organizer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political activity.] "There were fifteen men to a gun. You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society.  We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much. . . It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army." 
   Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to. After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz { "I wouldn't mind having an evening like it, say, once a week ----ordinarily there's no excitement," one man commented to Mass-Observer about the air raids }, and the war that is missed doesn't even have to be a shooting war : "I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic," an American man wrote in 2014 on the comment board of an online lecture about war. "Now that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, I must admit that I miss those days of extreme brotherhood . . . which led to deep emotions and understandings that are above anything I have felt since the plague years."
   What people miss presumably isn't danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier soldier returning from combat foes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and PERSONAL GAIN COMPLETELY ECLIPSES COLLECTIVE GOOD. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of mdern society-----and they're nearly miraculous--- the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit. 
   "You'll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society ----that we are an ANTIHUMAN society, " anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned. Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps volunteer during the start of the civil war in 2002 and experienced firsthand the extremely close bonds created by hardship and danger. "We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people : our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. OUR SOCIETY IS ALIENATING , TECHNICAL, COLD, AND MYSTIFYING. OUR FUNDAMENTAL DESIRE, AS HUMAN BEINGS, IS TO BE CLOSE TO OTHERS, AND OUR SOCIETY DOES NOT ALLOW FOR THAT. " 
   
   One of the most notable things abut life in the military, even in support units, is that you are almost never alone. Day after day, month after month, you are close enough to speak to, if not touch, a dozen or more people. When a correspondent  was with American soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, they slept ten to a hut in bunks that were only a few feet apart. The correspondent could touch three other men with his outstretched hand from where he lay. They snored, they talked, they got up in the middle of the night to use the piss tubes, but they always felt safe because they were in a group. The outpost was attacked dozens of times, yet the correspondent slept better surrounded by those noisy, snoring men than he ever did camping alone in the woods of New England. 

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA ----Episode 8

     If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them. War has the ability to ennoble people rather than just debase them. The Iroquois Nation presumably understood the transformative power of war when they developed parallel systems of government that protected civilians from warriors and vice versa. Peacetime leaders, called sachems, were often chosen by women and had complete authority over all the civil affairs of the tribe until war broke out. At that point war leaders took over, and their sole concern was the physical survival of the tribe. They were not concerned with justice or harmony or fairness, they were concerned only with defeating the enemy. If the enemy tried to negotiate an end to hostilities, however, it was the sachems, not the war leaders, who made the final decision. If the offer was accepted, the war leaders stepped down so that the sachems could resume leadership of the tribe. 

   The Iroquois system reflected the radically divergent priorities that a society must have during peacetime and during war. Because modern society often fights wars far away from the civilian population, soldiers wind up being the only people who have to switch back and forth. Siegfriend Sassoon, who was wounded in World War I, wrote a poem called "Sick Leave" that perfectly described the crippling alienation many soldiers feel at home : "In bitter safety I awake, unfriended," he wrote. "And while the dawn begins with slashing rain / I think of the Battalion in the mud." 

   Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. Iroquois warriors did not have to struggle with that sort of alienation because warfare and society existed in such proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other. In addition, defeat meant that a catastrophic violence might be visited upon everyone they loved, and in that context, fighting to death made complete sense from both an evolutionary and an emotional point of view. Certainly, some Iroquois warriors must have been traumatized by the warfare they were engaged in ---- much of it was conducted at close quarters with clubs and hatchets --- but they didn't have to contain that trauma within themselves. The entire society was undergoing wartime trauma, so it was a collective experience ---- and therefore an easier one. 

   A rapid recovery from psychological trauma must have been exceedingly important in our evolutionary past, and individuals who could climb out of their shock reaction and resume fleeing or fighting must have survived at higher rates than those who couldn't.  A 2011 study of street children in Burundi found the lowest Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] rates among the MOST aggressive and violent children. Aggression seemed to buffer them from the effects of previous trauma that they had experienced. Because trauma recovery is greatly affected by social factors, and because it presumably had such high survival value in our evolutionary past, one way to evaluate the health of a society might be to look at how quickly its soldiers or warriors recover, psychologically, from the experience of combat. 
   

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA --- Episode 7

   If there are phrases that characterize the life of our early ancestors, "community of sufferers" and "brotherhood of pain" surely come close. Their lives were probably less labor-intensive than lives in modern society, as demonstrated by the !Kung, but the mortality rate would have been much higher. The advantages of group cooperation would include far more effective hunting and defense, and groups tht failed to function cooperatively must have gradually died out. Adaptive behavior tends to be reinforced hormonally, emotionally, and culturally, and one can see all three types of adaptation at work in people who act on behalf of others. 

   Humans are so strongly wired to help one another -----and enjoy such enormous social benefits from doing so --- that people regularly risk their lives for complete strangers. That risk--taking tends to to express itself in very different ways in men and in women. Men perform the vast majority of bystander rescues, and the children, the elderly, and women are the most common recipients of them. Children are helped regardless of gender, as are the elderly, but women of reproductive age are twice as likely to be helped by a stranger than men are. Men have to wait, on average, until age seventy-five before they can expect the same kind of assistance in a life-threatening situation that women get their whole lives. Given the disproportionately high value of female reproduction to any society, risking male lives to save female lives makes enormous evolutionary sense. According to a study based on a century of records at the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, male bystanders performed more than 90 percent of spontaneous rescues of strangers, and around one in five were killed in the attempt. { "Hero" is generally defined as risking your life to save non-kin from mortal danger. The resulting mortality rate is higher than for most US combat units. } Researchers theorize that greater upper-body strength and a predominately male personality trait known as "impulsive sensation seeking" lead men to overwhelmingly dominate this form of extreme caretaking. 

  But women are more likely than men to display something called moral courage. The Righteous Among the Nations is an award given to non-Jews who helped save Jewish lives during the Holocaust and by its very nature selects for people who have a deep moral conviction about right and wrong. In Poland, the Netherlands,and France, providing refuge to Jews who were trying to evade the German authorities was a crime punishable by death, and while the decision todo so didn't require the same kind of muscular action that men excel at, it could be just as deadly. 

   There are more than 20,000 names in the Righteous Among Nations records, and an analysis conducted in 2004 found that if married couples are excluded, women slightly outnumber men in the list of people who risked their lives to help Jews. The greater empathic concern women demonstrate for others may lead them to take positions on moral or social issues that men are less likely to concern themselves with. Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows bout it----donating more kidneys to non-relatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group. 

   In late 2015, a bus in eastern Kenya was stopped bu gunmen from an extremist group named Al-Shabaab that made a practice of massacring Christians as part of a terrorism campaign against the Western-aligned Kenyan government. The gunmen demanded that Muslim and Christian passengers separate themselves into two groups so that the Christians could be killed, but the Muslims---- most of whom were women --- refused to do it. They told the gunmen that they would all die together if necessary, but that the Christians would not be singled out for execution. The Shabaab eventually let everyone go. 

   Sexual division of risk-taking would seem to suit the human race particularly well. We evolved, and continue to exist, in a physical world that assaults us with threats, but we also depend on a strong sense of morality and social justice to keep our communities intact. And intact communities are far more likely to survive than fragmented ones. When a woman gives shelter to a family because she doesn't want to raise her children in a world where people can be massacred because of their race or their beliefs, she is taking a huge risk but also promoting the kind of moral thinking that has clearly kept hominid communities glued together for hundreds of thousands of years. It is exactly the same kind of altruistic choice --- with all the attendant risks and terrors --- that a man makes when he runs into a burning building to save someone else's children. 
Both are profound acts of selflessness that distinguish us from all other mammals, including the higher primates that we are so closely related to. 

MORE TO COME.

   

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA ----Episode 6

     AMERICANS DON'T ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR

     ONE ANOTHER AND THEY CHEAT THEIR FRIENDS

     AND NEIGHBORS JUST TO AGGREGATE WEALTH 

   Dishonest bankers and welfare or insurance cheats are the modern equivalent of tribe members who quietly steal more than their fair share of meant or other resources.  That is very different from alpha males who bully others and openly steal resources. Among hunter-gatherers, bullying males are often faced down by coalitions of other senior males, but that rarely happens in modern society. For years, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has been trying to force senior corporate executives to disclose the ratio of their pay to that of their median employees. During the 1960s, senior executives in America typically made around twenty dollars for every dollar earned by a rank-and-file worker. Since then, that figure has climbed to 300 - to- 1 among S & P 500 companies, and in some cases it goes higher than that. The US Chamber of Commerce managed to block all attempts to force disclosure of corporate pay ratios until 2015, when a weakened version of the rule was finally passed by the SEC in a strict party-line vote of three Democrats in favor and two Republicans opposed. 

   In hunter-gatherer terms, these senior executives are claiming a disproportionate share of food simply because they have the power to do so. A tribe like the !Kung would not permit that because it would represent  serious threat to group cohesion and survival, but that is not true for a wealthy country like the United States. There have been occasional demonstrations against economic disparity, like the Occupy Wall Street protest camp of 2011, but hey were generally peaceful and ineffective. [ The riots and demonstrations against racial discrimination that later took place in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, led to changes in part because they attained a level of violence that threatened the civil order. ] A deep and enduring economic crisis like the Great Depression of the 1930s, or a natural disaster that kills tens of thousands of people, might change America's fundamental calculus about economic justice. Until then, the American public will probably refrain from broadly challenging both male and female corporate leaders who compensate themselves far in excess of their value to society. 

   That is ironic, because the political origins of the United States lay in confronting precisely this kind of resource seizure by people in power. King George III of England caused the English colonies in America to rebel by trying to tax them without allowing them a voice in government. In this sense, democratic revolutions are just a formalized version of the sort of group action that coalitions of senior males have used throughout the ages to confront greed and abuse.  Thomas Paine, one of the principal architects of American democracy, wrote a formal denunciation of civilization in a tract called Agrarian Justice : "Whether . . . civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested," he wrote in 1795. "Both the most affluent and the most miserable of the human  race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." 

   When Paine wrote his tract, Shawnee and Delaware warriors were still attacking settlements just a few hundred miles from downtown Philadelphia. They held scores of white captives, many of whom had been adopted into the tribe and had no desire to return to colonial society. There is no way to know the effect on Paine's thought process of living next door to a communal Stone-Age society, but it might have been crucial. Paine acknowledged that these tribes  lacked the advantages of the arts and science and manufacturing, and yet they lived in a society where personal poverty was unknown and the natural rights of man were actively promoted. 

   In that sense, Paine claimed, the American Indian should serve as a model for how to eradicate poverty and bring natural rights back into civilized life. 


MORE TO COME.

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA----Episode 5

    THE HUNTER--GATHERERS WOULDN'T TOLERATE 

    FAILURE TO SHARE 

 A cave painting from the early Holocene in Spain shows ten figures with bows in their hands and a lone figure prone on the ground with what appear to be ten arrows sticking out of him. The configuration strongly suggests an execution rather than death in combat. Boehm [the super anthropologist] points out that among current-day foraging groups, group execution is one of the most common ways of punishing males who try to claim a disproportionate amount of the group's resources. 
   It's revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren't necessarily more moral than other people ; they just can't get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud.  

             THE BLATANT FRAUD IN MODERN AMERICA 

     Around 3 percent of people on unemployment assistance intentionally cheat the system, for example, which costs the United States more than $2 billion a year. Such abuse would be immediately punished in a tribal society. Fraud in welfare and other entitlement programs is estimated to be at roughly the same rate, which adds another $1.5 billion in annual losses. That figure, however, is eclipsed by Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which is conservatively estimated at 10 percent of total payments ----or around $100 BILLION A YEAR. Some estimates run to two to three times that figure. 

              IF YOU THINK MEDICARE / MEDICAID 
              CHEATERS  NEED KILLING, WAIT TILL
             YOU SEE THE FIGURES FOR INSURANCE
             COMPANY SLUTS WHO UNABASHEDLY
            CHEAT CONSUMERS 

   Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums.  All told, combined public-and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year --- or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused the hardship would be immediate and probably very violent. 

   Westerners live in a complex society, and opportunities for scamming relatively small amounts of money off the bottom are almost endless --- and very hard to catch. But scamming large amounts of money off the top seems even harder to catch. Fraud by American DEFENSE CONTRACTORS is estimated at around $100 billion per year, and they are relatively well behaved compared to the FINANCIAL INDUSTRY. The FBI reports that since the economic recession of 2008, securities and commodities fraud in the United States has gone up by more than 50 percent. In the decade prior, almost 90 percent of corporate fraud cases---insider trading, kickbacks and bribes, false accounting --- implicated the company's chief executive officer and/or chief financial officer. The recession, which was triggered by illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion dollars in stock value losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half. Total costs for the recession have been estimated to be as high as $14 trillion --- or about $45,000 per citizen. 

   Most tribal and subsistence-level societies would inflict severe punishments on anyone who caused that kind of damage. Cowardice is another form of community betrayal, and most Indian tribes punished it with immediate death . It can be assumed that hunter-gatherers would treat their version of a welfare cheat or a dishonest banker as decisively as they would a coward. They may not kill him, but he would certainly be banished from the community. The fact that a group of people can cost American society several trillion dollars in losses --- roughly one-quarter of that year's gross domestic product --- and not be tried for high crimes shows how completely de-tribalized the country has become. 

MORE TO COME. 

   

    

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA ----Episode 4

HUMANS HAVE DRAGGED A BODY WITH A LONG HOMINID HISTORY, REARED IN A TRIBAL ENVIRONMENT,  INTO AN OVERFED, MALNOURISHED, SEDENTARY, SUNLIGHT-DEFICIENT, SLEEP-DEPRIVED, COMPETITIVE, INEQUITABLE, AND SOCIALLY-ISOLATING ENVIRONMENT WITH DIRE CONSEQUENCES 

   The alienating effects of wealth and modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and never let up. Infants in the hunter-gatherer societies are carried by their mothers as much as 90 percent of the time, which roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. One can get an idea of how important this kind of touch is to primates from an infamous experiment conducted in the 1950s by a primatologist and psychologist named Harry Harlow. Baby rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and presented with the choice of two kinds of surrogates : a cuddly mother made out of terry cloth or an uninviting mother made out of wire mesh. The wire mesh mother, however, had a nipple that dispensed warm milk. The babies took their nourishment as quickly as possible and then rushed back to cling to the terry cloth mother, which had enough softness to provide the illusion of affection. Clearly, touch and closeness are vital to the health of baby primates----including humans. 
   In America in the 1970s, mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the modern practice of making young children sleep by themselves.  In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone in their own room --- a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered "well-educated." Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals ; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them. 
   The point of making children sleep alone, according to Western psychologists, is to make them "self-soothing," but that clearly runs contrary to our evolution. Humans are primates ---we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees ---- and primates almost never leave infants unattended, because they would be extremely vulnerable to predators. Infants seem to know this instinctively, so being left alone in a dark room is terrifying to them. Compare the self-soothing approach to that of a traditional Mayan community in Guatemala : "Infants and children simply fall asleep when sleepy, do not wear specific sleep clothes or use traditional transitional objects, room share and cosleep with parents or siblings, and nurse on demand during the night. " Another study notes about Bali : "Babies are encouraged to acquire quickly the capacity to sleep under any circumstances, including situations of high stimulation, musical performances, and other noisy observances which reflect their more complete integration into adult social activities." 

                         LESS COMMUNITY --- MORE AUTHORITY 

   As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority. The two are uneasy companions, and as one goes up, the other tends to go down. In 2007, anthropologist Christopher Boehm published an analysis of 154 foraging societies that were deemed to be representative of our ancestral past, and one of their most common traits was the absence of major wealth disparities between individuals. Another was the absence of arbitrary authority. "Social life is politically egalitarian in that there is always a low tolerance by a group's mature males for one of their number dominating, bossing, or denigrating the others," Boehm observed. "The human conscience evolved in the Middle to Late Pleistocene as a result of . . . the hunting of large game. This required . . . cooperative band-level sharing of meat." 
   Because tribal foragers are highly mobile and can easily shift between different communities, authority is almost impossible to impose on the unwilling. And even without that option, males who try to take control of the group ----or of the food supply----are often countered by coalitions of other males. This is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm found that ---in addition to murder and theft --- one of the most commonly punished infractions was "failure to share." Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list. Punishments included public ridicule, shunning, and, finally, "assassination of the culprit by the entire group." 

   

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA----- Episode 3

                       TRIBAL LIFE TRUMPED THE LIFE OF THE 
                       SETTLERS IN MANY IMPORTANT WAYS 





The question for Western society isn't so much why tribal life might be so appealing ----- it seems obvious on the face of it -----but whyWestern society is so unappealing. On a material level it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it's possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren't a good trade for freedom. One study in the 1960s found that nomadic !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert needed to work as little as twelve hours a week in order to survive ---roughly one-quarter of the hours of the average urban executive at the time. " The 'camp' is an open aggregate of cooperating persons which changes in size and composition from day to day," anthropologist Richard Lee noted with clear admiration in 1968. "The members move out to hunt and gather, and return in the evening to pool the collected foods in such a way that every person present receives an equitable share. . . Because of the strong emphasis on sharing, and the frequency of movement, surplus accumulation . . . is kept to a minimum."
   The Kalahari is one of the harshest environments in the world, and the !Kung were able to continue living in a Stone-Age existence well into the 1970s precisely because no one else wanted to live there. The !Kung were so well adapted to their environment 
that during times of draught, nearby farmers and cattle herders abandoned their livelihoods to join them in the bush because foraging and hunting were a more reliable source of food. The relatively relaxed pace of !Kung life----even during times of adversity --- challenged long-standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite : a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work. The !Kung had far fewer belongings than Westerners, but their lives were under much greater personal control. 
   Among anthropologists, the !Kung are thought to present a fairly accurate picture of how our hominid ancestors lived for more than a million years before the advent of agriculture. Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear i humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture  in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool. Early humans would most likely have lived in nomadic bands of around fifty people, much like the !Kung. They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group.  They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. THEY WOULD HAVE ALMOST NEVER BEEN ALONE. 
   First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day --- or an entire life --- mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.  
   The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society --- despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology ---is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth seems to foster it. 
   Suicide is difficult to study among unacculturated tribal peoples because the early explorers who first encountered them rarely conducted rigorous ethnographic research. That said, there is remarkably little evidence of depression--based suicide in tribal societies. Among the American Indians, for example, suicide was understood to apply in very narrow circumstances : in old age to avoid burdening the tribe, in the ritual paroxysms of grief following the death of a spouse, in a hopeless but heroic battle with an enemy, and in an attempt to avoid the agony of torture. Among tribes that were ravaged by smallpox, it was also understood that a person whose face had been hideously disfigured by lesions might kill themselves. According to The Ethics of Suicide : Historical Sources, early chroniclers of the American Indians couldn't find any other examples of suicide that were rooted in psychological causes. Early sources report that the Bella Coola, the Ojibwa, the Montagnais, the Arapaho, the Plateau Yuma, the Southern Paiute, and the Zuni, among many others, experienced no suicide at all. 
   This stands in stark contrast to many modern societies, where the suicide rate is as high as 25 cases per 100,000 people. [In the United States, white middle-aged men currently have the highest rate at nearly 30 suicides per 100,000.] According to a global survey by the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries, and people in countries with large income disparities---like the United States --- run a much higher lifelong risk of developing severe mood disorders. A 2006 study comparing depression rates in Nigeria to depression rates in North America found that across the board, women in rural areas were less likely to get depressed than their urbam counterparts. And urban North American women----the most affluent demographic of the study ---were the MOST likely to experience depression. 
   The mechanism seems simple : poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses --- and certainly isn't the American ideal --- but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence. A wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from the community is leading a privileged life that falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide. This might be a fair trade for a generally wealthier society --- but a trade it is. 

THIS STORY WILL CONTINUE PRESENTLY. STAY TUNED.
   

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA --- Episode 2

CONTINUING WITH THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER AND THE CLASH OF INDIAN CULTURE vs WHITE SETTLERS' CULTURE 

   First and foremost, Colonel Bouquet demanded the immediate return of all white prisoners, and any delay would be considered a declaration of war. During the next few weeks around 200 captives were brought in, more than half of them women and children and many too young to remember having lived otherwise. Some had forgotten their Christian names and recorded on ledgers with such descriptions as Redjacket, Bighead, Soremouth, and Sourplums. Dozens of white relatives of the missing had accompanied Bouquet's forces from Fort Pitt, and in addition to the many joyful reunions, there were also wrenching scenes of grief and confusion : young women married to Indian men now standing reluctantly before their former families ; children screaming as they were pulled from their Indian kin and delivered to people they didn't recognize and probably considered enemies.
   The Indians seemed universally anguished to give up their family members, and when Bouquet's army finally decamped for Fort Pitt in early November, many trailed behind the column, hunting game for their loved ones and trying to delay the final goodbye as long as possible. One Mingo brave refused to leave the side of a young Virginia woman despite warnings that her former family would kill him on sight. "It must not be denied that there were even some grown persons who shewed an unwillingness to return," William Smith, a contemporary of Bouquet's, admitted about some white captives. 
   "The Shawanese were obliged to bind several of their prisoners . . . and some women, who had been delivered up, afterward found means to escape and run back to Indian towns." 
   The reluctance of Bouquet's captives to leave their adopted tribe raised awkward questions about the superiority of Western society. It was understood why young children would not want to return to their original families, and it made sense that renegades like the infamous Simon Girty would later seek refuge with the Indians and even fight alongside them. But as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, there were numerous settlers who were captured as adults and still seemed to prefer Indian society to their own. And what about the people who voluntarily joined the Indians ? What about men who walked off into the tree line and never came home ? The frontier was full of men who joined Indian tribes, married Indian women, and lived their lives completely outside civilization. 
   "Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become a European," a French emigre' named Hector de Crevecoeur lamented in 1782. "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us." 
   Crevecoeur seemed to have understood that the intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn't necessarily compete with. If he was right, that problem started almost as soon as Europeans touched American shores. As early as 1612, Spanish authorities noted in amazement that forty or fifty Virginians had married into Indian tribes, and that even English women were openly mingling with the natives.  At that point, whites had been in Virginia had been in Virginia for only a few years, and many who joined the Indians would have been born and raised in England. These were not rough frontiersmen who were sneaking off to join the savages ; these were the sons and daughters of Europe.
   "Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure, and the cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women," wrote a Seneca captive named Mary Jemison at the end of her long life. Jemison, who was taken from her family's farm on the Pennsylvania frontier at age fifteen, became so enamored of Seneca life that she once hid from a white search party that had come looking for her. "We had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased," she explained. "No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace. . . Their lives were a continual round of pleasures."
   In an attempt to stem the flow of young people into the woods, Virginia and other colonies imposed severe penalties on anyone who took up with the Indians. The Puritan leaders of New England found it particularly galling that anyone would turn their back on Christian society : "People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as Heathenish as ever if you do not prevent it," the Puritan preacher Increase Mather complained in a tract called Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy. Mather was an early administrator of Harvard who spent his life combating ---and criminalizing --- ant relaxation of the Puritan moral code. It was a futile battle. The nature of the frontier was that it kept expanding beyond the reach of church and state, and out on the fringes, people tended to do what they wanted. 
   The Indian manner was clearly suited to the wilderness, and it wasn't long before frontiersmen began to shed their European clothing and openly emulate people they often referred to as "savages." They dressed in buckskin and open-backed leggings and had muslin breechclouts strapped between their legs. Some even attended Sunday service that way, which so distracted the girls at one church that their minister accused them of not listening to his sermons. The men smoked tobacco and carried tomahawks in their belts and picked up Indian languages and customs. They learned to track and stalk game and move quickly and quietly in the woods, and they adopted what the Puritans dismissed as a "skulking way of war." They fought from concealment as individuals, in other words, rather than lining up like tin soldiers. 
   "The men and the dogs have a fine time, but the poor women have to suffer," one pioneer wife wrote to her sister about life on the frontier. She complained that her husband---a man named George ---refused to make their newborn son a plank cradle, and just gave her a hollowed-out log instead. The boy's only shirt was woven of nettle bark and his pillow was carved out of wood. When his mother pointed out that he was getting sores and rashes, George said that the hardships would just toughen him up for hunting later in life. "George has got himself a buckskin shirt and pants," this woman added. "He is gone hunting day and night." 
   It's easy for people in modern society to romanticize Indian life, and it might well have been easy for men liek George as well. That impulse should be guarded against. Virtually all of the Indian tribes waged war against their neighbors and practiced deeply sickening forms of torture. Prisoners who weren't tomahawked on the spot could expect to be disemboweled and tied to a tree with their own intestines or blistered to death over a slow fire or simply hacked to pieces nd fed alive to dogs. If there is any conceivable defense for such cruelty, it might be that in Europe at the time, the Spanish Inquisition was also busy serving up just as much barbarism on behalf of the Catholic Church. Infidels were regularly burned alive, broken on the rack, sawn in half lengthwise, or impaled slowly on wooden stakes from the anus to the mouth. The Protestant Reformation changed a lot about Christianity but not its capacity for cruelty, and early Puritan leaders in New England were also renowned for thir harsh justice. Cruelty, in other words, was very much the norm for that era, and the native tribes of North America were no exception. 
   On other levels, however, there seemed to be no competing with the appeal of the Indians. Hunting was obviously more varied and interesting than plowing fields. Sexual mores were more relaxed than in the early colonies [in the 1600s, colonial boys on Cape Cod were publicly whipped if they were caught talking to a girl they weren't related to ] . Indian clothing was more comfortable, Indian religion was less harsh, and Indian society was essentially classless and egalitarian. As the frontier marched across North America, from the Alleghenies to the Great Plains to the Rockies and then finally to the West Coast, successive generations of pioneers were subject to being captured and adopted into Indian tribes ----or simply ran off with them. 
   For all the temptations of native life, one of the most compelling might have been its fundamental egalitarianism. Personal property was usually limited to whatever could be transported by horse or on foot, so gross inequalities of wealth were difficult to accumulate. Successful hunters and warriors could support multiple wives, but unlike modern society, those ADVANTAGES were generally not passed on through the generations. Social status came through hunting and war, which all men had access to, and women had far more autonomy and sexual freedom----and bore fewer children --- than women in white society. "Here I have no master," an anonymous colonial woman was quoted by the secretary of the French legation s saying about her life with the Indians. "I am the equal of all the women in the tribe, I do what I please without anyone's saying anything about it, I work only for myself, I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities ?" 

THIS STORY WILL RESUME PRESENTLY. 

AMERICA'S WORST ENEMY IS AMERICA----Episode 1

                                     THE HUNTER--GATHERERS WERE

                                     HAPPY PEOPLE AND TOOK CARE 

                                     OF ONE ANOTHER 

       Perhaps the single most startling fact about America is that, alone among the modern nations that have become world powers, it did so while butted up against three thousand miles of howling wilderness populated by Stone-Age tribes. From King Philip's War in the 1600s until the last Apache cattle raids across the Rio Grande in 1924, America waged an ongoing campaign against a native population that had barely changed, technologically, in 15,000 years. Over the course of 300 years, America became a booming industrial society that was cleaved by class divisions and racial injustice but glued together by a body of law that, theoretically at least, saw all people as equal. The Indians, on the other hand, lived communally in mobile or semi-permanent encampments that were more or less run by consensus and broadly egalitarian.  INDIVIDUAL AUTHORITY was earned rather than seized and imposed ONLY on people who were willing to accept it. Anyone who didn't like it was free to move somewhere else. 

   The proximity of these two cultures over the course of many generations presented both sides with a stark choice about how to live. By the end of the nineteenth century, factories were being built in Chicago and slums were taking root in New York while Indians fought with spears and tomahawks a thousand miles away.  It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans  --- mostly men --- wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and, on some occasions even fought alongside them. EMIGRATION ALWAYS SEEMED TO GO FROM THE CIVILIZED TO THE TRIBAL, AND IT LEFT WESTERN THINKERS BEWILDERED ABOUT HOW TO EXPLAIN SUCH AN APPARENT REJECTION OF THEIR SOCIETY. 

   "When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs," Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, "[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return." 
    On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home : "Tho' ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life . . . and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods." 

   The preference for tribal life among many whites was a problem that played out in particularly wrenching ways during the Pennsylvania frontier wars of the 1760s. In the spring of 1763, an Ottawa Indian leader named Pontiac convened a council of tribes along a small river named the Ecorces, near the former French trading post at Detroit, in what is now the state of Michigan. The steady advance of white settlements was a threat that unified the Indian tribes in ways that no amount of peace and prosperity ever could, and Pontiac thought that with a broad enough alliance, he might push the whites back to where they had been a generation or two earlier.  Among the Indians were hundreds of white settlers who had been captured from frontier communities and adopted into the tribes. Some were content with their new families and some were not, but collectively they were of enormous political concern to the colonial authorities. 
   

The meeting of the tribes was coordinated by runners who could cover a hundred miles in a day and who delivered gifts of shell wampum belts and tobacco along with the message of urgent assembly. The belts were beaded in such a way that even distant tribes would understand that the meeting was set for fifteenth day of Iskigamizage--Giizis, the sap-boiling moon. Groups of Indians drifted into Riviere Ecorces and encamped along the banks of the river until finally, on the morning of what English settlers knew as April 27, old men began passing through the camp calling the warriors to council. 
   "They issued from their cabins : the tall, naked figures of the wild Ojibwas, with quivers slung at their backs, and light war-clubs resting in the hollows of their arms," historian Francis Parkman wrote a century later. "Ottawas, wrapped close in their gaudy blankets ; Wyandots, fluttering in painted shirts, their heads adorned with feathers and their leggings garnished with bells. All were soon seated within a wide circle upon the grass, row within row, a grave and silent assembly." 
   Pontiac was known for his high oratory, and by the end of the day he'd convinced the assembled warriors that the future of their people was at stake. Three hundred warriors marched on the English fort, with 2,000 more fighters waiting in the woods for the signal to attack.  After initially trying to take the fort by stealth, they withdrew and attacked naked and screaming, with bullets in their mouths for easy reloading. The attempt failed, but soon afterward, the entire frontier erupted in war. Virtually every out-fort and stockade from the upper Allegheny to the Blue Ridge was assaulted simultaneously. Le Boeuf, Venango, Presque Isle, La Baye, St. Joseph, Miamis, Ouchtanon, Sandusky, and Michilimackinac were overrun and their defenders massacred. Scalping parties fanned out through the woodlands and descended upon remote farms and settlements up and down the eastern escarpment, killing an estimated 2,000 settlers. Survivors fled eastward until the Pennsylvania frontier basically started at Lancaster and Carlisle.
   The English response was slow but unstoppable. The remnants of the 42nd and 77th Highlander Infantry, recently returned from military action in Cuba, were mustered at the military barracks in Carlisle and prepared for the 200-mile march to Fort Pitt. They were joined by 700 local militia and 30 backwoods scouts and hunters. The Highlanders were supposed to protect the column's flanks but were taken off the job almost immediately because they were getting lost in the woods. The commander was a young Swiss colonel named Henri Bouquet who had seen combat in Europe and joined the English to advance his career. His orders were simple : march across Pennsylvania, with axmen clearing the way for his wagons, and reinforce Fort Pitt and other beleaguered garrisons on the frontier. No prisoners were to be taken. Native women and children were to be captured and sold into slavery. And bounties were to be paid for any scalp, male or female, that white settlers managed to carve from an Indian head. 
   Bouquet's army lumbered out of Carlisle in July 1763 and within months had defeated the Indians at Bushy Run and reinforced Fort Pitt and several outlying garrisons. The following summer they carried their campaign into the heart of Indian territory. Sometimes covering five miles, sometimes covering ten, Bouquet's army ground its way through the rich, flat country of the Ohio River basin. They passed through great strands of hardwood and open savannahs fed by innumerable creeks and rivers. Some of the rivers had gravel beaches running for miles that afforded clear passage for the column's supply wagons. The timber was mostly free of underbrush and could be passed easily by men on foot or on horseback. It was a kind of paradise that they were traveling through, and Bouquet's journals mention the natural beauty of the land on almost every  page. 
   By mid-October, Bouquet had gained Muskegham River, deep in the Shawnee and Delaware territory, and an Indian delegation met with him to sue for peace. Hoping to intimidate them, Bouquet deployed his forces across an adjacent meadow : rank upon rank of men-at-arms with their bayonets fixed ; kilted Highlanders arrayed behind their regimental flags ; and dozens of backwoodsmen dressed much like the Indians and leaning confidently upon their rifles in a way that must have been enormously reassuring to a European colonel in the wilderness. 

THE STORY OF THE KILLING OFF OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS WILL CONTINUE. 
   

              

                           

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---EPISODE 24

IN MARCH OF 1985, MIKHAIL GORBACHEV TOOK OVER AS LEADER OF THE SOVIET UNION 

   Gorbachev described the situation he confronted this way : "Defense spending was bleeding the other branches of the economy dry." Visits to the defense plants and agricultural production complexes drove home the point. "The defense production workshop making modern tanks . . . had the newest equipment. The one working for agriculture was making obsolete models of tractors on old-time conveyor belts." The cause of this disparity was obvious. "Over the previous five-year plans," Gorbachev wrote, "military spending had been growing twice as fast as national income. This Moloch was devouring everything that hard labor and strain produced." But even Gorbachev found it difficult to obtain the hard data needed to fully assess the situation. "What made matters worse," he explained, "was the fact that it was impossible to analyze the problem. All the figures related to the military-industrial complex were classified. Even Politburo members didn't have access to them." 

Precise figures are still hard to come by. Central Committee staffer Vitaly Katayev may have kept the most detailed and accurate records. He estimated that in 1985 the Soviet defense sector accounted for 20 percent of the economy. It incorporated nine ministries, not all of whose functions could be identified by their titles. The ministry dealing with the Soviet Union's nuclear programs, for example, was titled the "Ministry of Medium Machine Building." Defense production consumed the efforts of more than fifty cities and, according to NSA Director William Odom, ate up some 20 to 40 percent of the Soviet budget. 

To realize the goals of revitalizing the nation, Gorbachev needed to end the arms race and redeploy resources to productive purposes. He also needed to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict he thought from the beginning was a "fatal error" and now believed was a "bleeding wound." Achieving those goals would go a long way toward refurbishing the Soviet Union's international image, which had been badly tarnished during the previous decade. One of his foreign policy advisors, Sergei Tarasenko, commented, "One of the first concerns of the Gorbachev administration was to repair this image so the Soviet Union would be viewed as the 'evil empire'." Gorbachev braced for resistance from his own defense sector.

Gorbachev wrote his first of several extraordinary letters to Reagan on March 24, 1985. It was a letter that might have been written by Henry Wallace forty years earlier : 

     Our countries are different by their social systems, by the ideologies in them. But we believe that this should not be a reason for animosity. Each social system has a right to life, and it should prove its advantages not by force, not by military means, but on the path of peaceful competition with the other system. And all people have the right to go the way they have chosen themselves, without anybody imposing his will on them from outside. 

Gorbachev also echoed Kennedy's American University commencement address when he wrote to Reagan in October that despite their differences, they must "proceed from the objective fact that we all live on the same planet and must learn to live together." 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973------Episode 23

REAGAN ACTED LIKE HE WAS MENTALLY UNBALANCED 

   For a radio broadcast, Reagan quipped during a sound check :"My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes." This was picked up by the press all over the world, and Reagan was characterized as an irresponsible old man" by newspapers in Europe. At home, the controversy refused to go away. Commentators raised doubts about Reagan's fitness for the job. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver's admission that Reagan often napped during cabinet meetings didn't help. John Oakes, a former New York Times senior editor, asked what kind of confidence  the American people could have during a crisis in a man of such "shallow, rash, and superficial judgment?" He and others cited Reagan's confusion over fundamental policy issues, including contradictory statements about tax policy, and found him unqualified for the job. Former MIT president Jerome Wiesner, who served as science advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, described Reagan's "gallows humor" as a "verbal Rorschach test" and questioned his competence to continue with his finger on the nuclear button. Some people even raised the question of the president's mental acuity. Reporters were particularly troubled by a recent photo opportunity at his ranch at which Reagan was asked a basic question about arms control. Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer described the scene : "No answer came, and for an embarrassing few moments, the President of the United States seemed lost, gesturing but not speaking. Then his wife, Nancy, at his side, apparently saved him with an answer, uttered while barely moving her lips. 'Doing everything we can,' she said. Reagan repeated, 'We're doing everything we can.' " 

   Those around Reagan ran interference and protected him as best they could. George Shulz nurtured the side of Reagan that preferred negotiations over belligerency. Backed by Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver, Shulz battled against the administration zealots. Reagan gave Shulz the green light to improve relations with the Soviets. In mid-1982, the United States and the Soviets began negotiating a new treaty to dramatically reduce strategic forces : the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START. But Reagan continued the Committee on the President Danger's campaign of bemoaning American weakness. "You often hear," he stated in late 1982, "that the United States and the Soviet Union are in an arms race. The truth is that while the Soviet Union has raced, we have not . . . Today, in virtually every measure of military power the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage." Despite the scare talk, the United States still maintained a small advantage. In 1985, the U.S. arsenal contained 11,188 strategic warheads to the Soviets' 9,907. In total warheads ----strategic, intermediate-range, and tactical ---the United States led 20,924 to 19,774. And global arsenals continued to grow, peaking in 1986 at more than 70,000 nuclear weapons with a total destructive capability equivalent to that of approximately 1.5 million Hiroshima bombs. 

   Arms control gained renewed urgency when scientists calculated that even a small nuclear exchange would release enough smoke, dust, and ash into the atmosphere to block the sunlight, plunging the earth into a prolonged period of cooling that would kill off much of its plant life. Some predicted dire consequences, even the end of life on the planet, caused by the "nuclear winter" that would result from a nuclear war----even a "small" one. 

   Tensions between the world's two superpowers were running precariously high when an extraordinary development in the Soviet Union changed the course of history. In March 1985, Konstantin Chernenko became the third Soviet leader to die in office in two and a half years. His successor, fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, brought new energy and vision to the job. As a young man, he had witnessed the horrors of war. Later, as a Communist Party official, he had traveled widely in the West. As premier, he intended to realize his dream of revitalizing Soviet socialist democracy and improving the lives of the Soviet people. Like Krushchev and othe r reformers before him, he knew that that could not be accomplished as long as military expenditures continued virtually unchecked. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973----Episode 22

SOVIET LEADERS FEARED A NUCLEAR FIRST STRIKE 
BY THE UNITED STATES IN THE EARLY REAGAN YEARS 

   The Soviet leaders not only feared the kind of decapitating first strike envisioned in Presidential Directive 59 [ The one signed by Carter describing "flexible" and "limited" nuclear wars, as opposed to mutually destructive wars ] , drummed up by the members of the Committee on the Present Danger, they took concrete steps to ensure the survivability of their nuclear deterrent ----- a form of sub-delegation similar to that undertaken earlier by Eisenhower. Their fears were heightened by U.S. deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe in 1983, which meant that Soviet leaders would have even less time to launch a retaliatory strike. As David Hoffman details in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 work, The Dead Hand, Soviet leaders contemplated constructing a fully automated system, the "Dead Hand," in which computers would launch a nuclear counterstrike if leaders were incapacitated. Frightened by this Strangelovian prospect ----"It was complete madness," said Colonel Valery Yarynich of the Strategic Rocket Forces ---they instead settled on a system in which a small number of duty officers in deep underground bunkers would authorize the launch. The system was tested in November 1984 and put into operation soon thereafter. 

    Yarynich grappled with a profoundly troubling question that often plagued U.S. nuclear planners as well : he wondered if, knowing that their country was already destroyed, Soviet duty officers would actually decide to launch their weapons. He explained : 

      We have a young lieutenant colonel sitting there, communications are destroyed, and he hears "boom," "boom," everything is shaking ---he might fail to launch. If he doesn't begin the launching procedure there will be no retaliation. What's the point of doing it if half the globe had already been wiped out ? To destroy the second part? It makes no sense. Even at this point, this lieutenant colonel might say , "No, I won't launch it." No one will condemn him for it or put him before a firing squad. If I were in his place, I wouldn't launch. 

   Yarynich understood that it was the unpredictability of the officer's response that gave the system whatever limited deterrent effect it might have. He also thought it irrational that the Soviets were going out of their way to hide rather than broadcast the system's existence. 

   Reagan traced his commitment to eradicating nuclear weapons to his earliest presidential briefings about nuclear weapons : 

     One of the first statistics I saw as president was one of the most sober and startling I've ever heard. I'll never forget it : The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union --- even if we "won." For Americans who survived such a war, I couldn't imagine what life would be like. The planet would be so poisoned the "survivors" would have no place to live. Even if nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. No one could "win" a nuclear war. 

   Despite his abhorrence of nuclear war, Reagan possessed a dark side that fantasized about using those weapons to defeat his enemies. Such thinking slipped out in shocking fashion when Reagan quipped during a sound check for a radio broadcast, "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes." Reagan was unaware that the tapes were rolling when he spoke. The reaction was quick and unsparing. Colorado Senator Gary Hart thought that Reagan's "poor judgment" might have been caused by the stress of his reelection campaign but worried that "more frighteningly, it's in moments of that sort that his real feelings come out, which is the most dismaying and distressing possibility." The New York Times reported that the story was front-page news across Europe. Paris's Le Monde figured that psychologists would have to determine whether the comments were an "an expression of repressed desire or the exorcism of a dreaded phantom." West Germany's Social Democrats dismissed Reagan ----"The lord of life or combustion of all Western Europe" --- as "an irresponsible old man . . . who can no longer distinguish whether he is making a horror movie or commanding a superpower," ," while the Greens exclaimed that the "perverse joke makes the blood of every reasonable person run cold." TASS, the Soviet news agency, quoted a Western leader who described Reagan as a man "who smiles at the possibility of the mass extermination of people" and decried "the hypocrisy of his peace rhetoric." Izvestia called it a "monstrous statement."       


    

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973----Episode 21

IN THE REAGAN ERA, NUCLEAR WAR WAS A HOT TOPIC CONSTANTLY BEING DISCUSSED 

Reagan decided to protect the United States from incoming missiles by building a high-tech, futuristic atmospheric shield around the nation. But such a seemingly benign defensive shield, if it worked at all, would have done little to protect against a Soviet first strike, it might have offered a measure of protection against a limited retaliatory attack by a Soviet Union already crippled by a U.S. first strike.  

Reagan also understood how easily a crisis could be provoked. In September 1963, when Soviet military personnel mistakenly took a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that had crossed into Soviet airspace for a spy plane and, after unheeded warnings, shot it down, killing all 269 people on board, including 61 Americans, Reagan railed against "the Korean Air Lines massacre" as an "act of barbarism"and a "crime against humanity." But in his memoirs he drew a different lesson :"If anything, the KAL incident demonstrated how much we needed nuclear arms control : If, as some people speculated, the Soviet pilots simply mistook the airliner for a military plane, what kind of imagination did it take to think of a Soviet military man with his finger close to a nuclear push button making an even more tragic mistake ?" 

His concerns about nuclear war came to the fore again the following month. After watching an advance copy of The Day After , he wrote in his diary : "It has Lawrence, Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done ---all $7 mil. worth. t's very effective & left me very depressed." The usually unflappable Reagan remained depressed for days. His advisors became so concerned that they brought in Weinberger's Soviet expert, Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Policy Richard Perle, to talk sense into him. 

Reagan's concerns didn't abate, although Perle and others could sometimes manipulate him into defending a nuclear buildup that was at odds with his deeper wishes. It was also during this time, in the fall of 1983, that he was beginning to grasp that Soviet leaders took his bellicose rhetoric and military escalation seriously and feared that he was preparing for an attack. 

His diary entry for November 18 was revealing. he worried about the Soviets being "so paranoid about being attacked" that he planned to reassure them that "no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h___l have they got that anyone would want." He then noted that Shulz would appear on ABC following The Day After, but now he was more concerned about making sure the film didn't further fuel the already strong public opposition to his nuclear policies : "We know it's 'anti-nuke' propaganda but we're goig to take it over & say it shows why we must keep on doing what we are doing." In that same diary entry, he also wrote about "a most sobering experience with Cap. W & Gen. Vessey in the situation room ---a briefing on our complete plan in the event of a nuclear attack." 

Reagan later wrote in his memoirs, "Three years hd taught me something surprising about the Russians : Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. In fact, I had difficulty accepting my own conclusion at first." When he came to office, it didn't dawn on him that the Soviets could actually fear a U.S. first strike. "But the more experience I had with the Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike."

Although Reagan might have found such an idea inconceivable, he did note that "there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was 'winnable'." He concluded that they were "crazy," but he was beginning to understand why the Soviets might take them seriously. In October, he suggested to Shulz that "maybe I should go see [Yuri] Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons." 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973----Episode 20

THE UNITED STATES SUPPLIED CHEMICAL WEAPONS TO IRAQ IN EARLY 1980s IN THE WAR AGAINST IRAN 

    Infuriated by Iraq's use of chemical weapons and by U.S. support for such heinous behavior, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had ended the shah's secret nuclear weapons program when he assumed power in 1979, condemning nuclear weapons as anti-Islamic, reversed course in 1984 and started the program back up again. 

   While the United States was strengthening its support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime, Reagan continued his bombastic anti-Soviet rhetoric and provocative behavior. In 1983, he urged his audience at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, "to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority . . . not to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulse of an evil empire." The United States deployed ground -- launched cruise missiles to Great Britain and Pershing II missiles to West Germany in November 1983 and conducted Able Archer 83  ---- a massive military test using nuclear weapons ---that same month. By the end of 1983, U.S.---Soviet relations had reached their lowest point in more than two decades. The two nations were conducting proxy wars around the globe, and a real one seemed possible. Some Soviet officials were convinced that a U.S. attack was imminent. 

   Bellicose rhetoric frightened the public. The Day After, which was viewed by a huge television audience, and other nuclear--war movies heightened the sense of alarm and helped spark a massive nuclear freeze movement. Psychiatrists reported that children in both the United States and Soviet Union were experiencing an outbreak of nuclear nightmares not seen since the early 1960s. 

   Even nuclear weapons designers were not inured against the implications of the rising threat of nuclear war. Physicist Theodore Taylor had an epiphany during his first visit to the Soviet Union. He described the experience to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, whose own probing scholarship had revolutionized the field of nuclear studies : 

     Walking in Red Square in Moscow, Taylor saw many young people in wedding parties visiting Lenin's tomb and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and was impressed by how happy they looked. He experienced a flashback to the night of the birth of one of his children years before when, rather than being with his wife, he was at the Pentagon poring over intelligence data, including aerial photographs of central Moscow, in connection with potential plans for nuclear attack. Standing in Red Square, he began to weep uncontrollably :"It was seeing those happy-looking , specific people, going around, working their way up to the mausoleum. For any human being to contemplate setting off a bomb on top of all this, these people, is insane . . . a symptom of insanity." He had experienced such feelings before, but now for the first time "I literally set foot in the SU to see what it was that I was doing with all the details filled in. "Before that, Moscow had been no more than "a set of lines at various levels of rads. . . and. . . pressures and calories . . . per square centimeter" that one had to "match" with "the bombs with those numbers." 

Taylor decided to abandon weapons research and devote himself to more life-affirming research. 

   Despite his bluster, Reagan too feared the possibility of nuclear war, although his knowledge of nuclear weapons was miniscule. In 1983,he shocked a group of congressmen when he said that bombers and submarines did not carry nuclear weapons. But his profound, gut-level aversion to nuclear weapons was sincere. He repeatedly told stunned advisors that he considered them "evil" and wanted to eradicate them. His fears were shaped, in large part, by his religious convictions, particularly his fascination with Armageddon, the biblical account of the bloody conflagration that ends history and augurs Jesus' return, which he believed might be coming. He associated it with nuclear war and thought it his responsibility to protect the American people. Bud McFarlane, who served as Reagan's deputy national security advisor, said, "From the time he adopted the Armageddon thesis, he saw it as a nuclear catastrophe. Well, what do you do about that 's answer was that you build a tent or a bubble and protect your country." 

   

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973-----Episode 19

              PENTAGON'S MASTER PLAN FOR 1984--1988

    The Pentagon's master plan for 1984---1988 ranked defense of the Middle East second only to the defense of North America and Western Europe. The plan explained : 

     Our principal objectives are to assure continued access to the Persian Gulf oil and to prevent the Soviets from acquiring political--military control of the oil directly or through proxies. It is essential that the Soviet Union be confronted with the prospect of a major conflict should it seek to reach oil resources of the Gulf. Whatever the circumstances, we should be prepared to introduce American forces directly into the region should it appear that the security of access to Pesian Gulf oil is threatened. 

   To put this into effect, the United States spent a billion dollars modernizing military bases and deployed nuclear-armed cruise missiles to Comiso, Italy, from which they could reach targets throughout the Middle East. It inserted itself into the middle of the Iran-Iraq War. It provided arms to Iran, helping it turn the tide and begin advancing, by mid-1982, toward Basra, Iraq's second largest city. Administration officials then had a change of heart and decided to do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent an Iranian victory. They did so knowing full well knowing that Iraq was using chemical weapons. On November 1, senior State Department official Jonathan Howe informed Secretary of State Shultz that Iraq was resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against Iran. In December 1983, Reagan sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein. The U.S. Embassy reported that Saddam showed "obvious pleasure" at Rumsfeld's visit and the letter he presented from the president. 

   Rumsfeld assured Saddam that the United States was doing all it could to cut off arms sales to Iran. 

   Rumsfelt returned for a second visit the following March, partly to assure Saddam that the United States' priority was defeating Iran, not punishing Iraq for using chemical weapons. Howard Teicher, a Reagan NSC Iraq expert, later admitted in a sworn affidavit that the United States had "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." More than sixty officers at the Defense Intelligence Agency provided combat planning assistance. Teicher reported that Casey used a Chilean company to deliver cluster bombs, which could effectively repel Iran's human-wave attacks. U.S., British, and German arms manufacturers happily supplied Iraq's growing needs. Under license by the Commerce Committee, U.S. companies shipped several strains of anthrax that were later used in Iraq's biological weapons program and insecticides that could be used for chemical warfare. The Iraqi military brazenly warned in February 1984 "the invaders should know that for every harmful insect there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it whatever the number and Iraq possesses the insecticide. " 

   Iran asked for a UN Security Council investigation. Although U.S. intelligence reports confirmed Iran's charges, the United States remained silent for several more months, before finally criticizing the Iraqi use of chemical warfare in early March. But when Iran proposed a UN resolution condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons, U.S. Ambassador Kirkpatrick lobbied other countries to render "no decision." Upon the Iraqi ambassador's suggestion, the United States preempted the Iranian measure by getting a presidential statement in late March opposing the use of chemical weapons but not mentioning Iraq as the guilty party. In November 1984, the United States restored diplomatic relations with Iraq. Not only did the use of chemical warfare persist until the end of the with Iran, but in late 1987, the Iraqi air force began dropping chemical weapons against Iraq's own Kurdish citizens, whom the government accused of supporting Iran. The attacks against rebel-controlled villages peaked with the chemical warfare assault on the village of Halabjah in March 1988. Despite widespread outrage in the United States, including many from inside the administration, U.S. intelligence aid to Iraq actually increased in 1988 and, in December 1988, the government authorized a sale to Iraq of $1.5  million in insecticides by Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of the napalm used in Vietnam. 

AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973-----Episode 18

IN 1983, THE U.S. INVADED THE ISLAND OF GRENADA

   After Grenada, Reagan proudly announced, "Our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall. " Even the sting of humiliation in Vietnam had been alleviated. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, he claimed, had been "denied permission to win." "We didn't lose the war," he insisted. "When the war was all over and we'd come home -----that's when the war was lost." In December 1988, a National Defense Commission report concluded, "Our failure in Vietnam still casts a shadow over U.S. intervention anywhere."

   The U.S. attempt to avenge the killing of marines in Lebanon was badly bungled. Casey worked closely with the Saudis to assassinate the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, exploding a massive car bomb outside his residence in 1985. Eighty people died and two hundred were wounded, but Fadlallah escaped unharmed. 

   While running roughshod over Central America and the Caribbean, Reagan also trampled the United States' working class and poor, who were sacrificed to the exigencies of a massive military buildup, which was cheered on by the more than fifty members of the Committee on the Present Danger who held official positions. Right after the 1980 election, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had warned that a "defense spending binge" would be "the worst thing that could happen" to the United States. Reagan ignored that advice, having campaigned on the fiction that the United States was militarily weak and vulnerable to a Soviet attack, saying, "we're in greater danger today than we were the day after Pearl Harbor . Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country."

   Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum praised Budget Director David Stockman's adroitness at cutting the budget, "but," he added, "I also think you've been cruel, inhumane and unfair." Four hundred eight thousand people lost their eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children [ AFDC] by 1983, and 299,000 saw their benefits cut. Reagan prodded Congress into cutting $2 billion out of the $12 billion food stamp budget and $1 billion from the $3.5 billion budget for school lunches. The budgets for Medicaid, child nutrition, housing, and energy assistance were also pared. Federal funds for cities were cut almost in half. While waging war on the poor, Reagan cut the highest income tax rate, which was 70 when he took office to 28 percent by the time he left.

   New and upgraded weapons systems rolled off the assembly lines, including the long-delayed and very costly MX missile program, which moved missiles around loops that hid their precise location, making them largely invulnerable to a Soviet first first strike. Reagan knew that the Soviets, whose economy was stagnant, would be hard pressed to keep pace. 

   The nuclear arms budget also grew by leaps and bounds. In 1981, George Kennan, the architect of U.S. containment policy, decried the continuing senseless buildup of nuclear weapons : "We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily, like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings headed for the sea." 

   Reagan and Bush were anything but helpless in their arms buildup. They rejected the widely held view that nuclear war would lead to mutual destruction and began planning to win such a war --- an approach advocated by nuclear extremists like Colin Gray and Keith Payne, who declared in 1980, "The United States should plan to defeat the Soviet Union." They believed that the United States might lose 20 million citizens in the process. The key to surviving a nuclear attack, they posited, was an effective command-and-control structure to prevent chaos and keep lines of communication open. The military called this "C3" : command, control, and communications. Reagan invested heavily to ensure its invulnerability. Perversely, he projected such a war--winning strategy onto the Soviets. He pointed to a massive Soviet civil defense program as proof, even though no such program existed.