A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.

Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.

Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby’s book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll’s best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.

In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby’s research complements Carroll’s quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let’s look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds.

Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes or at least made biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.

Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. “Ticks,” Carroll writes, “find baby chicks irresistible.”

In July of 1975 a new or very rare disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea). Even Plum Island’s indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.

By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.

Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease — and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

If Newby agrees or disagrees with any of the above, she does not inform us. But here’s what she adds to it.

The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.

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I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten – a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a US veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.

Fallujah was the “city of mosques,” made up of some 300,000 to 435,000 people. It had a tradition of resisting foreign – including British – invasions. It suffered, as did all of Iraq, from the brutal sanctions imposed by the United States in the years leading up to the 2003 attack. During that attack, Fallujah saw crowded markets bombed. Upon the collapse of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, Fallujah established its own government, avoiding the looting and chaos seen elsewhere. In April, 2003, the US 82nd Airborne Division moved into Fallujah and met no resistance.

Immediately the occupation began to produce the sort of problems seen by every occupation everywhere ever. People complained of Humvees speeding on the streets, of being humiliated at checkpoints, of women being treated inappropriately, of soldier urinating in the streets, and of soldiers standing on rooftops with binoculars in violation of residents’ privacy. Within days, the people of Fallujah wanted to be liberated from their “liberators.” So, the people tried nonviolent demonstrations. And the US military fired on the protesters. But eventually, the occupiers agreed to be stationed outside the city, limit their patrols, and allow Fallujah a degree of self-governance beyond what the rest of Iraq was permitted. The result was a success: Fallujah was kept safer than the rest of Iraq by keeping the occupiers out of it.

That example, of course, needed to be crushed. The United States was claiming a moral obligation to liberate the hell out of Iraq to “maintain security” and “assist in transition to democracy.” Viceroy Paul Bremer decided to “clean out Fallujah.” In came the “coalition” troops, with their usual inability (mocked quite effectively in the Netflix Brad Pitt movie War Machine) to distinguish the people they were bestowing liberty and justice upon from the people they were killing. US officials described the people they wanted to kill as “cancer,” and went about killing them with raids and firefights that killed a great many of the non-cancer people. How many people the United States was actually giving cancer to was unknown at the time.

In March, 2004, four Blackwater mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, their bodies burned and hung from a bridge. The US media portrayed the four men as innocent civilians who somehow happened to find themselves in the middle of a war and the accidental targets of irrational, unmotivated violence. The people of Fallujah were “thugs” and “savages” and “barbarians.” Because US culture has never regretted Dresden or Hiroshima, there were open cries for following those precedents in Fallujah. A former advisor to Ronald Reagan, Jack Wheeler reached for an ancient Roman model in demanding that Fallujah be completely reduced to lifeless rubble: “Fallujah delenda est!”

The occupiers tried to impose a curfew and a ban on carrying weapons, saying they needed such measures in order to distinguish the people to kill from the people to give democracy to. But when people had to leave their homes for food or medicine, they were gunned down. Families were gunned down, one by one, as each person emerged to try to recover the injured or lifeless body of a loved one. The “family game” it was called. The only soccer stadium in town was turned into a massive cemetery.

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I recently did a couple of public debates with a professor from the U.S. Army’s West Point Academy. The question was whether war can ever be justified. He argued yes. I argued no. Like many people who argue his side, he spent a fair amount of time talking not about wars but about finding yourself confronted in a dark alleyway, the idea being that everyone must simply agree that they would be violent if confronted in a dark alleyway, and therefore war is justifiable. I responded by asking him not to change the subject, and by claiming that what one person does in a dark alleyway, whether violent or not, has very little in common with the collective enterprise of constructing massive equipment and preparing massive forces and making the calm and deliberate choice to drop explosives on distant people’s homes rather than negotiate or cooperate or make use of courts or arbitration or aid or disarmament agreements.

But if you’ve read this excellent book that’s being given to these outstanding students today, Sweet Fruit from a Bitter Tree, then you know that it simply is not true that a person alone in a dark alleyway never has any better option than violence. For some people in some cases in dark alleyways and other similar locations, violence could prove the best option, a fact that would tell us nothing about the institution of war. But in this book we read numerous stories — and there are many, no doubt millions, more just like them — of people who chose a different course.

It sounds not just uncomfortable but ridiculous to the dominant culture we live in to suggest starting a conversation with a would-be rapist, making friends with burglars, asking an attacker about his troubles or inviting him to dinner. How can such an approach, documented to have worked over and over again in practice ever be made to work in theory? (If anyone here is planning to attend college, you can expect to encounter just that question quite often.)

Well, here’s a different theory. Very often, not always, but very often people have a need for respect and friendship that is much stronger than their desire to inflict pain. A friend of mine named David Hartsough was part of a nonviolent action in Arlington trying to integrate a segregated lunch counter, and an angry man put a knife up to him and threatened to kill him. David calmly looked him in the eye and said words to the effect of “You do what you have to do, my brother, and I am going to love you anyway.” The hand holding the knife began to shake, and then the knife fell to the floor.

Also, the lunch counter was integrated.

Humans are a very peculiar species. We don’t actually need a knife to the throat to feel uncomfortable. I may say things in a speech like this one that don’t threaten anyone in any way, but nonetheless make some people pretty darn uncomfortable. I wish they didn’t, but I think they have to be said even if they do.

A little over a year ago there was a mass shooting at a high school in Florida. Many people have, quite rightly I think, asked the people just up the street here at the NRA to consider what role their corruption of government may play in the endless epidemic of gun violence in the United States. Thank you to Congressman Connolly for having voted for background checks, by the way. But almost nobody mentions that our tax dollars paid to train that young man in Florida to kill, trained him right in the cafeteria of the high school where he did it, and that he was wearing a t-shirt advertising that training program when he murdered his classmates. Why wouldn’t that upset us? Why wouldn’t we all feel some responsibility? Why would we avoid the subject?

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Friends, fellow inhabitants of planet Earth, I’m not breaking up with you. I just think maybe we ought to see other species for a while. You like dogs, right?

I’ve spent so many years trying to talk with you, and you haven’t heard anything. So, we have the same conversation over and over and over. Let’s just take a little amicable break, OK?

What do I mean? Well, you say you’re mad at some scandal or party or personality, or you’re upset at something that costs millions of dollars. I say you could get tens of thousands of times that by cutting a few percent out of the criminal, destructive, unaudited military bonanza, or out of corporations that pay negative taxes, or out of the billionaires who tell you what to think. You say but without any military, an evil crazy group would “get you.” I say, how about cutting the U.S. military back to no more than four times the next most expensive one. You say, but think of the jobs. I say, there’d be more jobs, not fewer, but I wasn’t thinking of them because I’m not a sociopath. You say, so Hitler should have killed all the Jews? I say the United States government refused to accept them and gave not a single flying fuck who Hitler killed except that it very much wanted him to kill more Russians. You exhibit no ability to hear that remark and go back to the millions of dollars or some other bullshit.

I don’t mind this. Of course you don’t allow me to say it on U.S. television anymore, only foreign-owned networks. But I say it to large gatherings. And people claim they’ve heard it. I write books to give people a basic understanding, as far as I’m able, of war and peace and the lies that are told about them, so that each new lie can be rejected. And people claim they’ve read the books. And sometimes it seems that people are catching on. Other times, well . . .

Lately, it’s gotten much worse. Smart, courageous, educated people tell me that Donald Trump’s every move is ordered by Vladimir Putin, including things that have not actually happened, such as the U.S. withdrawal from NATO that people tell me occurred some time back, and including things Russia adamantly opposes, such as a coup in Venezuela, ripping up the INF Treaty, leaving the Iran agreement, sending weapons into Ukraine, sending troops and missiles into Eastern Europe, staging war rehearsals in Scandinavia, imposing sanctions on Russia, expanding NATO, demanding that NATO members buy more weapons, fighting several wars at once and building more bases, refusing to ban weapons in space, refusing to ban cyber attacks, building more nukes, etc.

People tell me that a pristine U.S. election system only slightly flawed by its total lack of verifiability, a communications system rotten to the core, bribery legalized, ballot and debate access severely restricted, blatantly racist removal of voters from the rolls, open intimidation of voters by a victorious presidential candidate, an electoral college that gives victories to losers, grotesque gerrymandering, enormous incumbent advantages, etc., has been sullied by some weird unrelated Facebook ads from a foreign nation whose former ruler Boris Yeltsin was properly installed for the good of humanity by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Do they believe it? I’m afraid they struggle to believe their own horse manure, that they may in fact need a war in order to properly do so, and that we may not survive that war. If I believed that Vladimir Putin had secretly made Trump president, and that the Democratic Party screwing its strongest candidate out of the nomination was just a lucky coincidence for the Evil Master Mind in the Kremlin, I’d be protesting at the Russian Embassy every day. I’d go to Moscow and protest there. What are Russiagate believers doing? They’re waiting for the U.S. government to investigate itself. How many times has that worked?

But, then, when do you, humanity, ever act on your supposed beliefs? If I believed that life was infinitesimally short and meaningless in comparison with an infinite and joyful magical life after death, I’d damn well be signing up to clear land mines, while demanding that governments lay more of them. What are you doing? You’re strategizing to add minutes to your actual life through a diet of any sort of food, no matter how revolting.

Would you believe your beliefs if yet another war accompanied them? Quite possibly. Do you think so many of you have clung to Iraq war lies or Libya war lies or any other war lies just because you have found them so convincing? Of course not. It’s because without them, your beloved government, which you despise except when it’s waging war, would have committed mass murder for no good reason.

Does anyone really currently believe that secret cells of Hezbollah in Venezuela are plotting to overthrow the U.S. government and restrict your freedoms? Or that the U.S. government is trying to provide aid to Venezuela while simultaneously imposing brutal sanctions on Venezuela? Or that when John Bolton blurts out that it’s all about oil, he’s just being sarcastic to make fun of all those marginalized commentators who harbor a twisted obsession with actual facts? Yet, once a war comes, you know that yall will do your best to believe all this garbage and more.

Your problem, if I may be so bold, is part nationalism, part partisanship, part militarism, and part just plain simplemindedness. This doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of genius who never has to correct his blunders. It just means that I notice in you, humanity, a fanatical devotion to oversimplifying anything you can. If I say a bad word about Russiagate, I’m supposed to deny that Trump has attempted to make corrupt financial deals in every corner of the globe including Russia. If I say a bad word against Trump, I’m supposed to love NATO and the wars on Syria and Afghanistan. If I say a good word about Trump, I’m supposed to love fascist demagoguery and border walls.

Life is complicated, people. It’s more complicated than I grasp, I’ll readily admit. But I don’t devote my energies to actively trying to pretend the world is as simple as a cartoon or a Fox News broadcast for fucksake. Sometimes you have to recognize that something is only partly true. Sometimes you have to agree with lunatics. “You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons,” said Arthur Koestler. “This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity. It is an expression of a lack of self confidence.” Let’s work on our confidence, humanity. Let’s meet for coffee in a year or ten, if we’re still here, and if coffee is still here. I do love you.

[ Or, I have a Dream × Imagine ] by Martin Luther David Swanson Lennon

• When talking about how to fund useful projects, or talking about the federal budget or the U.S. economy, talk as if U.S. military spending exists. With 67 percent of federal discretionary spending going to militarism, don’t talk about the “size” of the government as if only the other 33 percent exists. Be aware of the fact that military spending is an economic drain, not a jobs program, and speak accordingly.

• Have a position on what a basic outline of the federal budget ought to look like. Put it in a pie chart on your website next to last year’s actual federal budget.

• Be aware that the nuclear doomsday clock is closer to midnight than ever, and talk about it.

• Talk about wars. When talking about people fleeing U.S.-armed and U.S.-trained killers in a U.S.-backed coup government in Honduras, call them refugees, not immigrants, not bad parents, not ravaging hordes. When talking about environmental destruction, do not omit the military’s major role. When talking about the spread of racism and xenophobia, be aware that they consistently follow as well as facilitate war-making. When talking about militarized police and eroded civil liberties, talk about their origins. When talking about the need for funding for human and environmental needs, note what percentage of military spending would suffice. Stop calling the United States the greatest nation on earth, and instead make the explicit comparison to countries that spend less on war and have higher life expectancy, greater health, better education, stronger democracy, etc.

• When talking about wars, be aware that U.S. weapons dealing exists, and that U.S. weapons are sent to most governments on earth that the U.S. government itself defines as dictatorships. Be aware that most of the places we call violent manufacture no weapons. Be aware that U.S. weapons are on both sides of many wars. Be aware that converting to non-military jobs can be economically beneficial, and talk about it.

• When talking about the victims of wars, talk about non-U.S. victims too. When the non-U.S. victims make up 97 percent of the victims, don’t talk about them 5 percent of the time; talk about them 97 percent of the time. Don’t call unidentified families “insurgents” or anything other than human beings. Don’t use the word “defense” for anything other than actions that are actually defensive.

• When holding hearings about foreign policy, bring in outside experts. Every war’s initiation and continuation are promoted to you by the Pentagon as last resorts while experts in nonviolent conflict resolution who could point out infinite alternatives go unconsulted. Stop asking for views on current and future wars exclusively from witnesses who’ve consistently been wrong up to this point.

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• End war rehearsal exercises in Europe and South Korea.

• Use the War Powers Resolution to end U.S. participation in the war on Yemen; the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Mali, Niger, and Somalia.

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• Cease arming the Israeli government, and cease protecting Israeli crimes from international sanction.

• Pass a resolution thanking whoever was responsible for informing the U.S. public of the misconduct of the Democratic Party during its last presidential primaries, and apologizing to the Russian government for blaming it for providing that service without any proof that it did so.

Finally, the hardest:

• End all hostility toward Russia.

Here in Charlottesville, as in most places, we like our stories simple. Most books by local author John Grisham have good guys and bad guys. When a UVa sports team wins, everybody says “Yay, we won!” When it loses, three-quarters of the people say “Boo, we lost!” Reality that gets messier than a coyote and roadrunner adventure gives us trouble.

When we’re fed a fictional tale of sexual assault at a UVa fraternity by Rollingstone magazine, we like to declare that every other tale except that one is true or, alternatively, that every other tale is, just like that one, false. We’re less comfortable with the notion that a lot of tales are true and a lot of other ones false, and yet other ones partially true and partially false. It seems too sloppy. What are people supposed to wear, gray hats? How do we distinguish the angels from the demons, the bunny from the lisping hunter?

We particularly struggle with our national and international news stories that involve someone local dying: Humayun Khan, Otto Warmbier, Heather Heyer.

Humayn Khan’s father Khizr Khan has become a Democratic Party celebrity. We’re supposed to celebrate his political positions that we agree with, and his ethnicity or religion (or rather our own self-righteous lack of bigotry), . . . and also the criminal and genocidal campaign of mass slaughter and destruction in Iraq that his son died participating in. That last bit trips some of us up, because even though it complicates the childish simplicity, it seems importantly different from the other things.

Despite our appreciation for those who participated in the destruction of Iraq, we Charlottesvillians nonetheless manage to take no pride in George Norris and Robert Campus, the two local military contractors who were given big bonuses for doing what nobody at numerous agencies in D.C. had been willing to do, that is, articulate the desired lie about Iraqi aluminum tubes so that Colin Powell could use it, against the advice of his own staff, in unsuccessfully marketing the war to the United Nations.

Otto Warmbier was a UVa student who died shortly after being freed by North Korea, which had arrested him for trying to steal a poster. Warmbier’s grief-stricken parents and President Donald Trump claimed North Korea had tortured Warmbier. But a serious investigation of the affair found that the doctors who had examined Warmbier disagreed with that conclusion and its details, reporting that the young man’s teeth had not been damaged, that he had no significant scars or bone fractures, and that he did not seem to have suffered head trauma. The evidence suggested the strong possibility of attempted suicide. How’s that for a messy story? A young man commits a foolish petty crime. An abusive government arrests him for it. He’s so traumatized that he tries to kill himself. His grief-stricken family and his own abusive government lie about what happened for purposes of propaganda that could get us all killed. Who’s the godlike protagonist? Who’s the purely evil monster? Aaaargh! I don’t get it!

Heather Heyer was murdered with a car during a fascist rally that took over downtown Charlottesville. The possibly mentally ill man who did it is locked up in a cage for the rest of his life. Local media and people proclaim justice served! But the U.S. President who encouraged hateful violence goes unsanctioned, as do the police who stood by and watched it, as do the legislators who forbid the banning of guns, as do the courts and officials who refused to ban an armed event by people threatening violence and having engaged in it the night before, as do many of the public voices and activists who made it happen. The ban on banning guns remains. The ban on removing the statues that the turmoil centered on remains (or is accepted as supposedly remaining). And the ban applies to all war statues, those recognized as racist and those imagined to be non-racist. Few have learned anything about the actual suffering of people who are easily recruited by violent racists. Few of the racists have learned anything about the people they hate. Few on either side have learned much about the superior tools of nonviolence. But a man who will most certainly no more be the same person next decade than you will has been locked in a cage forever. This hardly even qualifies as a Hollywood ending, but we do our best.

I came to UVa because a brilliant thinker named Richard Rorty and a great many other intelligent and open-minded people were there. Charlottesville has as many smart people in town as anywhere else, if not more. Over-simplification is a global problem. But it’s a good idea to start at home, and Charlottesville provides fertile ground. Our town is far more complex than any cartoon. Most of the fascists came from far away, but Charlottesville has its own racist past and present. Local founding fathers articulated noble sentiments they never, ever acted upon. The local government often speaks up for peace and justice, even while it’s invested public dollars in weapons of war and fossil fuel production. We’re an independent liberal oasis, but with a hill nearby inside of which the CIA plans to shelter during a nuclear apocalypse (about which it will apparently have ample warning but not bother to warn the rest of us, much less avert the disaster).

Here’s the painful truth that we ought to apply at all levels of society, though I really do not understand what is so painful about it: there are no good guys and no bad guys, no noble political party, no saints, no devils, no dictators who don’t do things right once in a while, nobody you could put up a statue of who wouldn’t merit serious criticism, no perfect martyrs, no inhuman monsters, no hell below us, above us only sky.

There’s action happening now in the U.S. Senate on ending U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. There’s a big loophole in the bill. There’s the matter of selling Saudi Arabia its weapons. There’s the House of Misrepresentatives to worry about. There’s the veto threat. There’s the question of getting compliance out of a president you’ve pretty well promised never to impeach, at least not for any of dozens of documented offenses unrelated to Russia. All that being said, the current action is a very good thing, and New Mexico’s senators have thus far been on the right side of it.

If the U.S. Congress were to stand up to a president on one war, people might raise the question of every other war. If the U.S. were to stand up to Saudi Arabia, not by giving it weapons and military assistance and protection from international law while asking it gently to mend its ways, but by refusing to be its partner in crime, somebody might ask why the same couldn’t be tried with Israel or Bahrain or Egypt, and so on.

But you can’t just end a war, can you? What should we replace the war on Yemen with? This is a question I get asked. When this war was what President Obama called a “successful” drone war, the question was usually something like this: “Hey, would you rather have a real war? With a drone war at least nobody gets killed!” Without commenting on who counts as nobody and who doesn’t, I’ll just recall that I would respond that I’d replace it with nothing whatsoever, but that it would eventually replace itself with a worse war — as it has now done.

Wars are different from other things one might propose to end. If I say we should get rid of mass incarceration or gerrymandering or fossil fuel subsidies or livestock or nations or religions or war monuments or major television networks or corporate tax breaks or the United States Senate or the Central Intelligence Agency or the off-sides rule or the acceptability of revenge or private campaign funding or aircraft carriers or telemarketing or the Electoral College or the Commission on Presidential Debates or advertising on stadiums — sorry, sometimes it’s hard to stop — it may or may not make sense, depending on one’s perspective, to ask what I would replace each of those things with. You might be asking, in the absence of gerrymandering, exactly how would districts be drawn. But in the absence of advertising on stadiums, the answer could be stadiums with taxes on corporations or it could just be stadiums without advertising on them, couldn’t it? Not everything needs a replacement.

If I say we should get rid of murder or theft or child abuse or rape or the torture-of-kittens, there are a lot of people who would not ask “But what would you replace it with?” There are even people to whom I could say that we should end the torture of human beings, and not just of kittens, who would still not respond by asking “But what would you replace it with?”

The war on Yemen is accomplishing nothing good, while the harm it is doing could be listed for the next hour. And it’s costing financially many times what it would take to transform that nation for the better through actual aid. So, what should we replace the war with? What should we do instead of bombing Yemen?

Not bomb Yemen!

Justifying the biggest public enterprise of the United States with its use three-quarters of a century ago is a tricky business, not just because of so many unpopular uses of it since, but also because of the lack of concrete actions to memorialize. Has nobody ever noticed that there’s no holiday to commemorate the date on which the United States decided to rescue the Jews? It’s hard to glorify things that didn’t happen. This is part of why Pearl Harbor is so incredibly important. With the saving-the Jews myths alone it simply would not be the case that you could rehabilitate a blood-soaked warmonger like George HW Bush by saying the world “World War II.” A World War II without Pearl Harbor myths could not possibly outweigh Central American death squads, killing thousands of people in an attack on Panama, manufacturing a war on Iraq with grotesque lies and then bombing principally civilians and retreating troops and installing bases that would generate 911, ginning up new excuses for a permanent military after the Soviet collapse, sending the vultures to exploit Russia, and of course the October Surprise and the possible role in killing Kennedy, not to mention the fact that during World War II Bush’s father was doing profitable business with the Nazis. What gives the phrase “World War II” the power to erase all such horrors is a concoction of overlapping and interlocking myths in which the keystone is the Pearl Harbor Lie of Innocence.

The combination is difficult to make sense of. If being innocently attacked by the Japanese justifies the war, and rescuing the Jews justifies the war (even though neither of these things actually occurred), should Yemenis try to rescue Afghans if attacked by the United States and Saudi Arabia? And would they be wrong to try to rescue Afghans if not attacked by the United States and Saudi Arabia? Would the mythical rescuing of the Jews have been wrong without the mythical surprise attack by the Japanese? Would fighting the Japanese have been wrong without the mythical rescuing of the Jews? In any case, despite not being dependent on logic, faith in the Good War is dependent on each of its major myths. So, knocking down the Pearl Harbor one is helpful.

Winston Churchill’s fervent hope for years before the U.S. entry into the war was that Japan would attack the United States. This would permit the United States (not legally, but politically) to fully enter World War II in Europe, as its president wanted to do, as opposed to merely providing weaponry and assisting in the targeting of submarines as it had been doing. On December 7, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt drew up a declaration of war on both Japan and Germany, but decided it wouldn’t work and went with Japan alone. Germany quickly declared war on the United States, possibly in hopes that Japan would declare war on the Soviet Union.

Getting into the war was not a new idea in the Roosevelt White House. FDR had tried lying to the U.S. public about U.S. ships including the Greer and the Kerny, which had been helping British planes track German submarines, but which Roosevelt pretended had been innocently attacked. Roosevelt also lied that he had in his possession a secret Nazi map planning the conquest of South America, as well as a secret Nazi plan for replacing all religions with Nazism. The map was of the quality of Karl Rove’s “proof” that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.

And yet, the people of the United States didn’t buy the idea of going into another war until Pearl Harbor, by which point Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and — just 11 days before the “unexpected” attack, and five days before FDR expected it — he had secretly ordered the creation (by Henry Field) of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.

From the pardoning of Nixon and whitewashing of Watergate on through the failure to punish anyone for Iran-Contra and dozens of such outrages, and the refusal to impeach any recent president for any of their major abusive policies (while impeaching one for sex), a bipartisan swarm of swamp creatures has consistently closed ranks against any serious change in the systems of legalized bribery, war profiteering, and wealth concentration. Trump’s unprecedented financial corruption, one of numerous indisputable grounds for impeachment, is so far off limits as to be effectively erased by virtually all media discussions of impeachment, which instead focus on Russiagate conspiracy theories (in the dubious use of that phrase to refer to allegations that are dubious, not just activities that involve two or more people).

When you want to know what threatens those who have normalized permawar, concentrated wealth and power beyond medieval levels, and ravaged this poor planet possibly beyond the point of recovery, one reliable approach is to listen to what they say threatens them. Nothing has elicited as many warnings from powerful political players since the Occupy movement as has the possibility of the impeachment of Donald Trump. To take one typical example of thousands, a column in The Hill recently warned:

“Democratic voters overwhelmingly want to impeach Trump. A Quinnipiac poll last month found that the vast majority, 71 percent, of Democratic voters want the party to begin the impeachment process if they win control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Moreover, Democratic voters are willing to prove their desire for a Trump impeachment come Election Day by favoring candidates that would make it a reality. . . . Yet, if the Democrats do win back the House and pursue impeachment against the president, there is little on the record to suggest House Democrats have enough evidence to get a conviction in the Senate.”

The above ridiculous claim is based on two factors. First, the author, like some other authors, seems to mean by “evidence” the slightly different concept of “Senate seats held by Democrats.” Second, the author, like virtually all other authors, clearly means by “evidence” the limited concept of “evidence of working with Vladimir Putin to steal a U.S. election.”