To The Undeclared

 
We said in a previous post in difficult times like these it hard to tell who your friends are. With the recent slaughter in Orlando, the Brexit vote here and the upcoming election this November, it's most likely more important than ever to know who your friends are.

That may take some time and thought. And even worse for many some research and thinking. In the MSM world there is only the right and the left. We sometimes hear about the great undeclared, but it's usually a form of editorial page tokenism that comes with a condition: "We're interested in their view especially since it looks like their leaning our way."

Of course, realizing who your friends are can change with the subject. In this case American foreign policy. Here's quote from an article everyone who is still undecided about November should read before Election Day, putting aside if possible on whose site and where it ran.

Greider’s article is brief, and I recommend reading every precious word of it.  Here is but one quote: “Trump has, in his usual unvarnished manner, kicked open the door to an important and fundamental foreign-policy debate.”  And here is a passage from Trump’s interview with the Washington Post that Greider chooses to quote:

“’I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up,’ Trump told the editors.  ‘And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn.… at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities.’”

There's much more. Here's another quote, different author.

Next, Glen Ford, the eloquent radical Left executive editor of Black Agenda Report, a superb and widely read outlet, penned an article in March 2016, with the following title: “Trump Way to the Left of Clinton on Foreign Policy – In Fact, He’s Damn Near Anti-Empire.” Ford’s piece is well worth reading in its entirety; here are just a few quotes :

“Trump has rejected the whole gamut of U.S. imperial war rationales, from FDR straight through to the present.”

“If Trump’s tens of millions of white, so-called ‘Middle American’ followers stick by him, it will utterly shatter the prevailing assumption that the American public favors maintenance of U.S. empire by military means.”

“Trump shows no interest in ‘spreading democracy,’ like George W. Bush, or assuming a responsibility to ‘protect’ other peoples from their own governments, like Barack Obama and his political twin, Hillary Clinton.”

“It is sad beyond measure that the near-extinction of independent Black politics has placed African Americans in the most untenable position imaginable at this critical moment: in the Hillary Clinton camp."

One more quote of note and you can read the rest for yourself. 

Trump has also been noticed by the Left in Europe, notably by the sharp minded Jean Bricmont, physicist and author of Humanitarian Imperialism who writes here:

(Trump) “is the first major political figure to call for ‘America First’ meaning non-interventionism.  He not only denounces the trillions of dollars spent in wars, deplores the dead and wounded American soldiers, but also speaks of the Iraqi victims of a war launched by a Republican President. He does so to a Republican public and manages to win its support. He denounces the empire of US military bases, claiming to prefer to build schools here in the United States. He wants good relations with Russia. He observes that the militarist policies pursued for decades have caused the United States to be hated throughout the world. He calls Sarkozy a criminal who should be judged for his role in Libya. Another advantage of Trump: he is detested by the neoconservatives, who are the main architects of the present disaster.”

If you don't understand what these people are saying here even though they might clearly not be of  your total political persuasion, you're missing a basic truth: America has been going down the wrong foreign policy path for quite a while, led by the powers that be on the left and the right.

davidstockmanscontracorner.com/trumps-anti-interventionism-the-neocons-hate-it-but-the-anti-war-left-has-taken-note