Thanks for that info. I will share that with a couple people in hopes they may know the urgency, and historical importance of this! And it went out to this List so hopefully some people with the Committee for the Republic will step forward and go beyond giving Dan the Defense of Liberty Award, and help with funding this movie!
Sent from my iPhone On Apr 19, 2023, at 4:28 PM, Wilkerlb <wilkerlb@aol.com> wrote:
Yes, indeed, Todd, those are excellent sources. But -- and it's a large "but" -- the documentary to which I'm referring now is the one underway even as I speak. It's likely to be some time yet -- I'm now informed -- before it makes it to the public screen as the filmmakers need some $1.5m and have thus far only put together $400,000. We're working on obtaining the rest, but if anyone knows of funders, please don't hesitate to contact Paul Jay. Paul informs that he would dearly love to finish it before the inevitable happens with regard to Dan, but that might not be possible. I for one am going to do all I can to assist with the fund-raising.
lw
-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com>
To: SALON Admin <salon@committeefortherepublic.org>
Sent: Wed, Apr 19, 2023 1:41 pm
Subject: Fwd: Chomsky and Ellsberg on the Present Danger - theAnalysis.news
Larry Wilkerson (who needs no introduction, and whose oral history interview I recorded a couple weeks ago when I was in DC, which I will get up on YouTube this week), suggested that I not "forget as well to advertise widely the new documentary that Dan has just finished -- with Paul Jay at TheAnalysis.News -- with Noam and others, on the present peril of nuclear weapons. I've seen the trailer and, earlier, a rough cut of the film. It's Dan at his very best.”
I agree, it is, and confirms what I say that Dan is in the Pantheon of the Great Political Theorists, with Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and Clausewitz (as a phenomenological theorist, in the “consciousness” dimension of war, not the “tactical/strategic” that obtuse military officers, Prussian and American, etc., could only understand his higher order thinking as). With those right-wing, self-identified “political theorists,” like Leo Strauss, Wilmoore Kendall, Harry Jaffa, et al. (“New Right” ideologists), and Carl Schmitt, past the time for them and their war-promoting ideas to be consigned to the “dustbin of history.”
But see the two attached files at bottom for why I include Daniel Ellsberg, and Noam Chomsky, as two great political theorists, in the line of Arendt and Clausewitz (and clear your mind of all the misrepresentations that simple-minded military officers could not get beyond in their simple understanding of Clausewitzian political theory).
I guess COL Wilkerson must mean this 2-part video, which both are essential to see!
And see this for “context” on one of the promoters of U.S. nuclear aggression/recklessness, as an acolyte of Gen. Curtis LeMay:
(Excerpt)
"CLEVELAND, Aug. 27 (AP) —Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus R. Vance said today that to label tactical nuclear weapons “conventional”—a description used by Senator Barry Goldwater—is “dangerously misleading and totally inappropriate.”
"Mr. Vance asserted that typical battlefield nuclear weapons now had destructive power several times greater than the strategic bombs that wiped out the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
"His remarks were in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, at which Mr. Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee, spoke on Tuesday.
"Mr. Vance's target was the Arizona Senator's proposal that a way should be developed to provide the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “with its own stock of small, tactical nuclear battlefield weapons.” Mr. Goldwater told the veterans that “these small, conventional nuclear weapons are no more powerful than the firepower you have faced on the battlefield.”
…
“The largest blockbusters of World War II are like handgrenades compared to these infantry‐supported weapons of today. And how ‘conventional’ is the nuclear radiation and contamination of any weapon, small as well as large? ‘Small’ and ‘conventional’ are dangerously misleading and totally inappropriate adjectives when applied to any nuclear weapon.”
End Excerpt
Now LBJ was not much better on his policy of nuclear weapons but at least he wasn’t out in public “selling” their use, and prioritized trying to avoid nuclear war, with “Limited War” doctrine, while Goldwater was denouncing “Limited War,” meaning instead, “Total War,” to include nuclear weapons. I’ve gone through his papers so don’t tell me differently.
Or see this, as posted on The Analyis News page, which I was previously unaware of, but which has an abundance of information/documentaries that an ignorant US population should make themselves aware of! And won’t!
Chomsky and Ellsberg on the Present Danger
Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg discuss American objectives in the Ukraine war and the preparations for war with China. To view part two of this interview, click here.
Notwithstanding the Klinger paper below is published by Parameters, and her incapablility of escaping the clutch of Army interpretation of “terrorism,” it does serve as a corrective to the insidious book by that intellectual poseur the odioius COL Harry Summers, Jr., and his Clausewitz revisionism which that imbecile Cheney latched on to turning upside down Clausewitz’s observation that the “defensive was the stronger form of war,” which Cheney adopted, and that chapter of Summer’s book was contributed heavily to by extreme neoconservative Norman Podhotetz, echoing conservative/militarist fanatic Barry Goldwater. The war fanatics on this email list, whether as against Russia first, or China first, or both simultaneously, which in fact is already going on, and was heightened by Trump as I explained in the past, with a higher-order understanding of war “causality,” with Biden having adopted that, and “reaping the whirlwind” which Trump accelerated, as well, with all of us paying for that already in the economic meltdown, etc., already underway, and well-advanced.
"Clausewitz displays an intuition concerning war thatwe can better comprehend with terms and concepts newly available to us: OnWar is suffusedwith the understanding that every war is inherently a nonlinear phenomenon, the conductof which changes its character in ways that cannot be analytically predicted. I am not arguing that reference to a few of today's "nonlinear science" concepts would help us clarifyconfusion in Clausewitz's thinking. My suggestion is more radical: in a profoundly unconfused way, he understands that seeking exact analytical solutions does not fit the nonlinear reality of the problems posed bywar, and hence that our ability to predict the course and outcome of any given conflict is severely limited.
"The correctness of Clausewitz's perception has both kept his work relevant and made it less accessible, for war's analytically unpredictable nature is extremely discomfiting to those searching for a predictive theory. An approach through nonlinearity does not make other reasons for difficulty in understanding On War evaporate. It does, however, provide new access to the realistic core of Clausewitz's insights and offers a correlationof the representations of chance and complexity that characterize his work. Furthermore, it may help us remove some unsettling blind spots that have prevented us from seeing crucial implications of his work.
. . .
"But Clausewitz contends that an actual war never occurs without a context; that it always takes time to conduct, in a series of interactive steps; and that its results are never absolutely final-all of which impose restrictions on the analytically simple”pure theory”of war. Any specific war is subject to historical contingencies: he thus concludes that the theoretical basis for prediction of the course of a war dissolves from analytical certainties to numerical probabilities. Wars, therefore, are not only characterized by feedback (a process distinctly involving nonlinearities), but inseparable from their contexts. (TP- Which to “see,” one has to see beyond mere “appearances,” often of a falsified nature as to events which actually precipitated an attack.)
"The unique political situation is the context that bounds the system constituted by a given war. It must be considered carefully, Clausewitzargues, for “the same political object can elicit differing actions from different peoples, and even from the same people at differen times. . . . Between two peoples and twostates there can be such tensions, such a mass of inflammable material, that the slightest quarrel can produce a wholly disproportionate effect-a real explosion.”2 Not the nonlinear image of combustion, and the view that the prevailing political conditions rather than the intended "political object” constitute the parameters that determine fundamental regimes of behavior in the system.23 The emphasis on the changeable political context also contrast sharply with the view held by many theorists (then and in our owntime) that the parameters of war must be readily quantifiable military categories such as logistical factors, characteristic of weaponry, etc. 24
"Consideration of the political environment leads Clausewitz to generate his famous second definition of war as “merely the continuation of policy [Politikw,hichalsomeans"politics”in German] by other means.”2 He claims that war is never autonomous, for it is always an instrument of policy. Yet the relationship is not static; it implies neither that the instrument is un-changing nor that the political goal or policy itself is immune to feedback effects. Using another image of explosion, he argues:
"War is a pulsation of violence, variable in strength and therefore variable in the speed with which it explodes and discharges its energy. War moves on its goal with varying speeds; but it always lasts long enough for the influence to be exerted on the goal and for its own course to be changed in one way or another. . . . That, however, does not imply that the political aim is a tyrant . It must adapt itself to its chosen means, a process that can radically change it; yet the political aim remains the first consideration.26 (That’s where the radical-right, militaristic ideology of the Conservative Movement, then, in the 1950s, and today, in today’s bipartisan “Goldwaterism,” poses the very real “probability” of a nuclear war, with the “original” trigger being U.S. foreign policy over the last 25+ years of US military expansionism.)
"The ends-means relationship clearly does not work in a linear fashion.The constant interplay is an interactive, feed back process that constitutes an intrinsic feature of war. Clausewitz’s conception is that the conduct of any war affects its character, and its altered character feeds back into the political ends that guide its conduct. War is, he says,a “true chameleon” that exhibits a different nature in every concrete instance.27
"To reach an understanding of the character of war in general is a purpose of theory and, to describe how that theory functions, Clausewitz resorts to a third definition that he elucidates in terms of a striking metaphor of non-linearity. In the last section of Chapter1, BookOne, he claims that war is"a remarkable trinity(“einewunderlich Dereifaltigkeciotm) composed of (a) the blind natural force of violence, hatred,and enmity among the masses of people; (b) chance and probability, faced or generated by the commander and his army and(c)war’s rational subordination to the policy of the government.28 Clausewitz compares these three tendencies to three varying legal codes interacting with each other (thecomplexity of which would have been obviousto anyone who had lived under the tangled web of superimposed legal systems in the German area before, during, and after the upheavals of the Napoleonic years). Then he concludes with a visual metaphor”: Our task therefore is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between the three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.”29 What better image could he have conjured to convey his insight into the profoundly interactive nature of war than thise mblem of contemporary nonlinearscience?30
"Although the passage is usually taken to mean only that we should not over emphasize any one element in the trinity, Clausewitz’s metaphor also implicitly confronts us with the chaos inherent in nonlinear system sensitive to initial conditions."
|