{"id":76955,"date":"2016-08-01T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=76955"},"modified":"2016-07-28T17:09:26","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T16:09:26","slug":"the-clintons-celebrated-but-likely-disastrous-for-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/08\/the-clintons-celebrated-but-likely-disastrous-for-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Clintons Celebrated \u2013 But Likely Disastrous for the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jan<\/a>27 Jul 2016 – <\/em>Hillary Rodham Clinton was nominated last night by the Democratic Party as its candidate for the U.S. Presidency. She may well win on November 8.<\/p>\n

What a tragedy for Western democracy that the leader of what is still called the free, democratic world cannot produce better candidates than Trump and Clinton through a disgustingly commercialized and corrupt political process where candidates like Jill Stein<\/a> \u2013 did you ever hear of that candidate? \u2013 doesn\u2019t have a chance because she cannot mobilize the funds.<\/p>\n

As a European intellectual with a life-long commitment to peace and democracy, I find little reason to celebrate.<\/p>\n

And why the total focus on a few individuals<\/em> at the top but not the structures<\/em> that will run them both, such as the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex (MIMAC); the cancer in many societies, including Russia, that President Eisenhower warned the world about in his farewell speech already in 1961?<\/p>\n

How short the media memory! Hillary Clinton\u2019s nomination celebrated all over the mainstream press as a victory for the party \u2013 preventing it from splitting \u2013 and for all women.<\/p>\n

But how can people \u2013 women in particular \u2013 really believe in such genderism:<\/em> that she will be a better president for the US and the world because<\/em> she\u2019s a woman? Hasn\u2019t the world learnt anything from the inverse racism:<\/em>that Obama would be a great president because<\/em> he is black?<\/p>\n

How blind the media to militarism, war and other violence: Not one media focuses on the Clinton\u2019s well-documented fascination with violence and war.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to refresh the memory of the Clintons:<\/p>\n

Bill Clinton\u2019s record<\/strong><\/p>\n

From 1994 BC broke all promises made by his predecessors and other Western politician to Gorbachev about \u201cnot expanding NATO an inch\u201d. He started out in Tblisi, Georgia. I happened to be there, spoke with the U.S. representative to the country and got a sense what was coming. Later too in Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n

There is a straight line from that fatal arrogance to today\u2019s Second Cold War in Europe, Ukraine having \u2013 predictably \u2013 to be the this-far-and-no-longer country<\/em> of that mindless and reckless expansion that should never have happened.<\/p>\n

BC\u2019s interventionist record is also forgotten: He bombed in Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia \u2013 the latter much much worse from any point of view than the Russian annexation of Crimea. It was based on the fake Rambouillet \u201ctalks\u201d between Serbs and Kosovo-Albanians, his public lies about there being an ethnic cleansing of all Albanians in Kosovo coming from Slobodan Milosevic whom he called a new Hitler.<\/p>\n

No such plan was ever found \u2013 and I know a bit about it because I was a goodwill adviser both to three governments in Belgrade and to the non-violent Kosovo-Albanian leadership under Ibrahim Rugova.<\/p>\n

It was Clinton\u2019s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who masterminded much of it and is on record for saying that it was politically justifiable that the sanctions on Iraq had killed 500.000 innocent people. And they continued.<\/p>\n

And she, having survived as a refugee child in Belgrade, Serbia, with her Czechoslovakian family during the Second World War and spoke Serbian is on record for hatred of the Serb people.<\/p>\n

Conveniently, the West has forgotten it all. BC is such a charming man (who just told us at the reality show-like democratic convention how much he loves his wife).<\/p>\n

His administration was one of the most militarist.<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton\u2019s record<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no excuse for having forgotten her record. GFrom 2009 to 2013, she served as Secretary of State under Obama, the US president who has been engaged in warfare during more days than any other US President according to the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

HC has supported all the wars she could and she was a mastermind of the war in Libya. One remembers the film clip showing her happiness at Khadafi\u2019s death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She is a Cold Warrior, anti-Russia, anti-Putin Russians will be great for fighting Putin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Her war-promoting record is as long as it is well-documented.<\/p>\n

The most solid documentation is that of professor Stephen Zunes<\/a>. Zunes is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco teaching courses on the politics of Middle East and other regions, U.S. foreign policy, nonviolence, conflict resolution, and globalization. He currently chairs USF\u2019s Middle Eastern Studies Program. He serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, a contributing editor of Tikkun, and a member of the academic advisory council of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.<\/p>\n

Professor Zunes is also a TFF Associate and here is his analysis of Hillary Clinton\u2019s systematic fascination with war and everything military, \u201cHillary The Hawk\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

AS if this was not enough, here is a Mark Landler\u2019s brilliantly researched analysis \u2013 again in The New York Times<\/a> \u2013 of HC\u2019s persistent cultivation of American exceptionalism, interventionism, war and \u201cthe men with medals.\u201d He writes:<\/p>\n

Unlike other recent presidents \u2014 Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton \u2014 Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military \u2014 not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into \u201cany dark corner of the world.\u201d Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.<\/em><\/p>\n

I can only hope that I am wrong but I fear that Hillary Clinton \u2013 if she becomes the next President of the United States \u2013 is likely to be yet another militarist disaster for the world.<\/p>\n

And for the US itself whose manifest destiny<\/em> is now manifest decline<\/em>, caused mainly by all the failed wars, the cost of militarism and their consequences and blowback effects.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

TFF Director Prof. Jan Oberg is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 transnational.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can only hope that I am wrong but I fear that Hillary Clinton \u2013 if she becomes the next President of the United States \u2013 is likely to be yet another militarist disaster for the world. And for the US itself whose manifest destiny is now manifest decline, caused mainly by all the failed wars, the cost of militarism and their consequences and blowback effects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}