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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As you read Nick Turse’s stunning report on his recent visit to the killing fields of South Sudan today, remember that if you support this site with a donation of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. It's Turse's dramatic, up-close-and-personal account of the tragedy of the American-“midwifed” newest nation on the planet. Check our donation page for the details. Tom]

Slaughter is all too human. Killing fields or mass burial grounds are in the archeological record from the Neolithic period (6,000 to 7,000 years ago) on. Nonetheless, with the advent of modern weaponry and industrial processes, the killing fields of the world have grown to levels that can stagger the imagination. During World War II, when significant parts of the planet, including many of the globe’s great cities, were effectively reduced to ash, an estimated 60 million people, combatants and civilians alike, died (including six million Jews in the killing fields and ovens of Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and elsewhere).

America’s wars in our own time have been devastating: perhaps three to four million Koreans, half of them civilians (and 37,000 Americans), as well as possibly a million Chinese troops, died between 1950 and 1953 on a peninsula largely left in rubble. In the Indochina wars of the 1960s and 1970s, the toll was similarly mind-bending.  In Vietnam, 3.8 million civilians and combatants are estimated to have perished (along with 58,000 Americans); in Laos, perhaps one million people died; and in Cambodia, the U.S.-led part of that war resulted in an estimated 600,000-800,000 dead, while the rebel Khmer Rouge murdered another two to three million of their fellow countrymen in the autogenocide that followed. In all, we’re talking about perhaps, by the roughest of estimates, 12 million dead in Indochina in those years. 

And that’s just to begin to explore some of the numbers from World War II to the present. Nick Turse, who spent years retracing the slaughter that was the Vietnam War for his monumental, award-winning book on war crimes there, Kill Anything That Moves, has more recently turned to a set of killing fields that are anything but history. In the last three years, he’s paid three visits to South Sudan, the newest “country” on the planet, the one the U.S. midwifed into existence, producing a dramatic account of the ongoing internecine struggles there in his recent book Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. It’s a land that has experienced Syrian-level death counts with almost no attention whatsoever from the rest of the world. Recently, he returned to its killing fields and offers a chilling account of a largely forgotten land in which slaughter is the essence of everyday life. Tom

The Worst Place on Earth
Death and Life in the Lost Town of Leer
By Nick Turse

LEER, South Sudan -- There it is again. That sickening smell. I’m standing on the threshold of a ghost of a home. Its footprint is all that’s left. In the ruins sits a bulbous little silver teakettle -- metal, softly rounded, charred but otherwise perfect, save for two punctures. Something tore through it and ruined it, just as something tore through this home and ruined it, just as something tore through this town and left it a dusty, wasted ruin. 

This, truth be told, is no longer a town, not even a razed one. It’s a killing field, a place where human remains lie unburied, whose residents have long since fled, while its few remaining inhabitants are mostly refugees from similarly ravaged villages.

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Okay, here’s your quiz of the day: What country, according to the Congressional Research Service, has been the “largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” to the tune of $124.3 billion, and most of it military in nature?  Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Philippines?  The answer: none of the above.  The correct response is Israel.  In the midst of an election campaign in which almost nothing can’t be brawled about, military aid to Israel might be the only nonpartisan issue left.  After all, President Obama, who hasn’t exactly had a chummy relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascendant Israeli right, recently agreed to a deal that, even compared to the present stratospheric levels of military aid to Israel, the White House has termed “the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history.”  You’re talking about a 10-year deal (2019-2028) for this country's most advanced weaponry (and a lot of less advanced but no less destructive stuff as well) adding up to $38 billion, or about 27% higher than the previous aid package -- though Netanyahu originally asked for $45 billion, which represents chutzpah of a major sort).

This was undoubtedly the Obama administration’s way of throwing a sop (and quite a sop it is) to the Israeli prime minister in return for the Iran nuclear deal, which he so fervently opposed, and to congressional Republicans who also failed to block that deal (and many of whom are now relatively quiet but eager to pony up yet more military aid for the Israelis).  In fact, in an era in which hardly a move the U.S. has made across the Greater Middle East hasn’t come a cropper, resulting in collapsing states and spreading terror movements, you could say that Washington has had just one genuine success.  As befits the reigning arms trader on the planet, it has poured staggering amounts of weaponry into that embroiled region.  Only recently, for instance, we learned from a study by arms expert William Hartung that, since 2009, the Obama administration has offered the Saudis $115 billion worth of arms and advanced weapons systems in 42 separate deals -- a record even for the Saudi-U.S. relationship -- and don’t forget similar, if somewhat smaller scale sales, often of advanced weaponry, to Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries in the region.  

It’s quite a record. (U.S.A.!  U.S.A.!) Now, TomDispatch regular Sandy Tolan, author of Children of the Stone, puts that future $38 billion worth of weaponry for Israel in the context of the larger Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” in order to suggest just how bankrupt Washington’s policies in the Middle East actually are. Tom

Throwing in the Towel
What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for the Israelis and Palestinians
By Sandy Tolan

Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won’t find any acknowledgement of this in the official record. Formally, the U.S. still supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the Obama administration’s recent 10-year, $38-billion pledge to renew Israel’s arsenal of weaponry, while still ostensibly pursuing “peace,” makes clear just how bankrupt that policy is.

For two decades, Israeli leaders and their neoconservative backers in this country, hell-bent on building and expanding settlements on Palestinian land, have worked to undermine America’s stated efforts -- and paid no price. Now, with that record weapons package, the U.S. has made it all too clear that they won’t have to. Ever.

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Consider it justice (of a sort): he who lives by the media dies by the media. I’m talking -- as if you had a scintilla of doubt -- about Donald Trump. If the Washington Post’s release of a video of his lewd conversation with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush (that family again!) on his way to the set of Days of Our Lives proves to be the beginning of the end for him, there could be no more appropriate way to go. After all, we’re talking about the man whose greatest skill may be sensing the proximity of a camera and attracting it; about the man who, despite his recent denunciations of the use of unidentified “sources” in reporting his campaign, spent the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s calling reporters as “John Miller” and “John Barron” to offer the latest scoop on one Donald J. Trump; about the man who launched his political career in part by citing an “extremely credible source” claiming Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a "fraud"; about the man whose boasts of routinely assaulting women were caught on camera.

He was always a media-made man. In return, he's had an uncanny ability to glue eyeballs -- never more so than in this unending Super Bowl of elections that has included a level of public crudeness once unimaginable and now the purest of cash cows.  As CBS head Les Moonves put it earlier this year, speaking of The Donald’s performance: “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS... The money's rolling in and this is fun... Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” And keep going it has. 

So if, in the last week-plus, the media finally said to him, “You’re fired!” and started him on his presidential death spiral, who better? And of course, all the unavoidable questions of our moment follow, ensuring through-the-roof ratings for a few more lucrative weeks until November 8th: How far will he go down? Can he recover? Who will he take with him? And what about the Republican Party?

Until now, it’s been such a close relationship. The Donald has played a significant role in transforming the news into the strange, obsessive, 24/7 creature it is today, and in return the media made him. That it can now unmake him should surprise no one but does highlight the basic asymmetry between them, since he’s incapable of unmaking them. In this context, stop thinking of the mainstream news as “the fourth estate.” It, not the Libertarians or the Green Party, is now the true third party of the present infotainment version of American politics. Get used to it. Les Moonves and his associates aren’t going anywhere. And count on it: election 2020 starts on November 9th. These are, after all, the days of our lives.

Luckily, not everyone has been glued to the screen, eternally watching The Donald. From Black Lives Matter to the climate change movement, activists have, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out, never stopped working to make this a better world and, as she indicates, if we can take our eyes off the media spectacle-cum-circus for a few moments, they offer us a kind of hope for our future that shouldn’t be ignored. Tom

Learning to Claim Our Victories
Or Why Fighting for Justice Is Like Surfing
By Rebecca Gordon

In these dismal days of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope. How can that be? Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers who have been “rebuilding” for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game.

But what exactly is making me feel hopeful at the moment?

For one thing, we seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important.

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: On December 6th, in conjunction with Haymarket Books, Dispatch Books will be publishing its first novel, Splinterlands, by John Feffer, a riveting, dystopian view of our lives to come.  Based on a vivid (and much read) piece Feffer wrote for us late last year, the novel just got a starred pre-publication review at Publisher’s Weekly (a first for us): “In a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning, foreign policy analyst Feffer takes today’s woes of a politically fragmented, warming Earth and amplifies them into future catastrophe... This novel is not for the emotionally squeamish or optimistic; Feffer’s confident recitation of world collapse is terrifyingly plausible, a short but encompassing look at world tragedy.” Foreword Reviews, which highlights the best of the independent press, recently hailed it: “Feffer’s book is a wild ride through a bleak future, casting a harsh, thought-provoking light on that future’s modern-day roots.”

Barbara Ehrenreich has written: “Splinterlands paints a startling portrait of a post-apocalyptic tomorrow that is fast becoming a reality today. Fast-paced, yet strangely haunting, Feffer's latest novel looks back from 2050 on the disintegration of world order told through the story of one broken family -- and offers a disturbing vision of what might await us all if we don't act quickly." And Mike Davis says: "John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London, and, like the latter's Iron Heel, Splinterlands is a vivid, suspenseful warning about the ultimate incompatibility between capitalism and human survival."

In short, Splinterlands is a must-read. To make sure that you’re the first on your block to get a copy (and remember: each copy you buy is also a way of supporting TomDispatch's new publishing project), why not pre-order it now?  Here’s how to do it, and it’ll be in the mail to you on December 6th (and you’ll even get a significant discount): click on this link, which will take you to the Haymarket Books website.  Then click on "add to cart," select the number of copies of Splinterlands you want, and then click on "checkout." After you've filled out your shipping and billing information, you will be asked to enter a coupon code. To purchase one book, enter SPLINTER40 and you will get 40% off the cover price; for five or more books, enter SPLINTER50 and you will get 50% off. It’s the perfect Christmas gift in the grim year of 2016! Tom]

Recently, I posted a piece, “This Is Not About Donald Trump,” in which I explored some of the ways in which The Donald was, in American terms, anything but a freak of nature. As I suggested, the two roles he’s inhabited most fully in his life -- salesman and conman -- are so in the American grain that it’s been apple pie all the way to the Republican nomination for president. Think, then, of today’s post by TomDispatch regular John Feffer, author of the soon-to-be-published dystopian novel Splinterlands, as a kind of companion to that piece. It suggests far wilder ways in which Trump couldn’t be more in that same grain, if what you have in mind is the Dr. Strangelovian current that runs through American life, involving evangelicals, apocalyptics, survivalists, and white racists; even his extremity, that is, couldn’t be more us -- or, if you prefer, more U.S. Tom

Trump the Arsonist
Evangelicals, Survivalists, the Alt-Right, and Hurricane Donald
By John Feffer

The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the Republican primaries. It’s “like medieval times,” he suggested during the second presidential debate. “We haven’t seen anything like this, the carnage all over the world.”

For Trump, it’s not morning in America, it’s just a few seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock. Although his campaign doggedly continues to promise a new beginning for the country, the candidate and his advisers are sending out a very different message: the end is nigh. These Cassandras all agree that, although Obama’s two terms were no walk in the park, the stakes in 2016 are world-destroyingly higher. If Clinton is elected, the future could be, as conservative political operatives Dick Morris and Eileen McGann titled their recent book, Armageddon.

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Last week in Afghanistan, the Taliban, once almost lacking a presence in the northern part of the country, attacked Kunduz, a northern provincial capital and held parts of it for days (as they had in 2015). At the moment, that movement also has two southern capitals under siege, Tarin Kot in Helmand Province and Lashkar Gah in Uruzgan Province, and now seems to control more territory and population than at any time since the U.S. invasion of 2001-2002.  Mind you, from an American perspective, we’re talking about the war that time forgot. Amid the hurricane of words in Election 2016, neither presidential candidate nor their vice presidential surrogates has thought it worth the bother to pay any real attention to the Afghan War, though it is the longest in our history. It’s as if, 15 years later, it isn’t even happening, as if American troops hadn’t once again been ordered into combat situations and the U.S. Air Force wasn’t once again flying increased missions there.

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way, not for the planet's “sole superpower,” its “hyperpower,” its last remaining “sheriff” bestriding the globe with military bases in close to 80 countries, its Special Operations forces in almost 150 nations annually, and its Navy’s 10 aircraft carrier battle groups patrolling the seas.  On paper, it’s been a hell of a new century for the United States.  Only reality, it seems, has begged to differ.

As TomDispatch regular Dilip Hiro points out today, if you've noticed the growing assertiveness of China and Russia (and perhaps, one of these days, India will become more assertive, too), you'll know that we're on an increasingly multipolar planet. In reality, I suspect it’s always been a significantly more multipolar place than anyone in Washington cared to imagine. In a sense, our world is not only becoming more multipolar but also more helter-skelter, a place filled with low-level insurgencies and terror outfits that simply can’t be crushed, amid failing and collapsing states and vast refugee flows, on a globe that is ever more subject to the overheated, rampaging pressures of nature.  It’s not exactly the picture of a tidy imperial planet nor one that Washington had ever imagined possible. Tom

American Power at the Crossroads
A Snapshot of a Multipolar World in Action
By Dilip Hiro

In the strangest election year in recent American history -- one in which the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson couldn’t even conjure up the name of a foreign leader he “admired” while Donald Trump remained intent on building his “fat, beautiful wall” and “taking” Iraq oil -- the world may be out of focus for many Americans right now.  So a little introduction to the planet we actually inhabit is in order.  Welcome to a multipolar world.  One fact stands out: Earth is no longer the property of the globe’s “sole superpower.”

If you want proof, you can start by checking out Moscow’s recent role in reshaping the civil war in Syria and frustrating Washington’s agenda to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.  And that’s just one of a number of developments that highlight America’s diminishing power globally in both the military and the diplomatic arenas.  On a peaceable note, consider the way China has successfully launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a rival to the World Bank, not to speak of its implementation of a plan to link numerous countries in Asia and Europe to China in a vast multinational transportation and pipeline network it grandly calls the One Belt and One Road system, or the New Silk Road project.  In such developments, one can see ways in which the previously overwhelming economic power of the U.S. is gradually being challenged and curtailed internationally.

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