Why Do We Fight?
SF Mugged By Reality :: Politicians 4 Pimps :: Foreign Bureau of Investigation
Why Do We Fight?
In 1941, shortly after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Staff to the U.S. Army gave an assignment to a famous Hollywood movie director.
“Now, Capra,” said George Marshall to Oscar-winning Director Frank Capra, “I want to nail down with you a plan to make a series of documented, factual-information films — the first in our history — that will explain to our boys in the Army why we are fighting, and the principles for which we are fighting.”
Capra was famous for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It Happened One Night,” but he wasn’t sure how to sell the war to the American people. “I sat alone and pondered. How could I mount a counterattack against [Nazi propaganda film] ‘Triumph of the Will…”
Eventually, Capra landed on an idea: “Use the enemy's own films to expose their enslaving ends. Let our boys hear the Nazis and the Japs shout their own claims of master-race crud — and our fighting men will know why they are in uniform.” The result was the classic series of seven US propaganda films titled “Why We Fight.”
Now might be a good time for somebody in Hollywood to make a new “Why We Fight” about why Americans are going to war in Ukraine. As we noted last week, Biden decided to send cluster bombs to Ukraine even though, according to hawks on Capitol Hill, everything was going swimmingly, and Democrats had just a few months ago declared cluster bomb use a war crime.
Then, around noon yesterday, Biden said there was “no possibility” that Russian President Vladimir Putin could win the war in Ukraine. Indeed, reassured Biden, Putin had “already lost.”
But then, a few hours after that, Biden issued an executive order mobilizing 3,000 additional U.S. reserve troops to Europe. "This [executive order] reaffirms the unwavering support and commitment to defend NATO's eastern flank in the wake of Russia's illegal and unprovoked war on Ukraine," said Army Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims II, Joint Staff Director of Operations.
But… why? Because, Sims said, "This new designation benefits troops and families with increases in authorities, entitlements, and access to the reserve component forces and personnel."
So, the US military is deploying more troops to Europe to… benefit troops and families? Not exactly. In fact, Biden’s order mobilized soldiers who had already completed their contract to serve and were on their way to becoming civilians.
As such, the deployment highlights that the situation is far more desperate than Biden was letting on. And indeed, later in the press release, the Pentagon confesses that “fighting is severe.”
But then, just a few sentences later, the Defense Department writes, “Despite being shot at, bombed, and facing well-dug-in Russian defenses in tough terrain, Ukrainian forces are doing a remarkable job with their new equipment and techniques.”
Got that? Things are fine, and Putin has already lost. It’s just that fighting is severe, and we will need to commit thousands of additional troops and facilitate war crimes to win. As we noted last week, we have entered an era of doublethink.
And so it’s high time for Biden to find a director to create new propaganda films to explain to the troops, and the American people, why we are fighting and the principles for which we are fighting. Could the new “Why We Fight” films let our troops hear the Russians shout their own claims of being the master race?
That part might be tricky. After all, as The New York Times begrudgingly noted last month, the soldiers sporting Nazi imagery on their uniforms aren’t Russian. They’re Ukrainian.
—MS
Reality Makes a Cameo at the San Francisco Chronicle
In 2021, San Francisco’s infamously lenient former District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, warned against arresting and prosecuting the Honduran drug dealers that crowd the city’s downtown sidewalks on the theory that many of them were human trafficking victims coerced into the business. It’s a claim that has become a talking point of radical activists, and drug dealers’ lawyers routinely use it in court to get their clients off the hook.
Last year, I reported that Boudin’s human trafficking claim was specious, and now, in a blockbuster two-part series last week, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, Megan Cassidy and Gabrielle Lurie, further debunk that claim. The two traveled to the tiny village in Honduras where most of San Francisco’s drug dealers come from. There, dirt roads lead to sparkling new mini-mansions owned by the families of the Tenderloin’s drug dealers, emblazoned with the logos of San Francisco’s professional sports teams: the Giants, the 49ers, the Warriors. A teenager was financing one mansion under construction.
Dozens of drug dealers interviewed by the Chronicle’s reporters told them they had never heard of anyone trafficked. One dealer laughed at the idea, and told the Chronicle that the claim was just a defense strategy: “I told myself, ‘That’s what I’m going to tell my lawyer too,’ ” he said. “It went through my mind like, ‘I’m going to tell my lawyer they’re going to kill my family.’ ”
The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, which dominate San Francisco’s drug trade, don’t need to force anyone to sell drugs in the Tenderloin and SoMa, because the work is so lucrative — as I reported a year ago, dealers can make up to $1,000 a day. This too, is born out by the Chronicle’s reporting: dealers told Cassidy and Lurie they can make $350,000 a year doing it. “San Francisco gives me the money, the free money,” one dealer told the two reporters. “San Francisco is my city.”
Dealers told the Chronicle something else that’s obvious to anyone paying attention: San Francisco’s well-intentioned sanctuary protections are being exploited by Honduran dealers to keep them out of jail and the drug market open for business. “The law, because they don’t deport, that’s the problem,” one dealer told the reporters. “Many look for San Francisco because it’s a sanctuary city. You go to jail, and you come out.”
That’s precisely the case that San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey made when he proposed a carve-out to the city’s sanctuary laws to allow for the deportation of fentanyl dealers. For that, San Francisco progressives vilified him. Public Defender Mano Raju depicted Dorsey’s proposal as a racist attack on immigrants, invoking, once again, the human trafficking myth.
This has been the pattern in San Francisco politics: call anyone who acknowledges the obvious realities of the city’s transnational drug trade a bigot. Mayor London Breed was called “racist” merely for publicly noting the well-known fact that many of the city’s dealers are from Honduras, and pressured into apologizing.
Given the depth of the Chronicle’s reporting, dismissing the paper’s findings with such cynical smears will be harder. But that isn’t stopping the coalition of activists that has been shielding the cartel from the police for years from trying. In any other city, a report like this might radically change the political dynamic. But in San Francisco, the political rot is so deep that it’s hard to be confident that anything could dislodge it.
—LW
Deep Fake Of the Week
“This is an AI-generated image,” warns Twitter’s Community Notes of this beauty.
“All birds, including owls, are biped.”
Who says deep fakes can’t provide real nature education?