During his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation's op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time Magazine reported, just a week before the election, that "the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash . . . . what bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump."

Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing). "It doesn't surprise me when a socialist such as Bernie Sanders sees no need to fix our entitlement programs," the former Goldman CEO wrote. "But I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won't touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid."

Some of Trump's advocated assaults on D.C. orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at least some left-wing factions (e.g., his professed opposition to regime change war in Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions, global free trade deals, entitlement cuts, greater conflict with Russia, and self-destructive pro-Israel fanaticism), while other Trump positions were horrifying to anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding GITMO, killing terrorists' families, launching Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing hostility with Tehran, further unleashing federal and local police forces). Ironically, Trump's principal policy deviation around which elites have now coalesced in opposition - a desire for better relations with Moscow - was the same one that Obama, to their great bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by Obama's refusal to more aggressively confront the Kremlin-backed Syrian government or arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).

It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.

Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites' fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways - due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in western capitals, his reckless unpredictability - Trump posed a threat to their power centers.

It is often claimed that this trans-partisan, elite coalition assembled against Trump because they are simply American patriots horrified by the threat he poses to America's noble traditions and institutions. I guess if you want to believe that the CIA, the GOP consulting class, and assorted D.C. imperialists, along with Bush-era neocons like Bill Kristol and David Frum, woke up one day and developed some sort of earnest, patriotic conscience about democracy, ethics, constitutional limits, and basic decency, you're free to believe that. It makes for a nice, moving story: a film from the Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington genre. But at the very least, Trump's campaign assaults on their most sacred pieties was, and remains, a major factor in their seething contempt for him.

From the start of Trump's presidency, it was clear that the permanent national security power structure in Washington was deeply hostile to his presidency and would do what it could to undermine it. Shortly before Trump was inaugurated, I wrote an article noting that many of the most damaging anti-Trump leaks were emanating from anonymous CIA and other Deep State operatives who despised Trump because the policies he vowed to enact - the ones American voters ratified - were so contrary to their agenda and belief system. Indeed, they were even anonymously boasting that they were withholding secrets from Trump's briefings because they decided the elected President should not have access to them.

After Trump openly questioned the reliability of the CIA in light of their Iraq War failures, Chuck Schumer went on Rachel Maddow's show to warn Trump - explicitly - that he would be destroyed if he continued to oppose the intelligence community.

Although it is now common to assert - as a form of in-the-know mockery - that the notion of a "Deep State" in the U.S. was invented by Trump supporters only in the last year, the reality is that the U.S. Deep State has been reported on and openly discussed in numerous circles long before Trump. In 2010, the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Dana Priest, along with Bill Arkin, published a three-part series which the paper entitled "Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control."

The Post series documented that the military-intelligence community "has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." The Post concluded that it "amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight."

In 2014, mainstream national security journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady published a book entitled "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Agency," which documented - in its own words - that "there is a hidden country within the United States," one "formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them."

Other journalists, such as Peter Dale Scott and Mike Lofgren have long written about the U.S. Deep State completely independent of Trump. The belief that the "Deep State" was invented by Trump supporters as some recent conspiratorial concoction is based in pure ignorance about national security discourse, or a jingoistic desire to believe that the U.S. (unlike primitive, inferior countries) is immune from such malevolent forces, or both.

Indeed, mainstream liberals in good standing, such as the New Republic's Jeet Heer, have repeatedly and explicitly speculated about (and, in Heer's case, warned of) the possibility of Deep State subversion of the White House:

The terrifying thing here is the only people able to stand up to Trump so far are the denizens of the Deep State. Also the Chinese gov't. The American Deep State is in open conflict with an incoming president who is twitchy, thin-skinned & paranoid. What could go wrong? For me, the most terrifying thing about this political moment is the intervention of the Deep State (against both Clinton & Trump).

It's very hard to change American foreign policy (absent a Pearl Harbor or 9/11) because NatSec elite very mulish & committed to status quo. Call it what you will -- the National Security Elite, the Deep State, the Blob. It's very pig-headed & knows how to sabotage change. To qualify earlier tweet, there's a lot Deep State can do short of a coup: leaking and investigation. That's all to the good.

The last several weeks have ushered in more open acknowledgment of - and cheerleading for - a subversion of Trump's agenda by unelected military and intelligence officials. Media accounts have been almost unanimous in heralding the arrival of retired Marine Gen. John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff (pictured, top photo), widely depicted as a sign that normalcy is returning to the Executive Branch. "John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House," the New York Times headline announced.

The current storyline is that Kelly has aligned with Trump's National Security Advisor, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, to bring seriousness and order to the White House. In particular, these two military men are systematically weakening and eliminating many of the White House officials who are true adherents to the domestic and foreign policy worldview on which Trump's campaign was based. These two military officials (along with yet another retired General, Defense Secretary James Mattis) have long been hailed by anti-Trump factions as the Serious, Responsible Adults in the Trump administration, primarily because they support militaristic policies - such as the war in Afghanistan and intervention in Syria - that is far more in line with official Washington's bipartisan posture.

As the Atlantic's Rosie Gray reports, McMaster has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy and anti-Muslim worldview Trump advocated throughout the election. As Gray notes, this has provoked anger among Trump supporters who view the assertion of power by these Generals as an undemocratic attack against the policies for which the electorate voted. Gray writes: "McMaster's show of force has set off alarm bells among Bannon allies in the pro-Trump media sphere, who favored Flynn and regard the national-security adviser as a globalist interloper."

In a bizarre yet illuminating reflection of rapidly shifting political alliances, Democratic Party think tanks and other groups have rallied behind McMaster as some sort of besieged, stalwart hero whose survival is critical to the Republic, notwithstanding the fact that, by all accounts, he is fighting to ensure the continuation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and escalate it in Syria. As usually happens these days, these Democrats are in lockstep with their new neocon partners, led by Bill Kristol, who far prefer the unelected agenda of McMaster and Kelly to the one that Trump used to get elected:

"The success or failure of the Bannon/alt-right/Russian assault on McMaster will be a key moment for the Trump Administration--& the country.

But there's no denying that Trump is deluged by exactly the kinds of punishments which Schumer warned Trump would be imposed on him if he continued to defy the intelligence community. Many of Trump's most devoted haters are, notably, GOP consultants; one of the most tenacious of that group, Rick Wilson, celebrated today in the Daily Beast that the threat of prosecution and the tidal waves of harmful leaks has forced Trump into submission. The combination of the "Goldman Boys" and the Generals has taken over, Wilson crows, and is destroying the Bannon-led agenda on which Trump campaigned.

Whatever else is true, there is now simply no question that there is open warfare between adherents to the worldview Trump advocated in order to win, and the permanent national security power faction in Washington that - sometimes for good, and sometimes for evil - despises that agenda. The New Republic's Brian Beutler described the situation perfectly on Friday:

"Where the generals haven't been empowered to run the show, they have asserted themselves nonetheless. 'In the earliest weeks of Trump's presidency,' the Associated Press reported Tuesday, Mattis and Kelly agreed 'that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.'"

Beutler is a full-scale, devoted enemy of Trump's political agenda, and is clearly glad that something is impeding it. But he also recognizes the serious, enduring dangers to democracy from relying on military officials and intelligence operatives to serve as some sort of backstop, or supreme guardians, of political values and norms.

It's particularly ironic that many of the same people who have spent the year ridiculing the notion that the U.S. has any kind of Deep State are now trumpeting the need for the U.S. military to save the Republic from the elected government, given that this, roughly speaking, is the defining attribute of all Deep States, at least as they depict themselves.

There have been some solitary Democratic Party voices expressing concern about these developments. Here, for instance, is what Barbara Lee had to say as most of her fellow Democrats were cheering the arrival of Gen. Kelly in the West Wing:

"By putting Gen John Kelly in charge, Pres Trump is militarizing the White House & putting our executive branch in the hands of an extremist."

No matter how much of a threat one regards Trump as being, there really are other major threats to U.S. democracy and important political values. It's hard, for instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly aligning. And who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades than the U.S. National Security State?

In terms of some of the popular terms that are often thrown around these days - such as "authoritarianism" and "democratic norms" and "U.S. traditions" - it's hard to imagine many things that would pose a greater threat to all of that than empowering the National Security State (what, before Trump, has long been called the Deep State) to exert precisely the power that is supposed to be reserved exclusively for elected officials. In sum, Trump opponents should be careful of what they wish for, as it might come true.
(c) 2017 Glenn Greenwald. was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy," examines the Bush legacy. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

THE WHOLE world watched with bated breath while the days passed. Then the hours. Then the minutes.

The world watched while the condemned man, Muhammad Abu-Ali of Qalqiliya, waited for his execution.

Abu-Ali was a convicted terrorist. He had bought a knife and killed four members of a family in a nearby Jewish settlement. He had acted alone in a fit of anger, after his beloved cousin, Ahmed, was shot and killed by the Israeli border police during a demonstration.

This is an imaginary case. But it resembles very much what would happen if a real case that is now pending were to take this turn.

THERE IS no death penalty in Israel. It was abolished during the first years of the state, when the execution of Jewish underground fighters (called "terrorists" by the British) was still fresh in everybody's mind.

It was a solemn and festive occasion. After the vote, in an unplanned outburst of emotion, the entire Knesset rose and stood at attention for a minute. In the Knesset, such expressions of emotion, like applause, are forbidden.

On that day I was proud of my state, the state for which I had spilled my blood.

BEFORE THAT day, two people had been executed in Israel.

The first was shot during the early days of the state. A Jewish engineer was accused of passing information to the British, who passed it on to Arabs. Three military officers constituted themselves as a military court and condemned him to death. Later it was found that the man was innocent.

The second death sentence was passed on Adolf Eichmann, an Austrian Nazi who in 1944 directed the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the death camps. He was not very high up in the Nazi hierarchy, just a lieutenant-colonel ("Obersturmbannführer") in the SS. But he was the only Nazi officer with whom Jewish leaders came into direct contact. In their minds, he was a monster.

When he was kidnapped in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem, he looked like an average bank clerk, not very impressive and not very intelligent. When he was condemned to death, I wrote an article asking myself whether I was in favor of his execution. I said: "I dare not say yes and I dare not say no." He was hanged.

A PERSONAL confession: I cannot kill a cockroach. I am unable to kill a fly. That is not a conscious aversion. It is almost physical.

It was not always so. When I had just turned 15, I joined a "terrorist" organization, the Irgun ("National Military Organization"), which at the time killed lots of people, including women and children, at Arab markets in retaliation for the killing of Jews in the Arab rebellion.

I was too young to be employed in the actions themselves, but my comrades and I distributed leaflets proudly proclaiming the actions. So I certainly was an accomplice, until I left the organization because I started to disapprove of "terrorism."

But the real change in my character occurred after I was wounded in the 1948 war. For several days and nights I lay in my hospital bed, unable to eat, drink or sleep, just thinking. The result was my inability to take the life of any living being, including humans.

So, naturally, I am a deadly enemy of the death penalty. I greeted with all my heart its abolition by the Knesset (before I became a member of that not-very-august body.)

But a few days ago, somebody remembered that the death penalty was not really quite abolished. An obscure paragraph in the military code has remained in force. Now there is an outcry for its application.

The occasion is the murder of three members of a Jewish family in a settlement. The Arab assailant was wounded but not killed on the spot, as usually happens.

The entire right-wing clique that governs Israel now broke out in a chorus of demands for the death penalty. Binyamin Netanyahu joined the chorus, as did most members of his cabinet.

Netanyahu's attitude can easily be understood. He has no principles. He goes with the majority of his base. At the moment he is deeply involved in a huge corruption affair concerning the acquisition of German-built submarines. His political fate hangs in the balance. No time for moral quibbles.

PUTTING ASIDE, for the moment, my personal mental disabilities concerning the death penalty, judging the problem on a rational basis shows that it is a huge mistake.

The execution of a person who is considered a patriot by their own people arouses profound anger and a deep desire for revenge. For every person put to death, a dozen others arise to take their place.

I speak from experience. As already mentioned, I joined the Irgun when I was hardly 15. A few weeks before, the British had hanged a young Jew, Shlomo Ben-Yossef, who had shot at an Arab bus full of women and children, without hitting anyone. He was the first Jew in Palestine to be executed.

Later on, after I had already forsworn "terrorism", I still felt emotionally involved whenever the British hanged another Jewish "terrorist". (I take pride in having invented the only scientifically sound definition of "terrorism": "A freedom fighter is on my side, a terrorist is on the other side.")

ANOTHER ARGUMENT against the death penalty is the one I described at the beginning of this piece: the inherent dramatic effect of this penalty.

From the moment a death sentence is passed, the entire world, not to mention the entire country, gets involved. From Timbuktu to Tokyo, from Paris to Pretoria, millions of people, who have no interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, get aroused. The fate of the condemned man starts to dominate their lives.

Israeli embassies will be deluged by messages from good people. Human rights organizations everywhere will get involved. Street demonstrations will take place in many cities and grow from week to week.

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people, until then a minor news item in newspapers and on TV news, will be the center of attention. Editors will send special correspondents, pundits will weigh in. Some heads of state will be tempted to approach the president of Israel and plead for clemency.

As the date of execution grows nearer, the pressure will grow. In colleges and in churches, calls to boycott Israel will become shrill. Israeli diplomats will send urgent alarms to the Foreign Office in Jerusalem. Embassies will strengthen anti-terror precautions.

The Israeli government will meet in urgent emergency sessions. Some ministers will advise commuting the sentence. Others will argue that that would show weakness and encourage terror. Netanyahu, as usual, will be unable to decide.

I KNOW that this line of argument may lead to a wrong conclusion: to kill Arab assailants on the spot.

Indeed, this is a second discussion tearing Israel apart at the moment: the case of Elor Azaria, a soldier and field medic, who shot at close range a wounded Arab assailant lying on the ground and bleeding profusely. A military court sentenced Azaria to a year and half in jail, and the sentence was confirmed on appeal. Many people want him released. Others, including Netanyahu again, want his sentence commuted.

Azaria and his entire family are enjoying themselves hugely at the center of national attention. They believe that he did the right thing, according to an unwritten dictum that no Arab "terrorist" should be allowed to remain alive.

Actually, this was openly pronounced years ago by the then Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir (who himself, as a leader of the Lehi underground, was one of the most successful "terrorists" of the 20th century). For that he did not need to be very intelligent.

FROM WHATEVER angle one looks at it, the death sentence is a barbaric and stupid measure. It has been abolished by all civilized countries, except some US states (which can hardly be called civilized.)

Whenever I think about this subject, the immortal lines of Oscar Wilde in his "Ballad of Reading Gaol" come to my mind. Observing a fellow prisoner, a convicted murderer, awaiting his execution, Wilde wrote:

The cops at a Long Island, New York, pro-police event "laughed and cheered" when President Trump urged them to brutalize immigrant prisoners - "animals," as he called them. Then, caught in mid-guffaw, the supervisors and flaks for the bad boys and girls in blue struggled to straightened out their faces and disavow Trump's remarks.

"What the president recommended...is not what policing is about today," claimed Steve Soboroff, a civilian commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department, which is forever situating police brutality somewhere in the past.

"The president's comments stand in stark contrast to our department's commitment to constitutional policies and community engagement," said New Orleans police chief Michael Harrison. His city took until last December to reach a $13.3 million settlement for Katrina-related police murder and maiming of civilians.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police hastily restated its policy "that any use of force is carefully applied and objectively reasonable considering the situation confronted by the officers" -- a statement that sounds very much like the standard legal defense presented in the miniscule fraction of police brutality cases that actually go to trial.

The police department in Suffolk County, where Trump gave his speech, was compelled to allow federal oversight of its treatment of Latino immigrants in 2013, including claims that the department "discouraged Latino victims from filing complaints and cooperating with the police, and failed to investigate crimes and hate crime incidents involving Latinos." A former Suffolk County police chief was recently sentenced to almost four years in prison for beating up an immigrant who stole pornography and sex toys from the chief's car. But, Trump's spittle was barely dry on the podium before the department declared, on Twitter: "We do not and will not tolerate roughing up of prisoners..." The department "has strict rules & procedures relating to the handling of prisoners... Violations of those rules are treated extremely seriously."

Democracy Now! trotted out Maya Wiley, the chairwoman of New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board. Wiley actually bragged that her panel is "one of the oldest civilian oversight bodies in the country, and certainly the largest" -- which simply means it has been party to more police murders of civilians than any similar body since its beginnings in the 1950s.

The New York Times exploited Trump's bestiality with an editorial in praise of the police. "Law enforcement's backlash against this speech says something about how forward-looking police officials think about their responsibilities," wrote the Commissars of Capital at the Times. In this narrative -- shared by virtually all corporate media, but rooted nowhere in reality -- the police are in a perpetual process of reform. Trump is trying to drag the cops back into a savage past that they are valiantly attempting to escape. The editorial suggests "the president might bear this in mind the next time he opens his mouth on this subject."

The problem with the criminal justice system, according to both the Times and New York police review board chairwoman Wiley, is a lack of trust between the police and the community. "Enforcement strategies based in brutality make it difficult to solve crimes - because they alienate communities from the law, making it harder for officers to do their jobs," according to the Times. Wiley is most concerned about "safety." "One of the ways we create safety is that we have better relationships between police and community, the community trusts police, they're able to come to police," she said.

If only more "trust" could be created between "the community" and the armed, coercive forces of the state, everything would be lovely. Questions of power and democracy do not enter into the corporate equation -- including corporate "reformers." Maya Wiley speaks of the inability of police to "do their jobs" when communities feel alienated, assuming that their "job" is to provide "safety" to the community. But, that is like saying the job of prison guards is to keep inmates safe, rather than keeping them in captivity.

The real issues are power and democracy; the democratic exercise of power by the people of the community. Democracy demands that a self-determining people define "the job" that the police are hired to perform, and that the community have the power to hire and fire security personnel. When security regimes are imposed on a people by outside forces, it is repression, an injustice that must be resisted. No justice, no peace.

When Trump blows his whistle to incite the police to further crimes of repression, the more calculating corporate forces seize the opportunity to set the bar of "reform" even lower. The people are conditioned to equate justice with a lessening of instances of police brutality and blatant disrespect -- but not with community power over the police. They are discouraged from demanding that the police be directly accountable to the communities they patrol. Instead, the people are told to concentrate on the methods used by police to impose "order" in the community. Instead of "Power to the People," the demand becomes, "Please don't hurt us too badly."

So-called "community policing" is a gimmick and diversion. As Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation's best known political prisoner, puts it: "Body cameras? Training? BS. Nonsense. Done. It is a bourgeois mirage."

A coalition New York area organizations is pushing an expansion of the immigrant-based "sanctuary cities" concept, to include the historical victims of economic and police repression in the United States. "Where," they ask, "is the sanctuary for folks impacted by the War on Drugs, racial profiling, or police violence? Where is the sanctuary for people with convictions?" Among the demands of the "Freedom Cities" campaign are "Community Control," to "gain real control of the institutions that people interact with daily, including police and other public agencies"; and "Community Defense," to "establish systems of self-defense in neighborhoods to protect rights and dignity."

Elements of Black Lives Matter have taken similar positions.

The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, which is holding a national conference in Chicago, August 12 and 13, last year ratified a 19-point National Black Political Agenda for Self-Determination that calls for Black Community Control of the Police:

"We demand the immediate withdrawal of all domestic military occupation forces from Black communities. This democratic demand assumes the ability of Black people to mobilize for our own security and to redefine the role of the police so that it no longer functions as an agency imposed on us from the outside."

The US submarine captain says, "We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know and there's nothing to be done about it."

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

These lines from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute's novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world's second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

Their main aim seems to be war - real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies - the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people." He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom."

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present." Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics," wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man - not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system - beckons great danger for all of us.

While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional."

A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the "national security" managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them "the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today."

They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia's "borderland" - the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people. Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.

In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin - anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China's economic lifelines.

The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required," he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute's fiction.

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding cliches. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 - during the Cuban missile crisis - he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded - but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down."

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 - the year Shute wrote On the Beach - no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world's most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America's modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America's longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings - murder - by drones.

In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs - three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama - with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side - who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief."

One of Obama's last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618 billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.