Month: July 2023

Christening A Warship: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

/ went2thebridge / Leave a comment

Gov. Janet Mills at the podium, Senators Susan Collins and Angus King seated at right.

Yesterday, General Dynamics in collusion with the U.S. Navy held a “christening” of their latest warship, a nuclear-capable Aegis Destroyer attended by elected officials.

After decades of determined protest and, at times, civil disobedience leading to arrests outside Bath Iron Works’ gates, the shipyard’s glorifications of war making are no longer open to the general public. (They’re also announced at the last minute in obscure channels, so how our group is able to get wind of their plans in time to organize a response is anybody’s guess.)

That 24 of us gathered on short notice was one of the things right about yesterday. (Protester Bruce Gagnon’s favorable report is here.)Some of what was wrong:

🕱 Christening is an obnoxious term for naming a ship that will be used to menace China. 

Jesus Christ taught turn the other cheek and love one another. Co-opting his name to do pr for your nuclear weapons system is obscene.

🕱 The destroyer is named after a Vietnam war “hero” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) who’s incidentally still living and attended the ceremony. Most people who could remember the moral stain of the U.S. proxy war on China using Vietnam are dead. So, imperial narrative managers figure it’s time to refurbish the reputation of a wildly unpopular war that killed millions, poisoned thousands with chemical weapons, and spread cluster bombs that are still killing people in neighboring Laos and Cambodia.

🕱 The cost to the U.S. taxpayer for this warship: around $2 billion.

🕱 The Pentagon just failed its fifth audit, so we’ll probably never know why the ship cost so much. The U.S. military also just got the biggest budget ever authorized by Congress, a whopping $832 billion, and an undercount at that as nuclear weapons are funded through the Department of Energy budget.

🕱 As a friend pointed out to the reporter for the Times Record yesterday,

Outside the shipyard celebration, Mary Beth Sullivan of Brunswick was one of about 20 people who gathered to protest, holding signs that decried military spending and aggression.”The money should be going to human needs in our own community,” Sullivan, a social worker, said. “We could be building solar panels or windmills. There’re so many other projects we could be building if only we had a different mindset.

There’s so much profit in war.”

🕱 The reporter chose to follow MB’s quote with a rebuttal from Senator Angus King who was in attendance to kiss the ring of General Dynamics:

“There are people who say we shouldn’t spend so much money on defense and we shouldn’t build these ships,” King told the crowd. “The problem is there is evil and aggression in the world. If there’s any doubt of that: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The whole purpose of building this ship is notifying our adversaries … we have the capacity to punish them if they commit an act of aggression against the United States or its allies.

We are building these ships so they will never have to be used.”

🕱 King was there to demonstrate that no matter whether you have an I (he’s an independent), a D (Governor Janet Mills), or an R (Senator Susan Collins) after your name, the war machine owns you.

🕱 All military contracting is sold to local entities (who are then pressured to cough up tax rebates for the wealthy corporations they are lucky enough to attract) as a good jobs program. It is nothing of the kind, producing the lowest number of jobs generated per dollar invested in various economic sectors.

🕱 Ramping up a World War 3 with China is the Pentagon’s worst idea yet. If an Aegis is capable of carrying nukes, how is China supposed to know that a war ship menacing the South China Sea isn’t about to annihilate Beijing?

🕱 The environmental destruction to places like Gangjeong Village on Jeju Island in South Korea via construction to port U.S. war ships is tragic.

🕱 The climate harms of U.S. militarism are well-documented yet never included in the corporate news reporting that puffs gala events like the war ship celebration.


I’ll leave you with more of what went right:

☮ We did get a bit of coverage in local newspapers, both in advance and on the day of — which amplifies our messages considerably. (Kudos in particular to George and Maureen Ostensen for their publicity efforts.)

☮ A local talk radio show had me on prior to the event to talk about how and why we protest war ships.

☮ A lot of wisdom was shared in our closing circle (depicted above is Mair Honan, who moved many of us by speaking about war-induced grief).

☮ Many hundreds of celebration-goers, cops, security guards, and passers-by saw our messages. Some honked and waved, or thanked us for being there. 

☮ Our presence demonstrated that it’s possible to dissent from sailing full speed ahead toward nuclear world war.

BARBIE & OPPENHEIMER Are Both Sophisticated Propaganda Vehicles

/ went2thebridge / Leave a comment


I can hear you saying, “I get that OPPENHEIMER could be soft propaganda for nuclear weapons use but BARBIE??” And I’m right there with you — because not everything that comes out of Hollywood is propaganda for the U.S. empire’s war machine.

Unless it is.

Bear with me while I notice that a) BARBIE is stirring up controversy over a map that is glimpsed showing a nine-dash line delineating areas in the South China Sea right off the coast of China and 

b) U.S. client countries like the Philippines are lining up to ban BARBIE because they object to where the line is.

Here’s the non-fanciful map that NPR (National Pentagon Radio) served up in early July to accompany their article linked above:


Here’s another map I saw this morning that may have some relevance here:

Pew Research map shows unfavorable views of China are rather uneven worldwide and furthermore suggests that propaganda works. The highest percent of those viewing China unfavorably are in U.S. client states Australia and Japan, followed by U.S. client state Sweden, followed by the U.S. itself.
Heck, evenfalse stories about the Barbie movie are helping to fan the flames of the map controversy.

It’s evil, but I have to admire the empire’s narrative management strategies.

As for OPPENHEIMER? Don’t get me started. While sheepdogs for the Democratic Party insist the movie is required viewing and sure to turn anyone anti-nuclear, sharper analysts reach different conclusions. From indigenous activists Klee Benally and Leona Morgan:

To glorify such deadly science and technology as a dramatic character study, is to spit in the face of hundreds of thousands of corpses and survivors scattered throughout the history of the so-called Atomic age.

Think of it this way, for every minute that passes during the film’s 3-hour run time, more than 1,100 citizens in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died due to Oppenheimer’s weapon of mass destruction. This doesn’t account for those downwind of nuclear tests who were exposed to radioactive fallout (some are protesting screenings), it doesn’t account for those poisoned by uranium mines, it doesn’t account for those killed during nuclear power plant melt-downs, it doesn’t account for those in the Marshall Islands who are forever poisoned.

Of course the real power of propaganda is directing our attention, both away from inconvenient truths and toward a version of reality that benefits the powerful.

I’ll leave you with this example from popular culture aimed at young kids: 

This is  from a picture book for children, Diary of a Spider, published in 2011 by Scholastic. I could do an entire blog post on that corporate entity’s penetration of U.S. public schools with turn key book fairs that sell a myriad of pro-military and pro-empire books. 

Soft propaganda starts early and it never sleeps.