Is the world properly constituted? I used to think so. Having been brought up Catholic, and attended parochial schools, and served as an altar boy, I assumed that the cosmos was working according to a divine and just albeit mysterious plan.
Looking around, this does not appear to be the case. There are many examples, of course, but let’s take the current Russo-Ukraine war, about which we should be very much alarmed and outraged.
On this subject, Washington has shamelessly propagandized the world for its own ends. The aim has been to portray Russia as the bad guy in the conflict and Ukraine the good guy. America must naturally side with the good guy, being a good guy itself.
A Manichaeic, simple-minded scenario which has been swallowed hook, line and sinker not just in the U.S. but in Europe and Japan. Is it true? I wonder.
Please note that Washington is not just siding with Ukraine. It is actively promoting the conflict and taking part in it. Why?
Officials in Washington are providing Ukraine with carte blanche taxpayer-funded aid in the form of lethal weapons to kill Russians as well as outright transfers of cash and credits totaling many billions.
Concurrently, we are sanctimoniously assured that Ukraine is a valiant democracy by the American mainstream media commentariat.
Is what we have been told true, and is it any of our business in the first place? My view is that much of the narrative is not true, and that this civil war conflict should not be any of our business in the first or even second place.
On the other hand, informed observers know that Washington, with its behind the scene machinations, brought about the present war. Hence it could be argued that it is our business.
Or more precisely, Washington’s business—to clean up and rectify. But the malefactors who created the mess, including Joe Biden, can’t clean it up. They can’t think straight. And they have too much invested in it, to turn back now.
Is Ukraine a democracy? That’s debatable. Has anyone heard of the 2014 coup engineered in Kiev by Madame Secretary Victoria “fuck the EU!” Nuland and the democracy-loving CIA, which coup overthrew the elected government? The Zelensky regime is the successor.
This coup and Washington’s unconscionable, unnecessary meddling in Ukraine were entirely optional. It was extra-curricular activity, a series of deliberate policy decisions, the rationale for which remains unclear.
I suggest it is yet another example of crazed busybodyism in Washington, dressed up as a noble cause.
The Neocons and Neoliberals in Washington are on a private-agenda mission. Embarrassing, inept and know-nothing career politicians like Papa Joe Biden are along for the ride. The public is in the same boat.
This represents a tangent in American history, one that has been in play for a very long time, prior to the emergence of the current crew of reprobates, since 1898 and the Spanish-American war.
There was a fork in the road back then. Which path to take? The situation was understood and debated in the halls of Congress and in the press. The McKinley White House and Capitol Hill finally chose war and empire.
The original concept of “Manifest Destiny” was expanded. Having annexed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, Washington was off to the races. The track led to Woodrow Wilson’s Great War and to FDR’s Second World War. See inter alia, The Irony of Manifest Destiny by William Pfaff.
Manifest Destiny crashed through both the west and east coasts of North America…to embrace planet earth itself, which the Pentagon has divided up into various command zones. To the south, the entire South American continent was taken for granted to be a U.S. sphere of influence.
This strange phenomenon is folly, it seems to me, a wrong turn. The republic of 1789 has transmogrified into a world-wide American empire, predicated upon the U.S. Dollar status as the world’s reserve currency and upon a global military network of bases and alliances created during the Cold War.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the Neocons and Neoliberals—having gained working control over Washington—had to invent, shuffle, scheme and deceive.
Why? Because the legitimate purpose of the existing empire circa 1990 was very much in doubt. The Soviet Union was no more. What next?
The Dollar, economic sanctions, and military power became the enforcers of the “New World Order”—first announced by President H.W. Bush in 1991.
Relentless deadly sanctions and military interventions by the White House became the norm. It’s bullying on a truly massive scale, no matter how they dress it up.
Has the Neocon-neoliberal cabal who hijacked the USG done anything positive? Did they disband NATO, after the Soviet Union imploded and the Warsaw Pact disbanded? That would have been logical and honest.
No. To the contrary, Washington enlarged NATO eastward to enhance American hegemony in Europe and threaten non-communist Russia.
Did the average American receive the much-talked-about “peace dividend” for having outlasted the Soviet Union? No.
Americans were immediately misled in a different direction, on another crusade purportedly to save the world but actually to create new, determined enemies.
Does 9/11 ring a bell? Some people are still wondering, or pretend to wonder, why we were hit back then. Things do not happen out of the blue.
Dick Cheney’s sidekick explained that the reason simply was, the terrorists hated our democracy, our way of life. Few understood the concept of Blowback at the time. Or had read Chalmers Johnson’s book.
Did the Neocons and Neoliberals get on board with the project to banish or severely limit nuclear weapons, like the visionaries Reagan and Gorbachev wanted to do?
No. In the aftermath of the Cold War, they tore up existing agreements between America and Russia and refused to entertain the idea of new ones. It was to be a zero-sum game. Just ask Dick Cheney.
Washington’s justification? America was the exceptional nation, whose beneficent empire the world needed, to keep the world “properly constituted” as it were.
Hence, the status quo had to be maintained by force and chicanery. Otherwise, the world was going to spin off its axis. Washington’s template was the British Empire.
Over the years, this hubristic outlook has been touted most effectively by Robert Kagan, husband of the aforementioned U.S. Undersecretary of State, Victoria “fuck the EU!” Nuland.
She is the operative in charge of U.S. foreign policy for Europe and Russia. According to Andrew Bacevich, Kagan is, “the chief neoconservative foreign-policy theorist”. In brief, we have a husband and wife team at the controls.
The end-result is a nightmare. Both for the people on the ground and for those on the sidelines trying to make sense of it. No, the world is definitely not properly constituted.
