The One Percent?

With the fall of the Soviet Union, it soon became obvious that, for conservatives, we were entering a carpe diem moment, a rare, perhaps never to be repeated historical window of opportunity for opponents not just of communism but of a full spectrum of political philosophy--from our own homespun New Deal liberalism to socialism in all of its various forms.  Ironically, these efforts have been so frantic and strenuous that they actually betray a left-handed acknowledgement that such ideas cannot be buried forever.  The plan is nothing so delusional or ambitious.  The architects of this regimen are too sophisticated to be so detached from historical reality that they believe this is possible.  Instead, they buy as much time for global capitalism as they can by burying left wing thought in so deep a hole that its resurgence will take heroic time and effort.

      Of course, there is nothing entirely new in this.  The powerful have throughout history taken every measure they can to preserve their power.  While power is never reluctant to employ brute force and oppression to achieve its goals, covert control of social institutions, euphemism, outright lies and propaganda have all been violence's constant companions, even much to be preferred when possible.  Not since the French Revolution, however, was there so great a global threat to power and privilege (as current coinage would have it, an "existential" threat) as that posed by the now defunct revolutions in Russia and China.   (Our own revolution had no Robespierres, no aristocrats guillotined. In keeping with its DNA, it was driven by business concerns rather than class hatred and thus benign, largely off the radar of those fearing real revolution.) It might be kept in mind that conservatives had an earlier carpe diem moment in the aftermath of Great Britain's defeat of Napoleon.  As a result, Metternich's Concert of Europe lasted until World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to which it helped give birth.  It took exactly two hundred years, from 1789, the onset of the revolution in France, to 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall, at which time the right rushed to conclude, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn proclaimed on the front page of The New York Times, that, finally, it had been demonstrated that equality, fraternity and liberty were oxymoronic, incapable of coexistence.   Solzhenitsyn, it appears, was one writer who truly believed that French idealism could now be buried forever.  Conservatives everywhere would now begin a strenuous programme of "dig we must."  The first target and victim of their efforts, in a flurry of what may be seen as a linguistic form of shock therapy, was language.  As Orwell and many other thinkers had long been aware, control the minds of the masses and their bodies will follow.
      We now find ourselves live in a period in which double-speak, double-think, the wholesale giving over of language to all forms of twisted logic and, to use the polite expression, the mind-bender have become the go-to weapons of first choice for those assigned with the task of hiding unpleasant realities from the citizenry.  Though it is never entirely true to say that "it is all about language," when political speech is debased, trivialized and cleansed of it original meaning, logic and intent, it creates an Alice in Wonderland fantasy world that makes change and resistance far more difficult.  When innocent victims become "collateral damage," when powerfully armed nation states slaughter innocent victims in what amounts to the massacre of thousands or tens of thousands or even millions and it is written off as "asymmetrical warfare," exercises of power barely deserving to be described as "wars" at all, those nation states clothe themselves in veils of impunity. 

      
      

On Putin as a "Thug"

For some time now, but perhaps particularly after the events that took place in Ukraine this year, it has become nearly impossible to read any account of Vladimir Putin without finding him described as a "thug."  Though the adjective is liberally applied to other personae non gratae both current and historical, it is mandatory in writing about President Putin.  In what dark recesses of the American propaganda ministries these terms originate it is hard to say, but the creation and then obsessive repetition of such "truths" is a hallmark of how this country treats its perceived foes.  It is difficult to determine by what moral standard Putin earns such treatment while Americans who the rest of the world views as virtual war criminals, men like George Bush and Dick Cheney who gave us illegal wars, torture and preventive detention, just to head up the list, escape similar treatment.  One way of enhancing an indictment of thugishness is to impute ties to a local mafia.  Here, too, the lack of "clean hands" when it comes to those who indict others seems easily brushed aside.  Where Cheney and the Bush family are concerned, matters like the Enron or savings and loan scandals, to cite just two examples, are supposedly atomized in the general public amnesia.  We likewise reserve terms such as oligarch and plutocrat ( or its variant, kleptocrat) purely for our enemies, the reality of living in a glass house essentially owned lock, stock and barrel by a tenth of one percent of our population not serving as a deterrent against throwing stones ourselves.
        The American right wing, particularly the University of Chicago zealots with whose tactics we have become more painfully familiar with each passing year since the onset of the Reagan/Thatcher era, is fighting nothing less than a holy war.  Its enemies are demonized in a fashion highly reminiscent of the Muslim fatwa, a construct made infamous some years back when it was applied as a virtual death sentence to author Salman Rushdie for his having "blasphemed Islam" in one of his novels.  In this respect, as has often occurred in history, the two sides have come to resemble one another.  What is remarkable is the extent to which a "party line" seems to be so easily established in a land where there is a supposedly free press, freedom of expression and a free flow of ideas.  In this, too, the resemblance between what is done here in the U.S. and our caricatures of how the other side operates become almost indistinguishable.
     
      

What to Watch for in Gaza

Now that it should be fairly clear to all what the so-called Arab Spring was really about--more a spring board into chaos than anything resembling springtime hosts of daffodils--an even larger pattern emerges. Why would Israel launch an orgy of killing innocents, making it a pariah state in the minds of all nations outside of the Anglo-American cartel?  It is possible that Israel hopes to lure Hezbollah in Lebanon and forces in Syria into the fray for an all-out Michael Corleone day of reckoning.  Should such an event occur and meet with some success, all of the nations of the Muslim world--with the exception of Saudi Arabia--will have been successfully destabilized, a chain of failed states from the Straits of Gibraltar to the borders with China.  This would constitute a redrawing of the political map on a scale that we have not seen since the two world wars ended.  In this context, the "War on Terrorism," actually the rape of a whole culture that stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans, (never actually a war involving matched combatants), will have accomplished the aims of the Western powers, spearheaded by the U.S.  No one will be able to oppose the American hegemon.  Not a Muslim mouse will roar.
       The American inspired and supported putsch in the Ukraine will serve to divert Russian energy from playing the role of a great power in the region, laying the groundwork for further deepening the West's control over the theater of operations.  The Americans and the English were always better at mind games, the use of double and triple agents, false flag operations and the full panoply of covert operations--all deeply enhanced by their limitless capacity for being able to rationalize the most outrageous acts, costing countless loss of human lives--that gave us everything from Dresden to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the saturation bombing of Vietnam where it is often said that more tonnage of bombs were dropped than in all of World War II.  All for the greater good and the ultimate victory of Christian Civilization.

It's Not Just the Cold War that Is Not Over--It is WWII

As the rioting in Kiev continues and grows more violent, it becomes ever more clear that there is unfinished business going back not only to the Cold War but to World War II and even earlier.  Well within living memory for those who paid attention to history are the images of large numbers of Ukrainians greeting the invading Nazi troops not as invaders but as liberators.  Many of the children and grandchildren of those who were happy to see German troops on their soil are now among the "peaceful protesters" hurling Molotov cocktails at the Ukrainian police.

      Just as the West found ready allies in the Croats of the former Yugoslavia, it now finds allies in Ukrainian rightists with the same goal--the total destruction of any vestige of communist rule.  What Poles, Croats and many Ukrainians share is their Catholic faith and their visceral hatred of Communism, particularly when that hatred is embedded in their ancient hatred for Russia.  From the perspective of the West, those ancient animosities, combined with the Catholic church's demonization of atheistic communism and a nationalistic fervor vis a vis Russia, provide an ideal ally of opportunity in the effort to bury what is seen as the last bastion against American global hegemony--whether that foe is communist or not.  For the United States, with its self-assigned exceptionalism, a world-wide form of manifest destiny,  it matters little whether or not the cutting edge of opposition to Russia is nationalism, social philosophy (communism vs. capitalism) or religion; the underlying goal is the same.  The truth of this proposition is easily demonstrated for, in fact, Western attempts to "contain" Russia predate the 1917 revolution.  Russia has long been "in the way," as the so-called Great Game for control of Central Asia played by the first global empire that once flew the British flag everywhere the sun shined makes clear.  Today, the mantle of global empire dropped by Britain has been picked up by the American empire.  Today, the sun never sets on any of the over one thousand U.S. military bases that it maintains--even at the cost of nearly bankrupting itself--around the world.

      Whether in Yugoslavia or Georgia or Ukraine, we can count on one American "statesman," Arizona senator John McCain, (a former fighter pilot in Vietnam), to spell out for us the U.S. agenda in some utterance akin to that which he loudly proclaimed when Russian troops entered South Ossetia:  "Today, we are all Georgians."  Completely and blithely ignorant of history, (its own let alone past realities in other parts of the planet), U.S. citizens are easily duped into accepting the enemy of their enemy as their friends.   No crimes against their own people are too large for the U.S. to bury in the ash heap of history in exchange for their joining the cause--from Latin American dictators and their adherents even willing to assassinate Catholic priests to despots across the planet's longitudes similarly assigned to preserving the prerogatives of their various "one-percents."

      Frightened to their core by the prospect of communism's spread, demoralized by a world-wide depression in the capitalist world, Europe and America tolerated the spread of Fascism, turned a blind eye to the depravities of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler.   Some no doubt prayed that Fascism would do the dirty work and destroy the Soviet threat.  In the end, the Frankenstein monsters proved intolerable,  and the West was compelled to join in battle to defeat their creations.  That battle cost incalculable suffering and loss of life.  Next year we will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.  There are still many alive who remember; many alive who harbor the unthinkable nightmare that it could happen again.