WHAT
THE SPOOKS call an “estimate” is pretty much the same thing as what we
who practice the craft of print journalism call a “news analysis” – or
colloquially (and with characteristic green-visored cynicism*) – a
“think-piece” or a “thumb-sucker.”
In
either realm – whether that of Casper's less-than-friendly twin or that
of the professional descendants of Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken and
Louise Bryant – such studies examine events as expressions of their
historical contexts. Presumably, these broader perspectives reveal
“indications,” Casperian for “probable trends and outcomes.”
Ray McGovern, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief Soviet foreign policy analyst turned Consortium News
reporter, had 27 years experience in the spook role before he took up
journalism. Thus his understanding of people, places and things Russian
is of sufficient depth and magnitude to warrant not just our casual
notice, but our most closely focused attention.
“The West Snubs Russia over VE Day,” linked here,
is maybe McGovern's most usefully informative piece yet on the Ukraine
crisis. Not only does he lucidly present his own expert analysis; he
also provides links to relevant works by other experts on Russia –
academics who are now, with already tragic and potentially
extinction-level consequences – being passively ignored (if not
aggressively marginalized) by the world-conquest-minded One Percent and
their vassals in government and media.
“(D)o
not feel you must rely on me (although I have been watching what
happens in Russia and Europe for half a lifetime),” McGovern wrote. “I
strongly recommend the trenchant insights of John Mearsheimer,
pre-eminent political science professor at the University of Chicago,
and professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton and New York University, a
distinguished Russianist who has been a Kremlin watcher even longer than
I have.”
But
to me the most revealing passage in “The West Snubs Russia” is a
statement by former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that describes the
newest origins of the USian effort at global conquest:
“It
all began with the fact that the United States suddenly started talking
about the creation of a ‘new empire.’ An over-empire, a
super-empire. Alas, God and fate had put the task before them. Yes, they
thought their moment had come.”
Knowing as I do the dreadful reality of USian Christian theocracy -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008) or the just-released Bloomberg poll revealing the USian Christian fanaticism that's expressed as unequivocal support for Israel – the reference to “God” is genuinely chilling.
Thus
Gorbachev – like Mencken and Sinclair Lewis nearly a century earlier – has it terribly right. If you convince Moron Nation it is acting as
an instrument of “God's divine plan,” it will obey without question,
whether the mandate is the extermination of First Nations peoples (as it
was in the 19th Century), the re-enslavement of blacks (as it is today
via for-profit prisons and federally militarized police), or (as is
threatened by the Ukraine crisis), the crucifixion of the planet on a
thermonuclear cross of capitalist greed and imperialist ambition.
Finally
there is my own answer to the question implicit in McGovern's statement
that as to “what lies behind U.S. actions in central Europe...try as I
may to come up with cogent explanations that make some sense – the
reasons elude me.”
To
me – as to anyone else who truly understands the bottomless evil of
capitalism – the answer is as obvious as it is terrifying, even if it
remains officially unthinkable and unspeakable in mainstream U.S.
society.
Because
the One Percent has outsourced nearly the entire U.S. economy, most of
us in the 99 Percent are now surplus workers. We are therefore people
whom our overlords – once they finish imposing their Ayn Rand variant
of Nazism – would gleefully exterminate, just as our overlords'
ancestors smirkingly exterminated their surplus slaves.
And what today are our overlords' easiest, most efficient, most euphemistically camouflaged methods of extermination?
One
is the abandonment of unprofitable populations to natural disasters, as
were the blacks of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.
Another is “austerity,” the euphemism for intentionally genocidal cutbacks in government social and medical services.
A third, as McGovern notes in “Snubs Russia,” is the de facto
military draft driven by poverty and joblessness. Already operational,
its killing machine is methodical escalation of the wars of empire, with
the inconceivable casualties of thermonuclear war thus positioned to
provide extermination in its most optimum and efficient form.
The One Percenters and their political and military vassals are of course meanwhile protected in presumably atom-proof bunkers.
Could
this be the ultimate reason behind the intensifying U.S. provocation of
Russia? Particularly given the genocidal intent evident in other U.S.
policies, no other explanation seems so likely.
*** *** ***
ANOTHER CONSORTIUM NEWS piece on this week's list of recommended reading is Robert Parry's careful documentation of “Obama's 'Openness' and Deceit,” which summarizes in stark detail many of the more glaring elements of Obama the Orator's obviously premeditated self-transformation into Barack the Betrayer.
Here's a key paragraph:
“This
failure to trust the people with accurate information has arguably done
great harm to U.S. democracy by promoting false narratives on a range
of foreign conflicts. With all its talk about 'public diplomacy' and
'information warfare,' the Obama administration seems intent on using
half-truths and falsehoods to herd the people into a misguided consensus
rather than treating them like the true sovereigns of the Republic, as
the Framers of the Constitution intended with the explicit phrase 'We
the People of the United States.'”
Which again makes relevant my comments last week on Parry's “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.”
Parry wrote of the Nazi death squads now (predictably) at work in
Ukraine and of equally predictable “propaganda efforts by the Obama
administration and the major U.S. news media to play down western
Ukraine’s legacy of Nazi collaboration.”
As I wrote in reply,
“Give Moron Nation ten more years of dumbing-down – at the current
rate of moronation, maybe even less than that – and it will be official
policy the United States was on the wrong side in World War II: that
U.S. support would have enabled capitalism's conquest of the planet 70
years ago.”
_________
*Green visors, or eye-shades, described here,
were frequently worn by old-time newspaper editors, including many of
those for whom I worked during my younger manhood. The visors protected
its wearer's eyesight from the harsh overhead glare that often
characterized newsroom lighting in the days before the American
Newspaper Guild and other such unions made on-the-job eyestrain a
bargaining issue.
*** *** ***
I
DEEPLY APPRECIATE websites on which the discussion encourages real
thinking (and therefore writing that is sometimes lively and interesting
rather than, for example, the soporific parroting of Democratic Party
talking points we encounter at Daily Kos and so many other self-proclaimed “Leftist” domains.
One of my all-time favorites is Thom Hartmann's Blog,
which has an attached discussion thread that seems to bring out the
best from its regular participants. The occasional fascists who stomp in
anticipating easy prey soon discover they are hopelessly outclassed,
and usually they quickly retreat. A very few stick around for a while,
hopefully long enough to loosen the stranglehold Ayn Rand and all the
other Hitler surrogates have on their alleged minds.
In any case, if I may paraphrase the clever late-1950s advertising campaign
that briefly tempted me to switch from Pall Malls to Viceroys, Hartmann
offers “a thinking person's blog for a rebellious person's taste.”
I've
contributed to its dialogue off-and-on for several years, probably
starting in 2009 or 2010, though alas the files that would confirm my
actual starting-date were destroyed in the recent computer debacle.
As
I started getting back on-line, an exceptionally informative Hartmann
news analysis prompted me to elaborate in writing an idea that has
intrigued me for some time – that China's capitalism is a Sun-Tzu-type ruse, perhaps the most clever such ruse in our species' history. Here is the full text of my comment:
"All warfare is based on deception" -– Sun Tzu, c. 500 BCE
Knowing
something of the history of our species' long and mostly unsuccessful
struggle for economic democracy –- knowing also just a bit about the
Chinese revolution -– I have always found the apparent Chinese embrace
of capitalism perplexing. East Asian civilization, with a cultural
continuity extending back at least 5,000 years, has no counterpart on
this planet. Though the civilizations of Europe and the Middle East are
equally old, the inherent savagery of Abrahamic religion has ensured the
total suppression of all of the cultural wisdom of these region's first
3,000 years, with the result that -– never mind for example our
European DNA can be traced to the paleolithic -– we "barbarians" (for
that is how East Asia regards us) -– are, culturally speaking, mere
children. For this reason China has always seemed to me far better
prepared to resist the deadly temptations of capitalism, which in truth
is not just an economic system but an entire universe of hierarchy,
governance and exploitation based on a single precept: that there is no
greater virtue than greed. Thus I was genuinely astounded when the
People's Republic of China seemed to adopt the very ideology against
which its people had fought for most of the first half of the last
century.
The
easy answer, of course, was that the Chinese government had been
infiltrated and co-opted. But that never felt right to me – and though
now I was in the realm of gut feelings and journalistic intuition rather
than facts or even factually based speculation – I began to suspect
the Chinese were (again) following the principles of Sun Tzu, one of
which is defeating an enemy by turning his greatest strength into his
greatest vulnerability.
Viewing
the relationship between China and the United States from this
perspective, it appears China has used the bottomless greed that is
capitalism's greatest strength to seduce the U.S. with cheap labor and
endless credit and so ensnare it. The U.S. no longer has an economy;
it's manufacturing capabilities have all been outsourced –- mostly to
China -– and it is as dependent on Chinese money as any junky is
dependent on the pusher for the next fix. When the incipient
U.S.-Chinese conflict ends in war, as is inevitable, the U.S. will have
its master-race ideology of divinely ordained "exceptionalism" and the
Fourth Reich arrogance of its military omnipotence and the zomboid
submissiveness of its Moron Nation masses as cannon fodder but none of
the manufacturing capabilities essential to a sustained conflict. That
is why the better-dead-than-Red capitalists will most likely try to nuke
China into quick surrender and by so doing will destroy the world
instead. Any other sort of war -– that is, a conventional and therefore
extended war -– the U.S. would lose precisely because it no longer has
an economy of its own. (Ironically, the same conditions -– lack of
economic depth and manufacturing capabilities -– are what defeated the
Axis in World War II.)
But
what if China did not really embrace capitalism? What if China's
embrace of capitalism was merely an expression of Sun Tzu's principles
in present-day strategy? What if China today is as Communist -– that is,
as committed to real economic democracy -– as it was under Mao Ze Dong?
The relentless prosecution of capitalists reported by Mr. Hartmann
suggests this is may well be the case. If this is so, the global Working
Class has precisely the powerful ally it hitherto seemed to lack.
Remembering that it was the Russian Revolution and the rise of the
Soviet Union that terrified the world's capitalists into making all the
humanitarian concessions of the last century, the implications for the
future are profound indeed.
* * *
A more recent Hartmann piece protesting the workplace consequences of the zero-tolerance, divine-right tyranny being imposed on us by our Christofascist overlords prompted a website regular screen-named Aliceinwonderland to start the discussion thread with one of the most appropriately caustic comments I have read anywhere on the 'Net:
All I can say is -– WOW.
Just one question though: how the hell would employers even know
whether someone uses birth control? I'm not aware of any birth control
methods that are visually apparent to the onlooker.
Beyond
that, I keep wondering how far these pigs have to raise the bar on
fascism in America before enough people wake up and we see widespread
rebellion occurring. I keep waiting, wondering, hoping...
So hey ladies- You want your boss peeking in your underwear?! Seriously.
* * *
Soon I would post my own response to the ensuing dialogue:
As
I have said so many times before, the one flaw in Mr. Hartmann's
otherwise excellent reporting is his failure to recognize that
capitalism is in fact the societal equivalent of cancer.
This
means -– exactly as the last 70 years of history prove beyond rational
argument -– capitalism is a malignancy. And like all other malignancies,
it cannot be rendered benign.
A
second, equally important lesson is that no matter how strict the
regulatory restrictions by which we attempt to neutralize capitalism's
deadly toxicity, it will always revert to its original malignant form.
This means it will eventually kill its host.
Hence
–- since we the people are capitalism's host –- it is literally our
species' terminal illness. Either we find a cure -– which seems
increasingly impossible –- or we perish.
But
the ultimate lesson of this most dreadful epoch is that democracy –
which we fervently believed was the one sure antidote for the toxins of
tyranny – has turned out to be no cure at all.
In
fact it is the antithesis of a cure. It is via what we call "democracy"
–- verbal shorthand for presumably representative government elected
by presumably universal suffrage -– that capitalism has conquered the
world.
It turned the United States into its puppet realm at least 120 years ago.
Since
then it has triumphed even in the two nations wherein it was thought to
be permanently defeated: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
the People's Republic of China. Though capitalism's co-opting of
Communism in the latter may be a colossal deception facilitated by the
principles of Sun Tzu, as I said here on 18 March 2015.
What then empowers capitalism's success?
What is the essence of its deadly seductiveness?
Capitalism's
core dynamic is the transformation of the Absolute Evil of total moral
imbecility –- the mindset of a serial killer –- into apparent goodness.
Stripped
of its camouflage, capitalism is the vileness and venom of infinite
greed and infinite selfishness hidden by the perfume of false abundance
and cloaked in the brightly compelling fashions of ecocidal
acquisitiveness.
It
is, in fact, the secular proof of a core Christian dogma I as a pagan
agnostic instinctively reject –- original sin, the notion we are a
species accursed and damned.
But if indeed we are not accursed and damned, why is there still such a thing as capitalism, and why is it thriving?
* * *
Then I followed up by describing capitalism's lineage as a direct descendant of patriarchy:
Conceptually, just as capitalism is the direct descendant of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)...
Just as fascism and Nazism are the (sole and historically inevitable) descendants of capitalism...
So are all these malignancies the direct descendants of patriarchy, which appeared on this planet only about 5,000 years ago.
Before
patriarchy's sudden and mysterious onset, we humans regarded motherhood
as our species' most important individual and collective function.
Mothers were thus properly recognized as our most important individuals.
Indeed the original creation story went something like "In the beginning was the Mother, and She gave birth..."
Human societies were therefore matrilinear, matrifocal and (most likely) matriarchal.
Though
it is a truth maliciously concealed by U.S. archaeologists and
anthropologists, their counterparts elsewhere freely acknowledge the
socioeconomic systems of these early societies were definitively
communistic: from each according to ability, to each according to need.
The
people of these societies were also earth-respecting in a reflexive,
bow-to-the-five-directions manner most of us today cannot imagine, much
less to make our own.
Then
cometh patriarchy. Its advocates as described in the Old Testament of
the Bible were variously a "fiery wheel" or a "burning bush" or some
creature from the sky who met Moses atop Mount Ararat and handed him a
set of tablets inscribed with "divine" mandates that must be obeyed lest
we all be nuked like Sodom and Gomorrah.
Here
in this demonstration of force is obviously is the origin of the
Christian and Islamic practice of "conversion" at swordspoint and by the
burning-stake or impalement.
Significantly
-– apart from the fact these primitive technologies of oppression have
been replaced by total surveillance, electric-shock torture, drones,
napalm and Willie Peter -– capitalism, fascism and Nazism employ
patriarchy's traditional missionary practices even today.
Point
being, what ScaryMary and stecoop01 are telling us about the "Christian
agenda" is not only absolutely true but absolutely in keeping with the
patriarchal legacy as manifest not just in all Abrahamic religion but
in its capitalist, fascist and Nazi descendants.
Yet
above all else, the core purpose of patriarchy was –- and remains --
upending the natural order, seen everywhere in Nature, in which the
female is the epicenter of society.
Which
leads us to the core patriarchal principle: that it's virtuous to
murder the macrocosm of Mother Earth and despise her microcosmic form
Woman because, as it says in a favorite Bible-thump hymn, "thar's a
better land a-waitin in the sky Lord in the sky."
Patriarchy
and its descendants are therefore expressions of a kill-the-planet
death cult, a truth at last made undeniable by capitalism.
Which
in turn -– though I do not believe in extraterrestrial visitations --
makes me wonder just what cockroach universe those fiery wheels came
from and whether their sowing of the deadly poison seeds of patriarchy
was the ultimate (original) form of the smallpox-infested blankets my
European ancestors gave my First Nations ancestors.
That's
right: trash the planet enough –- as we are in fact doing –- it becomes
cockroach heaven, perfect even for such highly-advanced intergalactic
cockroaches (we hope) don't exist.
(Yes,
I reject the Marxian explanation of patriarchy as a logical consequence
of socioeconomic change. Instead I accept the Marija Gimbutas/Rianne
Eisler/Barbara Mor hypothesis of patriarchy as an oppressive system
forced onto conquered peoples at swordpoint –- exactly as it was, for
example, forced onto First Nations folk in the Americas. But what was
patriarchy's origin? For that we have only the glimpses given us by
folklore, as in the biblical tale of Moses or the oldest traditional
poems and ballads.)
Meanwhile
the astute observer will note there is a substantial difference in the
way I paragraphed the Sun Tzu post as compared to the
capitalism-as-cancer/intergalactic-cockroaches post. The former is
paragraphed like an academic paper. The latter reverts to journalistic
form.
Why?
I'm not sure. Stay tuned. When I figure out what's happening I'll let you know.
*** *** ***
ANOTHER OF MY favorite websites is Popular Resistance,
which seldom evokes the lengthy and informative discussions that
characterize Hartmann's place but often provides essential reporting
that is not readily available anywhere else.
Though
the website does not (yet) generate the epic dialogues one often finds
in Hartmann-land, it is nevertheless possessed of a subtle (and perhaps
subtly female) ambiance that encourages an emotional honesty so much of
the Internet lacks.
Hence
the following, the opening post in a gentle exchange between two old
men, our conversation focused on Steve Early's comprehensive account of
the ongoing rebellion
provoked by (yet another) betraying Democrat, a governor who lied his
way to re-election, then killed the widely heralded Vermont
single-payer/public-option health-care plan.
Thanks
to Mr. Early for the most informative report I've yet seen on the
Democrats' calculated betrayal of the Working Class in Vermont.
Elsewhere
it's the same infuriating story –- note for example Washington state
Democrat Maria Cantwell's anti-worker vote for free-trade fast-track -–
but at least Vermonters have their Progressive Party through which to
fight back.
Nevertheless those Democrat betrayals now virtually guarantee a total Republican landslide in 2016.
This
is not because of the popularity of Republican (that is,
Ayn-Rand/neo-Nazi) dogma, but because the corruption of the Democratic
Party has left the electorate without any viable national alternative.
Hence the vast majority of progressives will vote "none of the above" by refusing to vote at all.
Indeed
-– given Obama's record of unprecedented Big Lies and betrayals -– it
is as if the Democrats are actually working to engineer a Republican
victory.
Which of course makes perfect sense once we recognize the two parties serve one single cabal of capitalist overlords.
And
what is Nazism – whether as expressed by the German "master race" or
by the "exceptionalist" United States – but capitalism's ultimate form.
Point being, as few freedoms as we dissidents have left now, after a Republican landslide in 2016 we will have none at all.
In fact we will probably discover our role here in the de facto Fourth Reich reduced to that of the White Rose Society in the Third Reich.
Were
I a believer in the Abrahamic god, which I am not, I would pray we find
the courage and determination we will need to sustain any meaningful
resistance.
Meanwhile –- not the least because of my own fondness for Vermont -– I salute Vermonters for daring to continue the struggle.
LB/19-26 April 2015
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