Challenging Russia in Ukraine Could Trigger World War III

I FEAR KIEV could become – like Sarajevo of the century past – an international flashpoint. Just as the Slavic minority in Sarajevo despised the city's Austro-Hungarian overlords, so is the Russian minority in Kiev afraid of the allegedly neo-Nazi rulers of the Ukraine.  And given the new regime's alleged USian sponsors, the jeopardy in which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry puts himself and world peace by his visit to Kiev  could therefore be extreme. Let us prayerfully hope 4 March 2014 does not acquire infamy comparable to – or possibly far worse than – 28 June 1914.

Even the politically moderate European press – though it flinches from calling the new Ukranian government neo-Nazi – is alarmed by the hard-Right Svoboda party. “(A)nti-Semitism,” says a der Spiegel report,  “is part of the extremist party's platform; until 2004, they called themselves the Social-National Party of Ukraine in an intentional reference to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party. Just last summer, a prominent leader of party youth was distributing texts from (material) Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels translated into Ukrainian. Without the nationalists' tight organization, the revolt on Maidan Square would long since have collapsed.” The more Left-leaning Guardian now reports Svoboda appointees control the new government's most powerful ministries.  To those who are familiar with the combination of means by which Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party took over the Weimar Republic, Svoboda's swiftly rising power is justifiably frightening.

As I presciently said last Monday (24 February) on a Reader Supported News comment thread, Russia – especially given its experiences during World War II – will not tolerate  the presence of a fascist state, USian surrogate or not, on its western frontier. Hence I cited three reasons this could start World War III:

(1)-Nazism has an ugly history in the Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler's Wehrmacht, then gleefully aided the SS in rounding up, deporting and killing Jews. This history imposes huge obstacles to the present-day Ukrainian quest for national identity.

(2)-Russia's strategic interest is threefold. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe – as vital to the Russian economy as the grain fields of the Middle West are to the U.S.; it is an invasion route to the Russian interior, hence vital to the defense strategies of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and today's Russian Federation. It controls access to the Black Sea, an objective of Russian and Soviet policy since the time of the earliest Tsars.

(3)-The USian Empire's apperent Ukranian strategy is a variant of Hitler's plans for eastward conquest. Its purpose seems to be imposition of a militarily friendly neo-Nazi state on Russia's frontier, for-profit seizure of Ukrainian agricultural and natural resources and obstruction of Russian Black Sea access.

To imagine Russia will tolerate this de facto invasion is to imagine the U.S. would tolerate foreign conquest of its Middle Western states. This time the neocons, with their dreams of a global Fourth Reich, may have made the same mistake their secret hero Hitler made: they have goaded the Bear in his own den.

In other words, the events in Ukraine embody what the Russians perceive as a direct threat to Rodina – their beloved Motherland. For a hypothetical parallel, imagine Mexico taken over by a coup organized by the People's Republic of China. How would the USian Empire react?

But that's only one reason this looming confrontation scares me more than the Cuban Missile Crisis did. There is also a glaring difference between the quality of U.S. leadership in 1962 and today, specifically in the caliber of the presidents. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was popular, respected and already assured of his role in history. Barack Hussein Obama is unpopular, scorned as vehemently by the Left as by the Right. A few days ago his disapproval-rate polled as high as 56 percent, an omen of sure defeat for his Democratic Party in the fall congressional elections. At the very least, Obama remains a president in search of a positive legacy. And his increasingly authoritarian demeanor – manifest in unrestricted drone warfare,  extra-judicial presidential death warrants  and ever more aggressive foreign policy  – suggests he intends that legacy to be akin to Octavian's, who declared himself the first Roman emperor.

Apropos the Cuban Missile Crisis, when its story broke in 1962, I was only days out of the Regular Army. I had served the three active-duty years of my six-year enlistment, more than half of that in Korea, but I was obligated for three more years in the reserves. The troop transport in which I returned stateside with some 3,500 other soldiers, the U.S.N.S. Sultan,  was shadowed from Hawaii nearly to San Francisco Bay by a Soviet submarine, no doubt as part of the Cuban preliminaries. Had the crisis led to war while we were at sea, we'd no doubt have been torpedoed and sunk. And had the war begun after I was a civilian, I'd have been yanked back into uniform minutes after the first shot was fired. I knew that, and as a 22-year-old man with a 19-year-old wife and my first full-time job in journalism, a sportswriter for The Knoxville Journal, I was understandably worried. Given the grotesque realities of nuclear warfare, I was also gravely concerned for the wellbeing of my wife and other family members, especially those in and around Knoxville, Tennessee – a critical target due to its proximity to Oak Ridge. 

But I trusted President Kennedy. I thought of him as “our” president, even “my” president despite the fact I had not been old enough to vote in the 1960 election. He was a president who had campaigned honestly and whom We the People had rightfully elected to office.

Now though as I approach my 74^th birthday, I have no such trust in our leaders, least of all President Obama. He lied his way into office by promising “change we can believe in.” He shape-shifted from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer and immediately escalated George Bush's war against the Constitution. He betrayed his supporters in organized labor and in the movement for single-payer/public-option health care. He declared genocidal war on lower-income peoples of all ages by slashing food stamps, downsizing Medicare and attempting to cut Social Security. He is not my president, he is not “our” president (unless you are part of the One Percent or its corps of factotums), and it is most assuredly not We the People whose interests he serves.

Indeed I cannot but wonder if he seeks to provoke a war merely to boost his popularity and silence his critics, either by herding us into concentration camps or by unleashing his death squads with the extra-judicial extermination warrants he claims the right to issue at will.

At the very least – or so says Robert Perry in “Neocons and the Ukranian Coup,” the piece on which I posted the comments boldfaced above – he's abdicated control of the government (or more likely knowingly granted it) to a neo-conservative (i.e., neo-fascist) cabal that has been the real power behind the Oval Office at least since the Reagan years. “American neocons,” says Perry, “helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a 'regime change'...(with) neo-Nazi militias at the forefront.” (The link to Perry's analysis, also in the lead-in to the boldfaced paragraphs, is repeated here for readers' convenience.)

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My original intention this week was to post comment-thread contributions as I usually do – that is, by summarizing the article and my Outside Agitator's response. But now I think the threat of war makes my comments on two of these threads relevant in their entirety. Hence the following, which the sharp-eyed reader will note is ever-so-slightly edited from the original texts:

“The 'Deep State' - How Much Does It Explain?” Mike Lofgren of Moyers and Company writes at length on what he calls the “Deep State,” portraying it as “a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state...out of control and unconstrained... (the perpetrator of) deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war.” I reply that from a socialist perspective, the term “deep state” is nothing more than another deliberately anti-Marxist euphemism to avoid such terms as “Ruling Class,” “capitalist aristocracy,” “the bourgeoisie” or “the One Percent.”

The behavior of the “deep state” is therefore typical of all ruling classes.

But the power of the “deep state” has no counterpart in human history. It is literally omnipotent, made so by a combination of three factors. The first of these is technology, which gives it capabilities hitherto accorded only gods – and only the most sadistic gods at that. The second factor is the ethos by which it is driven: capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate, typically malicious rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever articulated. The third is the new Mein Kampf by which the One Percent rules, Ayn Rand's expansion of economic theory into a formal doctrine of statehood, governance and intention: absolute power and unlimited profit for the aristocracy, total subjugation for all the rest of us.

(A fourth factor that previously constrained even the most tyrannical states – the need to placate the masses – has been rendered irrelevant by weaponry that makes resistance not only futile but suicidal. We the people, we the 99 Percent, we the peasants and proletarians who do all the work – we no longer matter save in terms of our exploitability for profit. We are already prisoners, inescapably trapped in electronic slave pens.)

For the first time in our collective experience, our species has been subdued by conquerors so evil – that is, so hostile to human liberty and planetary life – the only metaphors to adequately describe their vileness come from mythology, religion and science fiction. Indeed they are the quintessence of evil; their triumph is the equivalent of conquest by demons or demonic creatures from outer space. And only a very few of our best writers – Chris Hedges, for example – have awakened to the bottomless horror of their moral imbecility.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lofgren's plea for a leader – someone with the “serene self-confidence” to lead us in rebellion – is nothing less than a call for voluntary human sacrifice, for yet another victim to walk the fatal paths of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. All were potentially such leaders. Each was murdered – decades before the state followed the pattern set by Hitler's Third Reich and publicly claimed, as it does now, the right to slaughter at will. Today our only certainty is that any true defender of freedom who arises to genuine leadership will be slain by the ever-eager assassins commanded by the One Percent.

What then, as Vladimir Lenin asked so presciently in 1902, is to be done? I have no satisfactory answer. Nor, seemingly, does anyone else. Hedges suggests our only recourse is the turning to art and spirituality that has been the opiate of slaves since the advent of slavery. History – specifically the fact there is no earthly precedent for the obscene might and toxic darkness of that which oppresses us today – tells me he is probably right, that we have no other alternatives.

As I ponder this unspeakable dismal future I remember a chant of the Cheyenne Ghost Dance – “the white man's god has forsaken him, let us go and look for our Mother.” My genes -- Scythian, Celtic, Norse, Iroquoian, others of which I know not – urge me to embrace the life and consciousness reasserted by the Gaia Hypothesis, to prepare myself for her vengeance on those who would knowingly destroy her. I do not imagine many of us will survive her fury. I am thankful I am old.

*

Later a poster on the same thread questioned my understanding of Hedges' stance. I replied by citing the Hedges essay entitled “A Time for Sublime Madness.” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_time_for_sublime_madness_20130120 In it he says, “To endure what lies ahead we will have to harness the human imagination,” which he then defines as both art and religion, with strong emphasis on the latter. (“Art” as used here includes not just visual work but music, poetry, dance, etc.)

What makes this particular Hedges essay so significant – it appeared on 20 January 2013 – is it is to my knowledge the first time he has acknowledged the true totality of our powerlessness. In so doing, he cites how other powerless groups sustained themselves. “It was the human imagination,” he wrote, “that permitted African-Americans during slavery and the Jim Crow era to transcend their physical condition. It was the human imagination that sustained Sitting Bull and Black Elk as their land was seized and their cultures were broken. And it was the human imagination that allowed the survivors in the Nazi death camps to retain the power of the sacred. It is the imagination that makes possible transcendence.”

Unfortunately – as we see in the de facto Christofascist theocracy of the USian South (and in the increasingly theocratic midlands as well) – religious imagination typically functions as opiate rather than agitation. This is true even in the case of non-Abrahamic religions. Note for example the stridently apolitical, even anti-political stance taken by so many Wiccans, who in every other sense are acutely aware of what is happening both politically and environmentally, yet cling to the New Age nonsense that collective transformation is impossible unless it is preceded by personal transformation.

To further clarify, while I believe Hedges is correct – that  “imagination” is our only recourse (simply because the genocidal technological superiority of the Ruling Class will not be defeated until it is overthrown by Gaian apocalypse) – I also regard it as a dreadful admission of defeat. Apart from the truly savage USian compulsion to religious conformity (which afflicts neo-Pagans as much as the Christofascists and the JesuNazis), our imagination has been withered to nonexistence by the slave mentality methodically imposed by the nation's public schools. One cannot make – or even comprehend – truly meaningful art when one's creative instincts have been deliberately starved to death by aesthetic ignorance. Thus we are robbed – perhaps permanently (because the only culture that can arise from ignorance is a culture of ignorance) – of even the one sanctuary Hedges suggested we might have left. Such is the totality of Evil by which we are now ruled. 

       

***

“Our Military: Fighting to Keep Its Culture of Abuse” Sarah L. Blum of Truthout reports on how the sexual and psychological abuse of women within the U.S. military not only continues unabated but – based on new statistics – is intensifying every year. I point out what I consider a major failure by mass media, the fact no widely published writer dares reveal the intimate connection between rape and the Christian fanaticism that now dominates the U.S. officer corps.

In the fanatical Christian worldview, which incidentally is shared by all Abrahamic fundamentalists, women are the (innately evil) daughters of Eve. As punishment for their alleged sinfulness, they are not only to be subservient to men, they are to be imprisoned in the homes of their fathers and husbands, their duties limited to housekeeping and child-rearing. Rape – the atrocity itself and the chain-of-command's diligent protection of the rapists -- is therefore part of “god's divine plan” to re-subjugate the entire female gender: that is, to drive women out of the military and out of the workforce in general and eventually “put woman back in her divinely ordained place.”

The troubling fact this horror-story is not being covered despite the abundant topical evidence -- the persecution of non-believers at the Air Force Academy, less-well-publicized reports of similar outrages at the other service academies, theocratic pronouncements by various general officers, major publications of at least four books discussing the theocratic threat to constitutional governance etc. ad nauseam – suggests even alternative mainstream media is now subject to theocratic censorship.

If this is not so -- if the Christian theocrats are not already so powerful they are muffling even allegedly alternative media -- then why is this story being suppressed?

(I ask not merely as a regular reader but as formerly award-winning print journalist, mostly a newspaper reporter, retired after a career spanning a half-century. Given only the publicly available sources, I could put together a basic report -- “Rape and the Christianization of the U.S. Military” -- in no more than a week. With time to cultivate inside sources and otherwise properly investigate the matter, a competent reporter could easily produce a Pulitzer-class story in two or three months.)

That this story has not already been broken is the most damning indictment yet of our allegedly "free" press.

*

In response to another poster on the “Culture of Abuse” thread, I point out I have written many times of rape and the Christianization of the military: access the TypePad edition of OAN, go to archives, then type in "theocracy" (no quotation marks).

For the record, the four books cited above are: The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Jeff Sharlet, Harper: 2008); American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges, Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: 2006); American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Kevin Phillips, Viking: 2006); The Age of American Unreason, especially Chapter 8 (Susan Jacoby, Pantheon Books: 2008).

The best of these is Sharlet's work. Phillips' text is interesting because he is a conservative but nevertheless is appalled by the theocratic threat, while Jacoby's work is a general exposé on the Moron Nation (as I sometimes call it) that has resulted from capitalism's methodical “moronation” (my term for “dumbing down”) of the national mentality. 

Other reliable sources on the theocratic threat include Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Theocracy Watch; Catholic Watch and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. AU's role is explained by its name. Theocracy Watch is an encyclopaedic source on the effort to impose Biblical Law on the United States, but in its fealty to the Democratic Party is blind to the Democrats' pro-theocracy efforts, for example Hillary Clinton's secret, pro-Biblical-Law  collaboration with Sam Brownback as exposed on pages 272-277 of Sharlet's book. Catholic Watch monitors the efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to buy up all U.S. health-care facilities and thereby impose total bans on contraception and legally assisted suicide, while the Military Religious Freedom Foundation fights the forcible Christianization of the armed forces. 

I think there are two reasons the predatory nature of Christianity is suppressed by publications on the USian Left. The first is elitist arrogance, which since the 1960s has been the Left's downfall, in this instance the assumption religion is irrelevant (never mind the fact the U.S. is the most fanatically religious nation in the industrial world). The second reason is political correctness: to acknowledge Christian fanaticism is to acknowledge the fanaticism of Abrahamic religion in general, which of necessity would include acknowledgement of Islamic fanaticism – which political correctness forbids – and acknowledgement of Jewish fanaticism as well.  

That said, the last and best word of this week's column comes from a dear friend's reaction to the Ukraine crisis (and Goddess grant her foresight is better than mine): “I don't think we'll get into a land war with Russia over some peninsula in the the Black Sea – strategic to others, but not to us – and I'm very sick of our continuing to clean up the messes created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imperial ambitions of Europe!”

LB/2 March 2014

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