USian Empire Now the Planet's Primary Source of Evil

 

Again this image reveals its iconic nature: originally about the quest for world peace rendered fruitless by the USian Empire's relentless aggression, it now becomes a symbol of afflicted Nature and therefore of oft-thwarted Clotho, Spinner of the threads of life, to whom the late Tim Buckley once sang, “If you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 1971: Nikon F, 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X in D-76 for 800 ASA. (Permission granted for non-commercial use with photo credit and attribution to Outside Agitator's Notebook.) Click on image to view it full size. 

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(Yes, there is another damnable OAN schedule change implicit in this text. Rather than post once per month, as I had proposed, or once per week, as I did for at least a year, I am now going to post randomly – that is, whenever I have a photograph to show or something to say and the time in which to show or say it. My apology for any inconvenience.)

 

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THE REALITY OF EVIL, nominally a theological question, has again been snatched out of the protective obscurity of that comfortably abstract realm of monasteries and convents and dumped like a steaming, butthole-reeking pile of shit onto our dinner-tables in the real (and really injurious world) of realpolitik, and this time the dumper-in-chief is not some conquest-hungry foreign despot (Kaiser Wilhelm II as in 1914) or even three such despots (Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo as in 1941). The people who are shitting all over us are instead (and far more ominously) a tiny clique of our own fellow citizens – that semi-invisible circle of inconceivably wealthy, obscenely powerful plutocrats who own and/or control the United States and all its governments at all levels and ever-more-openly use its bureaucrats and generals and police chiefs and judges and politicians, whom they also own, to facilitate their own morally imbecilic pursuits.

There is general agreement the consequences are evil – ask for example any of the innumerable homeless youth who five years ago were normal kids part of a normal working family living in a normal and normally mortgaged suburban house until the Great Wall Street Ripoff of 2007-2009 outsourced Dad's job and abolished Mom's job and foreclosed the house and flung Mom and Dad and their two offspring into the streets and destroyed their family. Now the kids are throw-away children thrown away to survive by their own wits because under capitalism (and beyond all the pseudo-romantic bullshit peddled by Madison Avenue), capitalist marriage and therefore capitalist family is merely another profit-seeking, profit-centered capitalist relationship, which means when there is no more profit to be extracted, the relationship naturally disintegrates. But here amidst all this manifest evil, seemingly nobody but the (intellectually shackled and therefore increasingly irrelevant) Abrahamic clergy dares think about what evil is or where it comes from or whether it should be spelled “Evil,” proper-noun cap “E,” or minimized as a lower-case common noun, merely “evil” and therefore of no greater significance than bad weather, the societal equivalent of a hurricane or a tsunami.

That's why, when I describe the consequences of capitalism as “evil” – and especially when I capitalize it as “Evil” (as below in “the U.S. has become the primary source of Evil on this planet”) – a lot of secularists are offended. They (legitimately) fear some Abrahamic subversive is at work, subtly jihading for patriarchy.

But as it says in the Porgy and Bess song, “It ain't necessarily so.”  Yes, I admit the tendency to cite “evil” or “Evil” is often a defining characteristic of obnoxiously crusading Christians, Muslims and Jews. But I am none of the above. I regard evil and Evil as purely human byproducts spawned not by talking serpents but by the genetic flaws in the tyrannosauric bipeds one finds in board rooms and executive offices. Moreover, Webster's third definition of evil – “causing harm” – neatly severs it from religious dogmatism. And if you want to deduce my beliefs, merely read the sidebar to OAN; then reflect on how, over the years, I have repeatedly portrayed myself as an agnostic influenced by Zen, Taoism and First Nations beliefs but mostly leaning toward paganism – specifically Goddess-centered paganism. I outed my spiritual self most recently in a minor dispute with an avowed Christian in a Reader Supported News discussion thread that touched on how USian Empire's methodical destabilization of human society is one if its primary weapons of global conquest.  Deliberately engineering the collapse of human society to suppress our collective ability to oppose enslavement is indeed Evil, and it is Evil in the same sense the term was used to describe the depredations of Hitler. No other label adequately describes the horrors the capitalists – the One Percenters and their Ruling Class vassals – are knowingly and with malice aforethought inflicting on us and our planet.  As I said on the same RSN thread, “capitalism IS corruption – the bribery of the masses with the bright baubles of trinket materialism, all to free the One Percent so they can amass obscene profit by murdering us and raping our planet.” And what is corruption but another of the subsets of Evil?

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RSN'S MOST RECENT discussions on the empire's global destabilization campaign was probably triggered by an original William Boardman piece that ran a couple of days earlier about the destabilization of Ukraine.

But Boardman, who is by far the best of RSN's staff reporters, neglected to explore the darker aspects of the probable motives for the empire's ongoing provocation of Russia. Hence my response, here somewhat revised from its original published form:

Absent from Boardman's otherwise brilliant analysis of the ever-escalating U.S. provocation of Russia is the probability its ultimate psychological driver is the One Percent's truly bottomless terror not just of Communism but of socialism in any form. While the associated fanaticism is repeatedly demonstrated by the blank-check support the U.S. reflexively grants any tyrant who pledges to exterminate socialists – note again the abysmal human-rights records of the USian satropies – it is nevertheless difficult to quantify, which is probably why Boardman omitted it from his text.

Meanwhile the empire's relentless drive toward war with Russia remains incomprehensible until we recognize the implications of the fact the Russian population has, within its living memory, experienced the differences between capitalism and socialism. And though today the Russian people tolerate capitalism as a necessary evil, there is no question they remain fiercely committed to the humanitarian benefits of socialism. That is why they rejected the “economic genocide” of Wall-Street-ally Yeltsin's disaster capitalism  for Putinism,  which has been as dramatic a change for post-Soviet Russia as the New Deal was for the depression-crippled United States. That is also why the Communist Party – in recognition of its economic doctrine of “from each according to ability, to each according to need” – remains the nation's second largest political organization.

Were the Russian preference for socialism to again become the pivotal element in Russian policy, as it was during the Soviet era, such a development – particularly given the exemplar of capitalist malevolence that is global austerity – could easily expand into an unprecedented drive for international revolution. The ever-worsening misery the capitalists' insatiable greed is deliberately inflicting on workers everywhere is the one truly irrefutable argument for socialism. Were there still a Soviet Union to evoke it, the ultimate global victory of socialism – if not of Marxist-Leninist Communism per se – would be assured.

Hence we can be sure the greatest fear of the USan Empire is the resurrection inside Russia of a state consciousness comparable to that of the Soviet Union, but – especially since capitalist psychological warfare has not yet robbed the Russians of their ability to learn from experience – without the U.S.S.R.'s ideological and administrative handicaps that made it relatively easy prey to Wall Street's economic warriors. Hence too the U.S. response: not only destabilization of the Russian state, but – via a third world war – the extermination of all those Russian people whose lives bear witness to the humanitarian superiority of socialism. Which, surely not coincidentally, is exactly the response proposed by Hitler, whose colleagues, through their One Percent connections, became the paramount influences in shaping postwar USian foreign policy. And the Russians, politically astute as they are, are surely aware of what intentions now obtain in the wholly owned Wall Street subsidiary of Washington D.C.

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THE EMPIRE'S GLOBAL campaign of deliberate destabilization was also the core topic of a Robert Parry report RSN reprinted from Parry's Consortium News. But Parry – superb reporter that he normally is – nevertheless deftly dismisses this geopolitical “madness” as if it were merely an anomaly rather than the new national norm of world conquest it has become. Hence my reply, this too revised from its original form:

Despite my huge respect for Parry's reportorial and analytical skills, I fear he remains in bondage to his original notions about the (allegedly) benevolent nature of United States, a captivity proven by his failure to recognize the irremediable magnitude of the Nazi-like malevolence that has become its defining quality. Nor does he see the broader truth of U.S. capabilities and intentions as demonstrated by the intentional destabilization first of the Middle East, now of Europe and eventually of all human society.

To arrive at this admittedly horrendous view of USian capabilities and intentions, we must consider five facts, which inevitably lead us to three (obvious and therefore undeniable) conclusions:

The facts are (1)-the breathtakingly manipulative, astoundingly long-range planning capability demonstrated by capitalism in controlling and predicting human behavior; (2)-the obvious application of this capability to global politics; (3)-the ideology of the One Percent, particularly as expressed by Ayn Rand and Adolph Hitler, in which politics and economics are mutually sustaining endeavors; (4)-the exposed intentions of the One Percent, which include the imposition of “disaster capitalism” (Naomi Klein) and the radical reduction of the human population (Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and (5)- the One Percent's total ownership of government and mass media, by which it exercises hitherto unimaginable control over every aspect of USian life and, increasingly, over every aspect of human life everywhere on this planet.

Thus – and here is where Parry seems blinded by the residue of a no-longer-sustainable patriotism – it is only logical to conclude what was formerly considered unthinkable: that (6)-the destabilization inflicted on the Middle East and now on Europe was foreseen (much as the psychological consequences of marketing are foreseen); that (7)-the resultant chaos, especially the resurrection of European fascism, was also foreseen and is itself intentional, and that (8)-its long-range purposes – in compliance with the internationalization of Nazi foreign policy achieved by Ayn Rand economics – are threefold. Reasoning from events already underway, these are (A)-forcible population reduction (whenever possible in a “coincidental” manner intentionally rendered difficult to document as genocide), of which the drowned corpse of little Alan Kurdi is surely an ultimate archetype; (B)-imposition of “disaster capitalism” – that is, the de facto fascism of zero-tolerance One Percent rule – on the entire planet, Europe most assuredly included and, as a result, (3)-the imposition of an Ayn Rand (Neocon) version of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich to ensure the One Percent and its descendants survive the forthcoming environmental apocalypse with sufficient slaves to maintain the obscene comforts to which they have long been accustomed.

When one factors in all the variables – especially the USian repetition of destabilizations – no other hypothesis is plausible. As I said at the beginning, the U.S. has become the primary source of Evil on this planet. And it is still acting out the policy of economic jihad first publicly acknowledged during the Vietnam War: “we had to destroy the village (or the planet) to save it (from socialism).”

LB/8-14 September 2015

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President Obama's Victory Day Rudeness: I Apologize for My Country's Scorn of Living Russians and Soviet Dead

Mothers and daughters became Soviet warriors. (Click image to view it full size.)

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I AM ASHAMED of how those who rule the Imperial United States and its European satrapies dishonored the millions of Soviet men, women and children who were slain in the epic struggle to save the world from Nazism.

I am ashamed of how we who have never yet suffered comparable invasion  have been taught to belittle the breathtaking sacrifices of those who fought and died to defeat the most obviously sadistic invader our unspeakably savage era has thus far produced. I am ashamed of the politics of xenophobia and greed that demand we disdain fellow humans we should instead hail as heroes and heroines, not just of their own Motherland but of all humanity.

Behind my shame at our overlords' unconscionable bad manners on this particular Victory Day is my far greater shame at how we in the United States have allowed our once-exemplary representative democracy to be reduced to an oligarchy of global oppression and environmental ruination.

I am especially ashamed of how its tyrannies are perpetuated by a white electorate so blinded by racial, socioeconomic and religious hatreds,  it seems idiotic to imagine it will ever stop voting against its own well-being. 

But my country has become so much a police-state, I dare not continue without affirming my shame is the shame of a patriot – that if I did not love my country, I would not so grieve its betrayal. I would not denounce the capitalist One Percent and their political vassals for looting my country into poverty. I would not damn the One Percent's ballot-box disciples for voting my country into ruin merely to inflict suffering on those whose race or ethnicity or gender or sexuality they despise. If I did not love my country, I would not be so appalled by the electronic concentration camp  to which it has been reduced by these betrayers of liberty and their wanton perversions of democratic process.

Nor dare I rationally hope for liberation in what remains of my lifetime. The U.S. Ruling Class is protected by technologies of surveillance and retaliation we can scarcely imagine. Armed with powers earlier generations attributed only to god, it is combining the doctrines of Ayn Rand economics, U.S. exceptionalism and divine-right imperialism into a new and uniquely USian form of Nazism – a Nazism in which absolute power rests not with a single despot but with an infinitely despotic cabal of corporate executives.

The pivotal question of our time, brought into sharp focus by the events in Ukraine, is therefore whether this newest, U.S.-sponsored onslaught of the human penchant for moral imbecility can be brought to bay before its proponents literally nuke the world into a radioactive cinder. 

Yet even if we somehow succeed in building a successful resistance, it may already be too late for our species and this planet as we know it. Indeed it is entirely conceivable some sure but thus far secret knowledge of ourselves as denizens of a dying world is what is fueling the unrelenting greed of the One Percent – a greed so limitless it has no known precedent in human experience.

Is this what is happening? Have the One Percenters been reliably informed their deadly contempt for Nature commanded by the Abrahamic religions has already doomed us? Is the One Percent's intent now merely to see who can collect the most wealth before the too-long-ignored-and-despised Mother Earth sounds the final buzzer? 

Only the darkest and most hopeless of times could produce such otherwise-unthinkable thoughts. And that – the darkest most hopeless time in our species' history – is the time in which we are cursed to live and challenged to do whatever we can to resist the encroaching darkness.

Another dark time, nearly as dark and hopeless as the present, were the months immediately after Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on the Summer Solstice of 1941.

But the Red Army and the Soviet people fought back valiantly, eventually defeating what was then the best trained, most technologically advanced war machine on Earth. 

Let us therefore never forget their victory came at a terrible price – their combined military and civilian deaths now estimated to be as many as 43.3 million. (Yes, this is the same material linked in my second paragraph above. But the source for the 43.3 million figure is the researcher Boris Sokolov, for whom you must scroll far down the text.)

All such numbers are inconceivable unless we restate them in quantities we can envision. 

Picture a man or a woman or a child. Then picture that person dead. Picture a corpse.

If you accept Sokolov's estimate (which I do), picture that corpse multiplied 43.3 million times. Forty-three-point-three million is the present-day population of five cities the size of London. Or five the size of New York City. Or four the size of Moscow. Now try to envision these entire municipalities filled with naught but corpses – decomposing bodies that were once living men, women and children, folks with all the pleasures and pains and ambitions and desires and other emotions you or I or anyone has.

That's what it cost the Soviet Union to save us from the Nazis.

But the most important element in this recitation of grim facts is that the Soviet people prevailed – and that by prevailing they saved us all, every man woman and child now alive – from those earlier forms of fascism and Nazism personified by Mussolini and Hitler. (Yes, Fascist Italy did indeed aid Nazi Germany  in the invasion of the Soviet Union.)

The English-language service of the Russian state television network, RT, celebrates this 70th anniversary of the Soviet triumph with a Victory Day program  so thoughtfully scripted it should be preserved and issued as a DVD. It is a valuable historical document, and if it is available, I will add it to my own personal library. 

RT's coverage gives us the obligatory summaries of the fighting but also offers vital glimpses of social history – stories of the people and how they coped with the stresses of enemy invasion.

It includes a sampling of the often poignant poetry of Russian wartime popular music. It is a musical literature utterly unlike the self-consciously happy-faced, “Boogie-Woogie Bugle-Boy-of-Company-B” trivializations with which we in the wartime U.S. were sedated. But you'll have to wait a bit for all the RT material to load, and then you'll have to scroll down to its last pages.

The songs are each accompanied by translations into English, and two are especially moving. One is called “White Cranes”:  “Sometimes it seems to me each fallen soldier/ That never came back from fields of gore/ In fact did never perish as they told you/ But turned into a crane as white as snow.” The other is “Wait for Me”: “That in the midst of gunfire/ It was your waiting for me/ That saved my life.”

Also especially relevant on this occasion is the 2010 Russian film entitled Brestskaya Krepost – “Brest Fortress” in English – that tells the heartrending stories of some of the soldiers and civilians, among them three women, who fought in the battle that was the Soviet equivalent of our Pearl Harbor and Wake Island battles combined.

Available as a DVD with some versions subtitled in English, it is notably unlike most Hollywood war films in that it neither sanitizes the horrors of the battlefield nor belabors the audience with pro-war propaganda.

The ability of Russian cinematographers to depict horrendous violence without simultaneously glorifying it is a skill that has apparently been carefully denied their U.S. counterparts. But that should surprise no one who understands that in the new imperial U.S. oligarchy, government at every level and all its mainstream informational media (including film producers, textbook publishers and advertising agencies), are owned and controlled by the same self-serving inner circle of voraciously capitalist One Percenters.

Nor is there any doubting the diabolical, Josef-Goebbels-inspired efficacy of the uniquely privatized U.S. government propaganda apparatus that has been spawned by the One Percent's seizure of power. The greed and selfishness the propaganda so successfully evokes was undoubtedly a major if undocumented factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prepared in accordance with state-of-the-art psychological research, its influence is so irresistible, it has already convinced the nominally well-informed people of Western Europe to accept the Big Lie World War II was single-handedly won by the United States. 

This same process of de facto psychological warfare, the relentless dumbing-down I label “moronation,” is what sustains Moron Nation – that portion of the U.S. electorate which is ever more militantly white, theocratically Christian, aggressively reactionary and therefore ever more inclined to embrace a uniquely USian, Ayn Rand version of Nazism. Its emergent ideology is already apparent, not only in the use of “austerity” as a euphemism for calculatedly genocidal elimination of social services, but in a local war against public-transport users I wrote about extensively earlier in this decade.

Now of course the One Percent's (allegedly unofficial) propaganda machine – which in truth is as potent and functionally official as Goebbels' own Ministry of Propaganda – is turning not just its assault weapons but its heaviest Joe McCarthy siege guns on anyone of significance who dares dispute the empire's portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine.

Quoth the ever-reliable Robert Parry via a Consortium News exclusive:

U.S.-taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty has a checkered history that includes hiring Nazi sympathizers as Cold War commentators. Now, one of its current writers has used the platform to bash an American scholar who won’t join Official Washington’s “group think” on Ukraine.

That follows Parry's earlier report detailing how the group-thinkers insist on describing the deadly ramrodding of Ayn Rand capitalist savagery down post-Soviet Russian throats as nothing more than “growing pains” intended “to help (these people) attain a better life.”

Which suggests another presumably unthinkable thought:

Given its context of economic warfare with imperialistic intent, could it be the real reason Obama snubbed the Russian people and their Victory Day celebration is that he cannot agree with what it celebrates?

Remember it was the immediate ancestry of the present-day One Percent that tried via the Bankers Plot of 1934  to join the U.S. to the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Perhaps then Obama is no different from so many other U.S. politicians in harboring a clandestine, beyond-top-secret commitment to the Nazi resurgence already evident in the Western Ukraine and unquestionably lurking in the Moron Nation shadows of the USian Homeland as well.

After all, what is Nazism – particularly with its profit-expanding policies of slave labor and the extermination of anyone no longer exploitable for profit – but the ultimate form of capitalism?

LB/3-10 May 2015

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