friends,
Sorry to be sparse with postings and red-pill news. I’ve been taken up with various projects. Lots has been going to newslog however, available in the archives.
I’ve been writing a column every two weeks in the Southeast Voice, a regional free newspaper here in Ireland. I thought I’d share with you my most recent article there. It’s great to have a paper that carries this kind of material. Lots of people I run into around town read it and comment favorably.
cheers,
rkm
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We are living in ‘interesting times’
I mean ‘interesting times’ in the sense of the traditional Chinese curse – may you live in interesting times. Thus one might say, the sacking of Rome was interesting, or the Nazi era in Germany was interesting. These were times when major changes were afoot – but not times one would necessarily choose to live through oneself. We today, however, have no choice. The whole world is passing through ‘interesting times’, and the changes afoot are profound.
Consider for example the recent conflict in Georgia, and the sudden polarization that has arisen between Washington and Moscow. The Western mainstream media has been presenting those events in a very distorted, propagandistic way, so it’s not obvious on the surface what really happened in Georgia, what is the meaning of Russia’s response, and what is the meaning of Washington’s response to Russia’s response.
The first thing to realize is that everything that is happening around Georgia has been planned out well in advance by the usual suspects in Washington. The events have not in any sense been caused by tensions in the Caucus, rather those tensions have provided a convenient venue for Washington to pursue its grand designs. Washington armed and trained the Georgian forces, and in the weeks prior to Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, US & Georgian forces engaged in joint military exercises. This has been a ‘psy-op’ – an incident arranged by the US in an attempt to demonize and isolate Russia.
The second thing to realize is that Russia has no interest whatsoever in conflict. By this I don’t mean ‘Russia is good’, but rather ‘Russia is sensible’. The conflicts now and to come are entirely the creation of US/UK/EU elites, in their pursuit of global domination. The Georgian attack on South Ossetia was as if Serbia were to attack the capital of Kosovo – and you can imagine the violence of the US/NATO retaliation against Serbia if that were to happen. The Russian response, by contrast, was not at all disproportionate.
The third thing to realize – and this is well known in both Washington and Moscow – is that the US has been preparing for many years to carry out a nuclear first-strike against Russia. That’s what Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ was about, and the thread continues to space-based lasers, new kinds of tactical nukes, US bases surrounding Russia and China, radar stations in the Czech Republic, and the missiles in Poland.
The fourth thing to realize is the reason why this first strike is critical to US/EU elite interests. Without it, the overwhelming balance of global power will shift to Eurasia, to Russia and China. Eurasia is growing rapidly economically and structurally, while the US & EU are in terminal economic decline – and these trends are not going to change without decisive military intervention.
The US has always been very clever about the wars it’s gotten into, always managing to blame its own aggression and conquest on the victim. Pearl Harbor is the most famous example – the Day of Infamy. We now know that President Roosevelt schemed systematically to provoke the Japanese to the point where they had no choice but to respond militarily. We know that the Japanese codes had been broken, the lookouts sent home, and Pearl Harbor left intentionally undefended. Roosevelt knew exactly when the attack was going to happen, and sent the strategically important aircraft carriers out to sea and safety. Those left in the harbor were sacrificed as so many pawns in an anti-Japanese psy-op so that America could enter the war as ‘the good guy’, ‘the offended party’. Infamy indeed.
The US is now pursuing that same basic script with Russia. The Georgian incident was merely the opening salvo. The plan is to poke the Russian Bear again and again, each time forcing it to roar and swipe with its military claws. Each time it swipes, that will be another ‘proof’ of Russian aggressiveness. The radar and missile installations are pokes, and other pokes could be delivered by admitting the Ukraine to NATO or by imposing a blockade on Iran. If the US tries to rebuild Georgia’s military, that is a poke Russia has already said it would swipe at.
These ‘pokes’ would be like Russia installing nuclear missiles in Cuba or Mexico, and one can understand why Washington could not tolerate that, and would take the installations out with so-called ‘precision’ bombing raids – for justifiable defensive reasons. Similarly, Russia is likely to take out the missiles in Poland, just before they are scheduled to be operational. Except in this case Russia will be accused by the West of carrying out an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation that had ‘done nothing wrong’. All hail the power of spin.
This game of ‘poke and swipe’ is entirely under the control of Washington. They can pace the pokes, and their severity, depending on how far the Pentagon has progressed with its first-strike weapons systems. When the systems are all go, the US can deliver a big poke, the kind that might cause Russia to sink one of the Pentagon’s big carriers. Then with a cry of “Russia started it”, the first strike would be launched – indeed the stealth B1’s would probably be airborne before the carrier even gets hit.
I’m not saying nuclear war is absolutely inevitable, but it is more likely in the near future than it ever was during the Cold War. In those days the US was content to isolate Russia, so that US and its ‘allies’ could have a free hand exploiting the so-called ‘Free World’. Mutual assured destruction worked fine for that era. But now the US has strong reasons to want to actually destroy Russia, and is clearly pursuing that agenda militarily, diplomatically, and with psy-ops. This new era of polarization, created by Washington and threatening armageddon, is one of the profound changes now afoot in our world.
There’s not room here to go into similar detail with each of the other profound changes, so I’ll summarize some of them for now:
• The current ‘economic slump’, or ‘credit crisis’, is not a cyclic phenomenon, as they’re trying to make us believe. Rather these things are the beginning of profound, historic, economic shifts. We will not return again to ‘business as usual’; things are going get much worse for us in the West economically.
For one thing, we are seeing the mantle of capitalist hegemony moving from the US & Europe to China. Similarly, beginning in the late 1800s, the mantle passed from Imperial Britain to America. Earlier it passed from the Dutch Provinces to an emerging British Empire, and before that from the Genoese banking network to the Dutch Provinces. That’s the nature of capitalism: each round of capital accumulation ends up unintentionally financing a successor hegemonic power.
At the same time, capitalism as-a-whole is running up against global limits it has never had to deal with before. Obviously growth cannot continue forever on a finite planet with finite resources, and we are now at the point where the unstoppable force is colliding with the immovable object.
• US and EU elites are absolutely committed to creating a centralized EU government, with all semblance of sovereignty removed from national governments, and with no democratic accountability. The European Commission, which wields all the power in Brussels, is not elected, and it takes its orders from financial elites. There are two major objectives behind this drive for centralization.
The first objective is to impose neoliberal policies on all of Europe – total privatization, low corporate taxes, deregulation of corporate abuses, drastic reductions in public services and welfare payments, etc. While the very rich will continue to get richer, the general standard of living in the EU will be declining down toward third-world levels. As usual, the future can be seen first in the USA, whose cities are filled with the homeless and with crime, and where something like 40% of the population lacks adequate access to health care. This is the response of Western elites to the economic shifts that are underway globally – pass the suffering on to the general population.
The second objective is to turn the EU into an imperialist military power, most likely involving conscription, so that EU elites can play a more active role in the geopolitical games that will be unfolding – assuming armageddon is somehow avoided. Already Ireland has given up its traditional neutrality, with its hosting of US military and rendition flights, and its participation in imperialist occupation operations, euphemistically called ‘peacekeeping missions’.
The people of Ireland are to be congratulated for their wisdom in voting No to the Lisbon Treaty, but we need to be prepared for the same wolf to return in different clothing. He was rebuffed in his Constitutional garb and his Lisbon garb, but he’ll be back more determined than ever, huffing and puffing and threatening to blow our houses down if we don’t let him in. The Irish government is loyal not to us but to Brussels, so they’ll be doing all they can to sneak the wolf in the back door.
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