What Do We Really Really Want? – Same As It Ever Was
Real Change is Truly Scary Stuff – Capitulationaries are Much Scarier Still
Note – auto-estimated reading times are always greatly exaggerated! (lots of photos and links)
Hey folks!
Today I want to put together a few big themes that I’ve been writing about for years now, along with some fresh and very much appreciated inspiration from distant friends on the far side of the equator.
That is, I want to try to reward you for bothering to read me, by putting some big pieces together and making something out of them, which we might all think and talk about further – perhaps even DO.
First and foremost I must insist (as did Buckminster Fuller, one of the most rational positive thinkers of the modern age) that a positive vision for all humanity on what he called ‘spaceship earth’ still exists. This is itself a radical assertion nowadays, since almost every model of the future which we are offered by our leaders and media is an endless fury, a painful doom or a surrender (or, in many cases, all three).
Back to basics, please – the absolute fact of the matter is that we have enough materials and production capacity to give every person on earth a decent shot at becoming an aspirational version of themselves.
I don’t mean everyone a rock-star, I mean everyone with love, purpose, work with meaning and value and a place in a thriving community. That is do-able, on a physical level, and this is beyond obvious (has been, for most of a century now).
It is also important to say, this is what humans NATURALLY do once you remove fear and uncertainty. Rights and cultural advances are not and have never once been, powered by government force or edict. The (frighteningly popular) idea that the average citizen is a bundle of essentially evil ingredients unless the government uses state institutions to coercively re-shape their character, combines the worst possible interpretation of “original sin” with the creepiest forms of psychotic authoritarianism. Catharsis for the bourgeoisie just ain’t worth THAT sacrifice. (pretty much everything we hold dear).
People make things better spontaneously. Free people. Community was our very first form of art.
To be equally clear on both the financial and ecological side of the big-doom arguments, massive amounts of capital are being siphoned-off by the very richest – often directly from struggling taxpayers (one of the main functions of our profoundly debased modern systems of capitalist government). Every kind of rollback of workers rights for the sake of foreign investors, is a fraud, so is every austerity.
UNTIL WE DEAL WITH THE GRAND CORRUPTION, ALL OUR NUMBERS ARE WRONG.
Likewise, on the environment, the west remains committed above all to a policy of racist global dominance through ultra-violence and every kind of immoral manipulation, rather than being a genuinely respectful and cooperative partner to the global east and south, in making a better more sustainable world, without created-scarcity-poverties, or thwarting so much beautiful human potential.
We (the collective west) ceased to be in any way serious about the global climate the day after 9/11, and we haven’t once stopped mass-killing since. FACT. Priority is what you DO, not what you SAY.
Even the modern offerings which many claim represent environmental policy start from the assumption that the most important thing on earth to save is the predatory parasitic war-promoting banking system! (That is, we are told morality means surrendering the only valid goal, before the fight even begins).
Strangely, the gigantic and passionate arguments we now have about politics are a completely unrelated subject. We do not seriously discuss any one of these vast, absolutely crucial and yet also clearly solvable problems (is “get evil, out of the driver’s seat, please” really such an unrealistic ask?)
This disconnect is not inevitable (and certainly not helpful) but in a strange dance between the forces of capital and power, and the ever more alienated and juvenile citizenry, we have come to regard politics as the central drama which entertains us and entrains our passions, not an intelligent and wide-ranging debate about adopting ever more sensible, practical and effective plans for making real things better.
Makes me think about Pompeii, where they had theatre seating for three times the population of the city (meaning they not only understood the importance of drama and catharsis, even for the non-urbanites in the surrounding areas – but also knew its proper place!)
We all know what politics is supposed to be for, and that it hasn’t done that in a very long time.
The question is – how did we get this way, and how might we fix it? (Instead of just rant and mope).
And we may ask ourselves....
I keep returning to the difference between the mindset of a consumerist (rationalizing, impotent-in-advance, frustrated, bitter, alienated individualist) and a citizen (care for others, planning responsibly for a future which includes more than personal needs, acting for effect instead of credit).
We get many useful insights using this basic dichotomy, instead of the (bizarrely degraded) tribalist forms of left and right. Of course it is obvious that we are talking about people who are basically on the line of psychopathy, compared to people who self-correct toward sanity. For many, that is quite enough.
But the key distinction politically and oddly, also in terms of personal happiness, is that for a consumer, the maximum possible (conceivable) ‘ask’ is a performance. A role, a ritual – but not ever the thing itself, ahead of self. Citizens DO. Sometimes at staggering cost to themselves, because they are not ever alienated from a (profoundly empowering) sense of greater community and faith in belonging. You don’t need an expert to tell you, or a money-man to back it up, this faith alone can empower you to sacrifice for others you will never know. (and I know many atheists who share this form of profound faith, with my more recognizably faithful religious friends).
To be clear, the definitions of community and belonging vary a ton – as they should – we humans have solved the ‘how to do life’ problem in uncountable valid ways. Freedom means having enough needs met and options ahead, to be who we really are, in a responsible way that also takes others into account and leaves space for their growth (once known as basic fairness). What it is definitely not, is any form of state-managed conformity to some theorists “designed model of ideal humanity.” Even (very recently sacred) humanism, can be completely perverted into justifying the worst kinds of despotism and mass violence, if we forget to recognize others and human difference itself, as equally valid.
The funny thing is – tribalists on both left and right think they can see this, and the other side doesn’t – when in reality – both sides see half of it, and still deny a great deal which does them lasting harm.
I know and care about many people who are still stuck deep in that tribalist mindset (very popular in Canada for sure, and my home town of Toronto especially) and I understand that some of them have been trained (Pavlov style) to reflexively suspect my criticisms of left-coded institutions and excesses are a kind of tribal disloyalty, or even a failure to make moral distinctions. To them I can only insist they are exactly and precisely incorrect, backwards in every way, and it is their tribalist blindness to morality which leads them to corrupting emotional alignment with things they once knew to despise.
It is because I insist on seeking ACTUAL morality – the reality of it, and not just a bourgeois power-performance of it, that I find I can stand and speak clearly, outside of the stifling and hatred-promoting frames of modern (frothing) tribalism. I am a citizen humanist, because I realize that consumerist humanists (and atheists, leftists, Marxists, feminists, and race-game specialists) are wrecking the brand!
Here, I can’t help invoking a line from finance – the bad drives out the good. That is, money being laundered or otherwise not correlated to the realities of any given market, destroys such value as it had for the ethical and sensible investors who created it, to serve a practical need. (truly ancient derivation)
Only in this case, the fake (and yet histrionic) bourgeois performance of revolutionary fervour (valid, only if you count the disastrous Chinese cultural revolution, as some kind of high-point) drives out any room for workers themselves to have a voice – instead of a “worker-expert’s performance” steered (that is, coopted and undermined) by whole thinktanks and faculties of theorists and ultimately run by slumming all-star corporatists, who have never had anything but contempt for workers.
Seriously, folks – we are all abstract ‘client herds’ to the social service set. Not humans, mass-product.
It is also important to note that “Political” people who have convinced themselves that being angry at the world, or a particular set of people in it, is useful political action, often resent much happier and more mentally well-balanced people, for not sharing their preference for constant never-ending upset.
Constant never-ending opposition on principle is a simple moral duty, for many destructive and dishonest games which capital is playing around the world to this day. Some social matters too.
But normal people correctly realize their best chance of changing the world is to be good kind excellent useful parts of it, and encourage younger people and those in their wider community to be better kinder more excellent and compassionate human beings. This means transcending toxic states like fear and anger, not fetishizing them. (in fact, recognizing them as a bourgeois indulgence, when there is important work to do). We can’t all of us be walking wounded, projecting our anguish onto the world at large, some folks have to take out the trash, and if they can do it with a cheery whistle, bless them!
We MUST understand this dichotomy also – hyper political people like to think they are incredibly left or incredibly right (or incredibly libertarian, or identitarian) but they are actually incredibly similar. Left and right, they share truly sickening contempt for everyday people who disagree with them, and casually regard good citizens as malign soldiers of complicity – that is, they are all basically psychotic!
The strangest proof of this? The arch-conservative warmonger Neocons were all former Trotskyists!
To be clear, I made stupid lazy and contemptuous tribal statements myself, for years (recovering tribalist, and I wouldn’t know how or why busting out of that trap was so crucial, if I hadn’t seen the cruellest and the stupidest of it, from inside). I’m ashamed of that contempt now, and working on doing steadily better as I go, but I don’t ever mean to pretend it is easy to pull your head out of those passionate tribal games. Tribal friends will be unkind and won’t understand, but others will welcome you back to consensus reality with open arms! Plus, I can honestly testify that almost everything which looks utterly doomed and hopeless from inside a tribal view, looks far more hopeful, when you escape.
(because only then can we see the shape of a truly viable popular front for social transformation).
Indignation is the key tell-tale. If you find yourself in love with yours, step back, find love elsewhere.
I have to stop here for a hilarious piece of clarity. I know many people still haven’t realized that every brand of BigNews now runs on the (only remaining profitable) FOX model (feeding one narrow-cast audience exactly what they want to hear) and not only cooperates with, but IS a component of BigWar – emotionally manipulative propaganda, furiously trying to align the western populace for renewed fits of racism, to prepare us for endless “Ethical” (supremacist) warfare, to enrich foul warmongers and bankers at the expense of all remaining hope and potential on earth.
But while Pavlov’s media bell was training us to enjoy sneering at mis, dis, and malinformation (the last, information which is COMPLETELY TRUE – but they find embarrassing, and so would like to criminalize anyhow – which should tell you everything about their respect for citizens and rights) one of the subjects that everyone was encouraged to sneer about was the idea that “The Deep State” even exists, let alone does many sneaky malign things which have nothing to do with the democratic will or interests of the citizens who pay them.
Another was a loud sustained sneer about the idea that globalists, as most clearly represented by the weirdly shameless World Economic Forum, had any sort of unwholesome intent or designs for power. (Even though diluting democracy with corporate power is literally their entire reason for existence)
These are the kind of denials which make me wonder why so many obvious imbeciles now insist on calling themselves left (actually, I do know – the neo-left (about as left as neoliberals are liberals) offers a powerful brand of stupefying emotional catharsis and escape from responsibility – but it still replaces hope and possibility, with just one more kind of paralyzing consumerist neo-barbarism). “Not-me-ism!”
While working very hard on post-tribalism (and the uniquely unifying, time-tested and most humanely revolutionary “Popular Front” as a political aspiration) I still feel most confident asserting my leftist credentials on what used to be the well-respected scholarly side of the thing. I don’t mean the Navel-(gazing) academy, I mean the history of the abuse of power against normal people, here and elsewhere.
I can dismiss the idiots skepticism about the WEF very simply. They just appointed a new leader, to replace Klaus Schwab (who was fiddling the books for years, it seems). Surely they could at least pick a new head-guy who didn’t come off quite so much like an actual cackling super-villain. You would think, right?
Wrong, the new leader of the WEF is Peter Brakeck-Letmanthe (formerly a director of Nestle) who is on the record repeatedly saying “defining Water as a human right is Extremist” and “Humans have no right to access free water.”
Tell me again how fearing the influence of WEF globalists (many in the new Liberal Cabinet) is crazy. But while you’re at it PLEASE note the helpful lesson. When we sneer, we get stupid (and boost evil).
A few days ago, someone dear asked me when I thought this gigantic mess we are all in, really started, and I had to laugh, because even though the question was wildly vast and vague, I had an immediate answer for her, and didn’t even have to search hard to find it (nor did I doubt it, once I did).
This whole mess started when American Capital became so much more powerful than the American government that it took full and complete control of it – a control it has not once since surrendered.
What we really mean when we say “The Deep State” is ultra powerful K St (Washington) and Wall St (New York) legal firms working for individual transnational corporations, and also for whole groups of them in alignment, to prompt (owned) governments to write policy which favours their interests, at the expense of citizens.
You could draw the “when exactly” line in a lot of different places – some argue the industrialists and bankers were so furious with Roosevelt’s New Deal, that they built powerful (thinktank) institutions which have done us all (and the poor long abandoned US constitution) incalculable damage ever since.
In effect, his challenge to capitalism was so great, they built intellectual and capital powered super weapons to oppose it, and the left has never been able to escalate adequately to answer them. (more precisely, when they tried, their thinktanks almost always ended up being coopted by pure evil ALSO).
For tribalist emotionalists, this is a lovely (and personally flattering) simplification. There are only two big problems with that view. One is that modern historians now very clearly recognize that far from opposing capitalism, Roosevelt’s radical new deal was what saved it from certain doom, at the very last minute. (A vast subject in itself – but Conrad Black, a Canadian super-Capitalist and author, is only one of many who make this argument, in their scholarly biographies of the unique impact of FDR).
The other problem with that comforting simplification (and I do apologize to my romantic leftist chums who never got deep into the books on history or economics) is that the new deal is simply not what rescued the American economy and workers. The Second World War, which Roosevelt promised American voters the US would absolutely not enter, was the force which ultimately revived American industrialism, which had still (a decade later) despite FDR, not recovered from the great depression.
That war was a vast crime and horror – entirely unimaginable to most moderns (much less so for Slavs and citizens in the Eastern Congo, tragically). I’ve been studying it for decades, and still find new clues and deceptions all the time. It is a super important event and historical marker, because that war not only created the world we live in now, it obliterated much of the way the world worked before (some of which was fine indeed, some deeply malign). As I remarked elsewhere, the first world war took us from an age when even shocking cruelty was at least personal, to a world of mass produced factory death.
The second world war nailed that transition down completely, and also added managerial Algorithms.
That is – the ruling elites moved from studying the classics, so they could use our most treasured epics and beliefs to manipulate us, to studying mathematics and engineering – and in so doing the minimum unit of their consideration went from individual (already alienated) people, to entire herds (of us).
And still that’s too general, we have the ghost of a motivated faction (scandalized capitalists, so arrogant they didn’t even understand the new capitalism-saving angle Roosevelt was offering them) and a set of techniques (early cybernetics – systems of management control and feedback), but I saw a great documentary the other day, which reminded me of one more very important clue we usually miss.
Big huge impressive stuff almost always comes from a very small group of people in a tiny room.
Fans of Star Trek – go watch an interview with Matt Jeffries – Star Wars – go look at Ralph McQuarrie’s original sketchbook – X men, check out the Chris Claremont doc (fun and revealing).
The enduringly impressive creative duo from South Park almost define this “shoestring megaphone.”
For more recent cases, Vince Gilligan’s writer’s room (or that from the Sopranos) make a fun study.
Yes, when we’re on the receiving end of the megaphone, a message can look polished, sophisticated, impressive, even iconic, and we often form emotional relationships with those big delivered messages.
But the actual creators at the sharp end (with the screwy management and tight budgets) were almost always going half-crazy trying to balance the chaos and contradictions. The part that makes it polished and iconic (all due respect to creators, editors and other fine presentation-polishers) is that we make a choice to invest in it, emotionally. Almost never a conscious choice though, we make it by instinct.
(And I should here briefly note – love is also a choice – and investing in that choice actively, taking the instinctive start, then making it conscious will also, is a huge part of doing it with lasting gratitude).
Anyhow, as much as consumerists like the horror movie version of what’s wrong (the one where cowering in the corner, or watching the neighbours burn, while eating popcorn, makes sense) I am more and more convinced that the creepiest games that are run against citizens in common, are very much like those small creative teams that bring us strange and wondrous amusements.
That is, coming up with weird new shit in a tiny room, then seeing if they can actually get away with it.
I have been intending for years now, to do a long piece called “American History is a very Dulles subject” – but I am compulsive in some ways, and I have three books on my shelf which I know will greatly expand my critique, so I can’t bring myself to write that big piece, until I’ve read them all.
But I can give you a starting reference. John Foster and Allen Dulles first made their mark as part of the American negotiating team at Versailles, after the first world war. Churchill famously said that had the Americans not entered the war, all sides were so exhausted, they would have come to fair terms soon. With the late American entry into the war, an overwhelming Allied victory became irresistible – which seems like a good thing, except that it also meant one more party at the table that wanted victory loot, when the war ended. Historians widely agree that the amount of loot exacted at Versailles (and also several map-redrawings) were so irresponsible as to make the Second World War absolutely inevitable.
I have a most fortuitous link to a Michael Hudson interview below, where he not only talks about the weird impact (self-destructive in every way) of Trump’s contradictory economic bully tactics, but also relates this to Versailles specifically. America demanded Germany pay for the weapons American had just used to defeat them, in American dollars – then congress blocked German imports, which was the only possible way Germany had to earn the American currency to pay-off that heavy debt! And no, we can’t say they didn’t know what they were doing. John Maynard Keynes himself said this whole plan was utter madness, at the time!
Weirdly, this is not only the same basic U$Dollar denominated debt versus new tariff trap which is suddenly freaking-out highly debt-burdened Europe, Canada and even the rich Asian export economies which have for so long worked to align themselves with the greater US economy, for mutual (albeit always second-tier subervient) prosperity.
This is also the same fundamentally extortionate debt structure the colonial powers have used for decades to reassert highly destructive (in fact, lethally parasitic) new influence in their former colonies.
Here’s a little hint for England and France especially. If you still feel lastingly resentful about your impudent slaves slipping their shackles – YOU ARE STILL FUNDAMENTALLY EVIL (just sayin’)
Just after that mass-murderous Second World War (they arguably helped cause), we find the Dulles boys working at the powerful corporate law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and just as some already established playwrights were soon to move into the exciting new realm of television, they too were poised and ready for their own brand-new kind of exciting post-war consumerist show business.
I have written several times about the National Security Act of 1947 – which established the USAF and CIA and ultimately lead also to the NSC (national security council) and NSA (no such agency) ;o)
Short summary? That act is “the thing that ate the constitution” stole government away from democratic control, or even effective supervision, and put it in the hands of imperialist/corporatists.
If you think I’m being too extreme, please consider the first two big projects the CIA undertook – the destruction of the parliamentary democracy in Iran (replaced by the universally hated Shah, who was then held in place by a despotic hyper-violent CIA-trained secret police force) which they did as a favour for UK oil companies, and the toppling of the government of Arbenz, in Guatemala, for the American company United Fruit. I should note – some histories still dishonestly suggest Arbenz was a radical communist – not so at all – he even said publicly that he was a great supporter of capitalist development, repeatedly, trying to emphasize the point. However, he also wanted the economics of his country to work for the people of his country (pretty sensible ask for any leader, one must allow).
Problem is, United Fruit didn’t want that. They wanted the money generated by the plantations they owned in Guatemala to keep coming to America forever, so Arbenz was slandered then deposed by force in a CIA organized, funded and coordinated coup.
The fact that Allen Dulles was then running the CIA, and John Foster Dulles the State Department, and United Fruit was a corporate client of their old law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, was never mentioned.
Same goes for the horrific US intervention in Chile, which destroyed the government of Allende and brought Pinochet, one of the most violent and sadistic American clients of all (which is saying a lot) to power in his place, all because ITT (another Sullivan and Cromwell client) didn’t think Chileans had a right to choose a policy of national control (max service, min cost) over their own infrastructure.
And yes, there is evidence of the Soviet Union mucking about with distant governments also, but even the most skeptical scholars of the cold war allow that was only ever strategic, not profit-seeking (and I am including several outright ethical actions as strategic – because they are, in the cynical cold war calculus which I am here invoking). More to the point, depending on where you set the threshold (minor interference in reputations and created scandals, to outright violent intervention) the Americans still did somewhere between three and five times more of this kind of intervention thing.
In fairness, it is true that there was no doctrine under communism which allowed a failure to respond to a strategic necessity – but profit is a far busier proselytizer even than revolutionary communism – anyhow, once the corporate brain trusts had the reins in their hands, it was inevitable that they would get together in small rooms, come up with weird shit, then see if they could actually get away with it.
And they have been doing that ever since. That’s what The Deep State is. Rich creeps stealing power. (Corrupting Democracy, blocking social aspirations, standing in the way of sustainable plenty).
Anybody who doesn’t understand that this whole idea of destroying stability and accommodations in other countries (and our own) for the advantage of multinational corporations (and ultimately, a little bribe taste for us consumers, their precious coddled herd of cash-cows) is evil, is colonialism, is exploitative, is supremacist, and is hyper violent, really needs to call themselves something other than progressive or left, until they read a book (or two dozen).
The idea that showing up for work on time is a manifestation of supremacy, but the cellphone in your pocket isn’t, is strictly for idiots. Last time I looked the cellphone industry had so far funded around five million civilian deaths in the Congo, perhaps a million more. (Western mining companies buying weapons and funding governments and rebels alike, to get what they want, cheap, at any cost in lives).
And even there, what looks like a problem too vast to solve is not. Apple has literally the greatest pile of liquid cash of any company in all of recorded human history. Guess who badly needs a safe and ethical mining industry? (and long-term stability).
Yes, billions over decades would be required – and still Apple could do it – without even denting their freakin’ stock price! (And it might even be the last possible Hail-Mary pass they could make, to regain a bit of their old long-abandoned ethical credibility).
Now here’s the really tricky part, especially for my friends who have drifted into an emotionally based (and now utterly coopted) kind of leftism, instead of sticking with intellect and clear strong principles.
Emotions aren’t enough. Never have been, never will be. That isn’t opinion, or patriarchal assertion, it is a tested and proven fact. Emotions can be manipulated, and once mister Pavlov has us on that track, we humans will countenance outrageous violations of principle, just to sustain the emotional thrills. That’s just the kind of animals we are (emotional critters, who deny and pretend to be rational instead).
What I was saying before about consumerists insisting on horror-show (unsolvable) politics, which justify self-evidently inadequate responses? That’s because those entirely inadequate responses are all they are ever prepared to offer. The performance of we tried, is as far as these minds can even aspire. (And as crazy-making as it is, that so many of them are in charge – it is even more sad and pathetic for the rest of us).
Sure, reason-traps abound also, but when people are trying to lead entire herds of us into self-harm, they ALWAYS use emotion, because emotions feed into tribalism, which goes right past reason and principle. Our best tools for restraint of passion.
That Scholar isn’t going to Rhodes himself
I’ve done a lot of detailed takes on Twentieth Century history in particular, so I’m just going to review a few key pieces here, rather than re-do the whole path of research and debate which got me there.
Nixon cheated to win the election in 1968 (and felt he was entitled, because he was so convinced that Kennedy cheated him out of a win in 1960). He did this by sending a delegation to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks – which might have brought the war in Vietnam to an end years earlier than it finally did.
Problem is, he didn’t want to solve the war on fair terms himself, he wanted a “Win” and so millions more (and entire new countries) would be devastated, as he greatly expanded the war that he extended just to gain political power. The fact that he kept that hyper-expensive war going so much longer, pretty much bankrupted the United States. That’s when they went from being a future-optimistic space-eyed global lender and leader, to a cynical dystopian extortionate nihilist-borrower (and scrapped the gold standard, as recently discussed).
Oddly, even though we now know the war in Vietnam was intended primarily to intimidate China, since they utterly failed in that aim, Nixon also advanced a seemingly completely contradictory plan – radically improve relations with China, to try to keep them from aligning closely with the USSR.
So – did (saint) Jimmy Carter the sweet humanist turn things around, and get America back out of the violent dominance game? Yeah, no, some of the most disgusting imperial excesses of all time happened on his watch, including the murder of nuns and clergy (by CIA trained death-squads) in El Salvador, and the deliberate fomenting of the first modern war in Afghanistan (Soviet invasion in 1979).
Seriously folks, right up to 9/11, Zbigniew Brezhinsky (Carter’s national security advisor, then a think-tank superstar) was taking personal credit for bringing down “The Evil Empire” by starting the war in Afghanistan. CIA operatives at the time called the weaponization of radical Islam a great bargain.
Reminds me of Joe Biden (back when he had a working brain, as Obama’s VP) boasting on a talk show that the destruction of the government of Libya only cost three billion, and, being so cost-effective, was “THE WAY WE SHOULD DO THIS SORT OF THING IN THE FUTURE.” (direct quote)
Everyone has something to say about Ronald Reagan. For the age cohort in which I grew up, he was the first big bad evil political figure we all hated for any and all reasons, fair or not.
I still think he represents a wrong turn in all kinds of ways, but I now make this critique on specific, rather than emotional grounds, because that way, when I critique the same foul policies done by the left, people who are skeptical on the right understand, hey cool, there’s still a left-faction for principle!
And that is the point of this review, when we do an over-simplifying morally extreme (manichaen) binary split – while pretending we already inhabit a shared and mutual politics based on genuine (rather than theatrical and cathartic) grappling with, and sincere arguments about, the future, we miss the fact that the evil on our side is almost identical to the evil we hate most on theirs, but for the emotionally self-serving framing which we grant it, as another one of those investments in beloved fiction.
Reagan was followed by ex CIA head Bush the first. I hated him even more than Reagan (who was a corny actor at best, and clearly only a mindless puppet by the end of his term, anyhow – pathetic compared to the malevolent puppet masters behind him). But Bush1 by contrast, was smart enough to be fully culpable.
But now here’s a strange thing about that. Bush can be blamed for failing to control his diplomats properly (US representative April Glasbie told Iraqi diplomats that if (recent US ally) Iraq wanted to ‘solve their problems with Kuwait’ the United States would consider it a regional matter only).
Worse still, he executed the first war in Iraq (which as I say, he might also have avoided entirely, with a slightly more competent diplomatic corps) fairly well, which was frightening even at the time, because it cleared the hard and horribly earned lesson from the war in Vietnam “DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN” from the collective memory of the US army, the imperialists, and over time, even citizens.
But I have listened to detailed personal witness from Col Lawrence Wilkerson, who was deep inside that White House, who insists that it wasn’t a reaction to “Desert Storm” or even the way he was forced to backtrack on his promise of “Read my Lips - No new taxes” which ruined his re-election chances. Not even the Faustian charm of Bill Clinton. It was the way Bush1 set hard limits on Israeli actions (the last time an American president dared do that, according to Wilkerson), and the Aipac lobby in America considered that pushback adequate reason to back his slick opponent 100%.
I must here note – restraining Israel is part of the relationship, helps Israel long term, big-time (or used to, back when it was still being tried). Keeping the violence from outrage-level is Uncle Sam’s job (if you are going to use a country to do your dirty work, you owe them some kind of responsible management and generalship, at least). And for those who haven’t been paying attention – senior diplomatic figures have now admitted that during all of this new mind-numbing and heartbreaking murder-madness in Gaza, Biden never once said stop or even slow down, not even by diplomatic back-channel. He let them go so far too far, they have destroyed their reputation with the whole world.
Again, I’m sticking to that cold war calculus Biden (and his ilk) were all steeped in. Where ethical actions were always also recognized as STRATEGIC ACTIONS (at least in part). Not saying that you have to, or even that you should try to find a self-interest reason to do the right thing, only that even for a psychopath who can see no other valid reason to act, there’s clear motivation to do far better. If I get into the ethics, civilizational values, even long term strategic thinking, it’ll need a whole new essay.
Which brings us to – oh dear – Bill Clinton. He (like Tony Blair in England) was supposed to be a brand new and exciting kind of leftist, the kind that could compete with the powerful and well funded corporate right wing at last – fight them on their level. What he promised in words was a new era of bipartisanship and innovative partnerships between corporations and government. What he actually meant was that he was going to suck-up to the weapons companies even harder than the Republicans, by creating whole new categories of “Moral Reasons” to justify ultra-violent (and profitable) US intervention in the politics of other sovereign countries. His brilliant team promised to turn the threat of great and lasting peace back into a never-ending war!
He also sucked-up to the wealthy in America in a way which strikes me as weirdly revealing. For a leftist, it a commonplace that one thing which proves right-wingers wrong, is their favouring of business. But while I have done many detailed critiques of huge-scale business, consumerism, monopolism and all of the downstream corruptions of community environment and struggling people overseas, business does at least usually employ some people usefully, and produce some useful product out the far end (the full costs of this activity, is another huge and separate subject).
Several economists I read insist Carter was the one who actually began this fundamentally principle-destroying compromise shift for the Democrats, but certainly by the time of Clinton it was clear that he was trying above all to please BANKS.
Again for leftists, linking a business-favouring policy to “fascism” is lazy and comfortable (and no less harmful).
But here I have to sincerely ask the question – the Democrats were THE PARTY OF SOUTHERN RACISM right up until they passed the Civil Rights Act, and then immediately after giving up on their old tradition of lynching, they began to mass-murder the Vietnamese (using industry and algorithms in combination).
So is it perhaps fairer for us to say that if the danger on the right is business directed fascism, the danger on the American left is and has always been a banker ruled Klu Klux Klan? I know it is a sacrilege to even ask this. “That’s impossible, why, the Democrats are the ones who CARE (tm) for the unfortunate.”
Care for the unfortunate, was that why the Democrats crafted their outrageously racist, family and community destroying Crime Bill (long Biden’s proudest work) precisely so that it would favour the IPOs of the private prison corporations which had been prepared in advance, to take advantage of it?
No wait, perhaps that was why he destroyed the old welfare system, and made survival support far more precarious and insecure for millions. I have to ask, is making people wards of the state and then cutting their rations your idea of compassion? CAN WE DO NO BETTER IN A HALF A CENTURY?
Of course we can, or at least we could, if we were planning and acting long term FOR HUMANS, instead of BANKS as our neoliberal leaders, a shocking proportion of them ACTUAL BANKERS now do.
They don’t want people off the streets and into productive work or care (as suits each) they want to preserve and then administer to their endless pain for endless profit. This “Charity” sustains a huge bourgeois class of ‘compassion technicians’ who can all feel heroic (and superior), while steadfastly refusing to ever seek a new solution that might actually work. Like prison guards for poverty, but with wish-boards and affirmations.
Clinton locked-in the crazy speculative games of Reaganomics for good, instead of repealing them, he obliterated controls on the stock market which went back to the aftermath of the great depression, and even shifted the rules for home-lending, thus setting up the conditions for the 2008 financial collapse.
His evil secretary of state Madeline Albright said a half a million dead Iraqi children was a price worth paying, and pioneered The Albright Doctrine. Way more war around the world, for “good” causes – a doctrine which inspires her disciple Hillary and many other slaughtering psychopaths to this day.
When he was governor, Clinton used to have state police from his protection detail pick out pretty girls from the crowd and send them up to his hotel room, so he could assault them (with his “charms”).
Above all, Clinton discarded our hard-earned, long-promised peace dividend from the end of the cold war – a whole new era for Europe – by doubling-down on the evil path of perpetual future warfare, instead of shifting the US to a true peacetime economy at long last (that is, making things you can use and profit from, without mass-murdering otherwise happy families over lies). Be clear folks – that was when China started pulling ahead, when we decided to stay killers – instead of learning to make and prosper, the way we once grew strong and (at least in some ways) useful to the world.
Now you tell me. He’s a leftist HOW? He’s a feminist HOW? He’s a progressive HOW?
He is none of those, he is a racist mass-murdering imperialist scumbag, and he always was. Problem is, the Republicans put up such a great scary show in congress back then (Gingrich was literally handing out copies of Heinz Guderian’s book on blitzkrieg tank tactics, to his colleagues) that we all got deeply emotionally invested in Manichaenism, and developed a frightening habit of excusing even outright treason against every principle and interest the left ever cared about.
People were screaming blue murder at MONICA not BILL. (honestly, WTF even was that?)
Tony Blair isn’t the genius behind Cool Britannia, he is a War Criminal. Failure to see these things is a form of blindness specific to the rich west. The exact arrogance which has always powered imperialism.
No you can’t be ‘a leftist’ and be that delusional (that is called being a narcissist/sociopath/imbecile).
Nobody remembers this anymore, but W “won” insofar as he ultimately did – (shouldn’t even have been close, with his scant qualifications) because of a clear answer he gave Jim Lehrer in a debate, when Al Gore was rambling-on in his pompous way about shining heroic America going around the world and fixing other countries (Albright Doctrine). W smiled his goofy smile and said he thought America ought to stop interfering in the world so much and just mind its own business. Stunning (and in context, devastating) use of obvious truth.
Even a quarter of a century ago (and leftists ignore this to their enormous shame) there was a powerful workers ANTI-WAR FACTION ON THE RIGHT. And they just helped elect Trump again (not fascists, at least not to any greater extent than it was true and faithful Klansmen who were trying to keep brainless Biden running so long).
Of course we all know how that worked out for hapless George – he delegated the power to screw up the world to his insane corporatist vice President Cheney, who proceeded to do exactly that, big time.
The 2008 crash definitely did not help (anything or anyone except the bankers, who even had their lavish bonuses restored by the suddenly shockingly more destitute taxpayers) but the way the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq were run, subcontracted to global corps and on credit, favoured both banking interests and big war corporations, and they liked the game so much, they have kept it running steadily.
Obama was supposed to repeal the patriot act, restoring rights and the constitution, and instead enshrined it, then normalized extra judicial assassination by flying robot, on target advice from early AI. (He had a meeting every week “Murder Tuesdays” to pick new targets for no-trial or evidence killings). Some estimate 90% of those killed were innocent (and that isn’t counting the bystanders or rescue vehicles often hit on the ‘re-strike’)
With Operation Timber Sycamore, Obama began the destruction and horror which has consumed secular Syria. Backing Kurdish separatists to take over the key oil fields (to deprive the government of money) and even the key croplands, causing PLANNED AND HORRIFIC MALNOURISHMENT (standard tactic of imperialists, to be sure – but never once to be overlooked or forgiven).
Hillary was the main driver behind the utter destruction of what was once the most prosperous and truly independent nation in Africa, Libya. She is proud of it to this day, though she destroyed a jewel of black power (American blacks who weren’t scandalized ARE SCANDALOUS) with shocking cruelty and absolutely zero contrition for the massive problems his vast scattered arsenal soon caused all of Africa.
Which problems soon gave these Globalist/Rhodes-ian/Malthusian maniacs an excuse to empower “Africom” because after such a fine starting example, didn’t Africa obviously need way more American military ‘help’?
(And no, I don’t mean to skip over Sudan, the Sahel, East Africa or the Francophone coast, all big and important stories in themselves). The point is, these assholes ARE IMPERIALISM and SUPREMACY.
Again, leftists who use those words but don’t oppose Democrats who are proud of racist mass murder, really need a different designation (and/or a nice dunce-cap, to make spotting and discounting them, easier).
The one that really gets me (even more than an expert in constitutional law, renewing the patriot act) is that Obama gave the CIA permanent military capability, instead of their old heavy paperwork case-by-case relationship with JSOC (Joint special operations command). He made the best liars much better and more fluent killers.
Trump is – well, he’s weird. He is also NOT a Republican. Almost no one on the left understands this, but one of the reasons he is so popular with his media-demonized base is precisely because he truly hates that stale and totally corrupted power centre. (like the left used to also, way back when it still had a brain-cell).
This is absolutely not the same thing as having a coherent strategy about how to do better – but since the left has long normalized the idea that all you have to represent is hating the other guy (literally, no positive aspirational vision for the future to offer AT ALL in decades) he (after sitting in a small room and coming up with some weird shit, with the help of a chaotic and often contradictory group of outsider thinkers) decided to see if he could get away with it.
I really don’t mean to trivialize it, for those who are still enjoying fetishizing their hatred for the man. But seriously, the reason he won the first time, is that he expected to lose, so he just did what he felt like doing. Had fun with it.
The fact that his own intelligence agencies and defence department were working against him his whole first term, is now well-established (though it sure did look like paranoid ranting at the time). Fake news really was a thing, after all (so frustrating).
He wanted to completely withdraw American troops from Syria almost a decade ago, which would probably have been enough to let them get their country put back together after Obama’s sustained assault (and would also have greatly reduced politically destabilizing refugee pressure on Europe).
His own general staff blocked him and lied about it. This is why he wants people in every department, he can trust. Now there is a salafist head-chopping maniac running Syria, and all Trump can do is lift sanctions and hope for the best (don’t kill everyone, eh?)
On the one hand, this looks like another endorsement of another externally imposed dictator madman – but we always forget – sanctions don’t punish the big guy, they punish normal citizens by far the hardest. Normal people in Syria badly need a break. I pray they finally get it (and that this inducement restrains the worst impulses of the new faction in power, though early results are not encouraging).
Trump was also sincere (this, from military advisors from his first term) about making peace and re-unification of the two Koreas possible, at long last. John Bolton lead a whole team of deep state creeps who sabotaged the progress he’d made, by taking extremely hostile actions against North Korea, behind Trump’s back.
I ain’t saying he’s a stable genius or anything, but west Asia would be better with secular Syria restored, instead of this highly unstable new temptation toward empire for both Turkiye and Israel.
And Koreans both North and South have paid way too much in dignity, wealth, peace and happiness, just to give America an excuse to station a whole lot of troops and aircraft near enough to intimidate China. They deserve peace and a restoration to a genuine sovereign policy, and I mean all of them.
That longshot chance is now completely lost. If the Koreas are brought back together now, it will most likely be through (recently outstanding and brilliant) Chinese diplomacy. Honestly, who saw Iran and the Saudis talking like friends again?
The Democrats called Trump a Russian agent, and got plenty of help from British intelligence to do it (so they could do it without violating American law, by using direct American ‘assets’). Total fraud, but it stuck and it hurt. They said he was wrong to scrap the nuclear treaty with Iran (and yet Biden did not renew it).
They said he was wrong to start a trade war with China (and then Biden threatened ACTUAL WAR for Taiwan, in a way that violated the diplomatic protocols and respect going all the way back to Nixon’s days). I don’t like Trump, at all, but he wasn’t the only guy making up dangerous shit as he went.
Worst of all, Biden pulled the trigger on the grandest ambition of the evil Albright Doctrine – ignoring the fact that Russia never posed the external threat that the Soviet Union once had (and in fact was seeking entry into the European family as a friend, or at least a stable-treaty partner, for decades) he set America into a direct proxy war which was designed (you can read the RAND paper yourself) to destroy Russia, then smash it into a whole bunch of smaller weaker pieces, which would be easy for foreign investors to bribe, threaten and buy-up to gain control (of profits which belong to others, the same old colonialist game that leftists used to always know was wrong – pre tribalist stupefaction).
Yes folks – I’ve done the detailed take a number of times, here’s the simple summary. The war was one hundred percent provoked. By UN numbers, fourteen THOUSAND Russian speaking civilians were murdered by Ukrainian militia units, before Putin’s troops ever crossed the border, and even then he was only trying to get the Ukrainians to honour the treaties they kept signing and then breaking, which promised to respect Russian speakers and restore their long established language rights once again.
Many here don’t understand this, but neutrality was written into Ukraine’s constitution (and NATO membership was not ever popular, nor a reasonable idea – which was why it was always voted down).
Zelensky himself was elected because he promised to sign a peace deal with Russia at last (Minsk 2) but then he did the opposite. Skeptics really need to listen to Arestovich (one of Zelensky’s key allies, and now a critic of his reckless policies). The offer was clear. You want into the EU? You will have to fight at least one (maybe two or even three) wars with Russia. But don’t worry (said the smug imperialists) you’ll be using superior western weapons and you’ll get our best tactics and training, too.
This is the part that BigNews consumers in the west still really do not understand. Yes, many of the weapons and vehicles sent to Ukraine at first were old stock, held in reserve, but they were still versions of all our war equipment, and as the war ground on, the west sent far newer and better gear.
More surprisingly, as the New York Times finally confirmed (how many years after learning it?) every single Ukrainian military action, every disastrous offensive and poorly planned operation, came from the ‘brilliant’ minds of western generals. The US of course, but perhaps even more from the UK.
The Kursk offensive, now entirely obliterated at staggering cost to Ukraine (as it was obviously always going to be) is the clearest example, because they only took the latest greatest models of all the war gear the EU, UK and America has, and that force had months or in some cases even years of special NATO fighting-doctrine training, and they even had dozens (maybe hundreds) of western ‘mercenaries’ (‘sheep dipped’ junior officers, whose official status as civilians won’t implicate their host country directly in war crimes, as a state – only as individuals) and please note – spies did not ever get Geneva convention protection, and foreign mercenary officers are always considered spies. A lot of “heart attacks” of retired officers on vacation have been turning up in western papers.
The result? The Russians have now proven to themselves and the whole wide world, that they can confront our best gear and tactics and defeat them. Also, because they (like the Chinese) are after function and efficiency, instead of maximum stock prices, they have proven to be incomparably better at adaptation and new weapons innovation than the financialized west has been capable of any time this whole century. (No really, I mean that – US and EU gear is almost all slightly upgraded versions (or not even) of the same once cutting-edge gear that they used against Saddam the first time in Desert Storm, way the hell back in 1990).
People who think everyone else hasn’t bothered doing their homework while we fiddled and fumed for the last thirty years? Imperialists, supremacists, or the kind of dumb emotional consumerists who faithfully serve them.
The Chinese aren’t pulling ahead on EVERYTHING because they are sneaky and evil, but because they plan for the long term and work damn hard to get it right (plenty of fails, but they still have a system where CAPITALISM SERVES SOCIETY, where here, SOCIETY SERVES CAPITALISM).
Conversely, we aren’t two fury-blinded symmetrical schizoid halves of a potentially healthy society, set at cross purposes by the drama games of powerful manipulators precisely so we can more easily be led to (and led to support) the slaughter, because one side represents all good, and one all evil.
Both sides are deeply committed to evil now. Deny that and admit you endorse evil too (so don’t).
Trump is a dick, and even when he gets a good idea from someone, he almost always screws it up, but he is uniquely positioned to destroy American military hegemony (while trying to pivot and save it) and he is absolutely right to seek an end to the war that violent racist American and UK hubris started.
The more (any given) Vader tightens his grip, the more systems slip through his fingers. Soon, all. (fingers crossed)
Is Putin a nice guy? Considering the fact that there are hundreds of books about him, and exactly two which are not western intelligence slander and propaganda, I have no idea at all – and neither do you. But he does seem to be what he has to be, to resist the most powerful countries on earth trying to destroy him personally and his country as a whole, all so that greedy western psychopaths can make even more money that they could never possibly need.
Even if he’s also a power-mad maniac (possible) he’s still quite a bit closer to being responsible to his own national interest than any acting western leader.
Xi? China keeps making progress, raising millions out of poverty, even while we have spent decades now (through ruinous de-industrialization and financialization) plunging our own middle classes down into it – and this, even though America hates and wants to kill their progress utterly (ever since Obama’s “Asian Pivot”). Uighurs who have been radicalized by demented Saudi wahabbists (and millions in CIA funding and advanced terrorism training) actually do represent precisely the kind of threat to society that western governments would also act strongly against (does no one remember the FLQ crisis, when supposedly sweet Canada suspended all presumption of civil law and rights, to root out two-dozen terrorists?) The rest don’t.
Tibet breaks my heart, but considering the extent to which the USA wants to smash (and then more easily and profitably exploit) China – even putting the Dali Lama on the CIA payroll for decades (confirmed by recent FOIA releases) those headwaters are simply too strategic for them not to retain full and direct control. (In the recent conflict, Pakistan was far more afraid of Indian threats to water, than their army).
Of course, if you can find the right (western imperialist) glasses EVERYONE WHO CHALLENGES THE WEST (or even shows “Aggressive Neutrality” like poor jailed-for-nothing Imran Khan) is a definite actual reincarnation of Hitler – because that justifies us being racist mass-murderers (which remains the thing we always want to justify, more than anything else in the entire freakin’ world).
Projection, folks – look it up.
The west, the left, the right, the financiers, the warmongers – all of these factions are now self-evidently functionally insane.
What I said at the start – back to basics, please.
We have enough of every physical substance (and even far more ephemeral things like capital) to still make this work.
The real question we ALL have to ask ourselves is when will we start actually working on THAT, instead of rushing to support justify and rationalize a pre-corrupted (murder and exploitation based) “Solution” crafted to make us feel like the good guys again, while trying to wash the blood off our hands, with fresh blood.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am again running a week behind in my indy news story scan – I still had a few dozen picked out, but I’m going to skip this wonky world for today, and just share a few specifics and a few great (that is, stimulating, not in every case correct) general sources.
And yes, I know I ran a little long this time – but I still only covered half the ground I meant to, I swear! ;o) Concision is for poets, dammit! (I’d have to change costumes).
Here’s that amazingly well timed Michael Hudson interview with Nima (though you’ll find him talking to many if not most of the best independent media people – he’s definitely ‘on the circuit’). I had literally just finished writing about Versailles, then asked myself if I was crazy to go for such an old reference, when I sat down and watched him tie that early foul debt-trap, to all of our most modern panics.
Man, I just love it when the universe does that – thank you Murphy! (Nima and Micheal, even more so)
Now I hate to mess with the poetic impact of that, for something so tenuous and screwy, but a note about the weird reactions to Trump (both supporters and detractors are frequently outright unhinged) really is called for.
I mentioned earlier that W got a huge amount of support, unnoticed by the (fake, bourgeois) left, for rejecting the idea that the US should be the dictator of the entire world. The Democrats are still completely hooked on that hyper-violent western domination for “moral purposes” idea (as are the EU supremacists and madmen in the UK). So are the traditional institutional Republicans that Trump had to fight, to win control of the party. Clinton, W, Obama and Biden were all absolute US supremacists.
Alternative media paid more attention than BigNews, to Marco Rubio’s astonishing speech a few weeks ago, where he noted publicly (for the first time ever as US policy) that the unipolar moment is over. He’s still a dangerous neocon himself, but he was obviously representing considered policy. It is also true, and long past time we noticed.
Yes Trump is a very weird and deliberately provocative guy, but as Arnaud Bertrand observed about this clip, it is sad and a little bit frightening, that something so incredibly obvious was never once said by any western politician until Trump.
This article by Alestair Crooke has a huge range of sharp insights that help set Trump’s actions into a much richer historical context. Come for the recent craziness, stay for the (BRILLIANT) Karl Polanyi quotations! (no really, they are so fine)
Seriously – if you want to understand what complex of weird intentions are powering all of this trade disruption, you gotta read this!
Here is another fantastically well timed and genuinely hopeful story from “Nkrumah’s Africa” (Nicholas Jones). I was planning to share his excellent earlier story about Traoré (also linked in this piece and much worth reading) but this ‘part one of two’ is even better, because he goes so much deeper into the historical line that Traoré represents so inspiringly. (Hope renewed, against all odds and opposition).
Thank you Nicholas!
Here’s globalist-skeptical financial analyst Alex Krainer with his own take on the most extraordinary man.
Jimmy Dore started off as a comedian, and ended up as a political commentator – with the kind of outsider-takes that used to be standard fare on the (old, sane, smart) left, and are now seen as treason by the mindless follower-hordes who subscribe to the new (unprincipled emotionalist) variations.
Plots somewhere on the George Carlin / Bill Hicks axis (and boy could we use more of those).
Sabby Sabs, like Dore, didn’t start off where she has ended up. She was once communications director of Bernie’s first presidential campaign, but watching him sell-out to the worst corruption of the democrats since, has radicalized her way beyond her old (institutional academic radical) stand. No one covers the (shockingly lucid) American Green party better, and she frequently has a way of turning a fight that could make you scream, make you laugh instead. Smart as heck, too. Fun stuff.
The Grayzone is outstanding, courageous and in every way “the real deal”. Many of my favourite independent reporters including Kit Klarenburg, Anya Parampil, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal run major pieces here (and thereby pay their rent). If you want to support just one indy outlet to help more truth get out – go straight here.
The Grayzone - Blumenthal, Klarenburg, Mate, Parampil - journalistic gold.
I’ve mentioned Scheerpost several times – they feature the best (English language) cartoonist working today (Mister Fish) and veteran international correspondents with deep integrity like Chris Hedges and Patrick Lawrence, and also gather indy stories the powerful would rather bury, from many fine sources. Not only will you see a range of critical opinions, you’ll probably find a new favourite writer, too!
Scheerpost - check out Patrick Lawrence, Mister Fish and Chris Hedges
Finally, a couple of culture treats (to help clear the mental palette, so you don’t have nightmares) ;o)
I have always adored the work of Borges – his “Labyrinths” in particular, contains some of the most deeply perceptive humane, intelligent and delicious writing ever rendered. These additional insights into his attitude about art suffering and resilience make me like him even more.
And here, still more delicious and readable ideas about reading
(I love Julian De Medeiros’ focus and tastes)
I’ll return to more links (and still more forays into non-delusional hope) next time.
Until then, keep working on it, eh? HOPE IS A PLAN.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wow – my streak of amazing timing backup from other writers continues! (touch wood)
For any who felt I skipped over the back room history a bit fast or loose, here’s brilliant Cynthia Chung with an absolutely fantastic piece about most of the key historical markers I invoked – and she not only draws extraordinary and revealing lines of connnection (superb scholarship) but names names (nerve!)
“Western Europe has only 20 to 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.”
– Willy Brandt (German Federal Chancellor, right before he stepped down in 1974)
and
“...NSC-68 would be drafted the same year, declaring that the U.S. was in the moral equivalent of war with the Soviet Union and called for a massive military buildup to be completed by 1954 dubbed the “year of maximum danger”, the year JIC-502 claimed the Soviets would achieve military superiority and be able to launch war against the U.S. This proposed military buildup would increase the defense budget from $10 billion to $40 billion from 1950-53.
During this same period another security doctrine was drafted, titled “NSC-75: A Report to the NSC by the Executive Secretary on British Military Commitments”. The report concluded that if the British Empire collapsed, and Britain could no longer carry out these deployments, in defending the “free world” against the Soviets, the U.S. would not be able to carry out its current foreign policy, including NSC-68.
It was thus concluded in the report that it would be more cost-effective to aid Britain in saving its Empire!
If you were ever wondering why the CIA was constantly found paired with British Intelligence, starting from its very inception, in a series of coups in countries they had no reason to be in, now you know why.”
https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-enemy-within-a-story-of-the-purge-d2f
Exceptionally well-written logic I concur with. The caveat is my pessimism. However, in my pitiful defence, my protest for Gaza was giving up Nestle Crema Coffee.