SC231-14

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56479.htm

Global Britain, Global Delusions

In a strategic review, the British government says the United States will remain its closest ally because of “shared values” which are allegedly attributed as being democracy, rule of law and human rights.
Far more realistic than these panegyrics is the way Britain and the US routinely trash those purported “shared values” by launching illegal wars of aggression (for example, Iraq, Afghanistan); subvert foreign nations for regime change (for example, Syria, Libya); and arm despotic regimes to the teeth which suppress human rights (for example, Saudi Arabia).

The 111-page British strategic review makes for painful yet hilarious reading. It is full of delusional self-flattery.

Another “shared value” is the way Britain and the US gratuitously label other nations as enemies and security threats. This scaremongering is invoked primarily against Russia and China but also other smaller nations like Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.

This preposterous demonization of others is of course a form of psychological projection by the British and American ruling class to distract from the fact they are the biggest security threat to the world.

Scaremongering is also an essential precursor for warmongering and the continuance of militarized economies which underpins Anglo-American capitalism. Just imagine if the British and Americans tried to live in peace and cooperation with the rest of the world. Their economies would totally collapse from the absence of militarism and weapons industries.

In its so-called strategic review, it is apparent more than ever that the British rulers suffer from delusions of grandeur. Prime Minister Boris Johnson talks fancifully as if Britain is a global dynamo for economic growth and development. No longer content to exaggerate Britain’s international image as “Great Britain”, it is now referred to as “Global Britain”.

This is partly about promoting Britain to the rest of the world to make better its post-Brexit isolation from the European Union. And so by talking up its presumed power “to shape the world”, the British ruling class are obliged to pose as flexing muscles.

This would explain the policy reversal on decreasing its nuclear arsenal. Britain is now planning to increase its stockpile of nuclear warheads over the next decade from around 180 up to 260. This is in violation of Britain’s obligation to disarm under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Johnson talks about Britain being a “beacon of democracy” to the world when in reality it is a rogue state which is dangerously destabilizing international security by its wanton militarism.

    Yet the British rulers have the brass neck to accuse Russia and China of jeopardizing global security and to assert that they will “prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon”.

On Russia, the British are particularly vociferous, claiming that “Russia will remain the most acute direct threat” to the United Kingdom (Britain’s other fanciful name for itself).

    The strategic review document states, “we will actively deter and defend against the full spectrum of threats emanating from Russia”.

But it does not substantiate what these alleged “full spectrum of threats” from Russia are.

For rogue-state Britain it is apparently sufficient to simply make an accusation and then proceed to “justify” plans for increasing its nuclear arsenal.

Russia and Iran condemned the British state planners for blatant hypocrisy. So should all other nations.

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, nailed it when she said that Britain’s “imperial ambitions” are based on illusions. It’s as if the arrogant British rulers think they have turned the clock back a 100 years to a time when “the sun never set on their empire”. Even then British power was also over-rated.

Today, Britain may have nominally the fifth-biggest economy in the world, but it also is broken-down nation with rampant poverty and inequality. A third of its children struggle with poverty and hunger, and the numbers are increasing. Look at the shambles of its public health service, yet its ruling class is planning to spend £24 billion over the next four years to increase its military forces, including the number of nuclear weapons.

The reprehensible and reckless move to increase its nuclear arsenal is an absurd and grotesque waste of public finances. It is criminal in the face of such harrowing social needs among ordinary Britons.

But what’s also criminal is that British rulers are undermining global security – all for the vain purpose of posing as a global power instead of actually being a global power.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/in-the-shadows-of-shadowland/

In the Shadows of Shadowland

Is there some kind of game on in the USA? Have our public affairs ever looked so false and disordered? Is it ever more wondrous that Joe Biden somehow managed to win the Super Tuesday primary, let alone the national election?

The country has gotten exactly what it saw all through the autumn of 2020: the empty shell of a broken politician. Back in October, Ol’ Joe hiding in his basement was played as a bad joke in a nervous zeitgeist. Nothing to see, according to the captive news media. Wasn’t that exactly it, though? Nothing to see and nobody home, the essence of our now-president, Joe Biden. How on earth did this happen?

My own theory: it was the strange byproduct of the political establishment fumbling to cover up its crimes, an endeavor so transparently inept that the rest of the world goggles at us in nauseated incredulity, watching our leadership flounder, our institutions fail, our economy vaporize, and our power dissolve, like a some dying blob in an epic horror movie. Even our most devoted adversary, North Korea, marvels out loud at the spectacle of American collapse. They joke about it, but it must make them awfully uncomfortable to realize that the USA runs under a shadow government, and runs so ineptly!

Who or what is this shadow government? I’d say it amounts to a small group around former president Obama and former attorney general Eric Holder, plus a coterie of Intel Community figures led by John Brennan, all awkwardly funneling instructions through Susan Rice to the hacks in the White House, who form a flimsy cocoon around the barely-pulsating organism within: Mr. Biden. I will boldly suggest that this cabal is actually controlling the executive branch of the government, and doing it with stunning incompetence. If it sounds like a conspiracy, that’s probably because it is a conspiracy.

What were those crimes of theirs? Mainly the actions they took the past four years to cover-up their intense and sedulous ongoing corruption of previous years, especially all the channels of moneygrubbing that ran from Wall Street and K Street through the halls of Congress, and secondarily their political agenda to destroy by any means necessary the opposition vested in a weak and ineffectual Republican Party at odds with its own elected leader, Mr. Trump.

The “means” turned out to be one dishonest exploit after another aimed at disabling and eliminating the uncontrollable Mr. Trump: RussiaGate, the Flynn case, the Mueller Investigation, Ukraine Phone Call Gate (impeachment No. 1), Coronavirus hysteria, identity politics hysteria (including the 2020 summer riots), the social media companies’ censorship and “cancellation” initiative, and, finally, the engineered ballot fraud in the 2020 national election, with a re-play in the Georgia senatorial special election of January, 2021. How did you miss all this?

I think it worked this way: John Brennan’s CIA enlisted a desperately failing news media in an ideological campaign to propagandize and lie to the American public based on Brennan’s own past ideological disposition as a self-declared “communist.” Yes, he actually said that about himself, though his Marxism and that of his allies was a mash-up of foolish utopianisms used to cover a sheer wish to annihilate any opposition frustrating their will-to-power. I’d venture to suppose that Mr. Brennan continued to influence and even direct these agit-prop operations long after he was removed as CIA Director, even as he fought off accusations for his role in helping Hillary Clinton gin up RussiaGate.

Hillary’s crimes in particular, especially her Uranium One deal and the Skolkovo scam, involved large networks of accomplices in the State Department and in Intel, including the FBI when it was under Robert Mueller, and since they were conducted under the Obama administration, they implicated Mr. Obama too, and many around him. People-of-color and the gender-muddled were useful idiots in the game to bamboozle the public, and were allowed to turn their own grievances into lucrative hustles. Thus, everything became a “racist” and “sexist” boobytrap used to nullify anybody seeing through this game, while garnering new social advantages and large sums of money for the aggrieved, especially the Black Lives Matter org.

All of these cynical power games were, and still are, playing out against the very real collapse of America’s economy and culture. That is the part of the story that nobody controls or can even hope to control. The manufacturing part of the economy has been going-going-gone for forty years, but Coronavirus paranoia has been mobilized to destroy any remaining small business or service, leaving the shell of a commercial sector represented only by rapacious chain stores. The oil industry is on the ropes, confounded by the high costs of getting shale oil out of the ground and the shortage of investor money for an obviously profitless activity. All that’s really left are the financial rackets tied to the Federal Reserve and Wall Street — and they amount to the sheerest vapor given the de-linking of capital formation from genuine productive activity.

Last week’s antics featured two dazzling failures of American diplomacy under the Obama-Biden shadow government: the president’s stupid obloquies against Vladimir Putin, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s feckless negotiation with China — in which China nullified our “human rights” complaints involving the Uyghurs on account of America’s incessantly self-declared “systemic racism.” Coming up this week, Joe Biden’s long-delayed premiere “news conference.” Even though the “questions” are all pre-submitted and vetted, and the answers will be scrolling on a teleprompter, Mr. Biden will be working without a net. His handlers must be cross-eyed with anxiety over what might happen. Pretty soon, the game will be up. The election fraud story won’t go away against all efforts to suppress it. The shadow government will get outed as the nation sinks deeper into economic and civil disorder, and some people will have to do something.