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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56629.htm

Miserere For The Land Of The Free

In science and mathematics, problems based on faulty data or corrupt inputs yield worthless results. Sound outcomes depend on accurate foundational elements.  With physical substances and numbers exactitude is possible.  The means, that is, always justify the end.  Or not…  Garbage in; garbage out.
 
In social and political constructs and, in fact, in all relating to the tangled, confusing labyrinth of human affairs, absolute precision can never be attained.  The best that can be said of them is that the sounder the foundation on which a social or political premise is based, the more likely it is that forecast of its evolution and  prediction of its future state may be possible.
 
Countries are, and have always been, accidents.  The myriad random events and historic freaks and anomalies that coalesce to form them in their historically malleable plasticity are uncountable, often lost in time, mysterious or untraceable.
 
The modern custom is that nations—forming or once formed—prepare a constitution to express—to itself, its people, and the world—the principles according to which it proposes to function.  This is in the nature of a testament to the virtue and integrity its founders intend to inculcate and implement through it.  It is always based on an acknowledged dominant collection of “laws”—natural, religious or cultural—on which to establish its bona fides as a viable, legal, and legitimate country.
 
The United States Constitution was based theoretically on three fundamental, long established pillars of European political, religious, and economic thought.  The political element was a synthesis of the core ideals of the Enlightenment, much of it in Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government” and in his “A Letter Concerning Toleration”.  The religious element derived from Protestant Christianity, materially modified by Deist thinking. The economic influence came exclusively from classic Capitalism, then beginning its period of dynamic worldwide expansion.

From amalgamation of these three sources the Constitution drew its theoretical potency and vitality, and each of these doctrines embodied in it took on, with time, the character of holy writ.  The men who crafted it, with meticulous attention to their private and personal interests, presented it to the birthing nation as the summation of the wisdom of the enlightened ages expressed in as compact, practical form as humanly possible. This it was not.

Insofar as it was a gross deception—which it was—this was not  intentional.  The powerful men who produced it had no dark, nefarious design to inflict an oppressive, exploitative system on their country and their people.  They, to a man, it seems, meant well by their lights in the cultural context in which they matured.  The flaws, biases, and gross injustices so obvious in it from a current perspective were, in large measure, the prejudices of all European ruling classes of the time and, indeed, the consensus of the most acute, discriminating philosophical minds of the era.
 
Behind their sincere conviction in the merit of their creation was the inherent human incapacity to see through and beyond their own zeitgeist; to see past what amounts to a kind of philosophic categorical imperative that prevents men from conceiving ideas that are not implicit in the moral conventions of their time.  It is what makes the egregious ethical failures of past generations so baldly obvious to us, while we remain utterly blind to our own.
 
Once the Constitution was ratified, a far more insidious and truly damning set of behaviors came into play.  The exalted principles from which it was synthesized left such latitude in their generality that it was susceptible to great abuses and perversions. For its religious, political, and economic bases were never sincerely pursued, rigorously practiced, or honestly implemented.  Once the dead words of the document, themselves so bereft of equity and justice, were given to ordinary men to oversee, deform and exploit, the little that was noble and just in it was largely lost.
 
The myth postulating an exalted American character was forged and employed from earliest days as a cover for a vicious, elitist program of murder, slavery, and exploitation of man and nature, that has led today to a nation so divided, destabilized, and lost, that our psychopathic monstrosity of a government is no longer safe in its long, evil charade behind its hubris, lies, and violence. 
 
In the back of their minds, in the dim unconscious of the mass of people, there is a nagging sense of unease, a foreboding of unavoidable disaster gathering.  They are not mistaken.  Every faction on the long spectrum of opinion and belief is searching desperately for an answer, hope, a renewal.  There will be none.
 
The reason a repulsive, vulgar oaf such as Trump, or a corrupt, addled nonentity like Biden can be elected President is that all ethical standards that might prevent it have been eroded by two hundred years of dishonesty and calculated betrayal by the privileged financial elite that owned our nation and plunged it into the dysfunction, disaster, and doom that is now inevitable.
 
The American people have been victimized, violated, and ruined by psychotic criminals who deceived and enslaved them and trained them to worship their abusers, to embrace their serfdom.  When, for decades, centuries, a people is subjected to endless indoctrination in cruelty and dishonesty, awakening from that propagandized state must be traumatic, if it is even possible.
 
The mythic “democracy” we were to have was subverted from the beginning by the power of official chicanery, and denied to the poor and ignorant, foreigners, Indians, women, and blacks.  The Christianity solemnly endorsed was always a pious, hollow fraud, chanted as a mantra of the ruling class, never practiced in the violent piracy and murder of our imperial expansion.  And the sanctified economics of Capitalism has always been based on extraction of profit from the sweat and blood of pauperized labor for the aggrandizement of conscienceless plutocrat exploiters.
 
When a nation is poisoned for its entire history by its ruling elite with toxic propaganda that contradicts the moral, ethical bases it was founded on, its only end is implosion and dissolution.
 
The impending crash of the American Empire is essential for the survival and health of the natural and political world.  The tragedy is not in what is coming; it is in the astonishing possibility we had that was despised and thrown away and will never be regained.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56617.htm

The long and winding multipolar road

The West’s ‘rules-based order’ invokes rulers’ authority; Russia-China say it’s time to return to law-based order

We do live in extraordinary times.

On the day of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen square, amid all the pomp and circumstance, delivered a stark geopolitical message:

The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to intimidate, oppress or subjugate them. Anyone who tries to do this will find themselves on a collision course with a large steel wall forged by more than 1.4 billion Chinese.

I have offered a concise version of the modern Chinese miracle – which has nothing to do with divine intervention, but “searching truth from facts” (copyright Deng Xiaoping), inspired by a solid cultural and historical tradition.

The “large steel wall” evoked by Xi now permeates a dynamic “moderately prosperous society” – a goal achieved by the CCP on the eve of the centennial. Lifting over 800 million people out of poverty is a historical first – in every aspect.

As in all things China, the past informs the future. This is all about xiaokang – which may be loosely translated as “moderately prosperous society”.

The concept first appeared no less than 2,500 years ago, in the classic Shijing (“The Book of Poetry”). The Little Helmsman Deng, with his historical eagle eye, revived it in 1979, right at the start of the “opening up” economic reforms.

Now compare the breakthrough celebrated in Tiananmen – which will be interpreted all across the Global South as evidence of the success of a Chinese model for economic development – with footage being circulated of the Taliban riding captured T-55 tanks across impoverished villages in northern Afghanistan.

History Repeating: this is something I saw with my own eyes over twenty years ago.

The Taliban now control nearly the same amount of Afghan territory they did immediately before 9/11. They control the border with Tajikistan and are closing in on the border with Uzbekistan.

Exactly twenty years ago I was deep into yet another epic journey across Karachi, Peshawar, the Pakistan tribal areas, Tajikistan and finally the Panjshir valley, where I interviewed Commander Masoud – who told me the Taliban at the time were controlling 85% of Afghanistan.

Three weeks later Masoud was assassinated by an al-Qaeda-linked commando disguised as “journalists” – two days before 9/11. The empire – at the height of the unipolar moment – went into Forever Wars on overdrive, while China – and Russia – went deep into consolidating their emergence, geopolitically and geoeconomically.

We are now living the consequences of these opposed strategies.

That strategic partnership

President Putin has just spent three hours and fifty minutes answering non-pre-screened questions, live, from Russian citizens during his annual ‘Direct Line’ session. The notion that Western “leaders” of the Biden, BoJo, Merkel and Macron kind would be able to handle something even remotely similar, non-scripted, is laughable.

The key takeaway: Putin stressed US elites understand that the world is changing but still want to preserve their dominant position. He illustrated it with the recent British caper in Crimea straight out of a Monty Python fail, a “complex provocation” that was in fact Anglo-American: a NATO aircraft had previously conducted a reconnaissance flight. Putin: “It was obvious that the destroyer entered [Crimean waters] pursuing military goals.”

Earlier this week Putin and Xi held a videoconference. One of the key items was quite significant: the extension of the China-Russia Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, originally signed 20 years ago.

A key provision: “When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that…it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats.”

This treaty is at the heart of what is now officially described – by Moscow and Beijing – as a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era”. Such a broad definition is warranted because this is a complex multi-level partnership, not an “alliance”, designed as a counterbalance and viable alternative to hegemony and unilateralism.

A graphic example is provided by the progressive interpolation of two trade/development strategies, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which Putin and Xi again discussed, in connection with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which was founded only three months before 9/11.

It’s no wonder that one of the highlights in Beijing this week were trade talks between the Chinese and four Central Asia “stans” – all of them SCO members.

“Law” and “rule”

The defining multipolarity road map has been sketched in an essay by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that deserves careful examination.

Lavrov surveys the results of the recent G7, NATO and US-EU summits prior to Putin-Biden in Geneva:

These meetings were carefully prepared in a way that leaves no doubt that the West wanted to send a clear message: it stands united like never before and will do what it believes to be right in international affairs, while forcing others, primarily Russia and China, to follow its lead. The documents adopted at the Cornwall and Brussels summits cemented the rules-based world order concept as a counterweight to the universal principles of international law with the UN Charter as its primary source. In doing so, the West deliberately shies away from spelling out the rules it purports to follow, just as it refrains from explaining why they are needed.

As he dismisses how Russia and China have been labeled as “authoritarian powers” (or “illiberal”, according to the favorite New York-Paris-London mantra), Lavrov smashes Western hypocrisy:

While proclaiming the ‘right’ to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries for the sake of promoting democracy as it understands it, the West instantly loses all interest when we raise the prospect of making international relations more democratic, including renouncing arrogant behavior and committing to abide by the universally recognized tenets of international law instead of ‘rules’.

That provides Lavrov with an opening for a linguistic analysis of “law” and “rule”:

In Russian, the words “law” and “rule” share a single root. To us, a rule that is genuine and just is inseparable from the law. This is not the case for Western languages. For instance, in English, the words “law” and “rule” do not share any resemblance. See the difference? “Rule” is not so much about the law, in the sense of generally accepted laws, as it is about the decisions taken by the one who rules or governs. It is also worth noting that “rule” shares a single root with “ruler,” with the latter’s meanings including the commonplace device for measuring and drawing straight lines. It can be inferred that through its concept of “rules” the West seeks to align everyone around its vision or apply the same yardstick to everybody, so that everyone falls into a single file.

In a nutshell: the road to multipolarity will not follow “ultimatums”. The G20, where the BRICS are represented, is a “natural platform” for “mutually accepted agreements”. Russia for its part is driving a Greater Eurasia Partnership. And a “polycentric world order” implies the necessary reform of the UN Security Council, “strengthening it with Asian, African and Latin American countries”.

Will the Unilateral Masters ply this road? Over their dead bodies: after all, Russia and China are “existential threats”. Hence our collective angst, spectators under the volcano.