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http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-the-manufacture-of-decline/

The Manufacture of Decline

 “We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered … sunk to the inexplorable depths of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries, classics … their critics and the critics of their critics…. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were of no concern of ours.”

That is Paul Valéry, the modernist poet, essayist and Academician, writing in April 1919. The Great War was but a few months over. Europe understood, if subliminally at that moment, that the world order of which it had been the center had shattered like glass. Or — better put — that Europe had shattered it.

“Everything came to Europe, and from Europe everything has come. Or almost everything,” Valéry wrote. “Now, the present situation permits of this capital question: Will Europe retain its leadership in all activities? Will Europe become what she is in reality: that is, a little cape of the Asiatic continent?” [Emphasis the author’s.]

Valéry was less interested in Europe’s wrecked landscapes and its blown-to-bits economy than he was in what had happened to European minds and spirits — how people thought and felt. Europe’s best brains had just wasted themselves “finding a way to remove barbed wire, baffle the submarines, or paralyze the flight of aeroplanes.”

Then, the war over, Europe no longer knew how to think. Europeans could not speak among themselves of their abruptly arrived new circumstances. People retreated into the classics of European culture and took to repeating the old verities as to the Continent’s ancient greatness. Valéry called the essay I quote “The Intellectual Crisis.” Its topic was “the disorder of our mental Europe.”
Paul Valéry photographed by Henri Manuel, 1920s. (Wikimedia Commons)

It is sobering, to put the point mildly, to sit in America in 2021 and read the reflections of a writer sitting in Paris 102 years ago. The world America made in the post–1945 years has ended just as the Great War ended the world Valéry, born in 1871, knew as his own.

And Americans suffer the same disabilities as the Europeans of 1919: They cannot think. They cannot speak plainly among themselves.

They are, in a phrase, manufacturing their own decline as they flinch from the world as it is in this, our post–American century.

‘Required to Kill’

Only a materially advanced civilization could have wreaked all the atrocities and destruction of World War I, Valéry observed: “A great deal of science was doubtless required to kill so many men… but moral qualities were equally required. Knowledge and Duty: Must we suspect you also?” [Emphasis again the author’s.]

We must, say yes, to reply to Valéry a century late.

America, the most materially advanced nation in human history, has made the same error Valéry described ever since it nominated itself, in the mid–19th century, as the very incarnation of Progress with a capital P. It has by a long tradition mistaken material progress for authentic human progress.

As to the latter, America has made little as measured by the lives Americans now live. And now, as the world it sought to make in its image goes its own way, America finds itself a desperate empire with no moral qualities to speak of as measured by its conduct. Caught up in a great game of pretend, it now has its very own “intellectual crisis.”

Three cases, of the countless number available to us, merit our consideration for their proximity. In each, we must note not merely what America did or did not do; taking a page from Valéry, we must also think about the deeper consequences for all Americans of their nation’s doing or not doing.

Julian Assange

Protester during Don’t Extradite Assange march, central London, Feb. 22, 2020. (Steve Eason, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Last week the Royal Courts of Justice in London resumed proceedings in the Julian Assange case and heard American arguments to overturn the ruling earlier this year that Britain should not extradite Assange to the U.S. out of concern for his mental state and the U.S. record for mistreating prisoners in “supermax” prisons. The legal irregularities that have featured in these proceedings from the first were again in evidence.

It is perfectly clear to anyone who looks squarely at this case that Assange faces up to 175 years in prison for revealing American and allied war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq in the post–2001 period. As Chris Hedges wrote last week, “If Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting, allowing the government to use the Espionage Act to charge any reporter who possesses classified documents, and any whistleblower who leaks classified information.”

What is at issue in London is plain. The headline on the Hedges piece says it better than I can: “The Most Vital Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time.”

Assange’s treatment in Belmarsh prison for the past two and a half years has been properly termed torture. I would also call it a human-rights atrocity. This, too, is plain.

And what are most Americans thinking and saying about Julian Assange’s fate? What is the press, whose principles and professional practice are at stake, saying and doing? Most Americans know little to nothing of the Assange case. Apart from independent media, the press cannot write of it due to its diseased relationship to power. 

This inflicts damage of a kind not adequately considered. It is the harm done by ignorance and silence — a self-inflicted harm. A society that cannot address a crisis in its press such as America has faced for some years now is doomed to proceed without a free press. It is paralyzed to act in its own interest.

Colin Powell

Colin Powell while serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1991. (National Archives)

Then there is the Colin Powell case. One knew as soon as Powell’s death was announced that Americans were in for days upon days of praise for a patriot, a hero, a brave warrior, a great statesman, a great American, and all the rest. I kept my radio resolutely turned to a classical station until I figured the coast was clear.

Of Powell’s famous lie at the U.N. as to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the most consequential lie so far told in this century — the corporate press said as little as it could get away with, and what it said was whitewash. Of his torching of Vietnamese villages, his post–My Lai cover-ups, his roles in the Iran–Contra scandal and the flagrantly illegal invasion of Panama in 1989, and other such pockmarks on Powell’s record — of these nothing.

Do Americans think there is no price to pay for this kind of self-deception? The price exacted is evident out our windows: It is our continued defense of empire and the consequences at home as measured by our increasing deprivations, our political collapse, and our social decay. Powell was a centurion in the imperial army. To glorify him is to preclude all action against America’s imperial aggressions — to sustain it, this is to say, on its ruinous path. 

Antony Blinken

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during foreign travel in May. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

There is the Antony Blinken case. Tiresome as it is, have you taken the trouble to follow his Twitter messages?

If you want to understand his record as secretary of state you must, because all he seems to do is Tweet utterly ridiculous bromides as to America’s respect for human rights, the right of others to self-determination, and press freedom along with his deep concern for starving Syrian children — children whose malnutrition is the direct result of sanctions Blinken maintains against the Syrian Arab Republic. There is always, of course, Blinken’s idolatry in the matter of “the international rules-based order.”

Blinken is not the worst secretary of state in my lifetime — that distinction goes to John Foster Dulles. But he is the most ineffectual, and possible the stupidest. His function is to portray, to put across, carefully, a nonexistent America.

Again, it is the consequences of America’s chief diplomat advancing this Disneyesque version of what America stands for and does that must concern us. No one in corporate media calls Blinken on all his silliness: They pretend the world according to Blinken is just as he says it is. There are consequences there, too. The unlawful, often atrocious conduct abroad continues in the name of people who do not even know it is occurring.

What Comes Into View

These three cases appear at first to have nothing in common. If we consider them together — and one could add very many others — what do we see?

I see a nation that is detached from reality (which is a basic definition of psychosis) such that its people are confined to a series of simulations:

This is what it would be like to live in a country that respects others; this is what it would be like if our government abided by the rule of law; this is what it would be like to have a free, unfettered press; this is what it would be like if America upheld either rules or order — to say nothing of both. We are merely pretending in all such cases.   

In the years after Valéry published “The Intellectual Crisis,” Europe drifted almost dreamlike into fascism, genocide and another war. He seems to suggest, without quite saying so, that Europeans had rendered themselves powerless to act as they drew back from what they had made of themselves. The piece was later retranslated as “The Crisis of the Mind.”

America’s crises today are numerous. It seems it is America’s crisis of the mind that causes the crises to multiply and worsen and stand without solutions. These are available to us in every single case whenever we are ready to… to make up our minds to speak of our crises and then to address them seriously, with determination and without dreams.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56851.htm

Gog and Magog: American Dilemma

In the arcane mythos of Medieval Christianity, Gog and Magog were monstrous, demonic allies of Satan, striving with him to see mankind damned to perdition and eternal punishment in Hell.

Religious mythology, from the Greeks on down, has been utilized to provide easily interpreted moral imperatives for the guidance of vulnerable, credulous humans. Gog and Magog embodied the power of evil, as symbols of all that was corrupt, perverse, and destructive in human nature, and were dreaded as such.

Americans are short on mythology now, except for the sleazy, dirty joke of Exceptionalist bullshit, but the Gog/Magog model will serve well in describing one aspect of the waning days of this despicable, moribund empire: its governing political parties.

The Party of Gog is less a party than an agglomeration of the bitterly resentful. It’s the Big Tent of the furiously pissed off, an attribute common to all its devotees. Their sources of resentment are many, the causes are various, but a raging fury bonds them.

They’re a mix of economic and social classes, a broad range of education levels, predominantly white but not exclusively, sexist male in presentation but with an amazing number of white female adherents. In their rage, they embrace a range of what civil society deems odious, primitive prejudices, and they flaunt them openly with prideful hostility. It is clear that they have had to stifle their views for far too long, waiting for their time to shine.

At its top financially are the maverick billionaires who resent government impeding unfettered, unrestrained acquisition of wealth, who believe society should exist to enable unlimited privilege. Under them are many very wealthy of the Ayn Rand school, all reciting the mantra that government is the enemy. These upper echelons harbor deep animosity for the system in which they have done so well because they have not done better.

Under this favored few, there is a great mass who feel they’ve been denied what they deserve. Small business men, ranchers, professionals, commercial, industrial, or manufacturing workers who have lost jobs or been replaced, they form a vast army with minimum-wagers/part timers struggling desperately to survive, and a mass of hillbillies and hicks with slim or no prospects.

The prejudices the wealthiest trumpet loudest are against all Democratic government or Social Welfare for the poor, sick, old, and disadvantaged, which is to say against society itself. This is hidden from the lower orders who are better off not knowing.

The lower groups—with some spillover from the wealthy—have simpler, more visceral biases. While the super wealthy have to conceal their contempt for their working class confreres, lower income groups feel no need to hide their gross, vulgar hatreds. These include, but are not limited to, race hate, misogyny, and xenophobia, detestation of education, intellect, science, history, humanism, evolution, paleontology, and environmentalism. They vigorously support religious and cultural hate, brutal exploitation of nature and other nations, all weapons—personal and of war— war-making in general, violence as mediation, crudity, cruelty, a rabid un-Christian Christianity, and killing wild animals for fun.

The Party of Magog differs radically in membership and core tenets, but not in the dogged loyalty of its faithful. Their chief characteristic is a passion to feel morally righteous, and a mind-boggling credulity for virtuous pronouncements. This party functions on the imperial model with a slender elite controlling a mass of subjects. The guiding principle of its rulers is that people must be deceived, betrayed and cheated but constantly reassured of the Party’s integrity and good intentions. It claims other virtues but they are negligible and negotiable. Its only true aim is survival, power, control, and continuity of imperial policy.

Accordingly, its top financiers are from the dominant lords of the Billionaire Class, the Establishment, the anointed nobility of the Deep State, whose money is older than they are. Beneath the Barons of Finance, is a large section of millionaires of louchely liberal persuasion, whose tiny, acid hearts belong to The Empire.

Under this vast wealth, a huge, varied segment of our tattered, battered middle class forms the bulk of membership. These folks are ready—no, eager—to affirm whatever the politburo asserts, and ever poised to adopt the designated Enemy of the Moment. Education and status in this set runs down from the high octane professionals and academics, to legions of diplomates and the moderately educated, to high school grads in crappy jobs, and a multi-racial mass pursuing the non-existent American Dream.

The animating principle of the Party, beyond their own privilege, is to steal as much money as possible for the massive banks, corporations, and insiders of the American War Machine. Since Gogs and Magogs both worship Mars, they are united on looting the treasury for the War Machine of all the money that could be used for public good. Unity makes their work simple. Gogs boast it; Magogs bullshit about it. Both ignore its devastating effects on the American people that neither represents.

This then is American politics, 2021. Well, fine, you say, but what has any of it to do with medieval mythology? I’d offer this. Since even phony Christians no longer buy or obey the lunatic dogma of Christianity, and we have no effective catalog of holy nonsense to scare us, we must make do with political monsters. Is there any doubt now that our political parties have replaced the ancient
horrors in their satanic determination to effect our destruction?

Gog and Magog live!