SC247-5

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/12/08/us-hegemony-doesnt-make-the-world-more-peaceful-it-makes-it-more-dangerous/

US Hegemony Doesn’t Make The World More Peaceful, It Makes It More Dangerous

A Republican senator who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee stated on a Tuesday Fox News appearance that he strongly supports keeping US military action on the table if Russia invades Ukraine, up to and including a first-use nuclear attack.

“I would not rule out military action,” Senator Roger Wicker told Fox News host Neil Cavuto. “I think we start making a mistake when we take options off the table. So I would hope the president keeps that option on the table.”

“What does military action mean, senator?” Cavuto asked.

“Well, military action could mean that we standoff with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability,” the senator replied. “It could mean that. It could mean that we participate – and I would not rule that out – I would not rule out American troops on the ground. You know we don’t rule out first-use nuclear action. We don’t think it will happen. But there’s certain things in negotiations – if you’re going to be tough – that you don’t take off the table.”

Wicker emphasized that his position was entirely bipartisan.

“To the extent that you’ve had Democrats on the show right before me saying that we should be tougher, I support that and I appreciate that,” Wicker said. “I think they represent the fear that we have, the realization that we have in the Congress, that losing a free democratic Ukraine to Russian invasion would be a game-changer for a free Europe.”

Top Biden administration diplomat and neoconservative Ukraine coup plotter Victoria Nuland didn’t go quite as far, but did assert that a perceived attack on Ukraine would see Russia financially cut off from the entire world.

“What we are talking about would amount to essentially isolating Russia completely from the global financial system, with all the fallout that would entail for Russian businesses, for the Russian people, for their ability to work and travel and trade,” Nuland told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.

It remains to be seen whether tensions between NATO powers and Moscow over Ukraine will improve or get worse after a two-hour talk between President Biden and President Putin on Tuesday, but it is already abundantly clear that we are as usual being aggressively deceived about the situation. As the Moon of Alabama blog explained the other day, the narrative that Russia is poised for an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is flimsy at best, and could easily be designed to frame Russia as the aggressor should a future attack on rebel-held territories in eastern Ukraine by US, NATO and Ukrainian forces cross one of Putin’s red lines and provoke a military response from Moscow.

Whatever’s happening, hawks in the US political/media class keep trying to amp the public up for a direct military confrontation between nuclear superpowers.

“If Russia invades a non-NATO partner vital to US-led operations in Iraq/Afghanistan, whose integrity we guaranteed in 1994 and defense we materially support, so soon after the abandonment of our allies in Kabul, the damage done to US credibility and hegemony will be immeasurable,” tweeted MSNBC’s Noah Rothman in contribution to the Ukraine controversy.

There’s a lot going on in that post, like the ridiculous claim that Ukraine played a “vital” role in US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the bizarre suggestion that Washington guaranteed it would militarily defend Ukraine’s integrity in 1994. But what’s most interesting is Rothman’s refreshingly honest admission that if the hawks get their way in the event of a Ukraine conflict, people’s sons and daughters would be sent to kill and die in a war over something as stupid as “US credibility and hegemony.”

Indeed, all US wars in recent memory have been over US hegemony. When they occur they are always portrayed as heroic acts of defense against evil hostile aggressors; self-defense, defense of human rights, defending freedom and democracy, defending populations which can’t defend themselves, etc. In the imperial doctrine of the US political/media class, the empire never attacks, it only “defends”.

But if you break down the underlying causes of those military interventions they always boil down to preserving US unipolar hegemony, i.e. undisputed planetary domination. It’s not an accident that US military interventionism is consistently most concentrated in areas of high geostrategic value, focused on maintaining the ability to control the world’s crucial resources and shipping lanes, militarily surrounding disobedient governments, and continually expanding the ability to quickly launch devastating attacks on any population which acts against the will of the empire.

That’s the real reason you’re hearing so much hysterical shrieking about China lately, as well as governments which cooperate with it like Russia. It’s got nothing to do with Ukraine or Taiwan or election meddling or human rights concerns in Xinjiang, it’s because China is the head of a rising bloc of non-empire-aligned governments which threatens US hegemony. It’s because Russia and China have been getting closer and closer after western empire managers predicted the exact opposite would occur.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum last month that she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.

“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”

Had the predictions of US empire architects proved correct, the Russia-China tandem described in 2017 by Gilbert Doctorow would never have come to be, and China would have been far weaker and far more vulnerable to US subversion as a result. All the panicked consent-manufacturing you’ve been seeing from empire managers these last few years is due to the frantic need to course-correct after those forecasts fell flat.

As Noam Chomsky recently observed, the real “threat” China poses is that it cannot be bullied into complying with the will of the US empire.

“The U.S. will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does but pursues its own course. That is the threat,” Chomsky told Democracy Now last month.

Whatever your opinions on Chomsky at this point in his life, you cannot deny that he is correct here. Beltway empire managers determined after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must prevent the rise of another rival superpower at all cost, and all the attempts you are seeing to undermine China and its geostrategic support system are simply the effects of that resolution playing out exactly as intended.

But what are the consequences of that resolution? What does it mean when history’s first ever unipolar planetary hegemon must maintain that unipolar hegemony even if it means risking a third world war against an alliance of nuclear-armed nations? What does it mean when the decline of an empire meets with the imperial doctrine that planetary domination must be held in place by any means necessary, and when we now have US senators talking on national television about launching a nuclear first strike on Russia if it invades a nation hardly any Americans could even find on a map?

It means the world has gotten a lot less safe.

The main argument you’ll hear from those who support the continued existence of a US-led world order is that if it wasn’t Washington ruling the world it would be Beijing or Moscow, which is just silly “If I don’t steal it someone else will steal it” nonsense that isn’t substantiated by facts. The planet never had a unipolar hegemon until three decades ago; there’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which says there needs to be one, and all the evidence coming from Beijing and Moscow is that those governments want a multipolar world, not to dominate a unipolar one. Besides, it’s not like the US has been making global domination look sexy during that time by rapidly burning itself out and teetering on the brink of collapse.

The other main argument you’ll hear in favor of US unipolar hegemony is the claim of “Pax Americana“; that it makes the world a more peaceful place. But, again, how true is that if US unipolar hegemony must be held in place by endless violence and is now forcing humanity toward a world war between powerful nuclear-armed nations?

After all, “Pax Americana” has already killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions in US wars of geostrategic domination just since the turn of this century. The US-backed assault on Yemen alone will have killed 377,000 people by the end of this year, and the horrors show no sign of stopping. Unilateral starvation sanctions on disobedient populations are deliberately murdering civilians around the world. And now, no longer able to make due with simply smashing weaker nations, we are being fed the usual “defense” propaganda about Ukraine and Taiwan to gin up support for world war in the nuclear age.

The western media have been screaming that Russia is about to invade Ukraine any minute now for years on end. The narratives we’re being fed about Taiwan are blatantly propagandistic. All they’re doing is brainwashing the public into consenting to aggressions which are so dangerous that, all by themselves, they completely invalidate the argument that US unipolar hegemony makes the world safer or more peaceful.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason nations can’t just cooperate with each other for the common good instead of waving armageddon weapons around over the ideas held by a few idiots about the need to dominate an entire planet. There’s no reason the US needs to imperil us all with these insane unipolarist aggressions, and everyone should stop supporting it in doing so.

....

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/have_you_been_naughty_or_nice_the_surveillance_state_has_a_list_and_youre_on_it

You'd Better Watch Out: The Surveillance State Has a Naughty List, and You’re On It

“He sees you when you’re sleeping

He knows when you’re awake

He knows when you’ve been bad or good

So be good for goodness’ sake!”

—“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

Santa’s got a new helper.

No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been naughty or nice.

Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-time reports on who’s been good or bad this year. This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—makes the NSA’s rudimentary phone and metadata surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.

Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list.

Tracking you based on your health status. In the age of COVID-19, digital health passports are gaining traction as gatekeepers of a sort, restricting access to travel, entertainment, etc., based on one’s vaccine status. Whether or not one has a vaccine passport, however, individuals may still have to prove themselves “healthy” enough to be part of society. For instance, in the wake of Supreme Court rulings that paved the way for police to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” government agencies are preparing to use virus-detecting canine squads to carry out mass screenings to detect individuals who may have COVID-19. Researchers claim the COVID-sniffing dogs have a 95% success rate of identifying individuals with the virus (except when they’re hungry, tired or distracted). These dogs are also being to trained to ferret out individuals suffering from other health ailments such as cancer.

Tracking you based on your face: Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

Tracking you based on your behavior: Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Tracking you based on your spending and consumer activities: With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business, a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Tracking you based on your public activities: Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Tracking you based on your social media activities: Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Tracking you based on your phone and online activities: Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. Police have used cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Tracking you based on your social network: Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

Tracking you based on your car: License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Tracking you based on your mail: Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

In an age of overcriminalization, mass surveillance, and an appalling lack of protections for our privacy rights, we can all be considered guilty of some transgression or other.

So you’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s coming to town, and you’re already on its naughty list.