https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/03/a-weird-stupid-dystopia/
A Weird, Stupid Dystopia
The last few days in the United States have seen a parade of wealthy freaks fellating each other’s egos and preening for the cameras in outlandish garb while ordinary Americans suffer more and more.
The weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner saw a gaggle of media celebrities congregate to congratulate one another on what a great job they’ve been doing bravely telling the truth and holding the most powerful government on earth to account. The host, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, gushed with enthusiasm about how much freedom the press have in America to say things the powerful don’t like.
“As we sit in this room tonight, people, I really hope you all remember what the real purpose of this evening is,” Noah said. “Yes, it’s fun. Yes, we dress nice. Yes, the people eat, they drink, we have fun. But the reason we’re here is to honor and celebrate the fourth estates and what you stand for — what you stand for — an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one.”
“And if you ever begin to doubt your responsibilities, if you ever begin to doubt how meaningful it is, look no further than what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Noah. “Look at what’s happening there. Journalists are risking and even losing their lives to show the world what’s really happening. You realize how amazing it is. In America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth even if it makes people in power uncomfortable, even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable. You understand how amazing that is? I stood here tonight and I made fun of the president of the United States, and I’m going to be fine. I am going to be fine, right? Do you really understand what a blessing it is?”
Of course there are people who’ve said things that US presidents don’t like who are not in fact fine. Julian Assange continues to waste away in Belmarsh Prison as the US government continues its efforts to extradite him to he can become the first publisher ever tried under the Espionage Act. Edward Snowden, an American, remains in exile because one US president after another continues to refuse to pardon his heroic whistleblowing about the sinister surveillance practices of the US intelligence cartel. Daniel Hale, also an American, sits in prison for exposing the depravity of America’s monstrous drone program.
Trevor Noah did not mention these people, or the many others who’ve been persecuted, silenced, imprisoned and killed for saying things the powerful individuals who govern the US don’t approve of, because as a member of the mainstream media his job is not to inform but to propagandize.
Far from providing “an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one” as Noah claims, the people in his audience on Saturday night are tasked with manipulating public thought in facilitation of the interests of the powerful. The mainstream news media in America, and throughout all the so-called free democracies of the western world, are propaganda institutions whose first and foremost job is to manufacture consent for oligarchy and empire.
Which is why the President of the United States, when he took the podium that night, had nothing but friendly words for the mainstream press.
“What’s clear, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, is that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century,” Biden said. “We’ve all seen the courage of Ukrainian people because of the courage of American reporters in this room, and your colleagues across the world who are on the ground taking their lives in their own hands.”
This past weekend also saw a friendly gathering of brave fourth estate truth warriors and political and government operatives of the US empire at a party hosted by the billionaire owner of the neocon war propaganda rag The Atlantic.
David and Katherine Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs hosted a dinner at the Bradleys’ home. SPOTTED: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Cabinet Secretary Evan Ryan, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, CIA Director Bill Burns, press secretary Jen Psaki, Deputy A.G. Lisa Monaco, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands), homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Jeffrey Goldberg, Nick Thompson, Peter Lattman, Anne Applebaum, Russell Berman, Franklin Foer, David Frum, Elaine Godfrey, Adam Harris, Mark Leibovich, Jeff Dufour, Heather Kuldell, Kevin Baron, José Andrés, Enes Kanter, Mitch Landrieu, Dafna Linzer, Rachel Martin, Judy Woodruff, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Jonathan Capehart, Katty Kay, Steve and Jean Case, John Dickerson and Jen Palmieri.
Yep, when you see a shady basketball player/empire propagandist fraternizing with the CIA Director while surrounded by media celebrities and government insiders at a party hosted by a media-owning plutocrat, you know you’re in a country where power is held to account. Right, Trevor?
The orgy of embarrassment was capped off by the 2022 Met Gala, a big weird dystopian parade of rich freaks dressed like Hunger Games aristocracy and laughing in the face of everyone who can’t afford to live.
An honest Met Gala dress would have a corset made from the bones of Yemeni children, draped with a cloth of stolen gold and lithium spun by the tiny hands of child slaves, with a full-length train that leached oil and blood wherever it went.
This while ordinary Americans struggle just to survive. While American women appear to be on the precipice of losing their reproductive sovereignty. While money is poured into a proxy war which threatens to escalate into a conflict that could easily end all life on earth.
This is your dying empire, America. This is your end-stage capitalism. This is your dystopia, in all its weird, phony, stupid glory.
It is horrifying. The longer you look at it, the creepier it gets.
Breathe it all in, folks.
We’re in for a hell of a ride.
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http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-ukraine-the-strength-of-nonalignment/
Ukraine & the Strength of Nonalignment
Liberals once mocked the Bush–Cheney regime’s with-us-or-against-us routines. Now the trans–Atlantic foreign policy cliques have no capacity to see the world differently.
I was interested to read, last December, of the expansive agreements Vladimir Putin and Mahendra Modi signed at the conclusion of a summit the Russian and Indian leaders held in New Delhi. These came to 28 and covered all manner of things — defense cooperation, energy projects, production sharing, technology transfers, investments in a range of industrial sectors India is eager to develop.The two leaders were very clear this was about more than rubles and rupees. Putin: “The ties are growing and I’m looking into the future.” Modi: “A lot of geopolitical equations have emerged, but India–Russia friendship has been a constant.”
Here’s the thing about those numerous rounds of cabinet-level talks and the summit that capped them: By Monday, Dec. 6, when the Russian president and the Indian prime minister smiled for the cameras, Washington and its NATO allies were busily provoking Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and insisting the world line up against the evildoing Russian Federation.
Nobody outdoes the Indians when it comes to nonalignment.
Also interesting reading was Lloyd Austin’s testimony to the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on April 6, wherein the defense secretary explained that those damnable Indians were going to have to ditch their defense ties to Russia. “We continue to work with them to ensure that they understand that it’s not in their — we believe that — it’s not in their best interest to continue to invest in Russian equipment,” he said.
The biggest pebble in the Pentagon’s shoe is India’s agreement to purchase the Russian-made S–400 missile-defense system, which must be some piece of gear considering that Washington is unfailingly inflamed whenever anybody buys it.
“And our requirement going forward,” Austin continued, “is that they downscale the types of equipment that they’re investing in and look to invest more in the types of things that will make us continue to be compatible.”
I just love that last bit: Our requirement. You have to sound tough up on Capitol Hill, I suppose.
Peddling Weapons & Sanctions
Now I’m interested to read — so many interesting things in the papers these days, providing you read beyond the American dailies — that Ursula von der Leyen spent two days in New Delhi this week. The dull, ineffectual president of the European Commission was peddling two items: European weaponry — surprise, surprise — and Western sanctions against Russia. Apart from the material agreements New Delhi and Moscow signed in December, the Modi government has declined to condemn the Russian intervention in Ukraine and is not participating in the sanctions regime.
What are we looking at here? Two matters are worth noting.
One, the Biden administration can pound all it wishes with its rhetoric to the effect that the whole world is horrified by Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine. We have all seen the maps: Most of the world isn’t. Subscribers to the sanctions and the shrieks of horror are by and large limited to the Western democracies.
The long-term effect of this bifurcation will be the West’s increasing alienation from the vast majority of humanity, otherwise known as the non–West. In time this will turn out to be big. Corollary: Those of us, myself included, who have longed over many years to see Europe act as an independent pole of power, in effect a mediator between West and non–West, can forget about it.
The current generation of European leaders including Emmanuel Macron, the poseur Gaullist just reelected to the French presidency, simply don’t have it in them to stand on their own two feet.
Two, the non–West’s impulse to return to the principles of nonalignment so brilliantly articulated by the charismatic leaders of the “independence era,” the 1950s and 1960s, has been evident for some time. But the Ukraine crisis appears to be infusing this welcome trend with a distinct electrical charge. Again, big stuff as we look out front just a little beyond our noses.
Emergent Nonalignment
China and Russia appear to have understood from the first that the Ukraine crisis would affect the geopolitical maps in these two ways. Their joint statement on Feb. 4, the eve of the Beijing Olympics and slightly more than two weeks before Russia began its intervention, was a not-very-veiled rejection of the West’s claim to global hegemony and an invitation to begin constructing a new world order based on principles Western nations profess but pay no mind to.
If nonalignment is the emergent drift in global politics and policy, India is logically prominent among the battlegrounds where the fight is engaged. India is big and populous. It is influential among non–Western nations. And Washington has long entertained ridiculous fantasies to the effect that it can pull New Delhi decisively into the Western camp against Russia and China alike.
Where, at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House, do they get these unschooled notions? From Nehru’s day to ours, the principle of nonalignment has been a sanctified a pillar of Indian foreign policy, as “freedom” is to all right-thinking American ideologues.
There’s no touching it. This was part of Modi’s point when he spoke alongside Putin on Dec. 6.
Antony Blinken made his first state visit to New Delhi in July 2021, a few months after taking office. His themes were the usual — “our strategic partnership” and so on. “Our interests are shared, our concerns are similar, and our convergences are strong,” saith the American secretary of state. All that is fine: India has no desire to stand militantly against the U.S.
But the reality beneath the pronouncements of Blinken, Austin, von der Leyen, et al. is that the West simply cannot accept a world in which nonalignment, noninterference, territorial integrity, and associated precepts are held up as abiding principles. A lot of liberals mocked the Bush–Cheney regime and its with-us-or-against-us routines. Now we find that Western elites and the trans–Atlantic foreign policy cliques have no capacity to see the world differently.
First Corporate Media Account
Hannah Beech, The New York Times Southeast Asia bureau chief, shared the byline Monday on a story headlined, “With Us or With Them? In a New Cold War, How About Neither.” This is the first — and so far only — clear-eyed report we have in corporate media on the nonaligned majority of nations that the Ukraine crisis has pushed to the fore. Beech and her colleagues write:
“The geopolitical landscape following the Ukraine invasion has often been likened to that of a new Cold War. While the main antagonists may be the same — the United States, Russia and, increasingly, China — the roles played by much of the rest of the world have changed, reshaping a global order that held for more than three-quarters of a century.”
More in the way of 500 years, Hannah, but who’s counting?
I have a certain amount of time for Beech. She has good bloodlines, as they say in the trade: Her father, Keyes Beech, was among the outstanding Asia correspondents of his generation. And she has a measured sympathy for non–Western perspectives that is unheard-of among the drips that generally populate the Times’s foreign bureaus.
Beech and her colleagues make the very astute point that non–Western nations paid a very high price for the deprivations and depredations the Cold War decades inflicted upon them — and do not intend to pay it again. “Governments representing more than half of humanity have refused to take a side,” they write, “avoiding the binary accounting of us-versus-them that characterized most of the post–World War II era.”
I do not see this sentiment ebbing once the Ukraine crisis is resolved one way or another. Washington’s overreaching adventure, with NATO allies following its lead, may well divide the world once again — not as the West intends, but between those nations who insist on a proper world order based on international law and those who insist they are above it.
For half a millennium — from Portugal’s 15th century intrusions in Asia and the Americas — there was no such thing as isolating the West: It was a logical impossibility, a convolution. This is no longer so, as the leading non–Western nations now know. So long as Western democracies refuse to accept this, they will set themselves up to lose the 21st century.
Alistair Crooke, founder and director of the Conflicts Forum and a familiar commentator on global affairs, just published an interesting piece headlined, “The Dynamics of Escalation: ‘Standing with Ukraine.’” Crooke thinks the Biden administration has effectively trapped itself on a path to military involvement in Ukraine — direct involvement, this is to say.
The war-by-sanctions, for a variety of reasons, cannot succeed in bringing Russia down as intended. At the same time, Crooke reasons, Biden and the mainstream Democrats cannot possibly accept defeat or failure — not with midterm elections coming, not with all the mythologies they conjured as to Russia’s responsibility for their loss at the polls in 2016:
“The conviction that the European liberal vision faces humiliation and disdain, were Putin to ‘win,’ has taken hold. And in the Obama–Clinton–Deep State nexus, it is unimaginable that Putin and Russia, still regarded as the author of Russiagate for many Americans, might prevail.
The logic to this conundrum is inexorable — Escalation.”
How quickly Crooke’s logic manifests itself. During and since their weekend visit to Kiev to promise the regime more weaponry, Austin and Blinken have made it terrifyingly clear that the true objective of the U.S.–NATO campaign in Ukraine is just as the more honest among us have said from the start: This is about “weakening Russia,” as the two secretaries put it — subjugating Russia, in other words, crushing it.
Have two not-quite-competent American officials just declared the start of World War III? Let me know when it is all right to express concern about the danger of a nuclear exchange without being called a treasonous propagandist in Moscow’s behalf.
Let’s not miss in all this: The logic of escalation also leads to deepening isolation — America’s, the West’s — from the currents that already carry our century forward.
Washington and NATO may be intent on making a hot war out of Cold War II, but they’ve got a radically wrong read on our moment: The further they take this crazy adventure, the more thoroughly they will alienate the rest of the world.
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