https://www.globalresearch.ca/church-humanitarian-intervention-threatens-survival-our-species/5799316
The Church of Humanitarian Intervention Threatens the Survival of Our Species. The Destruction of Russia and China on the Drawing Board of the Pentagon
“For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” – John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, Washington, DC, January 20th, 1961
As the 21st century unfurls its harrowing shadow, a moldering American republic groans in its agonizing death throes. Its heritage, collective memory, and canon lie in ruins. Its ties to reason, the rule of law, and the intellect rest in ashes. For the avarice of empire has hollowed out once noble institutions, and the voracious hunger for hegemony increasingly wields no other tool but the bloody truncheon.
This rapaciousness has, even with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, squandered trillions of dollars on barbaric wars of imperial conquest. Moreover, this relentless, brutal, and self-destructive ideology that seeks to subjugate the planet to the whims and dictates of a ruthless cabal has put us on a path to a third world war, a war in which the predator will perish along with the prey.
“She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy” said John Quincy Adams when addressing the subject of US foreign policy in a speech to the House of Representatives on July 4th, 1821. Over two hundred years have passed since these words reverberated in the House Chamber, their echo ringing alongside the ghosts of history. How many bombs have been dropped? How many governments overthrown? How many innocents slaughtered in the pursuit of phantom monsters?
While Americans drown in joblessness, mass incarceration, tribalism, atomization, medical mandates, and substance abuse both neocons and neolibs continue to clamor for more war. That they pursue this perilous path threatens not only the survival of our civilization, but of humanity. The growing censorship, glaringly on display with regard to both the Ukraine war and the Covid psyop, is intertwined with the dark shadow that has enveloped journalism and academia in an increasingly authoritarian discourse devoid of any fact-based analysis. Both deceivers and deceived, the priests of neoliberalism knowingly and unknowingly foment authoritarianism.
Unconcerned that tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are being used to fund a murderous Kiev junta, congressman Jamie Raskin writes on his website that Moscow “is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export.” Of the totalitarian Banderite state notorious for torturing dissidents and militiamen, he writes that “a Ukrainian victory would give us an opening to a much better future for all humanity.”
The idea that the Russian military will be driven from Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea, territories where they have the support of the overwhelming majority of the locals, is no less delusional, and yet this is clearly one of NATO’s principal goals in its proxy war against Russia.
Ignoring the fact that the war in Ukraine began with the ultranationalist Maidan putsch in February of 2014, and that the primary objective of the Russian military is to protect Russian speaking Ukrainians from persecution and genocide at the hands of the Banderite entity, NBC informs us, in what is clearly a fabricated story, that Russian soldiers have raped Ukrainian children. How many Ukrainian children have been raped by neo-Nazi gangs and death squads? Quite a few I would imagine, yet that is the real war which the presstitutes have no interest whatsoever in either learning about or discussing. The article offers a photo of a Russian soldier standing guard in Mariupol, implying that the Russian military committed war crimes there, when the city was held hostage to the Azov battalion for eight years.
If the Russian military had such contempt for Russian speaking Ukrainians – and indeed, they are operating exclusively in Russian language dominant oblasts – then why not simply leave the locals to the savagery of Azov, Aidar, and Right Sector? Such a question invariably falls on deaf ears in a dystopian technocracy where logic and reason have all but ceased to exist. The NBC stenographers go on to tell us that these atrocities have been confirmed by United Nations “experts.” Replace the UN with the WHO and we could be talking about Hydroxychloroquine.
Enclosed are some headlines taken from Google which embody the deplorable state of the media generally, and its coverage of the Ukraine war in particular:
- “Madmen like Putin who sanction killing of children shouldn’t be appeased,” by Trey Gowdy (Fox News)
- “1 in 5 Russians want Gays and Lesbians ‘eliminated,’ survey finds,” by Elizabeth Kuhr (NBC News)
- “Why Russia’s War in Ukraine is a Genocide,” by Kristina Hook (Foreign Affairs)
- “Women who were raped by Russian soldiers yearn for justice,” by Valerie Hopkins (The New York Times)
- “Russia using rape as ‘military strategy’ in Ukraine: UN envoy,” by Philip Wang, Tim Lister, Josh Pennington and Heather Chen (CNN)
- “How Moscow Grabs Ukrainians Kids and Makes them Russians,” by Sarah El Deeb, Anastasiia Shvets, and Elizaveta Tilna (Associated Press)
- “Russia is depopulating parts of eastern Ukraine, forcibly removing thousands into remote parts of Russia,” by Katie Bo Lillis, Kylie Atwood, and Natasha Bertrand (CNN)
- “Female Fighters Detail Russian Atrocities in Ukraine,” by Nike Ching (Voice of America)
- “Mad Vlad is likely to use nukes – we have to stop him,” by Tony Parsons (The US Sun)
Where are all the plucky “fact checkers” condemning these spreaders of “misinformation” and “disinformation?” Replace “Russians” with “Jews” and this language bears an eerie resemblance to anti-Semitism in the Third Reich.
Washington’s Russophobia and its loathing of the Putin government constitute almost insurmountable obstacles towards achieving a negotiated settlement at this time. (Consider Biden referring to Putin as “a murderous dictator” and “a pure thug,” language which would have been unthinkable during the Cold War). Clearly, the ultimate goal of the American ruling establishment is the breaking up of the Russian Federation and the total degradation of the Russian people. This desire to bully Russia as if she were no different than Libya or Somalia is indicative of an American exceptionalism that has lost all touch with reality.
The Pentagon has accelerated the delivery of upgraded nuclear weapons to its European vassals, and the 101st Airborne Division is training in Romania, replete with copious quantities of bravado and preposterous boasting. The Kremlin wouldn’t go to war with the US over eastern Syria, but can the same be said with regard to Odessa, a Russian speaking oblast inextricably linked with centuries of Russian culture and founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great?
In an Atlantic Council memo to the president of the United States, the think tank nonchalantly suggests that if the Kremlin decides to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine (for which there would presently be no justification vis-à-vis the Russian nuclear doctrine), one option is that “The United States could conduct a limited conventional strike on the Russian forces or bases directly involved in the attack.”
Retired Army General David Petraeus, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have reiterated this position in even more threatening language. In conjunction with this madness, the Pentagon is planning to send nuclear-capable bombers to the Tindal air base in northern Australia, yet another provocation meant to antagonize China and which threatens to further destabilize the region.
Having lost all moral, political, and legal credibility, the United States no longer has anything to offer the world except violence, anarchy, and unfettered capitalism. Barring the annihilation of China and Russia and the breaking up of BRICS (which the Saudis have notably asked to join), nothing can stop the inevitable disintegration of US imperial power, and yet the destruction of these two titans could only be achieved with a nuclear war which would irrevocably hurl humanity towards the abyss of extinction.
Nevertheless, the destruction of Russia and China is precisely what Pentagon war planners have on their minds right now; hence the interminable, almost hypnotic, calls to defend the “rules-based order.” As retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor points out in “Will Biden Gamble on a Ukraine Coalition,” any attempt on the part of the United States and its allies to directly enter the conflict is ill-conceived and fraught with tremendous danger.
The Biden administration’s recent Nuclear Posture Review significantly lowers the threshold for a nuclear first strike, and there is a chance that Finland and Poland may host nuclear weapons – likewise incredibly reckless provocations.
What makes the proxy war in Ukraine so volatile, is that while Russia is firmly committed to denazification and to protecting Russian speaking Ukrainians and Ukrainians of ethnic Russian origin from the Banderite entity, Washington is increasingly alarmed by the waning of American power and the rise of an increasingly multipolar world. Scott Ritter writes in Consortium News that “Should the US opt to resist the tides of history, the temptation to use the final weapon of existential survival — America’s nuclear arsenal — will be real.”
Image: President Dwight D. Eisenhower (National Archives)
The US must free itself from the cannibalistic maws of the military industrial complex and its insatiable lust for endless conflict. Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of an America in a state of permanent war:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people….
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
All empires eventually wither and die, yet no dying empire ever possessed thousands of nuclear weapons before. Where is the fear of Armageddon from our leaders, the dread crossing of the final Rubicon?
Unlike World War I, once coined “the war to end all wars,” a nuclear war truly would constitute such a cataclysm. Indeed, following the apocalyptic conflagration of a third world war, due to pollution and disease and an annihilated infrastructure, the survivors would be physically incapable of fighting another.
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https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/17/patrick-lawrence-more-futile-pacific-overtures/
More Futile Pacific Overtures
I’ve given up being amazed at how stupidly the Biden administration conducts its diplomacy with China and, by extension, Asia altogether. I spend my time now being amazed at how stupid these people assume the Chinese and other Asians to be.
Nearly halfway through his term in office — and let us hope there is not another after this one — the man from Scranton finally met Chinese President Xi Jinping Monday to discuss the single most important relationship between any two nations anywhere in the world.
This first face-to-face encounter since Joe Biden began his presidency comes after nearly two years of diplomatic drift during which the U.S. has escalated the threat of open conflict, incessantly provoked the Chinese on the Taiwan question and the administration’s bench of incompetents makes one mess after another. All the while Beijing has been consolidating an extensive range of ties with non–Western nations in the declared cause of a new world order.
I do not see that anything of moment got done when Biden and Xi met just prior to the Group of 20 session in Bali this week. A great deal could have been accomplished, of course, given the worsening state of the bilateral relationship, but Biden proved once again not up to it. He seems to have figured the Chinese side would be too stupid to notice that he and his administration are effectively paralyzed, a herd of deer caught in headlights.
Our moment calls upon American statesmen and stateswomen to act imaginatively, creatively, even courageously in response to a new era and new geopolitical circumstances. But those sailing the American ship of state, from the president on down, have neither imagination nor creativity nor courage. All they can do is reiterate past positions while expecting the other side to respond differently.
This is what Xi got in Bali on Monday. Nothing more. Nothing has changed, nothing of consequence has moved forward.
It was easy enough to see this pointlessness coming, this remove from reality, as Biden and his people advertised the Bali summit last week. America proposes to “build a floor in the relationship,” officials declared. The object of the encounter was to “set expectations.” The two sides need to “draw red lines,” Biden said in a press conference last Wednesday, “and determine whether or not they” —China’s and Washington’s red lines — “conflict with one another. And if they do, how to resolve it and how to work it out.”
Exhausted Rhetoric
What in these various remarks is there to hold onto, what of constructive substance did the U.S. side propose to get done in Bali? It is all sponge, exhausted rhetoric, a continued commitment to avoid addressing the Sino–U.S. relationship seriously.
This is what I mean by paralysis. American officials have nothing to say when they speak across the Pacific, and therefore say nothing in the cotton-wool language of obfuscation. The diplomacy of no diplomacy, as I have previously called it.
Straight talk — always cover a shortcoming by proclaiming it a strength — was another running theme in the run-up. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said at a presser last Thursday: “The president will get to sit in the same room with Xi Jinping, be direct and straightforward with him as he always is, and expect the same in return from Xi.” I love the “as he always is.”
And then the Big Guy, as Hunter Biden called his Pop when doling out the bribes during the latter’s vice-presidency, said: “I know Xi Jinping…. I’ve always had straightforward discussions with him….We have very little misunderstanding. We just got to figure out what the red lines are.”
All this seems to have been calculated to convey the impression that there is a set of new problems between Beijing and Washington and Biden has arrived to resolve them.
Say what? Refusing to put a floor in the Sino–American relationship has been the building block of U.S. policy since the Biden regime came to power in January 2021. China has since that day made its perfectly reasonable expectations clear and has drawn all the red lines it needs, only to see Washington ignore the expectations, the red lines and everything else the Chinese have had to say.
As to Biden the straight talker, this gets to be a clown act. Do he and his people think the Chinese do not know they are dealing with an habitual liar, having been on the receiving end of many of Biden’s falsehoods and elisions — notably, but not only, on the Taiwan question?
I’m not sure why any of this flimsy PR was necessary in the first place. At that press conference last Wednesday Biden asserted with evident righteousness that he would make “no fundamental concessions” to China on the Taiwan question. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…
Xi was forthright, as always, when Taiwan came up. “The Taiwan question is at the very core of China’s core interests, the bedrock of the political foundation of China–U.S. relations and the first red line that must not be crossed in China–U.S. relations,” Xi said according to a Xinhua report. “Resolving the Taiwan question is a matter for the Chinese and China’s internal affair.”
It doesn’t get much clearer, does it? And Biden?
“Biden said he sought to assure Xi that U.S. policy on Taiwan, which has for decades been to support both Beijing’s ‘One China’ stance and Taiwan’s military, had not changed,” Reuters reported from Nusa Dua, the Balinese town where the G–20 met Tuesday. “He said there was no need for a new Cold War.”
It doesn’t get much foggier. Biden has stated four times since taking office that the U.S. will defend Taiwan militarily in the event of open conflict between the island and the mainland — a straight-ahead repudiation of Washington’s longstanding commitment to the One China principle. The U.S. now embarks on a major new program to increase military aid to Taiwan.
Two-Front Cold War
As to a new Cold War, we hear the same thing as regards Russia and the Ukraine conflict. It has been evident for many months that the U.S. is well along in waging a two-front Cold War, Ukraine and Taiwan its sharp forward edges.
And then there is what the Chinese call the salami-slicing, a running series of small aggressions, none very large in itself, to inch away from One China toward de facto support for Taiwan’s independence. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s grandstanding visit to Taipei last summer is a case in point, even if it proved a very thick slice of salami.
In this latter connection, the ideologically obsessed Sullivan took it upon himself to announce before the Biden–Xi summit that the administration intended to brief Taiwan officials about what was said in the talks. This is two things: another incremental move toward legitimizing Taiwan’s standing as an independent state and, as the Chinese Foreign Ministry succinctly put it, an “egregious” violation of diplomatic protocol.
It is impossible to imagine that Sullivan spoke without prior calculation. This is how Washington slices its salami.
China’s Patience
At this point you have to admire the Chinese side for their patience in the face of this tedium. They sit there, one diplomatic encounter after another, and listen courteously as Washington invites them not to believe what is right before their eyes.
Biden’s message to Xi, such as we can speak of one, is by now familiar. Let’s cooperate on non-threatening matters such as climate change, compete in the economic and technology spheres, and face off as adversaries on national security and geopolitical questions — the South China Sea, Taiwan, nuclear stockpiles and so on.
As noted previously in this space, Beijing has been clear from the Biden administration’s first days that it does not take this cake-and-eat-it talk the least bit seriously.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried this on a few months after Biden was inaugurated. Then Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s No. 2, tried it. Then John Kerry, as Biden’s top climate diplomat, tried it very briefly. All with the same result: a string of failures — some spectacular (Blinken and Sullivan in Alaska in March 2021), others “quiet disasters,” as Foreign Policy put it after Sherman’s talks in Tianjin a few months later.
Now Biden has just tried the same thing, with a notable assist from Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, who accompanied him to Bali.
As noted some weeks ago, the U.S. has just imposed a range of new restrictions on U.S. technology exports explicitly intended — see Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo — to retard, if not block altogether, China’s development in high-technology sectors such as semiconductors. We have to assume this shameful act of industrial sabotage is what Biden and the policy cliques mean by competing on the economic side.
Here is Yellen, in an interview with The New York Times last Saturday, on the new sanctions, and we’ll have to forgive the non-sentence:
“I think stabilizing the relationship and trying to get it on a better footing while recognizing that we have a whole range of concerns, and we would like to address those…. They need to understand, for example, why we take actions. I know their concern, for example, about our policies of banning sales of advanced semiconductors. It’s important for us to explain why we’re doing things, how it’s delineated, that it’s not an attempt to completely paralyze China’s economy and stop its development.”
No, not completely, just critically and mostly.
In his post-summit remarks, Biden said he told Xi it was China’s responsibility to keep North Korea’s weapons programs in check and that if Beijing failed to do so the U.S. “would have to take certain actions that would be more defensive on our own behalf.” This is an altogether bizarre remark, but I detect a veiled intention in it — two, in fact.
One, by assigning China responsibility for Pyongyang’s conduct, ridiculous on the face of it, Joe “Diplomacy First” Biden is weaseling out of any renewed effort to open talks with the North: It is all on you, Mr. Xi.
Two, this position may be a screen — hard to say just yet—for what is already a major Pentagon program to increase the U.S. military presence in the western Pacific. The U.S. has used North Korea as an excuse in this way for many years, let us not forget.
I don’t know how quiet or noisy this disaster will prove, but I am certain of the disaster part. China agreed to reopen lines of communications on climate matters and other such questions, which it had closed in response to the Pelosi visit. It is not nothing, but it is barely more.
I do not know where in the proceedings this remark occurred, but I consider Xi had the last word:
“History is the best textbook. We should take it as a mirror and let it guide the future…. A statesman should think about and know where to lead his country. He should also think about and know how to get along with other countries and the wider world.”
Excellent stuff. After half a millennium of the Atlantic world’s dominance, the non–West lectures the West. It tells us just what time it is on history’s clock.
Comment to article:
" Brilliant piece Patrick thank you! Again we get nothing but propaganda in the mainstream media witness Xi’s beautiful snub of little boy Trudeau lecturing him on the proper conduct of statecraft, then dismissing him. The western media fawned over Trudeau’s inept response to someone who knows how to play the long game. You so correctly identify the stupidity of Biden, one wonders if this man had even studied or read anything other than the American mythology that passes for history. Once again no adults in the room other than the Asians who clearly see the west and its leaders as hypocrites, liars, and fools who cannot be trusted on the most basic forms of diplomacy. This hubris will cost the west a huge price. No leaders in any western state on the horizon who likely have any substance to deal with leaders who in the end will both outlast them and outwit them. "
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