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https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/08/chris-hedges-americas-theater-of-the-absurd/

America’s Theater of the Absurd

The 15 rounds of voting it took to install Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House is part of the carnival of folly that passes for politics. 

Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. The Squad and the Progressive Caucus have no more intention of fighting for universal health care, workers’ rights or defying the war machine than the Freedom Caucus fights for freedom. These political hacks are modern versions of Sinclair Lewis’s slick con artist Elmer Gantry, cynically betraying a gullible public to amass personal power and wealth. This moral vacuity provides the spectacle, as H.G. Wells wrote, of “a great material civilization, halted, paralyzed.” It happened in Ancient Rome. It happened in Weimar Germany. It is happening here.

Governance exists. But it is not seen. It is certainly not democratic. It is done by the armies of lobbyists and corporate executives, from the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street. Governance happens in secret. Corporations have seized the levers of power, including the media. Growing obscenely rich, the ruling oligarchs have deformed national institutions, including state and federal legislatures and the courts, to serve their insatiable greed. They know what they are doing. They understand the depths of their own corruption. They know they are hated. They are prepared for that too. They have militarized police forces and have built a vast archipelago of prisons to keep the unemployed and underemployed in bondage. All the while, they pay little to no income tax and exploit sweatshop labor overseas. They lavishly bankroll the political clowns who speak in the vulgar and crude idiom of an enraged public or in the dulcet tones used to mollify the liberal class.

Donald Trump’s seminal contribution to the political landscape is the license to say in public what political decorum once prohibited. His legacy is the degradation of political discourse to the monosyllabic tirades of Shakespeare’s Caliban, which simultaneously scandalize and energize the kabuki theater that passes for government. This burlesque differs little from the German Reichstag, where the final cri de coeur by a mortally ill Clara Zetkin against fascism on August 30, 1932, was met with a chorus of taunts, insults and jeers by Nazi deputies.

H.G. Wells called the old guard, the good liberals, the ones who speak in measured words and embrace reason, the “inexplicit men.” They say the right things and do nothing. They are as vital to the rise of tyranny as are the Christian fascists, a few of whom held the House hostage last week  by blocking 14 rounds of voting to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker. By the time McCarthy was elected on the 15th round, he had caved on nearly every demand made by the obstructionists, including permitting any one of the 435 members of the House to force a vote for his removal at any time, thus guaranteeing political paralysis.

The internecine warfare in the House is not between those who respect democratic institutions and those who do not. McCarthy, backed by Trump and far-right conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, is as morally bankrupt as those trying to bring him down. This is a battle for control among con artists, charlatans, social media celebrities and mobsters. McCarthy joined the majority of House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit to void the 2020 Presidential result by preventing four states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — from casting electoral votes for Biden. The Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit. There isn’t much in the Freedom Caucus extremist positions, which resemble those of Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Fidesz in Hungary, McCarthy doesn’t embrace. They advocate greater tax cuts for the wealthy, further deregulation of corporations, a war on migrants, more austerity programs, champion white supremacy and accuse liberals and conservatives who do not line up behind Trump of treason.

“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said in audio posted to YouTube by a Main Street Nashville reporter in 2021. Pelosi, for her part, called McCarthy a “moron,” after he said that a possible renewed mask mandate was “a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.” This is what passes for political discourse. I yearn for the time when political rhetoric was geared to the educational level of a 10-year-old child or an adult with a sixth or seventh-grade education. Now we speak in imbecilic clichés.

This political vacuum has spawned anti-politics, or what the writer Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics,” which “personalizes and moralizes issues and interests instead of clarifying them.” Junk politics “maximizes threats from abroad while miniaturizing large, complex problems at home. It’s a politics that, guided by guesses about its own profits and losses, abruptly reverses public stances without explanation, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized (e.g.: [the war in] Iraq will be over in days or weeks; Iraq is a project for generations).”

“A major effect of junk politics — its ceaseless flood of patriotic, religious, macho and therapeutic fustian — is to pull position after position loose from reasoned foundations,” DeMott noted.

The result of junk politics is that it infantilizes the public with “year-round upbeat Christmas tales” and perpetuates the status quo. The billionaire class, which has carried out a slow motion corporate coup d’état, continues to plunder; unchecked militarism continues to hollow out the country; and the public is kept in bondage by the courts and domestic security agencies. When the government watches you twenty-four hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. The iron primacy of profit means that the most vulnerable are ruthlessly discarded. Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to slow economic growth and increase unemployment to curb inflation, exacting a tremendous cost on the working poor and their families. No one is required to operate under what John Ruskin called “conditions of moral culture.” 

But the second result of junk politics is more insidious. It solidifies the cult of the self, the amoral belief that we have the right to do anything, to betray and destroy anyone, to get what we want. The cult of the self fosters a psychopathic cruelty, a culture built not on empathy, the common good and self-sacrifice but on unbridled narcissism and vengeance. It celebrates, as mass media does, superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel guilt or remorse. This is the dark ethic of corporate culture, celebrated by the entertainment industry, academia and social media. 

The essayist Curtis White argues that “it is capitalism that now most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment.” He assesses our culture as one in which  “death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.” This “legality” ratifies the systematic exploitation of workers. White excoriates our nationalist triumphalism and our unleashing of “the most fantastically destructive military power” the world has ever known with the alleged objective of “protecting and pursuing freedom.” 

“Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal ‘rights’ that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants,” he writes. “That’s the real and important ‘moral assessment’ sought by our courts. It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.”

The consequence is a society consumed by excessive materialism, pointless soul-destroying work, suffocating housing developments closer to “shared cemeteries” than real neighborhoods and a license to exploit that “condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal property.” 

The billionaire class, for the most part, prefers the mask of a Joe Biden, who deftly broke the freight railway unions to prevent a strike and forced them to accept a contract a majority of union members had rejected. But the billionaire class also knows that the goons and con artists on the far right will not interfere in their disemboweling of the nation; indeed, they will be more robust in thwarting the attempts of workers to organize for decent wages and working conditions. I watched fringe politicians in Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tudjman, dismissed by the political and educated elites as buffoons, ride an anti-liberal wave to power in the wake of widespread economic misery. Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Citibank, Raytheon, ExxonMobile, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs will easily adapt. Capitalism functions very efficiently without democracy.

The longer we remain in a state of political paralysis, the more these political deformities are empowered. As Robert O. Paxton writes in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” fascism is an amorphous and incoherent ideology. It wraps itself in the most cherished symbols of the nation, in our case, the American flag, white supremacy, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Christian cross. It celebrates hypermasculinity, misogyny, racism and violence. It allows disenfranchised people, especially disenfranchised white men, to regain a sense of power, however illusory, and sanctifies their hatred and rage. It embraces a utopian vision of moral renewal and vengeance to coalesce around an anointed political savior. It is militaristic, anti-intellectual and contemptuous of democracy, especially when the established ruling class mouths the language of liberal democracy but does nothing to defend it. It replaces culture with nationalist and patriotic kitsch. It sees those outside the closed circle of the nation-state or the ethnic or religious group as contaminants who must be physically purged, usually with violence, to restore the health of the nation. It perpetuates itself through constant instability, for its solutions to the ills besetting the nation are transitory, contradictory and unattainable. Most importantly, fascism always has a religious coloring, mobilizing believers around rites and rituals, using sacred words and phrases, and embracing an absolute truth that is heretical to question.

Trump may be finished politically, but the political and social decay that created Trump remains. This decay will give rise to new, perhaps more competent, demagogues. I fear the rise of Christian fascists endowed with the political skill, self-discipline, focus and intelligence that Trump lacks. The longer we remain politically paralyzed, the more certain Christian fascism becomes. The January 6 mob assault on the Capital two years ago, the polarization of the electorate into antagonistic tribes, the economic misery afflicting the working class, the rhetoric of hate and violence, and the current dysfunction in the Congress is but a glimpse of the nightmare ahead.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/08/patrick-lawrence-europe-and-the-legitimization-of-deception/

Europe and the Legitimization of Deception

The U.S., having no need of or gift for statecraft, has long practiced what I’ve taken to calling the diplomacy of no diplomacy. You can’t expect much from bimbos such as Antony Blinken or Wendy Sherman, his No. 2 at the State Department. All they can do is roar, even if they are mice next to any serious diplomat. 

But have the European powers now followed along? I fear to ask because I fear the answer. But I must, given recent events.

Early last year, when Petro Poroshenko stated publicly that the post-coup regime in Kyiv had no intention of abiding by diplomatic commitments it made in 2014-15 to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, a few eyebrows arched, but not over many. Who was the former Ukrainian president, anyway? I had him down from the first as a self-interested dummkopf who did what Washington told him to do and nothing more, no shred of statesmanship about him. 

It was another matter when, in early December, Angela Merkel admitted in back-to-back interviews that the European powers were up to the same thing. The objective of diplomatic talks in late 2014 and early 2015, the former German chancellor told Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, was not a framework for a federalized Ukraine in the cause of a lasting peace between its hostile halves: It was to deceive the Russians to give Kyiv time to prepare for a military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces in the east, whose people had refused to accept the U.S.–orchestrated coup that brought compulsively Russophobic Nazi-inflected nationalists to power in February 2014. 

Merkel’s revelations came as a shock, of course. But I contrived to mark down her comments as an inadvertent indiscretion in the autumn of a long-serving leader’s years. Merkel made her remarks more or less in passing. There was no boasting in them. She did not seem proud of her duplicity. 

Now François Hollande weighs in. A few days before the year ended, the former French president gave a lengthy interview to The Kyiv Independent. In it he made the Franco–German position perfectly clear: Yes, Merkel and I lied to the Russians when we negotiated the Minsk I and Minsk II Protocols in September 2014 and February 2015. No, we never had any intention of making Kyiv observe them or otherwise enforcing them. It was a charade from the first and—the part of this interview that truly galls—Hollande advanced this as wise, sound statesmanship.

Let us count the betrayals we must assign to the hapless Hollande and the inconstant Merkel. 

The betrayal of Russia and its president will go without saying. It is a matter of record that Vladimir Putin, who participated directly in the Minsk talks, worked long, long hours in the cause of a settlement that would leave Ukraine stable and unified, a freestanding post–Soviet republic on the Russian Federation’s southwestern order.  

Here I will remind readers of the animosity Putin expressed in his New Year’s address, three days after Hollande described the Franco–German sting operation in detail:

The West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia.

This, a clear reference to the Merkel and Hollande interviews, leaves us with clear and obvious questions. Did Berlin and Paris give Moscow any alternative but to intervene in Ukraine militarily when they sabotaged peace negotiations? While Moscow remains open to talks to end the war, how seriously is it supposed to take any such prospect? Volodymyr Zelensky is forever slamming the door to negotiations with the Russians, but the Ukrainian president is late to the gate: The Germans and French got this done years ago.

To betray the diplomatic process as Germany and France have done is also to betray trust as a necessary condition of orderly state-to-state relations. Nations may not fully trust one another but must be able to trust the diplomatic process—to trust the word given in the process of a negotiation. In this way the core European powers have condemned all of us to an unstable, dangerous world—and so are guilty of betraying all of us—our security, our futures, our desire for a stable, peaceable world order.

There are, of course, the Ukrainians. The majority of them wanted a peace deal from the start. Poroshenko was roundly defeated in Ukraine’s 2019 elections because he failed to deliver one. You would never know this from the Western press, but Zelensky succeeded him with a 70–odd percent majority of the vote precisely because he promised to negotiate a settlement in direct talks with Putin. 

Now the nation lies in ruins, its economy having cratered by 30 percent last year, 30 million of its people displaced, and its war dead to be counted in the tens of thousands. I see no argument against counting this a major consequence of the Franco–German design of deception. 

I urge readers to peruse Hollande’s interview with The Kyiv Independent. The second-rate Socialist—and so much for France’s long and storied Socialist tradition—competes with any duplicitous American diplomat as measured by his lies, omissions, and upside-down logic.

By Hollande’s account, the intent to mislead the Russians dates to the D–Day celebrations of 2014, a few months after the coup in Kyiv and the start of the coup regime’s artillery attacks on civilian areas in the eastern provinces. In June of that year France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine gathered in Normandy to begin a negotiation process nominally intended to lead to a peace settlement and a stable national structure in Ukraine. This was named the Normandy Format. 

This format produced the Minsk I Protocol the following September. When that collapsed in early 2015, Kyiv refusing to cease its shelling, the four nations convened again. This time, talks were based on a settlement plan Paris and Berlin developed jointly. Minsk II followed. This protocol included more than a ceasefire; it also provided for a restructuring of Ukraine such that the eastern provinces would enjoy that degree of autonomy deemed necessary to hold the nation together despite the marked differences between its Europe-tilted western region and its Russia-tilted east. 

All terrific, on paper. All deception on the ground, Hollande now tells us: “Putin accepted the Normandy Format, which required him to report regularly on the progress that could be made in implementing the Minsk agreements.” As to what actually transpired, Hollande offers this, and it is here his accounting of events begins to turn on its head:

The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a while. What was very important was to know how the West would use this respite to prevent any further Russian attempts.

To state the self-evident, Putin took the terms of the Minsk accords seriously by Hollande’s own account. It is a matter of record that the offensive in the eastern provinces was Kyiv’s as it shelled its own citizens. The death toll reported by monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, tells the story of the next eight years: 14,000 civilians dead, more than 80 percent of them in the eastern provinces known as the Donbas.

The lies come thick and fast from there. Early in the exchange The Kyiv Independent asks, “Did you have the impression that Vladimir Putin would respect the Minsk agreements?” to which Hollande replies, “We couldn’t know that.”

Liar. Putin’s desire for a negotiated settlement was perfectly obvious from the D–Day meeting onward.   

“He dreamt of a recreation of the Soviet Union,” Hollande says of the Russian leader. “Putin adopted an aggressive posture and waited to see what the West’s reaction would be.”

The former point is a common perversion of a remark of a sentimental sort that Putin made many years ago: Anyone who approves of the Soviet Union’s collapse has no heart, anyone who thinks it can be brought back to life has no brain. As to “Putin the aggressor,” whatever happened to Moscow’s decades-long efforts to negotiate a working post–Cold War order? Whatever happened to the decades of American subterfuge in Ukraine by means of various U.S.–sponsored “civil society groups”? Whatever happened to the February 2014 coup, an aggression if ever there was one?

Of these Hollande has nothing to say. It goes on and on. “Moscow didn’t want peace.” “Mariupol was already in his [Putin’s] sights,” this a reference to the Ukrainian port that fell to Russian forces last spring. Nonsense and nonsense. None of this stands up to logical scrutiny or known facts.  

And never mind that the subversion of the Normandy Format talks and the two Minsk accords led directly to the war that began a year ago next month. Europe’s duplicity has been a great success, Hollande wants us to know. “Ukraine has strengthened its military posture,” he asserts. “Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity.”

The merits of the Minsk agreements: We must assume he means the merits of their subversion. 

How, you ask, can Hollande count the underhanded strategy he pursued with Angela Merkel a success in view of how things have turned out? That is easy. The West went soft on Russia, so giving Putin the opening he was seeking. Consider this:

We have already seen the American withdrawal from the international scene in Syria with the “laissez faire” [the free pass] given to Putin regarding the support he gave Syrian dictator Bashar al–Assad.

Wow. I didn’t know the U.S. had free passes to give out in Syria—where its intervention was and remains illegal and where the Russians intervened against the Islamic State in September 2015 at the Assad government’s invitation.

How the French Socialists have fallen, I have to say.    

Why did Hollande choose to make these weird remarks? This is an interesting question. 

One clue may lie in his choice of The Kyiv Independent as the publication to grant this interview. The Kyiv Independent is not, to go straight to the point, independent. The Canadian government and the European Endowment for Democracy, the Continent’s version of the National Endowment for Democracy, have been among its supporters since its founding a year ago. It appears to be all mixed up with other NGOs of the anti–Russian sort. The Kyiv Independent, in other words, was dry ground for Hollande; it would ask all the right questions and none of the wrong ones.

It is inconceivable that Hollande spoke without Merkel’s knowledge. Maybe he was covering for what the two of them considered the former chancellor ’s mistake when she admitted her dishonesty and Hollande’s to Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. Hard to say. 

Whatever Hollande’s specific motivation, it seems more obvious that his intent was to legitimize deception as a feature of 21^st century statecraft. Greater cynicism knoweth no man. 

He and Merkel have taken a grave step in the wrong direction these past nine years. It is many decades since we’ve seen any serious diplomacy from the Americans. It is another matter for the Europeans to abandon their long, admittedly pockmarked diplomatic traditions. Ever fewer nations take U.S. diplomats seriously anymore. Will this now extend to the West altogether, the non–West seeing little point talking to it?

The duplicity with which France and Germany conducted the Minsk negotiations over some years now takes its place in the long story of the West’s dishonesty in its dealings with Russia since James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, promised Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990—in conversation, not in writing—that NATO would not expand eastward from Germany. 

In effect, Hollande has just confirmed that lying to Moscow remains perfectly acceptable among the major Western powers. This has never led the world anywhere good and never will.