American Militarism Marches On: No Discussion or Media Coverage of Washington’s War Against the World
Nearly everyone has heard the comment attributed for former Clinton consigliere Rahm Emanuel
that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. The implication of
the comment is that if there is a major crisis going on the cover it
provides permits one to do all sorts of things under the radar that
would otherwise be unacceptable. That aphorism is particularly true in
the current context as there are multiple crises taking place
simultaneously, all of which are being exploited to various degrees by
interested parties.
One of the more interesting stories carefully hidden by the smoke
being generate by civil unrest, plague and personal scandals is the
continued march of American militarism. The story is particularly
compelling as neither main party candidate is bothering to talk about it
and there is no discussion of foreign policy even planned for the final
presidential debate. Last week eccentric multi billionaire Elon Muskannounced that
he and the Pentagon are developing a new 7,500 m.p.h. missile capable
of delivering 80 tons of military cargo nearly anywhere in the world in
under an hour. It would undoubtedly be a major advanced capability
catering to those military planners who envision continued U.S.
intervention worldwide for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, agreement on a new START treaty that would limit the
proliferation of some hypersonic weapon systems is stalled because the
White House wants to include China in any deal. Beijing is not
interested, particularly as Donald Trump is also claiming that Beijing
will pay for the multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages
that the United States will ultimately require to combat the
coronavirus “… because this was not caused by our workers and our
people, this was caused by China and China will pay us back in one form
or another. We’re gonna take it from China. I tell you now, it’s coming
out of China. They’re the ones that caused this problem.”
Indeed, China and Russia continue to be the boogeymen trotted out regularly to scare Americans. Last week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s State Department issued a statement warning
that “some foreign governments, such as those of the People’s Republic
of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation, seek to exert influence over
U.S. foreign policy through lobbyists, external experts, and think
tanks.” Why the statement was issued at this time, so close to elections
is unclear, though it is possibly an attempt to line up possible
scapegoats if the electoral process does not produce results acceptable
to whomever loses. In fact, Russia and China hardly find a place on the
list of those who fund lobbyists and think tanks.
Also of interest is another story about how Washington has chosen to
interact with the world, one involving both enemy du jour Iran and
Venezuela. Readers will undoubtedly recall how the United States seized in international waters
four Greek owned but Liberian flagged tankers loaded with gasoline that
were bound for Venezuela. The tankers were transporting more than a
million gallons of fuel to economic basket case Venezuela, a country
which is in its sad condition due to sanctions and other “maximum
pressure” imposed by Washington, which has also sanctioned Venezuela’s
own oil industry. The fuel was seized based on unilaterally imposed U.S.
sanctions on Iranian sale or export of its own petroleum products, a
move intended to strangle the Iranian economy and bring about an
uprising of the Iranian people. As the sanctions imposed by Washington
are not supported by the United Nations or by any other legal authority,
the seizure is little more than exercise of a bit of force majeure that
used to be called piracy.
Even though foreign and national security policy has not really been
discussed in either the Biden or Trump campaign, there is general
agreement in both parties that Venezuela is a rogue regime that must be
replaced while Iran is an actual, tangible threat due to its alleged
misbehavior in the Middle East. It has been dubbed by Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo the “number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world.”
Saner voices have observed that neither Venezuela nor Iran threaten the
United States in any way and that the U.S. and Israel continue to kill
many more civilians than Iran ever has, but they have been drowned out
by the media talking heads who constantly spout the established
narrative.
Well, the alleged Iranian fuel has arrived in New Jersey and a legal battle for custody of it has begun.
The fuel had been removed from the Greek tankers and transferred to
other tankers for removal to the United States but the complication is
that the Trump administration must now prove its case for forfeiture
before the oil can be sold. The U.S. justification
for seizing the cargoes is the claim that the fuel was an asset of
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the Treasury,
Justice and State Departments have conveniently designated a foreign
terrorist organization. But that contention is disputed by the cargoes’
owners, who claim to have nothing to do with the IRGC. They include
other energy exporters and shippers in the Middle East, namely Mobin
International Limited, Oman Fuel Trading Ltd and Sohar Fuel Trading LLC
FZ. They have filed a motion for dismissal and are seeking return of the
fuel plus additional compensation for the losses they have suffered.
One has to hope they win as it is the United States that is in the wrong
in this case.
The entire saga of the tankers and the fuel is symptomatic of the
undeclared economic warfare that the United States now prefers to use
when dealing with adversaries. And there is considerable evidence to
suggest that Washington is trying to goad Iran into responding with
force, providing the U.S. government with a plausible rationale for responding in kind. President Trump has directly threatened Iran in an October 9th public statement
in which he promised the Iranians that “If you fuck around with us, if
you do something bad to us, we are gonna do things to you that have
never been done before.”
So, Washington’s aggression directed against much of the world
continues with a national election less than two weeks away but no one
is talking about it. That would seem odd in and of itself, but the sad
part is that it is deliberate collusion on the part of government and
media to make sure the voting public remains unaware the extent to which
the United States has in reality become a pariah, a full-time bully in
its foreign relations.
The new president-elect of Bolivia, Luis Arce, has told
the Spanish international news agency EFE that he intends to restore
the nation’s relations with Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. This reverses the
policies of the US-backed coup regime which immediately began closing embassies, kicking out doctors and severing relations with those nations after illegally seizing power last year.
Arce also spoke of warm relations with Russia and China.
“We
are going to reestablish all relations,” he told EFE. “This government
has acted very ideologically, depriving the Bolivian people of access to
Cuban medicine, to Russian medicine, to advances in China. For a purely
ideological issue, it has exposed the population in a way that is
unnecessary and harmful.”
Arce expressed a willingness to “open
the door to all countries, the only requirement is that they respect us
and respect our sovereignty, nothing more. All countries, no matter the
size, who want a relationship with Bolivia, the only requirement is that
we respect each other as equals. If that is so, we have no problem.“
If
you know anything about US imperialism and global politics, you will
recognize that last bit as brazen heresy against imperial doctrine.
The
unofficial doctrine of the empire-like cluster of international allies
that is loosely centralized around the United States does not recognize
the sovereignty of other nations, much less respect them as equals. This
empire takes it as a given that it has every right to determine what
every nation in the world does, who their leaders will be, where their
resources will go, and what their military posture on the world stage
will be. If a government refuses to accept the empire’s right to
determine these things, it is targeted, sabotaged, attacked, and
eventually replaced with a puppet regime.
The US-centralized
empire functions like a giant blob that slowly works to absorb nations
which have not yet been converted into imperial client states. It is
rare that a nation is able to escape from that blob and rejoin the
unabsorbed nations like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba in their
fight for self-sovereignty, and it is encouraging that it was able to
do so.
We saw the dynamics of the imperial blob explained quite vividly
last year by American political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate
hosted by the Australian think tank Center for Independent
Studies. Mearsheimer told his audience that the US is going to do
everything it can to halt China’s rise and prevent it from becoming the
regional hegemon in the eastern hemisphere, and that Australia should
align with the US in that battle or else it would face the wrath of
Washington.
“The question that’s on the table is what should the Australia’s foreign policy be in light of the rise of China,” Mearsheimer said. “I’ll tell you what I would suggest if I were an Australian.”
Mearsheimer
said China is going to continue to grow economically and will convert
that economic power into military power to dominate Asia “the way the US
dominates the western hemisphere”, and explained why he think the US
and its allies have every ability to prevent that from happening.
“Now
the question is what does this all mean for Australia?” Mearsheimer
said. “Well, you’re in a quandary for sure. Everybody knows what the
quandary is. And by the way you’re not the only country in East Asia
that’s in this quandary. You trade a lot with China, and that trade is
very important for your prosperity, no question about that.
Security-wise you really want to go with us. It makes just a lot more
sense, right? And you understand that security is more important than
prosperity, because if you don’t survive, you’re not gonna prosper.”
“Now
some people say there’s an alternative: you can go with China,” said
Mearsheimer. “Right you have a choice here: you can go with China rather
the United States. There’s two things I’ll say about that. Number one,
if you go with China you want to understand you are our enemy. You are
then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again,
we’re talking about an intense security competition.”
“You’re
either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading
extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re
undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re
feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make
us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how
nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”
Nervous laughter from
the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more
incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.
If
you’ve ever wondered how the the US is so successful in getting other
nations around the world to align with its interests, this is how. It’s
not that the US is a good actor on the world stage or a kind friend to
its allies, it’s that it will destroy you if you disobey it.
Australia is
not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is
aligned with the US to protect itself from the US. As a Twitter follower
recently observed, the US doesn’t have allies, only hostages.
As the recently released Palace Letters illustrated, the CIA staged a coup
to oust Australia’s Prime Minister Gough Whitlam because he was
prioritizing the nation’s self-sovereignty. Journalist John Pilger wrote in 2014 after Whitlam’s death:
Australia
briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75.
An American commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture
in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic
revolution”. Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished
royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement,
supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.
The primary difference between the coup in Australia and the one in Bolivia was that the Bolivians refused to roll over and take it
while we shrugged and said no worries mate. We had every option to
become a real nation and insist on our own self-sovereignty, but we,
unlike the Bolivians, were too thoroughly propagandized and placid. Some
hostages escape, some don’t.
The US empire got rid of Whitlam,
and then when we elected in 2007 a Prime Minister who was considered too
friendly with China they did it again; in order to facilitate the Obama
administration’s “pivot” against Beijing the pro-China Kevin Rudd was replaced by the compliant Julia Gillard. World Socialist Website reports:
Secret
US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in December 2010 revealed
that “protected sources” of the US embassy were pivotal figures in
Gillard’s elevation. For months, key coup plotters, including senators
Mark Arbib and David Feeney, and Australian Workers Union (AWU) chief
Paul Howes, secretly provided the US embassy with regular updates on internal government discussions and divisions within the leadership…
Rudd
had proposed an Asia-Pacific Community, attempting to mediate the
escalating strategic rivalry between the US and China, and opposed the
formation of a Quadrilateral military alliance between the US, India,
Japan and Australia, aimed against China.
Gillard, who had
cultivated her pro-US credentials through Australia-US and
Australia-Israel leadership forums, was literally selected by the US
embassy as a reliable replacement to Rudd. In her first public
appearance after knifing Rudd, she demonstrated her devotion to
Washington by posing for a photo op with the US ambassador, flanked by
US and Australian flags. She soon had a phone call with Obama, who had
previously twice postponed a planned visit to Australia under Rudd.
The
centrality of Australia to the US preparations for war against China
became apparent in November 2011, when Obama announced his “pivot to
Asia” in the Australian parliament, rather than the White House. During
the visit, Gillard and Obama signed an agreement to station American
Marines in Darwin and allow greater US access to other military bases,
placing the Australian population on the front line of any conflict with
China.
Gillard’s government also sanctioned the expansion
of the major US spying and weapons-targeting base at Pine Gap, agreed
to the US military’s increased use of Australian ports and airbases, and
stepped up Australia’s role in the US-led top-level “Five Eyes” global
surveillance network, which monitors the communications and online
activities of millions of people worldwide.
Rudd’s removal
marked a turning point. US imperialism, via the Obama administration,
sent a blunt message: there was no longer any room for equivocation by
the Australian ruling elite. Regardless of which party was in office, it
had to line up unconditionally behind the US conflict with China, no
matter what the consequences for the loss of its massive export markets
in China.
This is what we’re seeing all around the world now: a slow motion third world war being waged by the US power alliance
against the remaining nations which have resisted being absorbed into
it. As the most powerful of the unabsorbed nations by far, China is the ultimate target
of this war. If the empire succeeds in its ultimate goal of stopping
China, it will have attained a de facto planetary government which no
population will be able to oppose or dissent from.
I don’t know
about you, but I never consented to a world where powerful nuclear-armed
forces wave armageddon weapons at each other while fighting for
planetary domination and subverting less powerful nations if they don’t
play along with their cold war games. Detente and peace must be sought
and obtained, and we must all work to live together on this planet in
collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem.
This
omnicidal, ecocidal way of living that the oligarchic empire has laid
out for us does not suit our species, and it will drive us to extinction
along with God knows how many other species if we do not find a way to
end it. Rulers historically do not cede their power willingly, so we
ordinary human beings as a collective are going to have to find a way to
destroy their propaganda engine, force an end to imperialism, and build a healthy world.
....
And here is another example of the same kind of actions by the US,
Trump Regime Threatens New Sanctions on Firms Involved in Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Construction
Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany will be completed and become operational in early 2021.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak announced the following:
“Nord Stream 2 will go operational by the end of 2020.”
“One of the ships that can be used to finalize it is now in the Far East. Some time will be required for extra preparations.”
Earlier after the Swiss-based pipe-laying firm Allseas pulled out of
the project in response to threatened US sanctions, Novak said Russia is
able to complete pipeline construction on its own — without help from
foreign contractors.
When operational, it’ll deliver 55 billion cubic meters of natural
gas annually to Germany and other European countries annually.
Underhanded Trump regime efforts to halt the project failed — yet its hardliners haven’t ceased trying.
In July, the Trump regime threatened sanctions on companies involved in Nord Stream 2’s construction.
At the time, Pompeo falsely claimed the project and Turkstream gas
pipeline “strengthen Russia’s ability to use its energy resources to
coerce our European partners and allies (sic),” adding:
“The projects would hinder the process of European energy diversification (sic).”
“These projects could also severely limit gas transit through
Ukraine, depriving the Ukrainian government of significant transit
revenues and reducing a large deterrent against further Russian
aggression against Ukraine (sic).”
The US National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2020 included sanctions on enterprises involved in Nord Stream 2.
Unlawful US actions slowed but failed to halt work on the project.
On Tuesday, citing section 7503(d) of the US FY 2020 National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) titled “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security
Act (PEESA) of 2019 (sic), the State Department defied reality, saying:
“Russia uses its energy export pipelines to create
national and regional dependencies on Russian energy supplies,
leveraging these dependencies to expand its political, economic, and
military influence, weaken European security, and undermine US national
security and foreign policy interests (sic).”
“These pipelines also reduce European energy diversification, and hence weaken European energy security (sic).”
The above and related remarks are code language for pressuring Europe
to buy high-cost US NLG over 30% cheaper and readily available Russian
gas via Nord Stream 1 and 2.
PEESA calls for vessels involved in Nord Stream 2 to “immediately
cease construction-related activity…wind(ing) down” their operations.
The US diktat applies to “involved parties that have knowingly sold,
leased, or provided vessels that are engaged in pipe laying at depths of
100 feet or more below sea level for the construction of Nord Stream
2.”
Parties not complying with the US diktat face sanctions as explained in PEESA.
On Tuesday, the State Department expanded threatened sanctions on firms involved in Nord Stream 2 construction.
It targeted enterprises that “provid(e) services or facilities for
upgrades or installation of equipment for” vessels involved in the
project.
They also target companies that provide “funding for upgrades or installation of equipment for those vessels.”
In response to the above announcement, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the following:
“(T)his is…an unfriendly and destructive policy of
constant introduction of different restrictions against us, our economic
operators and our economy.”
“(T)his this has already become an integrant part of of the unfair competition, Washington’s overt raider competition policy.”
Along with countless other hostile US actions, many in flagrant
breach of international law, US hardliners “have been pursuing this
destructive policy (against Nord Stream 2) for over a year, and it
certainly damages our bilateral relations.”
Last month, Pompeo said the Trump regime is “working (on) build(ing) a
coalition (of European countries) that prevents” Nord Stream 2’s
completion.
The August Navalny novichok poisoning hoax was either part of the
diabolical plot to undermine Nord Stream 2’s completion or the Trump
regime is using his illness for this purpose.
Construction on the project continues. Germany’s support for its completion is key.
Angela Merkel’s government values low-cost Russian natural gas.
Days earlier, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said Nord Stream 2 will be completed.
It’s not if but “when this will happen. We make decisions about our energy policy and energy supply here — in Europe.”
As things now stand, the project will be completed and begin
delivering Russian gas to Germany and other European countries early in
the new year.
Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse
As modern civilization’s shelf life expires, more scholars have turned their attention to the decline and fall of civilizations past. Their studies have generated rival explanations of why societies collapse and civilizations die. Meanwhile, a lucrative market has emerged for post-apocalyptic novels, movies, TV shows, and video games for those who enjoy the vicarious thrill of dark, futuristic disaster and mayhem from the comfort of their cozy couch. Of course, surviving the real thing will become a much different story.
The latent fear that civilization is living on borrowed time has also spawned a counter-market of “happily ever after” optimists who desperately cling to their belief in endless progress. Popular Pollyannas, like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, provide this anxious crowd with soothing assurances that the titanic ship of progress is unsinkable. Pinker’s publications have made him the high priest of progress.[1] While civilization circles the drain, his ardent audiences find comfort in lectures and books brimming with cherry-picked evidence to prove that life is better than ever, and will surely keep improving. Yet, when questioned, Pinker himself admits, “It’s incorrect to extrapolate that the fact that we’ve made progress is a prediction that we’re guaranteed to make progress.”[2]
Pinker’s rosy statistics cleverly disguise the fatal flaw in his argument. The progress of the past was built by sacrificing the future—and the future is upon us. All the happy facts he cites about living standards, life expectancy, and economic growth are the product of an industrial civilization that has pillaged and polluted the planet to produce temporary progress for a growing middle class—and enormous profits and power for a tiny elite.
Not everyone who understands that progress has been purchased at the expense of the future thinks that civilization’s collapse will be abrupt and bitter. Scholars of ancient societies, like Jared Diamond and John Michael Greer, accurately point out that abrupt collapse is a rare historical phenomenon. In The Long Descent, Greer assures his readers that, “The same pattern repeats over and over again in history. Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.” Greer estimates that it takes, on average, about 250 years for civilizations to decline and fall, and he finds no reason why modern civilization shouldn’t follow this “usual timeline.”[3]
But Greer’s assumption is built on shaky ground because industrial civilization differs from all past civilizations in four crucial ways. And every one of them may accelerate and intensify the coming collapse while increasing the difficulty of recovery.
Difference #1: Unlike all previous civilizations, modern industrial civilization is powered by an exceptionally rich, NON-renewable, and irreplaceable energy source—fossil fuels. This unique energy base predisposes industrial civilization to a short, meteoric lifespan of unprecedented boom and drastic bust. Megacities, globalized production, industrial agriculture, and a human population approaching 8 billion are all historically exceptional—and unsustainable—without fossil fuels. Today, the rich easily exploited oilfields and coalmines of the past are mostly depleted. And, while there are energy alternatives, there are no realistic replacements that can deliver the abundant net energy fossil fuels once provided.[4] Our complex, expansive, high-speed civilization owes its brief lifespan to this one-time, rapidly dwindling energy bonanza.
Difference #2: Unlike past civilizations, the economy of industrial society is capitalist. Production for profit is its prime directive and driving force. The unprecedented surplus energy supplied by fossil fuels has generated exceptional growth and enormous profits over the past two centuries. But in the coming decades, these historic windfalls of abundant energy, constant growth, and rising profits will vanish.
However, unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust. Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic. Catabolismrefers to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself. As profitable sources of production dry up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once created. By cannibalizing itself, the profit motive will exacerbate industrial society’s dramatic decline.
Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict. Warfare, resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit makers. Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking. Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another.[5]
Difference #3: Unlike past societies, industrial civilization isn’t Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec, or Mayan. Modern civilization is HUMAN, PLANETARY, and ECOCIDAL. Pre-industrial civilizations depleted their topsoil, felled their forests, and polluted their rivers. But the harm was far more temporary and geographically limited. Once market incentives harnessed the colossal power of fossil fuels to exploit nature, the dire results were planetary. Two centuries of fossil fuel combustion have saturated the biosphere with climate-altering carbon that will continue wreaking havoc for generations to come. The damage to Earth’s living systems—the circulation and chemical composition of the atmosphere and the ocean; the stability of the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles; and the biodiversity of the entire planet—is essentially permanent.
Humans have become the most invasive species ever known. Although we are a mere .01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our domesticated crops and livestock dominate life on Earth. In terms of total biomass, 96 percent of all the mammals on Earth are livestock; only 4 percent are wild mammals. Seventy percent of all birds are domesticated poultry, only 30 percent are wild. About half the Earth’s wild animals are thought to have been lost in just the last 50 years.[6] Scientists estimate that half of all remaining species will be extinct by the end of the century.[7] There are no more unspoiled ecosystems or new frontiers where people can escape the damage they’ve caused and recover from collapse.
Difference #4: Human civilization’s collective capacity to confront its mounting crises is crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who care more about power and wealth than people and the planet. Humanity faces a perfect storm of converging global calamities. Intersecting tribulations like climate chaos, rampant extinction, food and freshwater scarcity, poverty, extreme inequality, and the rise of global pandemics are rapidly eroding the foundations of modern life.
Yet, this fractious and fractured political system makes organizing and mounting a cooperative response nearly impossible. And, the more catabolic industrial capitalism becomes, the greater the danger that hostile rulers will fan the flames of nationalism and go to war over scarce resources. Of course, warfare is not new. But modern warfare is so devastating, destructive, and toxic that little would remain in its aftermath. This would be the final nail in civilization’s coffin.
Rising From the Ruins?
How people respond to the collapse of industrial civilization will determine how bad things get and what will replace it. The challenges are monumental. They will force us to question our identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history. Who are we? Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth? Or do our primary loyalties belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion? Can we put the survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?
The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs. Will we overcome denial and despair; kick our addiction to petroleum; and pull together to break the grip of corporate power over our lives? Can we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our communities, re-learn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on the Earth? Or will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a degraded planet? The stakes could not be higher.
Why We're Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change
When times are good, modest reforms are all that's needed to maintain the ship's course.
By "good times," I mean eras of rising prosperity which generate bigger budgets, profits,
tax revenues, paychecks, etc., eras characterized by high levels of stability
and predictability.
Since stability has been the norm for 75 years, institutions and conventional thinking
have both been optimized for incremental change.
This is an analog of natural selection in Nature: when the organism's environment is
stable, there's little pressure to favor random mutations, as these can be risky.
Why risk big changes when everything's working fine as is?
Absent any big changes in their environment, organisms' genetic programming remains stable.
Unlike natural selection's process of generating random mutations and testing their efficacy
and advantages over the existing programming, human organizations quickly habituate to
stable eras by institutionalizing incremental changes as the only available process
for reform / change.
Radical reforms are not just frowned on as 1) unneccesary and 2) needlessly risky, there is
no institutionalized process to propose, test and adopt radical changes because there is
no need for such a process.
Nature has such a process: punctuated equilibirium. When faced with a rapidly
changing environment, organisms face intense evolutionary pressure to adapt or die.
Mutations which confer a significant advantage in the new environment become part of the
species' genetic programming as those with the adaptation bear offspring who carry the
advantageous adaptation. Those without the advantageous adaptation die and those with the adaptation
thrive and multiply.
Once the environment stabilizes in "the new normal," the evolutionary pressure lets up and
the species returns to the stability of relatively few changes in its genetic programming.
Organisms which have lost the ability to adapt to rapid change die off once they encounter
instability. Species that constantly face instability and rapid change will selectively
favor genetic traits which optimize rapid evolution.
Nature tends to retain a basement closet full of fast-evolution tricks just in case
the organism faces novel challenges.
Alas, human organizations and conventional thinking have no such closet of fast-evolution
tricks. Rather, human organizations and conventional thinking marshal formidable
forces to suppress anything which threatens the status quo, because why risk upsetting the
feeding trough unless it's absolutely necessary?
Therein lies the fatal problem: radical adaptation is never absolutely necessary in
human organizations and conventional thinking until it's too late--and even then,
the leadership and conventional thinking will fatalistically accept oblivion rather than
opt for a risky strategy of testing every mutation and fast-tracking whatever has promise,
even though the odds of failure are high since 1) the challenge is novel and therefore
unpredictable and 2) most mutations will fail to provide the radical advantages needed to
meet the challenge.
In other words, what's absolutely necessary to human organizations and conventional
thinking is the suppression of potentially dangerous novel ideas because the worst-case
scenario is that the novel ideas upset the feeding trough all the insiders have come to
depend on.
Unfortunately for human organizations and conventional thinking, novel challenges demand
precisely what they're incapable of: risky rapid evolution. The risks will never seem
worth it because some insiders might lose their spot at the feeding trough.
Since this loss is viewed as catastrophic by those at risk, they will fight with everything
they have to stymie any radical reforms. Ironically, their resistance to rapid evolution
only guarantees the demise of the entire organization / status quo, including the spot at
the trough they were so eager to defend at all costs.
As the crisis deepens, the default setting in organizations and conventional thinking
is that incremental changes and reforms will be enough, because they've been enough for
four generations. I call this entirely natural default setting the delusional faith
in incremental change because this faith isn't guided by history or the logic of causality;
it's simply convenient and easy.
Nobody gets fired or demoted for agreeing to do more of what's failed spectacularly.
I've prepared a chart of the delusional faith in incremental change showing how
each new crisis is met by incremental institutionalized defaults that are completely
inadequate to the novel challenges that have arisen. The blindness to the need for
radical adaption has been institutionalized as well: this is what worked in the past,
so it will work now. Why risk everything when we have procedures that have worked well?
Each stage of the crisis draws whatever conventional response causes the least pain.
First, the "rainy day fund" is drained to keep everyone at the feeding trough. Studies of
options are funded, and so on.
The recommendations are either too timid and clearly inadequate or they're too bold and risky.
So incremental policy and budget tweaks are adopted as acceptable institutional defaults.
But rifts open in the leadership as the farsighted few demand rapid, radical adaptations
and the conventional risk-averse crowd digs in their heels. The farsighted few are
pushed out or quit / retire, eliminating the only people who had the
ability and experience to actually pull off a radical change of course.
A reshuffling of leadership evokes hope that the modest reforms will work magic.
Alas, incremental tweaks only work in eras of stability. They fail miserably in unstable eras of
rapidly-evolving challenges.
As everything runs to failure, the only acceptable path is to do more of what's
failed spectacularly, a default to low-risk incrementalism that only accelerates the
final inevitable collapse.
The delusional faith in incremental change guarantees systemic failure. Better not to
risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured.
The militarization of the Western Empire: How the COVID pandemic accelerated the process
History repeats itself – oh, yes! And sometimes it repeats itself so
fast and so ruthlessly that it leaves you out of breath. Think of what’s
happening right now: the COVID; the lockdowns, the face masks, the
limitations to movements: all that happened in a few months, and the
world of last year looks so remote that it could be seen as part of the
still ongoing Middle Ages.
And, yet, there is some logic in what has happened. History may
surprise you and it usually does (the only sure thing we learn from
history is that people never learn from history). But whatever happens
in history has a reason to happen. And what we are seeing is not
unexpected. We have seen it already, stark clear and unavoidable: it is
the militarization trend of a decaying society.
Let’s go back to the Roman Empire, as always the paradigmatic story
of a state that preceded us and went through a full cycle of growth and
collapse. The Roman world was not so technologically sophisticated, nor
so rich as ours, but the basic needs of citizens were the same and the
Roman government provided many of them. You may have heard the
expression “Panem et Circenses” (bread and circus games). That
described two of the services that the Roman state ensured: the shipment
of food from Africa to the Roman cities and the various kind of games
performed in the amphitheaters.
But there was much more than that. The state built and maintained the
roads that connected the different regions of the empire. It built and
maintained the aqueducts that carried water to the cities. Then, the
main service was security: the government provided an internal justice
system that guaranteed a certain degree of social security to the free
citizens. The Romans also maintained an urban police (the vigiles) that served also as firefighters. And, of course, the legions were the backbone of the Roman state.
Of course, the Roman state had all the defects that states often
have: it tended to harass, oppress, humiliate, rob, and overtax its
citizens, But the Romans normally believed that a bad government was
much better than no government, so they put up with a lot of stress as
long as they could. Unfortunately for them, collapse was unavoidable. As
the Empire’s finances declined, the government became unable to pay for
the services it had been providing during better times.
The loss of government services in the Roman state was a complicated
process that went on for centuries, sometimes gradually and sometimes in
bumps. We have evidence that the Roman roads were already decayed so
much that they were unusable by the early 5th century. Many aqueducts
were in ruin by that time and that probably contributed to the
depopulation of large cities: nobody can live in a city without working
sewers. The last gladiatorial game in the Colosseum, in Rome, is
recorded in 438 CE. Wheat was still shipped to Rome from Africa until
ca. 450 AD, but no later than that date. The loss of the supply of food
was the last straw that sent the Empire to the dustbin of history a few
decades later.
But note an important detail: During the declining phase, the Roman
government gave maximum priority to maintaining its military potential
intact. The data are incomplete,
but the Western Roman troops kept increasing in numbers up to the end
of the 3rd century and the sum of the armies of the Western and Eastern
Empires kept growing for two more centuries. And to that one has to
include the cost of the gigantic defensive walls that must have been a
tremendous burden for the state’s finances. As decline continued, the
Western Empire was reduced to a giant machine that collected taxes and produced legions.
The result was that the Western Empire was often able to put up a
decent fight: even during the final stages of its decline. Just think of
the last ragtag Roman army that managed to defeat Attila’s Huns at the
battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD. It was at the same time the
last battle and the last victory of the Empire.
Now, let’s move forward of about 1,600 years and we are in our times.
The modern Western Empire has many points in common with the old Roman
Empire although, of course, the range of services the state provides
nowadays is much larger. Just think that the Romans had nothing like our
public education system, not our public healthcare service. But, like
the Roman state, modern Western states provide food, water,
transportation infrastructures, security, and entertainment. And, of
course, a heavy military apparatus supposed to defend citizens from
external invasions.
Today, the West is in a situation similar to that of the Roman Empire
at the start of its declining phase. With the economy declining because
of the gradual depletion of natural resources, the Western governments
can’t afford anymore to provide the services they had been providing
earlier on. You don’t have to think that the imperial elites are
especially smart, but they understand perfectly well the difficult
situation of the Western Empire: it can keep existing only as long as it
manages to exploit resources located in faraway places that are hugely
expensive to control. Crude oil in the Middle East is a good example.
And they face a giant and growing power: the Eurasian block, much better
placed in terms of still available resources within its local sphere of
influence.
Right now, the West is still in an aggressive posture in military
terms, but the leaders may decide to settle into a defensive position
and hold on as long as possible. In either case, the Empire needs
enormous amounts of resources to keep alive its overblown and
inefficient military system. Because of this, some Western leaders may
well be reckless enough to try something desperate, such as attacking
Russia (preferably in winter, as it has been fashionable in the past).
More easily, these resources can be found by taking them from other
sectors of the Western economy. If you like to see the empire as a beast of prey, it is starting to eat itself.
Curiously, it has been the coronavirus crisis that pushed the process
to accelerate at an unexpected speed. In less than one year, we saw the
collapse or the rapid decline of several infrastructures that we were
taking for granted but that the pandemic made obsolete. Note that I am
not saying that the virus was engineered on purpose in some military lab
— that’s extremely improbable, to say the least. I just mean that the
elites of the Western world are an opportunistic predator: they jump on
whatever opportunities they can find. And there is no doubt that they
exploited the coronavirus crisis to their own maximum advantage.
The first and the most illustrious victim of the virus scare was
international mass tourism. The collapse will probably be irreversible:
read any description of what is today to visit Disneyland while wearing
masks and keeping distances and you’ll understand why. Mass tourism was
unsustainable anyway, but the speed of its fall has been amazing.
Also, the collapse of the civilian airlines is well advanced and of
much of the industry that produces private cars. They were all very
expensive infrastructures that consumed a lot of resources for little
purpose. Their collapses are taking with them the fossil fuel industry,
but that’s not a problem for the military. The remaining production can
now be re-directed to military uses.
Then, we have the rapid decline of the public education system. It
had been already declining for a long time, but the pandemic showed how
fragile is a system that costs a lot of money to the state and produces
little that’s useful. Do we really need to teach ordinary people how to
read and write? They don’t need that to play on TikTok and most of them
are too fat to be useful as soldiers. All that we need is highly
specialized technologists able to design and build weapons and top-level
managers to handle the levers of the government. And that’s where the
remaining resources will be concentrated.
How about the healthcare system? That, too, was badly hit and turned
out to be desperately ineffective in stemming the first wave of the
pandemic. One possible reaction would have been to strengthen the system
with a badly needed injection of capital and a re-organization for
better efficiency. But it was not done. Here, propaganda played its usual role in convincing people that what’s bad for them is good for them.
Have you ever heard a slogan like “fewer tanks and more hospitals?” Can
you imagine one of the presidential candidates stating something like
that? Of course not.
Propaganda has been able to convince people that, if the healthcare
system was unable to manage a problem that never was really
overwhelming, it was not because the system was badly mismanaged and
turned into a profit-making operation for a few fat catss at the top.
No, it was the fault of the people who didn’t wear their face masks or
didn’t wear them right. The pen is mightier than the sword when it is used to write propaganda.
And there we are: suddenly we find ourselves rapidly moving along a
road that we hadn’t realized we had already taken. The system is moving
to a condition that will eventually turn it into a mirror of what once
was the Roman empire: a giant machine that collects taxes and produces legions.
And then what? Of course, the Empire will crumble. All empires follow
the same path: they bankrupt themselves with excessive military
expenses, they are like the fat man of the restaurant scene of the Monty
Python (if you haven’t seen it, it is here).
And in our case, things will go even faster than in the past because we
face not only resource depletion but also the collapse of the
ecosystem....
The physical and moral decay of the United
States and the malaise it has spawned have predictable results. We have
seen in varying forms the consequences of social and political collapse
during the twilight of the Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and
Hapsburg empires, Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany and the former
Yugoslavia. Voices from the past, Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Joseph Roth and Milovan Djilas, warned us. But blinded by self-delusion
and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human
nature, we refuse to listen.
The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources
in futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as
they attempt to restore a lost hegemony by force. Vietnam. Afghanistan.
Iraq. Syria. Libya. Tens of millions of lives wrecked. Failed states.
Enraged fanatics. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 24 percent
of the global population, and we have turned virtually all of them into
our enemies.
We are piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic
infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public
transportation, to spend more on our military that all the other major
powers on Earth combined. We are the world’s largest producer and
exporter of arms and munitions. The virtues we argue we have a right to
impose by force on others — human rights, democracy, the free market,
the rule of law and personal freedoms — are mocked at home where
grotesque levels of social inequality and austerity programs have
impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic institutions,
including Congress, the courts and the press, and created militarized
forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale surveillance of
the public, run the largest prison system in the world and gun down
unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity.
The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of
Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the
deep state and Hollywood run a massive child sex trafficking ring,
Christian fascists that place their faith in magic Jesus and teach
creationism as science in our schools, ten hour long voting lines in
states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors
of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war, is also ominous,
especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide.
All of our activism, protests, lobbying, petitions, appeals to the
United Nations, the work of NGOs and misguided trust in liberal
politicians such as Barack Obama have been accompanied by a 60 percent
rise in global carbon emissions since 1990. Estimates predict another 40
percent rise in global emissions in the next decade. We are less than a
decade away from carbon dioxide levels reaching 450 parts per million,
the equivalent to a 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise, a global
catastrophe that will make parts of the earth uninhabitable, flood
coastal cities, dramatically reduce crop yields and result in suffering
and death for billions of people. This is what is coming, and we can’t
wish it away.
I speak to you in Troy, New York, once the
second largest producer of iron in the country after Pittsburgh. It was
an industrial hub for the garment industry, a center for the production
of shirts, shirtwaists, collars, and cuffs, and was once home to
foundries that made bells to firms that crafted precision instruments.
All that is gone, of course, leaving behind the post-industrial decay,
the urban blight and the shattered lives and despair that are sadly
familiar in most cities in the United States.
It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social
fabric, rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in an array of
self-destructive and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the
anthropologist Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the communal
intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion, envy
and the lust for vengeance and violence. Nations in terminal decline
embrace, as Sigmund Freud understood, the death instinct. No longer
sustained by the comforting illusion of inevitable human progress, they
lose the only antidote to nihilism. No longer able to build, they
confuse destruction with creation. They descend into an atavistic
savagery, something not only Freud but Joseph Conrad and Primo Levi knew
lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilized society. Reason does not
guide our lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer puts it, echoing Hume, is the
hard-pressed servant of the will.
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the
most can defend themselves if they are attacked,” Freud wrote. “They
are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to
be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their
neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but
also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to
exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually
without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to
cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.
Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have
the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule, this cruel
aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service
of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder
measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental
counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also
manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom
consideration towards his own kind is something alien.”
Freud, like Primo Levi, got it. The moral life is a matter of
circumstances. Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered,
largely disappears in moments of extremity. It is the luxury of the
privileged. “Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and
10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent
can be moved in either direction,” Susan Sontag said.
To survive, it was necessary, Levi wrote of life in the death camps,
“to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the
arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by
those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and
individuals in cruel times. “It was, he wrote, “a Hobbesian life,” “a
continuous war of everyone against everyone.” Varlam Shalamov,
imprisoned for 25 years in Stalin’s gulags, was equally pessimistic:
“All human emotions–of love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s
fellowman, compassion, a longing for fame, honesty–had left us with the
flesh that had melted from our bodies during our long fasts. The camp
was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and
99% of us failed it…Conditions in the camps do not permit men to remain
men; that is not what camps were created for.”
Social collapse will bring these latent pathologies to the surface.
But the fact that circumstances can reduce us to savagery does not
negate the moral life. As our empire implodes, and with it social
cohesion, as the earth increasingly punishes us for our refusal to honor
and protect the systems that give us life, triggering a scramble for
diminishing natural resources and huge climate migrations, we must face
this darkness, not only around us, but within us.
The dance macabre is already underway. Hundreds
of thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoes, alcoholism
and suicide, what sociologists calls deaths of despair. This despair
fuels high rates of morbid obesity, some 40 percent of the public,
gambling addictions, the pornification of the society with the
ubiquitous of images of sexual sadism along with the proliferation of
armed right-wing militias and nihilistic mass shootings. As despair
mounts, so will these acts of self-immolation.
Those overwhelmed by despair seek magical salvations, whether in
crisis cults, such as the Christian Right, or demagogues such as Trump,
or rage-filled militias that see violence as a cleansing agent. As long
as these dark pathologies are allowed to fester and grow–and the
Democratic Party has made it clear it will not enact the kinds of
radical social reforms that will curb these pathologies–the United
States will continue its march towards disintegration and social
upheaval. Removing Trump will neither halt nor slow the descent.
An estimated 300,000 American will be dead from the pandemic in
December, a figure that is expected to rise to 400,000 in January.
Chronic underemployment and unemployment, close to 20 percent when those
who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of
being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the
poverty line, are included in the official statistic instead of being
magically erased from the unemployment rolls. Our privatized health care
system, which is making record profits during the pandemic, is not
designed to cope with a public health emergency. It is designed to
maximize profit for its owners. There are fewer than 1 million
hospital beds nationally, a result of the decades-long trend of
hospital mergers and closures that have reduced access to care in
communities across the nation. Cities such as Milwaukee have been forced
to erect field hospitals. In states such as Mississippi there are no
longer any ICU beds available. The for-profit health service did not
stockpile the ventilators, masks, tests or drugs to deal with COVID-19.
Why should it? That is not a route to increased revenue. And there is no
substantial difference between Trump and Biden’s response to the health
crisis, where 1,000 people a day are dying.
Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick
pay. Some 43 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health
insurance. There are ten thousand bankruptcies a day, with perhaps
two-thirds of them tied to exorbitant medial costs. Food banks are
overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families. Roughly 10 to 14
million renter households, or 23 to 34 million people, were behind on
their rent in September. That amounts to $12 to $17 billion in unpaid
rent. And that figure is expected to rise to $34 billion in past due
rent in January. The lifting of the moratorium on evictions and
forecloses will mean that millions of families, many destitute, will be
tossed onto the street. Hunger in U.S. households almost tripled between
2019 and August of this year, according to the Census Bureau and the
Department of Agriculture. The proportion of American children who do
not have enough to eat, the study found, is 14 times higher than it was
last year. A study by Columbia University, found that since May there
are eight million more Americans who can be classified as poor.
Meanwhile, the 50 richest Americans hold as much wealth as half of the
United States. Millennials, some 72 million people, have 4.6 percent of
U.S. wealth.
Only one thing matters to the corporate state.
It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the
governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state.
It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It
is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our
democracy, taken from us our most basic civil liberties and left most of
the working class in misery — and the increase and consolidation of its
wealth and power.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with
cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden?
Yes. Is Trump inepter and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a
threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.
Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the
same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s
largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy
or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization
of the electorate is by design.
In America we are only permitted to vote against what we hate.
Partisan media outlets set one group against another, a consumer version
of what George Orwell in his novel 1984 called the “Two
minutes of Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to
and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our
proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, as Matt
Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just for you.” The public is unable to
speak across the manufactured divide. Politics, under the assault, has
atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on manufactured political
personalities. Civic discourse has been poisoned by invective and lies.
Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged.
Political coverage is modeled, as Taibbi points out, on sports
coverage. The sets look like the sets on Sunday NFL Countdown. The
anchor is on one side. There are four commentators, two from each team.
Graphics keep us updated on the score. Political identities are reduced
to easily digestible stereotypes. Tactics, strategy, image, the monthly
tallies of campaign contributions and polling are endlessly examined,
while real political issues are ignored. It is the language and imagery
of war.
This coverage masks the fact that on nearly all
the major issues the two major political parties are in complete
agreement. The deregulation of the financial industry, trade agreements,
the militarization of police — the Pentagon has transferred more than $
7.4 billion in excess military gear and hardware to nearly 8,000
federal and state law enforcement agencies since 1990 — the explosion in
the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, support for
fracking and the fossil fuel industry, the endless wars in the Middle
East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass
media by corporations and the wholesale government surveillance of the
population–and when the government watches you 24 hours a day you cannot
use the word liberty, this is the relationship of a master and a slave —
all have bipartisan support. And for this reason, these issues are
almost never discussed.
This goal is to set demographic against demographic. This stoking of
antagonism is not news. It is entertainment, driven not by journalism
but marketing strategies to increase viewership and corporate sponsors.
News divisions are corporate revenue streams competing against other
corporate revenue streams. The template for news, as Taibbi writes in
his book Hate Inc., the cover of which has Sean Hannity on one
side and Rachel Maddow on the other, is the simplified morality play
used in professional wrestling. There are only two real political
positions in the United States. You love Trump or you hate him, which
comes from the playbook of professional wrestling.
By voting for Biden and the Democratic Party you vote for something.
You vote to endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita
Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the
endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in
Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government
intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas
corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of
welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade
deals, de-industrialization, a real decline in wages, the loss of
hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs
to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in Mexico, China or Vietnam.
You vote for the assault on teachers and public education and the
transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools.
You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and
quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death
penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of
color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and
immigration reform. You vote for the fracking industry. You vote for
limiting a woman’s right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote
for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive
educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance.
You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free
yourself of those debt obligations even if file for bankruptcy. You vote
for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of
Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical
corporations and against universal health care. You vote for defense
budgets that consume more than half of all discretionary spending. You
vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our
elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate
abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit
card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son
Hunter.
Biden was one of the principle architects of the wars in the Middle
East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or
extinguished the lives of millions of people. He is responsible for far
more suffering and death at home and abroad than Trump. If we had a
functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other
architects of our disastrous imperial wars, corporate plundering of the
country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on
trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic
debacle.
The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt
tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration,
women’s rights and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. These
issues are societal or ethical issues. They are important. But they are
not social or political issues. The seizure of control of the economy by
a class of global speculators and corporations has ruined the lives of
the very groups the Democrats pretend to lift up. When Bill Clinton and
the Democratic Party, for example, destroyed the old welfare system, 70
percent of the recipients were children. Those on the right of the
political spectrum — and we must never forget that the positions of the
Democratic Party would make it a far-right party in Europe — demonize
those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the
reality. Both parties are full partners in the destruction of our
democratic institutions. Both parties have reconfigured American society
into a mafia state. It only depends on how you want it dressed up.
The power of politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or Mitch
McConnell comes from being able to funnel corporate money to anointed
candidates. In a functioning political system, one not saturated with
corporate cash, they would not hold power. They have transformed what
the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica,
a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” into an instrument of
pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are
serfs ruled by the obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S.
Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the
media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil
liberties and give them the freedom to engage in tax boycotts, financial
fraud and theft.
In the midst of the pandemic crisis what did our ruling kleptocratic rulers do?
They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout
overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves
at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private
jets, yachts, penthouses and palatial estates to the suffering and
despised masses.
The molding of the public into warring factions
works commercially. It works politically. It destroys, as it is designed
to do, class solidarity. But it is a recipe for social disintegration.
It propels us towards the kind of Hobbesian world Primo Levi and Sigmund
Freud warned us about. I watched competing ethnic groups in the former
Yugoslavia retreat into antagonistic tribes. They seized rival mass
media outlets and used them to spew lies, mythological narratives
exalting themselves, along with vitriol and hate against the ethnicities
they demonized. This poisoned solidarity, which we are replicating,
pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia, destroyed the capacity for
empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil, and led to a savage
fratricide.
The United States, awash in military-grade weaponry, is already
plagued by an epidemic of mass shootings. There are death threats
against critics of Trump, including Rep. Ilhan Omar. There was an
aborted plot by 13 members of a right-wing militia group to kidnap and
perhaps assassinate the governors of Michigan and Virginian and start a
civil war. A Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats
and CNN, an effort to decapitate the hierarchy of the Democratic Party,
as well as terrorize the media outlet that is the party’s principal
propaganda platform.
The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron
“Jay” Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was
wearing a loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an
expandable metal baton when he was shot dead on August 29, allegedly by
Michael Forest Reinoehl, a supporter of antifa, in the streets of
Portland. A woman in the crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting:
“I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.” Reinoehl was
ambushed and killed by federal agents in Washington state in what
appears to be an act of extra-judicial murder. Once people start being
sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for demagogues to insist that
self-preservation necessitates violence.
Political stagnation and corruption, along with economic and social
misery, spawn what anthropologists call crisis cults–movements led by
demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial
distress and champion violence as a form of moral purification. These
crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian
Right, right-wing militia groups and many followers of Donald Trump, who
look at him not as a politician but as a cult leader, peddle magical
thinking and an infantilism that promises–if you surrender all
autonomy–prosperity, restored national glory, a return to a mythical
past, order and security. Trump is a symptom. He is not the disease. And
if he leaves office far more competent and dangerous demagogues will
rise, if the social conditions are not radically improved, to take his
place.
I fear we are headed towards a Christianized fascism.
The greatest moral failing of the liberal
Christian church was its refusal, justified in the name of tolerance and
dialogue, to denounce the followers of the Christian right as heretics.
By tolerating the intolerant, it ceded religious legitimacy to an array
of con artists, charlatans and demagogues and their cultish supporters.
It stood by as the core Gospel message–concern for the poor and the
oppressed–was perverted into a magical world where God and Jesus
showered believers with material wealth and power. The white race became
God’s chosen agent. Imperialism and war became divine instruments for
purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism,
because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned
the immoral to poverty and suffering, became shorn of its inherent
cruelty and exploitation. The iconography and symbols of American
nationalism became intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the
Christian faith.
The mega-pastors, narcissists who rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms,
make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey
on the despair and desperation of their congregations, victims of
neoliberalism and deindustrialization. These believers find in Trump,
who preyed on this despair in his casinos and through his sham
university, and these mega-pastors, champions of the unfettered greed,
cult of masculinity, lust for violence, white supremacy, bigotry,
American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism and conspiracy
theories that are the core beliefs of the Christian Right.
When I wrote American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America I was quite serious about the term “fascists.”
Tens of millions of Americans live hermetically sealed inside the
vast media and educational edifice erected by the Christian Right. In
this world, miracles are real, Satan, allied with liberal secular
humanists and the deep state, along with Muslims, immigrants, feminists,
intellectuals, artists and a host of other internal enemies, is seeking
to destroy America. Trump is God’s anointed vessel to build the
Christian nation and cement into place a government that instills
“biblical values.” These “biblical values” include banning abortion,
protecting the traditional family, turning the Ten Commandments into
secular law, crushing “infidels,” especially Muslims, indoctrinating
children in schools with “biblical” teachings and thwarting sexual
license, which includes any sexual relationship other than marriage
between a man and a woman. Trump is routinely compared by evangelical
leaders to the biblical king Cyrus, who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem
and restored the Jews to the city.
Trump has filled his ideological void with
Christian fascism. He has elevated members of the Christian right to
prominent positions, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike
Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the televangelist Paula White to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative.
More importantly, Trump has handed the Christian right veto and
appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the
federal courts. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677
total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme
Court justices, and with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination most likely
three, out of nine. This is nineteen percent of the federal trial judges
currently in service. Nearly all of the extremists who make up the
judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar
Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.
Trump has adopted the Islamophobia of the Christian fascists. He has
banned Muslim immigrants and rolled back civil rights legislation. He
has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and
defunding Planned Parenthood. He has stripped away LGBTQ rights. He has
ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment,
which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing
political candidates. His appointees, including Pence, Pompeo and DeVos,
throughout the government routinely use biblical strictures to justify
an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war,
tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an
action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private
“Christian” schools. At the same time, they are building paramilitary
organizations, not only through ad hoc militias but through mercenary
groups of private contractors controlled by figures such as Erik Prince,
the brother of Betsy DeVos and the former CEO of Blackwater now called
Xe.
I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School with James Luther Adams
who had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams witnessed the rise there
of the so-called German Christian Church which was pro-Nazi. He warned
us about the disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church
and the Christian right. Adolf Hitler was in the eyes of the German
Christian Church a volk messiah and an instrument of God—a view
similar to the one held today about Trump by many of his white
evangelical supporters. Those demonized for Germany’s economic collapse,
especially Jews and communists, were agents of Satan. Fascism, Adams
told us, always cloaked itself in a nation’s most cherished symbols and
rhetoric. Fascism would come to America not in the guise of stiff-armed,
marching brownshirts and Nazi swastikas but in mass recitations of the
Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the state and the sacralization
of American militarism. Adams was the first person I heard label the
extremists of the Christian right as fascists. Liberals, he warned, as
in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension of history and
radical evil. They would not react until it was too late.
Trump’s legacy will, I fear, be the empowerment of the Christian
fascists. They are what comes next. Noam Chomsky, for this reason, is
right when he warns that Pence is more dangerous than Trump. For decades
the Christian fascists have been organizing to take power. They have
built infrastructures and organizations, including lobbying groups,
schools, colleges and law schools as well as media platforms, to
prepare. They have seeded their cadre into positions of power. We on the
left, meanwhile, have seen our institutions and organizations destroyed
or corrupted by corporate power and been seduced by the boutique
activism of identity politics. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of
the Family Research Council,
already gives 245 members of Congress a 100 percent approval rating for
supporting legislation that is backed by the Christian Right.
Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for
tens of millions of Americans. It is impervious to science and
verifiable fact. The Christian fascists, by choice, have severed
themselves from rational thought and the secular society that almost
destroyed them and their families and thrust them into deep despair. We
will not placate or disarm this movement, bent on our destruction, by
attempting to claim that we, too, have Christian “values.” This appeal
only strengthens the legitimacy of the Christian fascists and weakens
our own. These dispossessed people will either be reintegrated into the
economy and the society and their shattered social bonds mended, or the
movement will grow more virulent and more powerful.
The Christian Right is determined to keep the public focus on
societal or ethical as opposed to economic issues. The corporate media,
whether it supports or opposes the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to
the Supreme Court, almost exclusively discusses her opposition to
abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic sect
that practices “speaking in tongues.” What our corporate masters, along
with the Christian fascists, do not want examined is Barrett’s
subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil
liberties, unions and environmental regulations. Since the Democratic
Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and
since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the
most ominous threat posed by Barrett and the Christian Right is ignored.
The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness.
All fascist movements paper over their squalid belief systems with
the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and
order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues,
patriotism and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society
and silencing and persecution of those who dissent. The Christian Right,
awash in money from corporations that understand their political
intent, will use any tool, no matter how devious, from right-wing armed
militias to the invalidation of ballots, to block Biden and Democratic
candidates from assuming office.
Our corporate masters do not care about abortion, gun rights or the
sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German
industrialists who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian
Right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny.
These oligarchs view the Christian fascists the same way the German
industrialists viewed the Nazis, as buffoons. They are aware that the
Christian fascists will trash what is left of our anemic democracy and
the natural ecosystem. But they also know they will make huge profits in
the process and the rights of workers and citizens will be ruthlessly
suppressed.
If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid
substandard wages, if you are trapped in the lower class, if you are a
victim of police violence, this is because, according to the Prosperity
Gospel, you are not a good Christian. In this belief system you deserve
what you get. There is nothing wrong, these homegrown fascists preach,
with the structures or systems of power. Like all totalitarian
movements, followers are seduced into calling for their own enslavement.
As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood: “The best
propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the
whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the
propagandistic initiative.”
The tinder that could ignite violent
conflagrations lies ominously stacked around us. It may be triggered by
Trump’s defeat in the election. Millions of disenfranchised white
Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery,
struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a
corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that betrayed them. They
are tired of the political stagnation, grotesque, mounting social
inequality and the punishing fallout from the pandemic. Millions more
alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with
no realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the
same emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing
down the governing structures and anti-fascism. These polarized extremes
are inching closer and closer to violence.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible, revolution, or tyranny.
If the corporate state is not overthrown, then America will soon
become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be
silenced with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around
the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists
covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber
bullets and pepper spray. This will become normalized. The huge social
divides, often built around race, will be used by the Christian
fascists to set neighbor against neighbor. Armed Christian patriots will
attack those groups blamed for social collapse. Dissent, even
nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
Peter Drucker observed that Nazism succeeded not because people
believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi
absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a
hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile
government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi
inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers
and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if
rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The
poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was
forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took
power in 1933, wrote in his autobiography: “The people are tired of
reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done
in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.”
After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In
Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
Once the internal enemies are purged from the nation, we are
promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one
enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a
steady escalation of conflict and a steady stream of victims. Every new
crisis becomes more urgent and more extreme than the last. This is what
made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of
conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced
by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. It is what Ernst Jünger
called a “feast of death.”
These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and
schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside
down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and spectacle
become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder, as
the federal marshals who wantonly gunned down the antifia activist
Michael Forest Reinoehl in Washington State illustrated, becomes
heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic
virtues.
What these crisis cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. There
is no ideological consistency. There is only emotional consistency. At
the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794 during the French
Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for
Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French
revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and
confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced
another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the
guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the
moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn
for self-annihilation.
The ruling elites will no more restore these ruptured social bonds
and address the deep despair that grips America than they will respond
to the climate emergency. As the country unravels, they will reach for
the familiar tools of state repression and the ideological prop provided
by Christian fascism.
It is up to us to carry out sustained acts of nonviolent, mass
resistance. If we mobilize in large and small ways to fight for an open
society, to create communities that, as Vaclav Havel wrote “live in
truth,” we hold out the possibility of pushing back against these crisis
cults, holding at bay the brutality that accompanies social upheaval,
as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This
requires us to acknowledge that our systems of governance are incapable
of being reformed. No one in power will save us. No one but us will
stand up for the vulnerable, the demonized and the earth itself. All we
do must have the single aim of crippling the power of the ruling elites
in the hopes of new systems of governance that can implement the radical
reforms to save us and our world.
The most difficult existential dilemma we face is to at once
acknowledge the bleakness before us and act, to refuse to succumb to
cynicism and despair. And we will only do this through faith, the faith
that the good draws to it the good, that all acts that nurture and
protect life have an intrinsic power, even if the empirical evidence
shows that things are getting worse. We will find our freedom, our
autonomy, our meaning and our social bonds among those who also resist,
and this will allow us to endure, and maybe even triumph.
SC stands for Storm Coming. Humanity has created an ever growing tempest of myriad converging difficulties and realistically unsolvable complexities. The architecture of the human mind and its manner of functioning meant we would always go down this increasingly troubled path as a species. My postings here are a collection of articles on the long list of looming dire issues. I have been posting SC for a few years at another website. To find earlier SC postings go to :
http://deepcreekhotsprings.net/dchs/forum/list.php?1 , then look for the SC postings in the forum list. To access older SC threads there go back in the older pages of the forum list to SC84 posted in January 2009. SC84 through SC1 ( titled " A storm is coming ) can be viewed at that forum. Use this blog for SC85 to current SC postings. I will be adding further updated info here at my Hotspringswizard blog as time permits.
My email:
hotspringswizard@hotmail.com
