My posts on America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine are legion. All make the irrefutable case that a dying US empire, not “Putin’s aggression”, is the conflict’s root and ongoing cause.
The most decisive rebuttal of the ‘Putin’s war’ thesis? No, for that see A Ukraine timeline. This is just the most graphic.
For the first two years I also made the case, in the face of a Western media propaganda blitz to the contrary, that Russia was winning. I still do, the only change being that our corporate media no longer trumpet the ‘inevitability’ of Russia’s defeat; rather, they now offer the contradictory but equally evidence-defiant absurdity that Putin means to follow subjugation of Kiev with that of Berlin, London and Paris.
(On top of the comprador factor, next paragraph, a Europe economically weakened not just by its folly in Ukraine, but by decades of offshoring industry, flirts with the chimera of salvation in the shape of a ‘military Keynesianism’ sold as necessitated by The Russian Threat. See my post of September 2024, The Super Mario plan for Europe.)
Last but not least I have also made the case that the real losers are: first, the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, its Western ‘defenders’ bent on fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian; second, a Europe nominally led by mediocrities who consistently subordinate, for reasons set out here, the interests of their citizens and economies to compliance with Washington.
Hold those thoughts.
Guardian, November 27. Trump plays good cop to Takaichi’s bad, but could she talk so tough without Washington assent?
Last week Japan’s new prime minister issued threats which have enraged and alarmed Beijing in equal measure. President Trump, in a routine as old as the hills, appealed for calm. Ludicrously transparent as this dark comedy is to those who pay attention, it wouldn’t be played with such depressing frequency if it didn’t work.
Witness the (im-) plausible deniability of a Washington in lockstep with Israel over the criminal strikes on Iran on June 13, and on Hamas negotiators in Qatar on September 9.
Over to Brian Berletic, lucid as ever, on the empire’s Ukrainising of Japan.
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My posts on Venezuela are less numerous, because more recent, than those on Ukraine. I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you that no one with a mental age above twelve is buying the Maduro-as-narco-terrorist nonsense.
Oops, I guess I just did. Sorry about that …
What I will say is that to regard what is happening as a substantive shift in Washington-Caracas relations – attributable in its entirety to the tangerine narcissist once again in the Oval Office – not only gives a free pass to every US administration since Bill Clinton’s. It ignores decades of continuity in US foreign policy that speak volumes on where real power lies, a theme I’ll return to in my forthcoming review of Aaron Good’s American Exception: Empire and the Deep State.
These things said, I’ve only alluded in outline form to how US piracy in the Caribbean connects to, inter alia, its backing of genocide in Palestine, ongoing slaughter in Ukraine, and relentless efforts to ‘contain’ China in the Pacific. As I will keep saying, viewing these and other matters in isolation is the vice of a mindset oblivious to imperialism. 1 But here, brought to my attention by fellow Stakhanovite Dave Hansell, is economist, stylish pundit and finance minister to Greece’s Syriza government during that hapless country’s 2015 IMF/ECB manufactured ‘debtor crisis’.
Over to Yanis Varoufakis on why US armed larceny against Venezuela reverberates planet wide to chilling effect.
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- A true crime addict, especially when legal niceties play out, I note that brides in the bath murderer George Joseph Smith would likely have escaped the gallows had the judge not made the precedent-setting decision to allow counsel in one case to bring in carbon copy deaths in others untried. (Having one life-insured newly-wed drown in her bath tub is a tragedy. Having three, each with a fat pay-out to the same grieving widower, looks a tad homicidal.) You catch my drift I’m sure. It pains me that a public whipped into holy fury by opinion-manufacturing media, over outrages real or concocted in Ba’athist Syria, neither paused to ask cui bono, nor heeded the fate of Iraq and Libya. As I also will keep saying, I do wish more would take E. M. Forster’s oft cited advice, and only connect.