The dark heart of a dying empire

Time and hindsight can bring the kind of clarity which, provided we take care to monitor and continually adjust our evolving understanding in light of new evidence duly reflected on, goes beyond the complacently self-serving. Looking back on over a decade of divergence from my natural peer group in the liberal intelligentsia, it’s clear that while I did not always debate with ept, tact or even decorum, at root of my dissent was a growing disparity in worldview, even on issues seemingly unconnected:

• Brexit, where most of my arguments were with middle class Brits who’d voted Remain. (As, with peg on nose given the EU’s status as a junior imperialism whose US capture would half a decade on become clearer through its economically suicidal participation in the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, had this middle class Brit.) Brexit unleashed hitherto concealed ‘liberal’ disdain for the left-behinds with no second homes in France or Spain, and a shrinking job market in which migrant Romanians posed a more visible threat than rentier driven export of manufacturing to the global south. It seldom occurred to latte sipping Remainers that exclusion from globalism’s upside, not xenophobia, had however misguidedly driven the Leave vote. Contempt was compounded by recklessness. All the polls pointed to a second referendum securing at best a 1-2% majority for overturning the June 23 result but millions of my peers insisted on their ‘right’ to a re-run. Could they not see that this was a recipe for civil war? Or were they too high on righteous fury to care?
• A 2016 US presidential election which saw friends insisting that Clinton was at worst the “lesser evil” to Trump – and at best a shining example to womankind – and expressing stupefied incredulity at my clearly misogynist failure to see things their way. By now, you see, it had begun to penetrate my thick skull that since the fall of the USSR if not before, beneath the circus babble necessitated by the chimera of US democracy, those for whom actions speak louder than words will discern a relentless continuity in American foreign policy regardless of what figurehead, be it an eloquently banker-compliant Obama or an oafish Trump, sits in the Oval Office. Indeed, a case could have been made, though I drew the line at making it, that openly warmongering Hillary’s talk of a No Fly Zone in Syria – the kind that had five years earlier reduced Africa’s richest country, with free healthcare and literacy levels higher than the West’s, to a failed state whose chief export is terror and in which slaves were sold openly on the Tripoli quayside – would put the world’s two foremost military powers on a head on collision course. Making, if anything, Donald the “lesser evil”.
• The true nature of the West’s dirty war on Syria, in which it harnessed violent terrorist proxies – Al Qaeda cut-outs risibly dubbed ‘moderate Islamists’ – to further US writ in the oil rich, geostrategically pivotal Middle East as a dying hence triply dangerous empire, drunk on Exceptionalist hubris and bent on Full Spectrum Dominance, refuses to accept multipolarity. As I would put it in a post of 2024:

Syria was for me transformative, almost single-handedly inspiring this site. By now even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington.

• The true nature of America’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. While that war was easily sold to credulous Western audiences as Evil Putin’s land grab, the facts as set out here flatly refute that simplisticly empire-serving narrative. Nevertheless, here too I found myself at odds with my liberal peers.

To the casual eye these issues and so many others – from Myanmar to Mali, Venezuela to Iran, EU and Nato expansion to Arab Spring, Kazakhstan to Xinjiang and Tiananmen Square – appear disjoint: to be judged in isolation, aided by Western media accounts deemed impartial (of which more in a moment) and in a few instances by personal contact with dissident expats who form too miniscule and self-selectingly skewed a sample for meaningful generalisation yet appeal to our species-wide privileging of word-of-mouth reports, particularly where these accord with mainstream narratives. Rarely do we consult maps which – as with Xinjiang’s proximity to US occupied Afghanistan … the Hormuz as choke point for China bound oil … Syria as, inter alia,  land bridge from Iran to Lebanon and Hezbollah … the significance of Central Asia and Caspian Sea to Belt and Road’s neutralising of potential US maritime blockade at the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca … the noose tightening over decades on Russia …

… point to explanations sharply divergent from those of the most effective and sophisticated propaganda machine the world has ever known. Rarer still, when simplistic tales of boo-hiss bad guys who just happen to stand in the way of US hegemony are spun to pull at our heart strings and co-opt our best instincts, are we invited to reflect on the fact that for 500 years the bête noire of Europe’s and now America’s supremacist strategists has always been the coming together of Eurasia’s eastern and western poles. A coming together which now, Greek Tragedy fashion, Washington’s ever more reckless efforts to thwart serve only to advance.

But I’m ahead of myself. I must return to that ‘growing disparity in world view’, alluded to in my opening paragraph, which has slowly shed light on why I have differed from my peers on such a plethora of seemingly unrelated questions. ¹

The disparity arises from three core differences.

One, for all their progressive instincts, liberals have little real grasp of class in its oppositional sense, nor the corollary that on matters which cut to the heart of ruling class interests – no longer those of industrial capital but of rentier  elites who captured government decades ago – Western democracy is a fiction. It is impossible to vote against the banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma or the FIRE sectors whichever party is in office.

Two, liberalism, even when not wholly blind to modern imperialism, is incapable – emotionally as much as intellectually – of seeing the true extent of its evil. Millions have been slaughtered on the watch of Bush Snr, Clinton, Bush Jnr, Obama, Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2 – yet liberals continue to insist a Putin, Assad or Xi is far worse, and/or that a new figurehead in the White House can turn it all around. Understandably, for the truth is shocking when we let it in, they can’t see the dark heart of an empire for whose managers no price is too high or blood-soaked to pay – fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian, say, while offloading the costs onto Europe via quisling leaders groomed in the USA to enable Washington to focus on its prime adversary, China – for renewing its licence to exploit the planet. A licence underwritten by waning military supremacy and fading dollar hegemony, yes, but also by a still unrivalled capacity to control the narrative:

The crimes of the USA have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but few have talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis – Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech 2005

Three, and speaking of controlling the narrative, Western liberals frequently express irritation at our corporate media yet continue to turn to its ‘progressive’ wing – in my country Guardian, BBC and Economist; in others Le Monde, Der Spiegel, NYT, WSJ, Sydney Morning Herald and El Pais – for light on matters where those media are systemically incapable of supplying the stuff. As I put it in a paragraph written some years ago and since recycled many times:

On many matters our ‘quality’ media serve us passably well but this enables a greater lie. They must show themselves trustworthy even if it embarrasses high office. (Not only does long term capacity to manufacture consent depend on it. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust gained helps them mislead us, more by lies of omission than commission, on matters of critical concern to the power they ultimately serve. Never more so than when vilifying states and leaders in the way of empire designs.

For more on why corporate media, however feistily oppositional on things not always trivial, are incapable in ways that need not suppose conspiracy and deceit –  nor, a-priori, rule out either – of speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but on issues that go to the heart of power, see these posts: Britain decides! … Monolithic control at the Guardian? … What of ideology when reality intrudes?

Let me add that narrative control by “the most effective and sophisticated propaganda machine the world has ever known” goes deeper and wider than corporate news media. In a footnote to the last of the three posts just cited, I wrote:

I target media, news media in particular … Yet media more broadly interpreted do vital service for a sophisticated ideological status quo, Borglike in its ability to co-opt the seemingly oppositional. I’m currently watching the passably diverting Mr Robot, its hero a cyberhacker addicted to opiates but a warrior for justice against corporate evil. He has his red lines though: “I won’t work for Iran or North Korea …”  Get it? In the face of stiff competition US capitalism is the bloodiest in history if we widen the focus to its activities across the globe. But we’re not invited to do that, are we? Narrow the focus and Iran and North Korea – remind me again how many countries they bomb, invade or starve with lethal sanctions – strike the Western mind, old school or ‘woke’, as patently worse. I saw similar when the US version of House of Cards, its sociopolitical comment sharper than Mr Robot’s, dutifully descended into caricature when a Russian President clearly Putin visited and behaved like the boor we all in our heart of hearts believe Russians to be. The subliminal  propaganda of the entertainment industries is critical to the manufacture of opinions superficially radical but ultimately serving the Borg. Drama bucking the trend would jar inelegantly with that vast and intricate matrix  I call ideology, and so strike us as unreal; propaganda even. After all, we know – from the countless opportunities news media offer us to study his speeches and unedited interviews – Vlad’s a jerk, right?

That last sentence, to be clear, was sarcasm. But let me wrap this up. Three things which have for a decade and more separated me from my liberal peers are (a) that democracy is largely bogus and class rule a thing, (b) that the US empire is terrifyingly real and ever more dangerous – far more so than the parade of “new Hitlers” we are constantly invited to revile – in its efforts to extend and lock in the brief moment of unchallenged supremacy it enjoyed after the fall of the USSR, and (c) the task of corporate media, including ‘elite’ and ‘liberal’ sections, is not to hold power to account but ultimately to enable its unfettered rapacity.

As Michael Caine would say: “not a lot of people know that”.

There’s nothing in this post I haven’t said, in greater detail and more fully documented, elsewhere. Here I’m taking stock as prelude to the series of posts – mostly from third party sources pending my return to full health – I’ll be putting out in the coming days on empire in decline.

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1. It’s worth noting that on Ukraine and Syria, and on the nature of Russian and Chinese capitalism, I differed not only with liberals but with many (not all) far-Left organisations. See Syria – how Trotskyism got it so wrong, and Ukraine take 2 – Stephen Gowans. See also, in An open letter: isn’t China “just as bad?”, my response to a far Left which, having failed to make its own revolutions in the West, now presumes to lecture China on the correct path to that socialising of wealth creation which as they and I agree remains, in Rosa Luxemburg’s prescient formulation of more than a century ago, humanity’s sole alternative to barbarism. Or as I put it two years ago in a footnote to a post on China’s dominance in EV:

   Far left refusal to distinguish on the one hand China’s state-monitored industrial capitalism, its big banks firmly outside the private sector; on the other the usurping of state control by the West’s oligarchs, leads it to dismiss China as a progressive force. Rather, crying plague on China and the West both, it embraces (or pays lip service to) a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in all the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This, moreover, in a West whose export of industry has eroded the very socialising conditions – an exploitation experienced en masse in the huge dark Satanic mills of Marx’s day – which led him to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into socialism.

   All the same, that far Left is infinitely smaller than the liberal constituency I’m concerned with here. And for all my particular and often sharp differences with the former, I share many of its core assumptions.