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Since my post tomorrow begs to differ with Caitlin Johnstone on a far from trivial matter, I was glad to read her post this morning and in it find – as usual – nothing I could take issue with. On the contrary, it’s a fine example of why Caitlin features in my posts more than any other pundit, and more disproportionally still in my masthead quotes.
I’ve written elsewhere on why I value the Melbourne Stakhanovite who, on those rare occasions she misses a daily post, always apologises and gives a reason. My approval is informed by two things. One is her combining of a steely materialist gaze (without which world events will make no sense or, worse, mangle cause and effect in ways which serve power) with a call to embrace our spiritual – I hate the word for its droopy connotations but for now it’ll have to do – nature.
Is this not what the old socialist hymn, Bread and Roses, strives for?
The other is her ability, in my opinion unrivalled, to voice truths counter to the diet of lies, half truths and lethal omissions which on the most important questions of our time is mainstream orthodoxy – and to do so in simple and colourful language. Try doing likewise. You’ll find being simple, without crossing over into simplistic, harder than it looks.
Be that as it may, tomorrow I’ll set out where I differ from this warrior for truth. Today though I find her in fine form on the significance of the man who, in a comeback without precedent in my lifetime – a fact indicative of shifting realities beyond the scope of this post – is once more the President of the United States.
Donald Trump is the empire unmasked
During his inaugural address, the new president of the United States was refreshingly open about the fact that Washington is the hub of a continuously expanding empire which is ruled by billionaire plutocrats.
As Joe Lauria highlighted for Consortium News, President Trump’s speech included references to the “manifest destiny” of America, saying that under his presidency the US will consider itself a nation that “expands our territory”. He waxed fondly about the settler-colonialist past which established the country at the expense of the people who were already living there, and vowed to take control of the Panama Canal.
Trump gave this speech to an audience where the wealthiest people on earth sat alongside his own cabinet in the best seats in the house. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were seen together in the crowd among the more official members of the incoming administration. Israeli-American Trump megadonor Miriam Adelson, who according to Trump helped dictate US policy toward Israel during his first term, was seen sitting among Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Clintons at the inauguration. There will reportedly be no fewer than 13 billionaires with official roles in the new Trump administration.
If you were to twist my arm and force me to say something positive about Donald Trump, this is the sort of thing I would point to. He makes the US empire much more transparent and unhidden. He removes its mask and reveals the twisted face beneath it.
The US isn’t suddenly ruled by billionaires now that Trump is president; it was already ruled by billionaires. The US isn’t suddenly an empire bent on global domination now that Trump has been sworn in; that was already the case. But you’re not supposed to just come right out and say that.
Well, Trump comes right out and says it. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs. He puts much less effort into disguising the true nature of the US empire than other presidents.
That’s the only reason various factions of America’s unofficial permanent government have had objections to Trump’s presidency over the years. It’s not because he presents a threat to the establishment or because he’s trying to bring down the deep state, it’s because he is viewed as a poor custodian of the empire. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the importance of keeping a polite face on the imperial machine.
If I were forced to say something positive about Trump, that would be it. The thing some US empire managers dislike about him is the only thing I like about him: that he makes the US empire a less effective evil because of how much less hidden he keeps the inner workings of the machine. The hood stays popped open the entire time, showing the whole world how the imperial sausage gets made.
ASTONISHING article in TIME about how the Biden administration never had any intention or even desire to help Ukraine win, and was always just going to step away at its behest at some point. We all *knew* this but to have it confirmed is important.
https://time.com/7207661/bidens-ukraine-win-zelensky-loss/
Kit Klarenberg tweet yesterday
Not that there haven’t been plenty of mask-off moments during the dementia-muddled chaos of the Biden administration as well. A new article in Time [the one Kit cites above] is a good example of this; the report cites a former member of Biden’s National Security Council saying that victory for Ukraine was never part of the Biden administration’s plan.
The opening paragraph reads as follows:
When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them. The phrase the White House used to describe its mission at the time—supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes”—was intentionally vague. It also raised the question: As long as it takes to do what?
Talk about a mask-off moment …
Aside – Caitlin cites only the first paragraph of that Time article. Here’s the second:
“We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately. The more important objective was for Ukraine to survive as a sovereign, democratic country free to pursue integration with the West.”
Weakening Russia by provoking then exhausting her in the Ukraine – the needless suffering of either country of zero concern to the hegemon other than as spin for a credulous West – was a goal set out with unabashed candour in 2019, when the Pentagon commissioned the Rand Corp. (one of the many private think-tanks to which ostensibly public policy is outsourced) to explore options for Extending Russia. See my post, six weeks prior to the Russian SMO of February 24, 2022, Kazakhstan: why is the Steppe on fire?
Back to Caitlin.
… It has long been clear that the US pushed Ukraine into an unwinnable war with the goal of bleeding and preoccupying Moscow, and that it actively sabotaged peace negotiations in the early days of the war in order to pursue these goals. Now that the job has been done and the demented meat puppet is out of office, we are finally hearing it from Biden’s own handlers in his administration.
And of course there was Gaza, where the world spent 15 months watching history’s first live-streamed genocide right in front of their faces while western officials made nonstop excuses of less and less believability. If there’s to be any good to come from that incomprehensibly horrific nightmare, it’s that it has shown everyone the true face of the empire.
The more glimpses people get of the true face of the empire, the less effective the imperial propaganda becomes, because propaganda only works if you believe it. The primary obstacle to revolutionary change under the western empire is the fact that its citizenry have been successfully propagandized into accepting the status quo. The more people open their eyes to the fact that we are ruled by psychopaths who are driving us to our doom on multiple fronts, the closer we get to a collective movement toward a healthy world.
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