Back in 2016 I refused to support that murderous Queen of Chaos, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Not because of her venality and air of regal entitlement but because she proposed to invite WW3 by imposing on Russia – how she didn’t say – a Syrian version of the ‘no fly zones’ that had turned Africa’s wealthiest country, with free healthcare and literacy rates higher than the West’s, into a failed state where slaves were sold openly on the quayside of its capital. 1
Such is the grip on the binary mindsets of most Westerners, including the liberal intelligentsia, exerted by a corporate oligarchy hiding class rule behind a fast thinning veil of democracy that my detestation of Clinton was read politely or venomously as support – overt or unwitting as the case may be – for her rival for the US presidency.
The polite assured me Clinton was ‘the lesser evil’ and/or Trump was ’embarrassing’, the IdPol besotted that I was misogynist, the incandescent that I was, as one put it, “human excrement”.
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Behind that circus by which US corporate oligarchies jostle for position in a ‘democracy’ for sale to the highest bidder, the continuity of foreign policy from Obama to Trump 2 is there for all to see – though few look …
… But grand strategy and conspiracy are not mutually exclusive. Trump has taken an extraordinary gamble, while Netanyahu has visited Washington seven times in fourteen months. We know that Epstein, the arch Zionist, ran a honey trap – which corporate media ignore while titillating us with wrongdoings of the rich and royal – and Trump “likes them young”. I don’t say Israel kompromat is root cause of US-Israeli virulent hatred of Iran; just that it provides a plausible catalyst … Trump gambled on a shock and awe attack and decapitation strike, one he could brag about as one more quick win, seemingly on the premise that Iranians would rise up and overthrow a government this popinjay had been told they detest. Instead, hundreds of thousands took to the streets to register their fury at the martyrdom of one of the most revered figures in Shi’a culture.
Thoughts on the war, day 4
Before writing the above I read somewhere that the US has entered a phase in which hypocrisy itself is abandoned in favour of “we’re strong, you’re weak; suck it up!” I had that in mind when, as war drums beat over Trump’s preposterous claims of Nicolás Maduro as head of a narcotics cartel, I wrote on December 5 – how long ago that seems, and how well is Lenin’s observation borne out that decades may pass where little happens, and weeks where decades happen – of Venezuela as:
… not Iraq or Libya. Its size dwarfs both, while daunting Andean mountains and dense jungle make it a far cry from the Iraqi sands, over which US Sherman and British Chieftain tanks sped with such devastating effect in 2003. A land invasion would come at high political cost given a US public notably averse to its sons and daughters coming home in body bags – a general rule here triply applicable due both to Venezuela’s low rating as issue of concern for America’s struggling, and to their president having pledged to end the forever wars – while Russian S-300s make “no fly zones” unenforceable as Iranian drones and hypersonic missiles with reaches of 2000 miles and more promise catastrophic optics should a single F-35 be downed, or so much as a boatshed on the Louisiana bayou take a hit. Given its world-beating powers of narrative control, such costs might be considered acceptable by a US ruling class united, but we’re a long ways from that. Of course Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, gold and rare earths – and an end to ‘socialism in our back yard’ – still hold the appeal they had when, twenty-six years ago tomorrow, Hugo Chavez first took office. But regime change in Caracas is neither an existential matter, making such extreme measures costly but necessary, nor Venezuela the dying empire’s only problem. Since this and the other hot spots grow more interwoven by the day, the fruits of escalation could prove more bitter than mere lack of success.
Venezuela: follow through or dial down?
This was correct but I hadn’t foreseen – who had? – that Trump would neither follow through nor dial down on the absurd but inflammatory rhetoric he was heaping on Caracas. Instead he did the to me unthinkable, and abducted another country’s leader. As many have said, success there – opening up the possibility, irresistible to a narcissist, of his being the POTUS who fuel-starved Havana into regime change – went to Trump’s bloated head. He really seems to have believed, aided by Bibi’s threats and Lindsey Graham’s flattery, that Iran was his for the taking.
But who is Trump, and what is his role in the US empire?
A piece three days ago by Edward Curtin opens with the crimes of the US and its Israeli proxy, noting how little they impact on the American public and quoting Neil Postman’s remark that “Americans are the best entertained and … least well-informed people in the Western World.”
It then studies two pioneers of US propaganda: Edward Bernays – twice Freud’s nephew in that his mother was Sigmund’s sister, his father the man’s wife’s brother – and Walter Lippman.
More than halfway into The Inner Cabinet and the Outer Media, Ed gets to POTUS No. 47:
Enter Trump, who seems to be and may be clinically insane or just plain evil like his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu, and who on the face of it seems to contradict much of this inside-out approach to controlling the masses. Like a bull escaped from a pen, he just bellows threats and wages wars at home and abroad, seemingly not caring whether or not he convinces the population that his actions are just and in their interest. It’s as if he is announcing to all who voted for him, that they were fools to believe for a moment that he wouldn’t start any new wars and would end America’s “endless wars,” and to those who didn’t vote for him, “Fuck you, too.”
In the past, presidents felt compelled to try to justify through propaganda the wars and coups they waged, from Vietnam to Iraq to Libya, etc. No matter how obvious their lies, like Colin Powell holding up a little vial to show how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (which he later said was a mistake and not a lie to cover his complicity), they told them and used all the propaganda at their disposal to make them sound true, having “journalist” friends and assets provide justifications. Trump seemingly doesn’t care.
Some say that is because he is a complete anomaly and was able to twice become president by some strange twist of fate. If that is so, it would be the first and second time in modern history that it happened. A man with no political experience, a comical reality-tv joke, a bombastic fat party boy with weird dyed hair who talks like a version of an East Coast Valley Girl, a womanizer, a very wealthy New York real estate wheeler and dealer, etc. gets the votes of middle Americans who are losing their farms and factory jobs and are angry at the government. All sorts of explanations have been given for this “anomaly,” except that it was not one, except in appearance.
Before Trump was first elected in 2016, it was accepted that one could never be elected president of the U.S. unless one checked off a list of boxes approved by the inner controllers of the Democratic and Republican parties. Independent or small party candidates like Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson were never given a real chance but were viewed as spoilers. In 2000, Trump entered the primaries seeking the Reform Party’s nomination but dropped out. He had no chance, even if he had won it, and he knew it. Then came sixteen years of burnishing his establishment credentials. So by 2016, and then again in 2020 and 2024, he was the Republican Party’s nominee, clearly a member of the establishment’s two-party club that had (and has) a lock on the presidency. He was an insider.
So if this insider is no longer following the traditional propaganda script of inside/outside, it is highly likely that those who control the political parties for the imperial ruling class have invented a new technique of mind control to serve their purposes. Since more and more people are starting to question the conventional propaganda as U.S. society cracks up, a new technique must be added to the old – a turning of things inside-out and further out, so to speak. Give Trump free range to say and do the most outlandish things, the things that many have come to suspect were previously said only by the hidden manipulators like Bernays and the CIA, and one side of the western “free press/media” will rip him for his grotesquely brazen mouth and actions, while the other will praise him. The latter will claim that he has finally liberated the country, while the former will rip him as a maniac. Both, however, owned by the same imperial ruling class that might disagree over tactics but not U.S. long term strategy, and knowing Trump got elected because he is a political insider which they must deny, will be satisfied that the masses are confused, angry, and divided, and therefore more easily controlled.
They call it “transparency,” and no one has to answer the question of why, under Republican and Democratic presidents, the U.S. has 750 + military bases in over 80 countries all around the world from which they have been waging wars for many decades, some of which have recently been attacked by Iran, after the U.S./Israel waged the current savage war of aggression against it in a continuation of The Great Game.
Emphasis added
It’s a good piece, written with its author’s characteristic elegance and erudition. But let me finish with something shorter. More superficial to be sure, and too suggestive to my mind of the idea that voting – even voting outside the red/blue duopoly masquerading as a democracy – offers a way forward for Elm Street America.
All the same, it gets a lot right.
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Top job. Thanks.
Cheers Johnny