As the events in the Ukraine unfold, they are followed by a cascade of misleading propaganda and, just as bad, by heaps of info-graphics and in depth analysis. The situation is treated as a sudden and new development, a
casus sui generis. Rubbish. To understand the Ukrainian crisis, all one has to do is look back in time... clearly and without sentimental illusions.
Ara Pacis
The
Ara Pacis is probably the world's greatest piece of propaganda ever. Commissioned by the Divine Augustus it depicts in allegorical form the res gestae of his rule, which was nothing less than the fulfilment of the Roman Dream
Mother Rome sit in the middle, nurturing her twins, uniting the spirits of the East and the West amid fecundity, prosperity and harmony.
It was an alluring myth with deep and universal appeal. It was also a blatant lie. Rome was not a Nurturing Mother; she was a Sucking Viper.
The bread and circuses of Rome were brought on the backs of millions of agricultural slaves toiling under the Egyptian sun to harvest the wheat for Roman mouths and the bloody amusements of the capital were brought with the brutalization and debasement of young men from Gaul and Syria and Germany.
That was the least of it. "All roads lead to Rome" was not a tourist motto. It was an epigram for the reality of ongoing economic plunder which relentlessly sucked wealth from the provinces and countryside. "Eternal Rome" was the narcissism of a class brought upon the crucifixion of another.
America the Beautiful
Although lyrics are less universal than graphics, there is probably no political hymn more inspiring than that composed by Katharine Lee Bates dedicated to the fulfilment of the American Dream.
The difference between Bates' poem and Augustus' frieze is the difference between Christianity and Paganism. Bates presents not an accomplishment, but a present which is here and yet to be attained.
Despite its all too often perversion into a hymn of
militaristic exceptionalism, the power of
America the Beautiful remains that it indirectly acknowledges the shortfall, the existence of evil, while singing to the greater nobleness that sees beyond the years alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.
But for all that, America the Beautiful is a Harmonious Lie. Bates was no pangloss. At the time she wrote her poem, the country had emerged from a terrible war over a system as brutal as Rome's. She was aware of the "selfish gain" which she prayed would "no longer stain, the banner of the free!" The beguilement of her poem lies in its puritanism -- the idea and the prayer that "God (will) mend thine ev'ry flaw." America is not a "flawed" country; it is a monster.
Nothing will be achieved so long as Americans persist in the delusion that we are "occasionally" misdirected rather than indelibly vile. This is a delusion which defeats the very aspirations of "liberals" and "traditionalists" alike.
This is not to say that the everyone and everything in the United States is evil and worthless. Of course not. But America is more than an aggregation of individuals -- some good and some bad. The Millsian individuation of society is another mistake Americans fall for. Countries are organisms and it is necessary to understand the inherent and congenintal nature of the organism in question.
The United States was conceived in greed. The resentments of the Colonials were against mild and legitimate limitations on aggrandisement and selfishness. There were, to be sure, relatively minor tyrannies in the Crown's colonial administration. Most of these "injustices" had to do with the Crown's "War on Rum." But it has been rightly said that no people in the known history of the world had ever been more free and more coddled than the American Colonials.
The real trigger of the insurrection was that the colonials wanted the western territories for themselves regardless it entailed the genocide of the "savages" as the enlightened Jefferson styled them.
Aside from the Romans no people has ever been more self deluded than the Americans. The United States was conceived in avarice and empire has been its game from the beginning. Spain's
Count of Aranda was prophetically correct when, in 1788, he wrote that the newly independent colonies were a pygmy that would grow into a devouring colossus.
Aranda was not disappointed. Within a decade, the devouring began incorporating as the "Northwest Territories" what had been the Province of Quebec and proceeding therefrom to the Mississippi River, and therefrom to Texas and California wrested from Mexico and therefrom into Central America and the whole hemisphere declared to be ours to despoil of right. And when that was accomplished the engorged pygmy looked overseas.
Zones of Democratic Peace
Given American self-delusions, it is hardly surprising that most Americans havn't an inkling as to what is going on in the Ukraine and that their crania are empty receptacles for the bullshit with which they are informed by the media. What is going on in the Ukraine is simply the next bite in America's ongoing, insatiable quest for world conquest.
In 1945, the United States achieved what was thought at the time to be the culmination of Empire. The hemisphere was hers; now too Europe and the Pacific Rim. Aside from Argentina, the rest of the world was literally broke, even the also-victorious Soviet Union.
There was an argument within the U.S. establishment as to whether we ought to pounce on our principal ally and finish the game up. There were quite a few who felt that an ailing FDR had fumbled at Yalta, "conceding" Easter Europe to Russia.
Eastern Europe was the tip of the matter. What Roosevelt had really conceded was Russia's right to exist as a power. He acknowledged "an other" in the global space which could have been "all ours". There was a bear in the ointment. Once the Soviet Union was recognized (and for 13 years prior to the war it hadn't been) her interests in Eastern Europe were an obvious sequitur which hardly needed restatement.
George Kennan sought to rectify Roosevelt's fumble by announcing the
Doctrine of Containment. We would build a cordon sanitaire -- that is an "iron curtain" -- around the Soviet Union to limit and contain the extent of our mistake.
Part of our Iron Curtain was, of course, NATO and the military. But an equally important part was what was known as
Zones of Democratic Freedom -- outposts of client and vassal states tied to us by "shared democratic institutions" and "free trade." It was like a vast game of GO. Each zonal "piece" on the board was one more territory and resource claimed for our side which correspondingly diminished their extent.
Just as the colonists' land grab into the West had been dressed up in the tinsel of "inalienable rights," Obama's carrying on of the policy of zonal conquest is decked out in neoliberal happy talk about "democratic yearnings," "free enterprise" "shared values," and "a chance at an opportunity for a change."
But the guts of the matter, whether carried out by Kissinger, Brzezinski, Clinton or the Bushes, consists in a two pronged military and economic penetration and dominance of our so-called allies. We would "advise" and "assist" the client state's military and police so that they could control their populations and serve in the geopolitical ballast against the "Communist World". At the same time, we would "lend and invest" in our new-found ally, turning it into a debt slave to our banks while gobbling up its resources and enterprise.
It is essential to understand that
in America's post war strategy economics is as much a weapon as the military. It bears repeating. The two weapons used in the strategy of extending U.S. hegemony while correspondingly "shrinking" the hegemony of "the enemy" are:
(1) lend and invest and
(2) advise and assist.
Vietnam was the colossal screw up, where the policy blew up in our face. But that misadventure was only cause for regroupment and tactical readjustments. At no time did the United States renounce the fundamentals underlying the Vietnam war.
Taking over from Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski continued the same zonal policy in Africa and the Americas while always seeking to stir up trouble in Eur-Asia. While Carter was blathering --- a la Bates -- about human rights, Brzezinski was baiting the Russians by provoking incidents and laying a trap for them in Afghanistan -- a fact which he has publicly and gleefully admitted. This was not simply "payback" -- it was the opening gambit in what Brzezinski himself has called the "Grand Chessboard" of Central Asia.
The mad little Pole is far more ruthless than Kissinger and his resented game was simply to kill the bear. It was Carter -- not Reagan -- who pushed the Soviet Union to the brink.
Cheney's Defense Planning Guide
In 1989 the Berlin Wall, and within years, the Soviet Union Fell. In the Western media, there was a lot of happy talk, particularly among "liberals," about a "Peace Dividend. The sentimental notion was that now that the "threat" had disappeared, we could take all that money that was being spend on defense and turn it to productive social purpose.
But the idea of defense is just part of the myth. There was nothing "defensive" in the policy of containment. It was just decked out that way. There certainly was nothing "defensive" about Vietname or provoking a war in Afghanistan. The opportunity presented by the implosion of the Soviet Union was more in the nature of a reallocation of "defense initiatives."
In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz and other members of Cheney's Neocon team, drafted a defense policy memorandum setting out the contours of prospective U.S. strategy. Its essential premise was the preservation of U.S. exclusive (uni-polar) preeminence. This naturally entailed the preclusion and diminishment of "potential" rivals.
It was taken as a given that the erstwhile Soviet Union no longer figured as a player in the balance and the goal in this regard was to insure that Russia remained weak. The
Defense Planning Guide summarised the matter, thus:
"We do not dismiss the risks to stability in europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia or efforts to reinocrporate into Russia the newly independent republics of Ukraine, Belarus and possible others. [However for the forseeable future] the continued fragmentation of the forer Soviet state and its conventional armed forced" have neutralized a Russian threat."
Nevertheless "our strategy must refocus on precluding the emeregence of any potential future global competititor"
"The best means of assuring that no hostile power is able to consolidate control over the resources within the former Soviet Union is to support its successor states (especially Russia and Ukraine) in their efforts to become peaceful democracies with market based economies.
"A democratic partnership with Russia and the other republics would be the best possible outcome for the United States... For the immediate future, key U.S. concerns will be the ability of Russia ... to demilitarize their societies, convert their military industries to civilian production, ... radically reduce their nuclear weapons...
"NATO continues to provide the indespensible foundation for a stable security environment in Europe... It is of fumanemental imprtance to preserve NATO...
"The most promising avenues for anchoring the east-central Europeans into the West and for stabilising their democratic institutions is their participation in Western and political and economic organizations. East central European membership in the European Community at the ealiest opportunity and explanded NATO liason...
"Should there be a re-emergence of a threat from the Soviet Union's successor state, we shold plan to defend against such a threat in Eastern Europe..."
It is important to recall the two prongs of U.S. policy. Cheney's memorandum focused on the military aspect. But it too acknowledged the importance of fomenting democratic institutions" and getting the targeted countries linked into "Western and political and economic organizations."
Thus, during the Yeltsin Years, immediately following the demise of the communist leadership, the promotion of "peaceful democracies with market based economies" focused on Russia. How did the "capitalization" of the former Soviet Union work?
It was basically very simple and brutal. Using shadowy scumbags like Mark Rich working in tandem with respectable Western financial institutions, the Soviet Union's economic infrastructure was carved up and handed over to the nearest handy aparatchik crook. There was no work and no merit involved whatsoever. It was purely arbitrary. If you happened to be at a certain desk within the soviet apparatus on one day, you were an oligrach the next. The aluminum factory, the gas field, the mine, the forest, which once belonged to the State, now belonged, to private slimebags and their "partners" and "co-investors" and "financiers" in the West.
This "transfer" had three principle consequences. The first was the hollowing out of the infrastructure needed to maintain a viable military. The second was the chaosification of the economy. Infrastructure is as much a matter of processes as roads. When the entire process is disrupted, collapse and chaos follow; and this means unemployment, scarcities, insecurity.
The third consequence was the destruction of the social safety net. Imbalanced as the priorities may be, when the "profits" of an economy accrue to the State, the government is able to use that wealth to fund housing, education and health care, as well as subsidies for food and fuel. When those profits are diverted to western bank accounts, the result is austerity. And since, the same loss of wealth requires loans to meet operational expenses and even reduced social benefits, the result is that banks and western advisors, demand more austerity and more privatisastion. The country is thus set on a downward spiral into oblivion.
It is in this way that "free trade" is as destructive a weapon as a campaign of military area bombing. Russia stood by helplessly as the United States invaded the Balkans, set up huge military bases in freed Kosovo and finally rectified Roosevelt's "mistake" at Yalta.
New American Century
As of 2000, Russia was a hollowed out shell. American policy now turned triumphalist. The tocsin for new and ongoing military conquest was sounded by the defense-industry funded Project for a New American Century whose manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000) restated and super-charged Cheney's 1992 Memorandum
According to PNAC, America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend the attained U.S. preeminence, while precluding the rise of a great power rival, and "shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests."
The premise of zonal wars is that “potentially powerful states” might challenge America’s geo-political preeminence or “expand their own influence.” (Rebuilding, Intro., pg. i; ch. 1, p. 2.)
Accordingly, the United States must ever seek to "expand" its "security perimeter " (Op cit. p. 34.) "As the American security perimeter in Europe is removed eastward this pattern will endure, although naval forces will play an important role in the Baltic Sea, eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, and will continue to support U.S. and NATO operations ashore." (Id., p. 44.)
It is typically thought that the neocon Cheney-PNAC Axis represents only half the balance within the the U.S. military-economic establishment. That is a misperception, as much as it is a form of idiocy to think that the two parties represent left and right alternatives. The difference between neo-cons and neo-libs is simply a question of bluster. It was Zbigniew Brzezinski who pronounced in his Grand Chessboard (1997) that,
"The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power..." (p. xiii)
"... But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book." (p. xiv)
In short, the gutting and constriction of Russia has been the primary strategic goal of America's political, economic and military establishment. Once this fact is understood, everything essential about the situation in the Ukraine is automatically understood the way pixie dust falls from an unfolded paper.
We have written before that the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and now Libya and Syria -- are in fact, from the correct understanding of U.S. geo-strategic aims, successes. The prime directive of U.S. policy has been to "prevent the emergence of a potential rival."
Although English presents difficulties to most Americans, the words explain it all. To pre-vent is not the same as to re-spond. The prefix "pre" signifies "action beforehand." Whatever the object is, a policy of preventing means taking action now against something not existing now but only possibly in the future. Similarly, the word "potential" refer to something not existing now, but only as a latency which might manifest itself in the future.
U.S. policy does not consist in responding to "attacks" or "aggressions." It does not consist in fighting off or fighting against powerful opponents. It consists in degrading, debasing, destabilzing and destroying any possible impediment or resistance to American preeminence and power.
From whoseover's mouth this policy spills it is a policy of ongoing global bullying. America is the big man walking around bashing other men in the face, slapping kids upside the head and, where possible, breaking their legs so they don't grow too tall.
Once this is understood, in all its brutality and stripped of the neutraleeze of bureaucratic objectification and abstraction, it can be seen that the civil chaos and destruction of national existence in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan are all successes.
Rome created a desert and called it peace. America creates rubble and calls it security.
Not only does this policy of rampaging the world create "security" it also opens the "zone of democratic disaster" to plunder. Libya is a prime example.
What "threat" did Libya pose to anyone? None. Not only had the U.S. removed Libya from its list of state-terrorists but beginning in 2003 Gadaffi opened Libya to market-liberalization, including permitting foreign investment and copartnering agreements with the National Oil Company. The real problem was that even though Gadaffi had effectively abandoned his islamic-socialism, he still adhered to his view of a"third world" alternative to the bi-polar East-West hegemonic axis. He viewed the African Union and its free trade zone (COMESA) as master in its own continental house. In short, Muammar was "uppity." In 2011, he was assassinated by astroturf goon squads. The following day (literally) saw plane-loads of European lawyers and accountants landing in Tripoli and within a year, Obama rebranded Clinton's "Africa Initiative" as "Trade Africa" and called for deeper, more extensive and coordinated U.S. commercial penetration of the sub-Saharan countries. Libya's threat was that it was not reliably prostrate and submissive.
With its successes in the Mideast and Africa under its belt and with the the Baltic States firmly in hand, the U.S. evidently felt it was time for a further constricting of the cordon sanitaire around Russia.
America's Wolfangel
Once again, it has to be borne in mind that the economy and the military are two blades of the same sword. More precisely, the power-relation the United States wishes to impose on any given "zone" is both an economic and a military reality. Economic and military control is both the end and the means. Chewing is the eating.
In this ontology, politics and diplomacy are merely subordinate and disposable instrumentalities. (This is what the PNAC paper meant when it stated that the United States should seek "provisional" alliances. ) America's goal in the Ukraine was to bring it within the West's economic and military sphere. Since one blade implies the other, either alone would suffice as an initial measure.
Accordingly the United States supported Yanukovitch whom the White House itself said had been elected in a free and fair election. The reason for this glowing endorsement was the expectation that Yanukovitch would sign a treaty with the European Economic Union. Such a treaty would "hook" the Ukraine into the I.M.F.'s debt structure and at the same time would open the Ukraine to despoilation, otherwise known as "investment." To the West's shock and dismay, Yanukovitch decided that the Russia's EurAsian economic union offered the better bad bargain. Overnight "spontaneous" twitter protests began.
The West has perfected the technique of astro-turfing -- of generating seemingly spontaneous grass roots protests. Although these protests can be triggered overnight, they are the product of long term "cultivations" by embedded operatives. These operatives are not necessarily prototypical stealth spies working a la James Bond, but include the full range of non-governmental contacts in business, academe, technical, charitable and media organizations. Back in 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, in his inimitably Orwellian fashion, publicly remarked that "we" would be working "unseen" in the background generating all sorts of "realities" which "we" would be unaware of.
And so it was that the day after Yanukovich backed off from a deal with the European Union, twittering students took to Maidan Square.
This is not to say that the protestors did not have genuine issues which they themselves sincerely believed in. They did. There were a lot of things in the Ukraine which warranted protesting. Being young, a lot of the protests were concerned about unemployment and the usual student gripes about universities. But twittering over course availability and pass/fail grading systems is nothing the West gives a damn about and is nothing that will bring down a government. What mattered was gathering a mass of people as a pressure gambit; how and over what the people were amassed was incidental.
The protests continued from November through February. It is a good technique because the mere presence of masses of people impedes and stymies the normal cycle of business and government. Ordinary things, like getting to work, which make up the bulk of everyday existence, get disrupted. On the other hand if the government tries to bust up the protests so that ordinary things can resume their normal cycle, it runs the risk of creating incidents which lead to more and more intense protests.
Nevertheless, although these "popular" protests generate pressure and create a climate for change, they themsevles are incapable of overcoming the inertia that all governments have and rely upon. A change in government simply does not happen without force which requires bona-fide troops under whatever flag or name.
In the Ukraine, these street-troops came ready made from the countries pre-existing and already powerful nazi groupings. It is something of a misnomer to call Svoboda and Right Sector "neo" nazis. There is nothing particularly new about them. They are the direct and lineal descendants of the nazi phalange that existed in the Ukraine leading up to and during the World War.
At the same time calling these groups"nazis" tends to obscure what they are really about. It would be more salient to say that Svoboda and Right sector represent ethnic nationalism. Focusing on the ethnic component of fascism is important in places where a strong ethnic divide already pre-exists. Thus, in the Ukraine, the West was able to exploit a strong ethno-nationalist faction which considered itself "Western" and "not Russian." That the faction was para-militarily organized was an added bonus. That they were virulently and violently anti-semitic was a mere inconvenient detail, as Jean Marie Le Pen might say.
And so it was that Fighter McCain stood on a podium holding hands with trad-Nazis fighting to free the country from Russian domination and bring it within the orbit of Western and IMF servitude.
As the protests and disruptions escalated into violence, these nazi street-troops became more active and more visible everywhere except the pages of the New York Times, which persisted in presenting the protestors as glowy faced, latté slurping, iPoding, members of the Twitter Generation.
The final days of the protests were nothing short of a violent putsch brought about by bats, bombs, pistols and high powered rifles. Maidan Square had been turned into an urban war-zone.
The shock troops invaded parliament, bullied away the pro-Russian MPs and with a newly adjusted "quorum" impeached the president and elected a new government. It is this pathetic cabal that Obama and Kerry, in all the hauteur of righteousness, call the "legitimate government" of the Ukraine.
The current president of the Ukraine is such a pathetic excuse that he puts puppets to shame. But it doesn't matter. His Emptiness is dragged to White House where he sits uncomfortably and dumb for a foto op with the Great Obama himself. He is then shipped back to Kiev where a few days later he signs the country up for another IMF pay-day loan. Price? A mere 50% reduction in pensions and and en to subsidized fuel prices. Ridi iPodi!
The irony in all of this, is that the Ukrainian nazis are victims of their own symbol.
The runic wolfangel is a stylized version of an old (and brutal) hunting device known as the wolf-angle-- a double prong hook attached to a chain which was baited with meat. When the wolf ate the bait, the hook got stuck in his throat. If the wolf pulled away, he disgorged himself. If he stayed put, in agony, he bled to death or could be disposed of at will. Far from being an appropriate symbol for Ukraine's ethnic-nationalist, the wolfangel is the perfect symbol for American's two-pronged economic-military strategy of bait-and-hook.
Now that the Ukraine has been roped into the "EU" orbit, its approchment to NATO is the forseeable next step. Thanks to its ethnic-nationalists, the Ukraine has at last been baited. Wherever he is Zbigniew Brzezinski must be experiencing paroxysms of joy.
It is a measure of Washington's lunatic arrogance that it expected Russia to take the annexation of the Ukraine lying down. Russia simply could not accept this zonal coup without taking counter measures. The Ukraine is not the Balkans. It is not merely within Russia's traditional European hegemonic sphere (which has all but been given up). The Ukraine has intimate historical, cultural and economic ties with greater Russia. It is to Russia what Canada is to the United States -- a nominally independent nation which is geographically, economically, linguistically and culturally integrated.
As might be expected, Russia has not been strictly neutral with the Ukraine. It has not sought to loosen ties but, within the framework of independence, to strengthen them. Given the West's use of the European Economic Union as a precursor to NATO enrollment it was natural for Russia to seek to disuade the former in order to prevent the latter.
Had the United States not sought to use the EU as a missile platform on Russia's borders, Putin's Russia might very well have been more relaxed about Ukraine's economic approchment with Europe. After all, the gas pipelines which Russia itself uses to sell gas to Europe go straight through the Ukraine.
Instead, with an effrontery that crosses the line into outright lunacy, the U.S. expected Russia to accept its assurances that missiles on its borders were aimed at protecting Europe from Iran.
Bearing in mind the importance of the Ukraine to Russia and the sinister significance of the U.S.'s hypocrisies, Russia's response to the storm-trooper coup in Kiev has been surprisingly moderate, contenting itself with the re-annexation of the Crimea which is essential to Russia's southern naval presence. Anyone with half a brain ought to understand that no Russian leader could long survive the loss, on his watch, of a naval base which has been critical in Russia's strategic thinking for the past three hundred years.
But Russia's response has been a far cry from Hungary 1956 or Prague 1968. A Soviet response to the events in the Ukraine would have seen tanks in Maidan Square by Christmas last.
The difference is that today's Russia is in fact integrated into the capitalist world order. It is Western propaganda that constantly resurrects geopolitical leitmotifs from the Cold War. It does so because it -- and particularly the United States -- has never actually given up on containment turned roll-back.
Putin, on the other, is constantly about "our partners" in the West and whining that this is not the way partners ought to behave. Putin is not being duplicitous or polite. Russian businesses and banks are in fact enmeshed in a vortex of multi-layered partnerships with Western banks and businesses. Putin's principal point is that it makes no sense to revert to geo-political antagonisms when the world is geo-economically integrated. What sense does it make to talk about "blocks" when what exists is interlocking fingers?
Of course, there is no real contradiction, once it is borne in mind that everything about Obama is nothing more than pogey bait and tinsel. Of course the United States believes in "free market competition" it just believes more in predetermined outcomes.
In the final analysis, as Lenin would say, this is a fight among capitalist nations, among partners in plunder. This is not to exonerate the U.S. pursuit of perpetual pre-eminence and global control. It is simply to say that until a fundamental political-economic alternative exists as a counterbalance the ebb and flow of geopolitical realities makes little real difference in the tenor, nature and quality of the civitatem mundi.
But the New Jerusalem will never be built so long as Americans insist on living in their delusional @*Twilight Zone*@.
©Barfo 2014.
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