Just as COVID threw into sharp relief the capture of of our institutions by dark forces, acting as confirmation to those of us who had suspected we were being led into serfdom through propaganda, so the Ukraine war has clarified to what extent the mythos of the American military-industrial complex trying to impose its hegemony over the whole world is, in fact, sober truth.
The disclosures of US biolabs, SAS troop training (and Canadian Azov training), US Generals in Donbas and so on show that Ukraine has been co-opted as a clandestine NATO fiefdom in all but name since 2014. The draconian Western censorship, war propaganda, military interventions and self-harming sanctions show that this is also a NATO war against Russia in all but name, with a clear trajectory towards justifying it being so overtly in the imminent future. Who gains from this?
To see this as a long-term strategy we have only to look at the whole series of regime-change wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, etc, and the proxy regime-change wars in Syria, Libya and many more nations over many decades.
As in COVID, the motivations appear to be mixed and, quite possibly, disparate. The average American in the light of 9/11, for example, was simply encouraged to want revenge against the perpetrators – so America invaded two countries whose governments were not involved because the one most plausibly linked, Saudi Arabia, was an ally. Upwards of half a million civilian deaths: perhaps the wrath against a few terrorists was assuaged.
But at a more fundamental level, overtly there is a strong Neo-conservative ideology, amongst its elites, of American exceptionalism, based on the wonders of her constitution that make her a paragon of liberty and prosperity (that’s true, in fact, were the constitution followed). Accordingly, the interventions around the world, whether overt or disclosed by investigative journalism, are justified as the promotion of “democracy” worldwide.
The trouble with this is that it depends on vigorous suppression of the fact that most of these interventions have been completely anti-democratic. The US-backed coup in 2014 in Ukraine is the most topical: a democratically elected regime sympathetic to Russia had to be forcibly overturned by Nazi thugs to install a US-friendly, and equally corrupt, regime. Zelensky’s subsequent election on a platform of bringing peace and unity to the divided country in fact turned out to mean crooked deals with the Biden family, the oppression of the eastern autonomous areas promised recognition under the Minsk agreements, and the wholesale conversion of the country to a NATO frontline battery. And this pattern is equally true of many other regime-changes engineered by the US since World War 2.
How this US adoption of the British Empire’s “White Man’s Burden” interacts with corporate interests is, of course, never entirely clear. Iran’s democratic government was overturned early in the 1950s to retrieve US and British oil interests. It is far away from democracy now. More recently Iraq is often said to have been invaded to secure oil as well: and whether this was a motive or not, the oil wealth was certainly procured de eventu. And Iraq is scarcely a model of democracy, either.
Similarly, the naive expressions by well-meaning folk, at the start of the Ukraine thing, that “nobody wants a war,” are absolutely wrong. Arms manufacturers closely allied to the US deep state want wars, and the longer and bloodier the better. In this case, the US has persuaded half the countries in the world to pour most of their own military defences into Ukraine, with the promise that they will be sold (not given) US replacements. The US taxpayers, too, will have to pay to replace not only what is being sent to be destroyed in Ukraine along with its citizens, but what was left behind to arm the Taliban in Afghanistan. None of this helps the all-important CO2 emissions, nor ordinary Americans, but it does make the bankers happy.
With so many uncontrolled arms movements going on, terrorists of the near future across the world will have state-of-the-art weaponry, leading to even more lucrative contracts for the military-industrial complex to combat their own products.
But an increasing number of analysts see this war as the culmination of a long campaign to destroy Russia as a potential world power, before moving on to China. During the Cold War, there was arguably justification for seeking harm to the Communist Soviet and Maoist empires, because they were undoubtedly driven by ideological internationalism. Even during that era, though, the ideological case became corrupted by the secret actions of the Western powers led by America. Operation Mockingbird alone undermined the moral ground on which US foreign policy stood. If you are prepared to manipulate your own population by lies, then you are no better than the Communists who do the same thing.
Apart from denials it ever existed, Mockingbird has been denounced as a Cold War mistake – only to be rolled out ten times as powerfully in recent years. Never in the Cold War were scientists and doctors cancelled, nor broadcasts from the Soviet Union blocked as they have been now, when we are not even at war. Never was such behavioural psychology applied, not the media so controlled, as now. Never was there such mass-surveillance of the population.
Perhaps I’ve said enough to indicate that there is nothing that sufficiently justifies US overt and covert geopolitical actions, certainly if the aim was to spread “democracy.” For in fact even US democracy has been undermined by the constant stream of lies: we now know that Donald Trump’s alleged “Russiagate” collusion with Putin was a deep-seated and long-sustained fiction from the US Establishment. Those accusations, rather than any Russian interference, undoubtedly affected the outcome of US elections. “Democracy” is clearly merely another buzz-word to fool the masses.
The last fig-leaf for this “One world, one USA” policy is that the prosperity and individual freedoms of the democracies in the US sphere have always been clearly superior to much of the rest of the world. But it would appear that this is only the result of the State’s former inefficiency. In 2022 the drive to increase the power of the Western system has not only destroyed democratic freedoms across the world (the most recent being the US-directed ousting of the immensely popular Imran Khan in Pakistan), but has increased totalitarian policies right across what was once the “free world,” and drastically decreased the standard of living of most of its citizens. No system that lies to make its own citizens less free, culturally corupted and increasingly poor is worthy to remain in power, still less to impose itself by force across the rest of the globe.
But the title of this piece is “British unexceptionalism.” One can perhaps understand the world’s most powerful nation, through delusions of grandeur, losing its moral compass in seeking to impose its own pattern on the world. But the Ukraine war has shown that you can broadly group America’s supporters into a divided, ideological and weak EU, trying to keep itself afloat, please NATO, and offer tattered olive branches to Russia; and the smaller, poorer, nations which can be cowed by the sheer power of American censure to vote its way.
What is interesting to me is that my own country, Britain, is often left out of these global assessments because it is subsumed into the USA like a 51st state. The British government and media are the most belligerent of all those outside the USA against Russia, and sometimes exceed even those of America. It is also increasingly clear that British Intelligence services have been most closely involved with the undoubtedly corrupted agencies of America, not only as regards Ukraine and Covid, but by their involvement in the witchhunt against Julian Assange, in Russiagate, in the covert mass-surveillance of UK citizens, and in the use of behavioural psychology to manipulate the public.
Now, as I have said, it is perhaps understandable for the elites of the US to want to rule the world. But why would the elites of Britain be so keen for America to rule the world? It’s not as if we really have a “most favoured nation” status, when by all accounts we weren’t even forewarned of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, so that our own people and equipment were left stranded. It’s not as if we would ever be more than a lackey of a US-led world system. Boris Johnson may have had a US passport until he stood for PM, and Rishi Sunak may have hedged his bets with a Green Card, but I think we paid off our World War 2 debt to America in 2006, and should have a measure of independence… even democratic independence. Yet the bulk of the population are losing jobs, money, health and freedoms because of the policies emerging from Washington. We’re closer to Russian nukes, as well, with the mere rump of an armed force to defend us. We may no longer have an empire, but do we have to be someone else’s sacrificial pawn?
Brexit was intended to give us access to all the world’s markets, but our slavish following of America has wiped out most opportunities in the new Eastern sphere, and reduced what we have to invest anyway. One has to conclude that, for Boris Johnson, unless he has simply been trapped in the system by threats, Brexit was just a means to gain power, and even that power is under threat because of his own casual dealings with truth.
So Britain appears to have little to gain by tying itself to a US which, from all appearances, is about to melt down politically, economically and socially and to lose much of its influence in the world. (How are the mighty fallen – the world owes so much to the genuinely benign influence of Americans.) Who in Britain can benefit from such a slavish alliance?
I guess one has to look at the bankers, the arms manufacturers, the oil companies, the green industrialists and so on, who have always profited from the misery of others. The political class now appears to be closely tied to such interests. But it’s certainly not to the benefit of the people, nor the nation as a commonwealth – the only justification for which such a political class even exists.
This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them. (Ezekiel 34:10)
Bring it on, Lord!
