A few months ago, Amanda Erickson wrote a highly commendable example of state-sanctioned propaganda for the Washington Post, projecting America’s well-documented support of the mercenary Mujahideen and white-washing of puritanical Wahhabism onto the Russians. The notion that Russian support for Iran and Syria has contributed more to the rise of extremist fundamentalism across the Middle East than has the unprovoked, militaristic “diplomacy” orchestrated by the United States against a baker’s dozen different non-Zionist nations throughout the region, is contrary to history and reality.
By no coincidence is this also the same mentality on display more and more from America’s police chiefs, with violence committed by police blamed upon apparently unprovoked anti-violence protestations such as the Black Lives Matter movement rather than the protests serving as a response to the excessive violence of the police themselves, which claims more lives than most standing armies of the world. This world view can probably be counted among the things learned by America’s law enforcement officials while undergoing special training in Israel.
Assertions that the opposite of reality is reality are painful to see unfold. The recent report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence imagining Russian interference in the last Presidential election cycle is nothing less. Shane Dixon Kavanaugh reported that the United States has interfered in 45 different foreign elections, although Senator Thom Tillis puts the number at 81 since the mid-1940s, and without counting coups or military interventions. I bet it would be easier to count foreign elections which American powers did not interfere with.
The ODNI report’s insistence on mistaking RT America’s news coverage for an anti-American plot is verifiable insanity. It represents the same polarity, that discord in reaction to the business interests of the American government is coincidentally the fault of the victims of the business interests of the American government, as opposed to said business interests.
Adam Johnson made a strong argument on behalf of seeing the forest for the trees on this point, but it was actually an article by him from months before that really nailed the situation. From that earlier article:
“Also missing from the posturing over RT is a bit of perspective. For decades the United States has supported similar tactics overseas to push their agenda — from the Voice of America and its assortment of spin offs to “pro-democracy” initiatives that often, with the help of Western NGO and think tanks, funnel money horizontally by sponsoring pundits who write in foreign media outlets. The professional hand-wringing classes make a distinction: that US-backed media are truthful and held to higher standards. While this is true in a strict sense, often times this simply means the United States is better at information war, not that it does less of it. The CIA helped produce, without disclosure, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, two glowing CIA commercials. The US government, via USAID, secretly created a fake social-media platform and infiltrated the hip-hop scene in Cuba to “stir unrest” and undermine the government. The Department of Defense runs a $100 million program to manipulate social media overseas, complete with fake sock-puppet profiles in “Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.” How many Americans are aware of these practices? Probably a lot fewer than know about Putin’s evil cable network.”
Edward R. Murrow’s powerful anti-McCarthy speech from 1954 is easily much more relevant now. Yet because truth can only be embraced by those on the receiving end, such sentiments would never be echoed constructively on any commercial news platform in the western world today.
While the United States maintains more military bases than does every other nation on Earth combined, many Americans remain oblivious of their military’s activities, even with approximately half of each and every paycheck’s taxes going to the Department of Defense. Most Americans exist in abject denial over the whole lot of it actually.
When Obama was first running for President in 2007, a large part of his platform was to bring the troops back home, as America had long been entrenched in pointless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq arguably going all the way back to the 1970s. A decade later, America is currently engaged with ongoing military conflicts across roughly a dozen countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Along the way Obama also expanded the reach of the drone program, furthered the militarization of domestic law enforcement, and dramatically increased the powers of the countless surveillance programs; accomplishing all of this while doubling the national debt over the course of his two terms in office. But the point is that he used the peaceniks, for their votes. And upon winning his seat of power failed to do anything to keep those promises or to appease those peaceniks by any other means. This was due to his Presidential post actually being in service to the empire, to the insatiable billionaires always craving more, more and more.
Around 95% of the world’s military bases belong to the United States, which maintains something like 800 official sites outside of its own borders. When we consider that the poorest half of the 190 or so nation-states are unlikely to afford any actual military facility of their own, this does not seem too far-fetched. Palestine, for example, has neither an air force or a navy despite weekly attacks from Israel’s air force and navy. So this is theoretically the reasoning for America to own military bases in about 130 different countries, in protection of those who cannot do for themselves. America’s proxy allies in NATO allow the United States to keep bases within their borders, particularly close to Russia’s borders, but god forbid Russia or other perceived enemies of the United States establish bases just outside of America’s own borders, like in southern Canada or northern Mexico. Even with perceived allies, nobody in America could consider allowing France, Germany or Italy to setup bases of their own on American soil.
And with these numbers, nobody is going to hurt America unless everybody decides to hurt America. This is important to keep in mind, so soon after xenophobia was declared the word of the year for 2016, and the current Presidency of Trump is already loaded with fear-mongering and red-baiting galore. But this is honestly not a Trump thing or an Obama thing or even a Bush thing. It is the spooky, billionaire-servicing Military Industrial Complex continuing its game no matter which figurehead the unwashed masses are offered to focus on. Much of this pathos was perfected in a report written by an obsessive think-tank of Washington insiders in the early 1990s called Project for a New American Century, whose counsel has been actively sought by every Presidential administration to date.
They laid out a battle-plan for destabilizing the entire Middle East through alliances with both the Israeli government and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and heavily influenced America’s foreign policy ever since. It’s non-partisan. Earlier initiatives had been tried by Henry Kissinger decades before, working on behalf of American business interests upset by Syria forming an alliance with Iran with greater aims to unite their region into a sort of United Nations of the Middle East. But the idea of a non-Zionist union drove DC completely nuts, as it does to this day.
The idea of arming local crazies to overthrow their own government was a tactic that the Reagan and Thatcher administrations deployed in the 1980s, which was so much easier than the old CIA way of just assassinating leaders and providing ongoing support for whatever puppet regime inserted thereafter. Money and weapons are given to the local gang-bangers and insane asylum escapees, which the press back home refers to as moderate rebel groups so that Americans won’t feel the need to be distracted from Netflix. Violent “religious” sects numbering into the hundreds or even thousands really would never have happened without American tax dollars to grow them, and still everybody forgets that Muslims themselves are the main victims of terrorism across the Middle East.
The Arab Spring of 2011 was 100% instigated by the enterprise of America, Israel and Saudi Arabia to prevent a “United Nations of the Middle East” from ever happening. They want the land and the oil under it, and all White House administrations work to this end, similar to how McDonald’s keeps selling the burgers no matter who is doing the cooking. Trump’s recent travel ban infers that nobody from these targeted nations will be permitted to flee with their lives or otherwise survive the “popular uprisings” of ISIS and other militants vetted, trained, armed and funded by America, the Saudis and Israel.
Something unlearned from American history textbooks is that when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, thereby officially drawing the Americans into the biggest war ever (forgetting Atlantis), they were doing so in direct retaliation to the severe economic sanctions placed upon them by the Americans, for entering the war. America had publicly avoided the war, while hypocritically giving aid to its allies and sanctions to its enemies. So it can clearly be argued that Japan was acting in self-defense, because if America had actually avoided the war it would never have been attacked. We put ourselves into these scenarios and then play the victim, when our resources could be so much better spent elsewhere.
Now, fast-forward to the last couple of years, as America enforces similarly severe economic sanctions against Iran, and tried to draw the United Nations into doing the same. Both China and Russia voted against such measures, as they were every bit as interested in oil from and arms sales to the region as is the United States. Free market Capitalism invests in death infinitely more than it does life.
So as we give Israel and Saudi Arabia any and all assistance as they dick-measure with Palestine and Iran and Syria, and drop daily bombs on the children of the poorest nation in the Middle East, Yemen, all for the purported sake of protecting our economic and political interests in the region, we should be aware that others have as much right to protect their own economic and political interests in the region. Russia could give to the enemies of our friends degrees of military and monetary support almost on par with what American bureaucrats have misappropriated from their tax-payers. Once again, we play the games of puppet-masters while the same insanity behind the Iran Contra Affair of the 1980s dusts the history off itself for a return appearance to the world stage. History doesn’t repeat itself, it regurgitates itself.
And for what end? Because we have created this bizarrely perverse industry of obsessively manufacturing terrorists the world over? Like no other nation is frightened enough by American nukes, or by American military bases in their backyards, or by American terrorism? Or by McDonald’s?
Even if troubles in the Middle East were merely a case of unchecked holy war, involvement from outsiders in warring theologies should be limited to physical humanitarian aid. Unwelcome are politics or business transactions concerning oil or armaments or anything else that might sustain conflict. If we are not trying to keep everyone alive, and without playing favorites, then we are doing it all wrong. Meaning that the American government and its business interests are indeed acting in the wrong.
To the DC establishment, the fact that two-fifths of all bridges in the country are at least 50 years old and have never received any major reconstruction work, or that the average age of America’s dams is more than half a century, is all of less importance than the estimated 7 million spent hourly in the name of homeland security. This is maniacally insane, intimidating the world at the expense of there being nothing left to defend.
Workers across the country have been fired from their jobs for even trying to protest this complete and total lack of logic in America’s foreign policy, the empowering way that it breathes life into the many problems of the world under the guise of spreading freedom. Caleb Maupin wrote a sharp piece discussing how the very concept of populism has been carjacked to mean the polar opposite of what it always otherwise represented, and how most Americans are too stupid to even realize the shift. Everybody should be seething with anger, not delirious with nationalistic pride.
The only real threats to the American people and to the rest of the world are the business interests of the American government funneled through its military industrial complex. There are no greater liars, no greater cheaters, no greater killers. It is wrong for anyone to accept this as normal, to allow the vilification of anything not welcoming the scheming of madmen with open arms and moist panties. Media does a purposefully horrible job at keeping its audience informed, but the fact that so many Americans can so easily ignore the numbers of their military’s reach or worse, find justification for any of it, is a raging nightmare. How anybody can hold the conflicting beliefs that America is the greatest but that threats are everywhere is the largest example of projecting a guilty conscience the world may ever know.
It is wrong to be more concerned with a movie review than hourly bombing campaigns. It is wrong to give banks any business after they’ve already stolen hundreds of billions from the public. It is wrong to file taxes when the money has been used to drone more children than “enemy combatants”. It is wrong to give money away to foreign state-sponsors of violent extremists while hundreds of domestic cities suffer contaminated public drinking water. It is wrong to fund proxy wars and the destabilization of other governments when millions of Americans are homeless and/or starving to death. Nobody has any business possessing even a single nuclear weapon, yet here we have stockpiles. And all while education and healthcare in America are insulting charades for those who need them. America is just plain wrong, in every conceivable way.