The reckless warmongering ambitions of the Western powers know no bounds. Just as Washington and its imperial minions in the NATO axis are escalating the war in Ukraine against Russia with the utmost deranged folly, the Western rulers are also pushing ahead to bait China with provocations and threats. The psychopathic behavior of the collective Western so-called leaders shows beyond doubt that the Ukraine conflict is but one battlefield in a bigger global confrontation.
This week saw the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on a tour of East Asia where he boasted about coordinating nuclear forces with South Korea and Japan in a provocative and wanton show of strength towards China (under the guise of standing up to North Korea). Austin repeated baseless propaganda claims accusing China of threatening security in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere. The audacious inversion of reality distorts the fact that it is the United States and its allies who are militarizing the region with warships and missiles. Just this week, the U.S. announced the opening of four new military bases in the Philippines for the explicit purpose of launching a future war on China.
In tandem with the Pentagon chief, the NATO alliance’s civilian head Jens Stoltenberg was also touring East Asia where he warned that Russia and China posed a threat to international peace and security. Stoltenberg claimed that if Russia was not defeated in Ukraine then China would be the next problem. He urged South Korea and Japan to work with NATO to confront Russia and China.
In an address in Tokyo, Stoltenberg held forth: “What is happening in Europe today could happen in East Asia tomorrow. China is not NATO’s adversary [sic]. But its growing assertiveness and its coercive policies have consequences. For your security in the Indo-Pacific and ours in the Euro-Atlantic. We must work together to address them. Beijing is substantially building up its military forces, including nuclear weapons, without any transparency. It is attempting to assert control over the South China Sea, and threatening Taiwan.”
The same message was delivered this week to the Atlantic Council in Washington by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson who is a notorious liar and waffler who claimed preposterously in a BBC documentary aired this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intimidated him with assassination, called for more weapons supply to Ukraine in order to decisively defeat Russia because otherwise, China will be an additional threat. According to Johnson, who was forced to step down last summer as prime minister owing to his incorrigible lying and intrigues in Downing Street, Chinese President Xi Jinping is watching Ukraine closely with a view to invading Taiwan.
This week thus saw an extraordinary public bracketing of Russia and China as a common enemy that, Western powers assert, needs to be confronted militarily by the United States and its NATO minions. Defeating Russia is a prelude to defeating China, according to the Western powers.
The madcap drive for war among Western imperialists has taken on a global dimension. U.S. military commanders are publicly warning that a war with China may be only two years away, and this is while the NATO powers are currently waging a dangerously explosive war against Russia in Ukraine.
This incredible outbreak of psychopathy among American and European elites is directly related to at least two historic developments. Firstly, there is a systemic collapse in the Western capitalist economies. Widespread endemic poverty and mounting public unrest are severely challenging the conventional authority of Western governments which are locked in failed dead-end policies. This empirical desperation for the ruling elite to avoid social meltdown and revolution – “peering down the abyss” as our columnist Alistair Crooke elaborates this week – is manifesting in the age-old recourse to militarism and war as a way to resolve deep-seated and insoluble contradictions in the capitalist system.
Secondly, the Western powers are hellbent on preventing the emergence of a multipolar international order that supplants their erstwhile global dominance. In an interview for Strategic Culture Foundation this week Pepe Escobar presented a big-picture analysis of why the U.S. and its associated cabal of Western rulers are pushing the war in Ukraine against Russia. It is all about trying to shore up a failing U.S.-led unipolar world order, one that is bankrupt and corrupted from decades of criminal imperialist warmongering. Russia, China and other nations of the Global South subscribing to an emerging multipolar order based on international law, equality, cooperation and common security is anathema to the U.S. supremacist view of the world.
This is what’s really at stake in the year-old military conflict in Ukraine. This is not merely an isolated war to do with “defending democracy and freedom” of Ukraine, as the Western media absurdly confabulate. The Nazi regime in Kiev was built up deliberately since the CIA-backed coup in 2014 with the strategic objective of eventually confronting Russia after eight years of low-intensity aggression against the Donbass and Crimea.
However, after Russia, if it were to be defeated, China is the next target in a geo-strategic move by the Western powers to gain hegemonic control over the Eurasian hemisphere. The U.S. imperial and NATO mouthpieces are making the stakes clearer than ever with their own self-indicting arrogant words.
The bankrupt capitalist West can only but drool at the prospects of conquering Russia’s vast natural wealth and gaining neocolonial control of China in another would-be century of shame. Eurasia is the key to global dominance, as Western imperial planners have long noted.
It seems appropriate too that this week saw the 80th anniversary of the historic Soviet victory at Stalingrad over the Nazi Third Reich. That turning-point victory in February 1943 led to the defeat of Nazi Germany and its criminal imperialist ambitions. If that heroic battle had not been won, the history of the world would have followed a very different path.
Likewise today in Ukraine there is another historic battle going on, one whose outcome threatens the world with expanded global war and perhaps even nuclear catastrophe if the warmongering NATO imperialist machine is not defeated. Washington’s Reich Syndrome (also known as “exceptional narcissism”) which has reigned since the end of World War II and which has subjected the world to endless wars and relentless financial looting must be finally extirpated.
This year is promising to be a most consequential watershed in world history.
A U.S. 51-star flag has already been created just in case there ever is a 51st state.
Foreword
Joke of the Decade from the quisling Stoltenberg: ‘NATO is united’. (Amazing what a few million dollars deposited into their bank accounts will do to some people’s sense of truth-telling. Ask the President of the Ukraine, if you do not believe me). Apparently, Stoltenberg has not heard of Greece and Türkiye (whose President the NATO US tried to assassinate). Or Romania and Hungary. Or try Germany and Poland. Many Non-Norwegians, for example all Germans and Poles, are aware that Germany and Poland are not on good terms. The current Polish government wants even more money back from Germany in war reparations – yes, for that war which ended 78 years ago.
Meanwhile the Germans continue to use the expression ‘polnische Wirtschaft’, literally ‘Polish economy’, meaning total chaos. And then there are Germans who would like Silesia back, those cities like Breslau and after all, why not Danzig? As for the provincial Polish obsession with recovering their ‘greatness’, a Polish Empire from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, by taking over and perhaps ethnically cleansing the western Ukraine (remember Akcija Visla in 1947; the parents of some of my best friends lived through it), Germans shake their heads in despair. However, there is also another international ‘rift in the lute’, or crack in the violin creating disharmony. It could be fatal. Read on.
London and Washington
Nationalism is always inherently narcissistic because it is all about imagined self-preening superiority. Once upon a time this was an imagined racial superiority, also known as racism. Thus, the British novelist Delderfield wrote a series of novels about the Victorians (1) called ‘God is an Englishman’. ‘Send them gunboats and missionaries’ (in that order), proclaimed the Victorians with their patronising ‘civilising’ mission. Their imperialist poet Kipling spoke of the Maxim gun and the Bible. Same thing. ‘Wogs begin at Calais’, proclaimed the splendid isolationists, right up until the 1950s. I remember a conversation a few years ago with an Indian, who told me that very, very few Indians had accepted Protestantism in India because, as he said, apart from anything else, Protestant English ‘missionaries’ had told Indians that if they wanted to become Protestants (or ‘Christians’, as the Victorians miscalled it), they would first have to agree to wearing trousers. In other words, it was never an issue of faith or the spiritual, but of becoming second-class Englishmen.
A century later the same mentality came to rule over the USA, where it was called ‘White Supremacism’ and the people who accepted it were called WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. However, that is now all taboo. There is no such thing as racial superiority among modern woke Americans, only of moral superiority. This is in fact even more insulting and condescending nonsense, which means the acceptance of ‘our’ values, i.e. ‘freedom and democracy’. Thus, Victorian London imposed the Puritan Englishman as the model for salvation (‘wash more often and your skin will become as white as ours’), whereas ‘liberal’ Washington says ‘wear jeans and trainers, eat at MacDonalds, drink coca cola and watch Disney, and you too will be saved, even though you are the wrong skin colour’. Same old, same old.
Greatness and Decline
Among the Victorians there were politicians with personalities: Palmerston, Disraeli and Gladstone, the only one adored by Bulgarians. Of course, the first two were obnoxious imperialists – but they did have personalities. Among them we can also include the Kurd-gassing Churchill and the Pinochet-loving Thatcher. They were Victorians in their mentality. Racist to the core. But they did have personalities. It seems now that they were the last of the line.
After Thatcher came a series of nonentities, the believing in his own delusions Blair and then in 2022 the three geniuses: Johnson, whose name is now a synonym for a buffoon; Truss, who gave the world a new word, a ‘Trussism’, e.g. ‘Peru is the capital of Africa’ or ‘Inflation is overcome by printing more money’; and then there is the Indian banker, sunny Sunak, not quite a billionaire, but well on his way:
Say no more.
Such British geniuses should recall that the neocons who run NATO and then think that if they extend their war in the Ukraine and hope to drag it out for a decade or so, that will destroy Russia. Clearly, they live not in the real world, but in a virtual world. The longer it lasts, the greater the damage to the West. This is what they will create: Civil war in the USA. Bankruptcy in the UK. Collapse in Germany. Revolt in France and Southern Europe. Chaos in Eastern Europe. The end of NATO. The trouble is that, as Col. Douglas MacGregor always quotes his Spanish NATO friend as saying: ‘The USA is not another country, it is another planet’. Having been to different parts of the USA four times, visiting from the Old World, I can confirm the words of the Spanish officer.
Continents and Islands
The point is that those who live on Continents are always pragmatists. They have to be. They have to live alongside those who have different religions and therefore different cultures, speak different languages and eat different food. No American-style ‘one size fits all’ here. However, the UK is an island. When you live on an island, you can run away to Dunkirk and go home for cups of tea in Brexitland, as the Germans call it. Britain can be to the USA what New Zealand is to Australia, i. e. a bit of a joke, as Texans say, ‘that iddy-biddy liddle island off the coast of Europe’.
So, before you make the choice, just remember that the USA is also an island. Or more precisely Northern America (the USA and the Frozen North, also called Canada, is an island. (Mexico is neither South, nor Central, America, but it still belongs to Latin America, not Northern America; remember Trump’s promised wall?). And since Northern America is thousands of kilometres away from any Continent, it is not like Britain, thirty kilometres from a Continent, but a very insular island.
And just remember that if you want to be taken over by Washington and become the 51st State, the Americans are really bad losers. Bad losers are those who if they can’t have what they want, throw their toys out of the pram and destroy everything. They would sooner choose self-destruction, as they cannot destroy others. Coming second is not an option for bad losers. And when their toys are nuclear, be careful. The British, say what you will, are not like that. (Probably because they have been coming second for a whole century now, so they have an awful lot of experience).
Bad Losers
I can think of half a dozen examples, but the most ‘actuel’, as the French say, is Meghan Markle. Here we are, the American actress who wanted to become a Princess, so then she could be ‘the Queen of England’. They would not let her, as she came too late and snatched the wrong baby, the ‘Spare’ (Harry) and not the Heir (William). In any case, William sems to have some backbone, whereas the depraved, drug-taking, Afghan-murdering Harry appears to be the classic weak-willed man, who will do anything, including maligning his own family, for the sake of going to bed with an American actress. (Remember his great-great uncle, the Hitler-saluting Edward VIII?) Another case of Hugh Grant and the strong American woman. And Meghan Markle has simply thrown her toys out of her pram, because she could not get her way, using Harry as her ventriloquist’s dummy. The classic American bad loser. It is a bit like homosexuals who are in denial: ‘I hate you and I am jealous of you because you are normal and therefore I am going to destroy you’. And that is what necons, Victoria Nuland a prime example, do.
Now this family argument between Harry and the Family Business in itself is not about the big political questions, but it is symptomatic of the ‘special relationship’ (i.e. London licking the boots of Washington every time Washington has walked on some turd). The fact is that the German House of Windsor is on its way out, Harry, Duke of California, or not. The fact is that there is no war between the Ukraine and Russia. The war is between Washington and Moscow, and quite a few British people are starting to cotton on to this fact. The Ukrainians, like most Western Europeans, including the British, are just naïve pawns in the Great American Game in their struggle to maintain their world domination. And therefore Britain is going to have a choice to make quite soon. Neither the dying and obsolete gerontocracy of the grandchildren of Nazis, known as the EU, nor insular English nationalist Brexit, but Eurasia or the 51st State. Choose wisely. You might get a better deal from those who are 21 miles away than from those who are 3,000 miles away.
Johnson, who was born in New York and Sunak who studied at Stanford, be careful of bad losers. They can get you into big trouble, especially if they decide to throw their nuclear toys out of their pram on top of you. As the Victorian poet Lord Tennyson wrote in 1859:
It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute.
9 January 2023
Note:
1. Just for the sake of historical accuracy, let it be said that the whole 19th century period is miscalled ‘Victorian’. It should have been called Alexandrinian, as Queen Victoria’s real first name was Alexandrina, held in honour of her godfather, Tsar Alexander I.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 