America's New Manifest Destiny

It is truly amazing to watch the mainstream mudia and the U.S. imperial establishment jerk itself up into an hysteria of righteousness over the Ukraine. Simon Tisdall of the UK FemWoke Guardian, gives the issue the usual man-hate gender twist by calling Putin “a rogue male on the rampage, threaten[ing] to start a war no one wants.”

The actual rampage is the petard that Russia is threatening the “independence” of the Ukraine by massing 100,000 troops along its border with that country. Of course, it must be said in the name of equal petardism that Russian pieties about troops just engaging in pic-nic's and manoeuvres don't hold much vodka. Nor the claim that what it does within its borders is its own business. Mobilizations of troops tend to make everyone in the vicinity rather jittery as the “massing” of troops along various borders on 30 July 1914 rather proved.

But as usual, U.S.U.K. has a truly marvellous capacity for tunnel vision and forgetting anything over two days old. Russian troops area amassing!! Yes; does anyone ask why? Of course they do, but their answer (hostile intent! and male rage!) ignores everything that has preceded in the past 30 years. Is the cabal that runs USUK really that stupid? No, of course not. They are just hoping everyone else will be.

As a premise, it will be understood that all states have “spheres of interests” -- geographical locations which are deemed critical to either their economies and/or military defence. Mexico is unquestionably within the U.S. “sphere of interest.” Can anyone imagine what the reaction would be in Washington it Russia started funding paramilitary militias in Mexico, as the US has done in the Ukraine?

You would see Murka's political class swinging from the vines wildly shrieking like enraged chimpanzees.

The Ukraine is Russia's Mexico. Punto y Final.

Russia has always had an understood sphere of influence in Eastern and Southern Europe. No one in their right mind can doubt this. This sphere is grounded in ethnic affiliation (Pan Slavism), economic relations and military necessity. Russia is essentially landlocked and access to the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the South have always been deemed existentially critical to Russia since the days of Peter the Great.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, there arose a fear in the West that Russia would use this sphere of influence as a politico-military springboard for “fomenting revolution” in the West. In other words, the fear was that Russia (now irreconcilably opposed to the liberal democratic money making way of life) would push its sphere of influence westward.

That fear was absolutely well grounded, especially after Stalin seized the reigns. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin had swallowed major territorial concessions as the price of getting some leeway to establish his New Communist Harmony in Russia proper. But the collapse of Imperial Germany, suddenly altered the equation. Where there had been a wall now their was an open path. Russia went to war against Poland. (It lost and if you ask any Pole he will tell you that Poland saved the West.)

(The Russian version is that it was only defending against subversive incursions by the West into its own territory, during the Red-White Civil War. This is true enough, but it also studiously ignores Comintern Doctrine calling for international revolution, next and most proximately in Europe.)

Once Poland had bought the West some Atmenraum (breathing room), the United Kingdom and France went to work building a cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union. The idea was to put in place a string of authoritarian-fascio-monarchies from Finland to Romania. And it was done.

In British and French planning this was a (mirabilis dictu) a two-way cordon. As the saying went: to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out. The French in particular were intent on squeezing Germany from both the east and west which is why France occupied the German Rhineland and had defence treaties with Czechoslovakia and Poland. What could be more ideal?

However, when the West's economic house of cards collapsed, the policy required revision. Thanks to the West's own economic stupidity (and the Depression was the result of stupidity), the West in general and Germany and Spain in particular were now fertile ground for proletarian revolution. Now the policy became: keeping the Americans in, the Russians out, and the German people down. This is what is today inappropriately called appeasement.

Why did England and the France “turn a blind eye” to the Nazis? Let's review. They had a policy of keeping Germany “down” -- i.e. indebted and militarily weak. Now they suddenly supported a man who vowed to repudiate the debt and vowed to make Germany militarily strong. So... Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay suddenly said: “Oh yeah.... we were wrong. A strong, threatening Germany is what we really wanted all along.” Really?

I have a bridge to sell you in case you were interested.

Better to support an anti-communist dictatorship in Germany than let the Reds get a foothold in the very centre of Europe. From the Allies' point of view Germany now became the key link in the chain of containment against Russia and Revolution. But the strategy had major and obvious flaws. France had promised to “defend” Czechoslovakia if the latter were attacked. But in the days before air lifts the only way she could do this was by marching through Germany, repeating 1914 all over again. Ooops. Daladier woke up to this harsh reality at the Munich Conference. Similarly, no one in England was very bothered by Hitler's talk about lebensraum in the East. The Commies under the German boot didn't sound so terribly awful after all. The only difficulty here was that before reaching “room” in Russia, Germany would have to march through Poland. Ooops, again.

Germany always was and remains an astonishing, dynamic country. The calculation behind appeasement was that a strong Germany could be used as a bulwark against Russia but at the same time contain its strength 'more or less' within a sphere of influence somewhere in Central Europe -- that the revived giant could be kept within a box... or maybe a slightly enlarged box give or take a Czechoslovakia or two. Of course when the Giant-in-the-Box sprung out to help defeat the Commies in Spain, no one in England or France expressed much concern about that. Yeah... Spain wasn't central Europe but who cares about Spain anyways so long as it doesn't go commie.

No wonder Hitler called the Allied leaders “little worms”.

Well... we all know where all of this led to. The Western Allies got their cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union, and then some. Hitler did exactly what he could have been expected to do when and, when he didn't do it in the way Britain preferred, she declared war on Germany and precipitated the Second World War. (Yes, you read that right.)

After Germany and Russia both lay in ruins, Stalin rather obviously vowed never to allow Western strangulation again. The Soviet Union moved into and occupied all of Eastern Europe and the eastern half of Germany to boot. From the Russian point of view, it made absolute sense both economically and militarily.

Once again the cry of “Containment!” went up in the West, with George F. Kennan being the town crier this time around. Only now the cordon sanitaire ran through France and the Low Countries plus Turkey, Greece and Spain. The idiocy of the Cold War is summed up in Churchill's famous “Iron Curtain” speech. Think about it. A curtain is not an instrument of aggression. It is a shield not a sword. So now we found ourselves building a chain of containment against Russia's shield of containment. Two sides buffering against one another. Poor France. Once a player now reduced to what was in effect America's Poland, a buffer state against Russia.

The United States and the Soviet Union, having each established their containment-buffer zones, as effectuated in the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances, now went to work confronting one another along the periphery: Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, the Congo, and Vietnam. To a certain extent these peripheral confrontations were driven by access to resources but, for the most part, they were simply ideological. Each side believed they offered a better way of organizing society. Because capitalism is a system driven by the ideal of making money, Western “ideology” could never be entirely divorced from filthy lucre. Russia imposed a plunder economy on eastern Europe, but its support of Castro's Cuba was a net economic loss. Its aim was to undermine pro-U.S. regimes in Latin America and advance the communist revolution. Similarly there was no economic advantage to America's incursion into Vietnam. It was done merely to maintain “credibility.”

And so it went, until the Soviet Union seemingly collapsed over night. In actuality, its collapse began when Nixon and Khrushchev argued over a washing machine. In what was know as the “Kitchen Debate,” Nixon showed off the latest in consumer hardware to Khrushchev arguing that no one supplied the housewives of the world with better washers and kitchen appliances. Big Nikita had no ready answer. You could see it in his downcast face. When it came to providing its people with consumer junk, the Socialist Paradise failed. First to put a dog into space, yes! Last on the the spin cycle. Khrushchev returned to the Kremlin with new orders to beat the capitalist west at their own game. The Consumer Race was on.

At this point, the Soviet Union lost its raison d'etre and with it the cold war. Socialism was no longer an alternative way of life, an alternative vision for society, but merely an alternative way of achieving the same goals as the West. Within months the first Walmarts opened on Red Square only that it was called GUM -- Russian initials for Great Universal Merchandise Store, where everything -- literally everything from sausage to saws to skirts was offered under one roof. If the Russians expected to produce better crap than the Germans, the Japanese or the Americans, they were sorely mistaken. Russian consumer products became a lacklustre joke: imitative and poorly made. The point and shoot LOMO was so bad, that it has since become a speciality artifact in the camera world with its own brand of imaging known as Lomography. Now manufactured by venture capitalists of course.

The demise of the Soviet Union was inevitable. Simply put, socialism -- as a system -- is not designed to churn out an endless cycle of consumer goods for its own sake. It is typically said that socialism is not “as efficient” as capitalism. That is a canard. Capitalism is an incredibly wasteful and inefficient system. What capitalism is excellent at is shifting and hiding the costs. At this, socialism sucks. Cambodia's Pol Pot understood this which is why he made consumerism a capital crime.

Nevertheless from the late 50's to the late 80's the Party of Lenin struggled to produce Ozzie and Harriet on the Volga. It was a valiant effort, the way a hunchback trying to do ballet is a valiant effort. But what ultimately did the Soviet Union in was its inability to maintain an arms race and a consumer race going at the same time. Reagan set out to bankrupt the Soviet Union and because the Soviet system was lousy at shifting and hiding costs, Reagan succeeded.

In an effort to make socialism work more efficiently to better meet the needs of Soviet citizens the Soviet leadership began to adopt elements of liberal economics, by gradually unregulating the economy and, concomitantly, freeing up the political process. At the same time they sought a rapprochement with the West. It is difficult to imagine exactly what the leadership was thinking. Tolstoy would probably have said, that the leadership was simply following its own loosening grip. Certainly, one by one of the countries in Eastern Europe and one by one of the various Asian republics that had formed part of the Soviet Union, broke away and declared independence. Finally, the citizens of Russia themselves broke away.

If the Russian leadership was at a loss within circumstances beyond their control, the West most certainly was not. It played a long, multi-faceted game aimed at undermining the Soviet Union -- a game which took full advantage of a virulently anti-communist pope who all but acted as a one man Fifth Column in Poland. The countries within the Russian grip began to squirm and the more they squirmed, the more the grip loosened and the more it loosened the more they squirmed engaging in spontaneous emigration, labor agitation, political demonstrations and demanding economic liberalization. One would have to be a fool not to think that the U.S. was not covertly assisting these movements through the device of NGO's.

But Russia was not powerless. It still controlled the state apparatus, and there were those within the various governments, most notably East Germany, that demanded a more Stalinism, not less!! The Kremlin was stuck within a dilemma of alternatives.

The critical moment came in 1989 when the Deutsches Volkes demanded reunification. Autonomy for Azerbaijan or Poland was one thing, Germany was another for the simple reason that half of Germany belonged to NATO whereas no part of Azerbaijan or Poland did. Were Poland to leave the Warsaw Pact, it would become merely a militarily neutral buffer state. A united Germany within NATO meant the abandonment of the very foundation of Russian policy in Europe since the capture of Berlin in 1945

I have not read that Russia proposed the withdrawal of West Germany from NATO as the price of unification with East Germany. If it did make such a proposal it did not lift off ground. In the end, Russia simply agreed to German re-unification within NATO. Just as astonishingly it did so on the basis of a gentleman's assurance that “with this last demand” the West would not demand more. (Where oh where had that refrain been heard before?)

U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker's “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification. But nothing firm was put into writing.

It is hardly surprising that Gorbachev was almost assassinated by the hard liners. But the denouement that followed was swift. Without the cornerstone of Soviet post war “architecture” the structure fell like the proverbial dominoes. One by one, in swift successions, the Baltic and Balkan states declared their independence. In Russia itself a power struggle ensued between Stalinist hardliners, Gorbacheffian socialist liberalizers, and Yeltsin's neo-liberal capitalists. That, in gross, is the struggle that ensued in all of the territories of the former Soviet Union.

James Baker had not lied. The U.S. did not demand “one inch eastward” only a mile. Corporate operatives, NGO's and the CIA all went to work “investing” in Eastern Europe and carving up the Russian turkey for themselves. They introduced “shock treatment” market reforms in Poland, Russia and elsewhere. After all freedom is not without pain! Yeltsin, now a clueless alcoholic played the role of Herr Professor Ratt to Bill Clinton's Blue Angel. Half clown, half puppet, he allowed Russia to become the West's plaything. The loss of state control was so bad that the United States enacted legislation to assist in restoring government control over Russia's nuclear arsenal, lest Russian scientists, desperate to pay for living expenses, barter away plutonium to shady operatives.

By the end of the 1990's Russia was indeed reduced to playing the clown on stage, crowing like a cock while eggs were cracked on its pate. But whereas Herr Professor Ratt stumbled in shock and shame back to his classroom and died, a man called Vladimir Putin walked on stage to restore Russia's resolve and dignity.

The New York Slime can prattle all it wants, but Putin will go down in history as Russia's saviour. It is not easy to bring order out of chaos and Putin had his work cut out for him. First he had to stop the plundering of the country by capitalist wolves (foreign and domestic). Next he had to stabilize living standards and pensions (at least somewhat). Last but not least he had to restore Russia's military competence (the Russian fleet had literally been reduced to an assortment of rusting hulks in the Crimea). Most importantly, he had to forge a new national consensus out of the ideological cacophony.

In this latter respect, Putin was brilliant, in effect composing a Parsifal out of the themes of Russian history. He acknowledged the “mistakes” of the Communist era but did not disparage it. He paraded the glories of Imperial Russia, but made the Communist victory over Fascism the cornerstone of his new Russian nationalism. Lastly he restored the Orthodox Church to its former privileges and married it to a restored military. Communism as religion was dead. When it came to the economy, Putin adopted the Chinese model of state-directed laissez faire.

That marriage between government and corporate power is, in fact, the model pursued by all governments in this new global, neo-liberal world. The differences are those of mechanisms and degree. When Putin speaks of “our partners in the West” he is not being polite. Even as the New York Slime rails about Putin's authoritarianism, his alleged poisonings and his “interference” in the sanctity of Murkan elections, Exxon Mobil and Gazprom are happily co-venturing in the Arctic. Putin understands business.

But for all his accomplishments, Putin's Russia is in a weak position. It is not the economic power house that China became and it is nowhere equal to the United States in military power. Although Putin has taken steps to insulate his country from Western sanctions, Russia is not immune to them. Thus, Russia under Putin has been surprisingly acquiescent about the West's inching eastward. And inching eastward is Murka's New Manifest Destiny.

Actually not so new. General George C. Patton got the drift back in 1945. He understood quite clearly that Germany was not a systemic adversary. Noxious as its social and racial policies might have been (at least to some in the establishment), it was still a capitalist country within the capitalist orbit. The Soviets understood this. Even Churchill understood it. Most of Europe understood it which is why (if truth be told) the Nazis had significant anti-Bolshevik support throughout Europe, from Spain to Finland. If Patton was shit-canned six feet under, it was not because he harboured the wrong object of desire but because he was crazy enough to think that the U.S. could accomplish it.

Patton completely overestimated our capacities. The idea that Germany having shed its last blood amid a scene of utter devastation was in any way capable of suddenly rising up as a Phoenix and charging East was madness. The idea that the U.S. Army was capable of rolling back the Red Army was, to put it mildly, overweening pride.

In June 1944, 20 days after D-Day, the Russians launched Operation Bagration, their own final push against the Reich. The distance from Normandy to Berlin was 1,200 km/745 miles, which was the same as the distance from the Kiev longitude to the Oder River (60 km east of Berlin). But although both sides had a roughly equal distances to traverse, the Eastern Front was immensely broad. The distance from Riga in the north to Odessa in the south amounted to 1,500 km/ or 930 miles. The Russians amassed 2,3 million troops, the Allies 1.4 million, although this was later increased and does not count American forces in Italy. The Germans, with under half the men on either front, fought the advances for 10 months. Everyone was sick of war and the notion that the Americans could now somehow launch Operation Barbarossa II was, to put it mildly, lunacy.

But Patton, Himmler and like minds were right. The two systems were incompatible. That they were, for the moment, stalemated allies did not mean that, eventually, one would not have to give way to the other. Now in 1989, that the Soviet Union collapsed, the West (i.e. the U.S.) began where it left off in 1945. What are today called “Neocons” are really only the George Patton wing of the American Establishment.

The unification of Germany brought the NATO presence up to the Oder River and, with this much achieved, the Neocons went to work. First among them was the Russophobic Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski whose geopolitical primer, The Grand Chessboard (1997), argued that the vast Eurasian land mass (from Portugal to the Bering Straights) was the field on which America's supremacy would be ratified and challenged in the years to come. Central to his thesis was the premise that no Eurasian challenger (read Russia) should emerge to dominate Eurasia and thus also challenge U.S. global pre-eminence.

The sorts of thing Brzezinski had in mind were evidence by the fact that it was he who convinced President Carter to give aid to the Taliban in order to suck the Russians into the Afghanistan trap. (They got sucked.)

Brzezinski's book was by no means the first to point to this game. Dick Cheney's 1993 “Defense Planning Guide” operated from the same premise of maintaining U.S. “pre-eminence” and advocated various strategic moves into Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, simultaneous with incursions into the Middle East. The mentality of the American military establishment was put on full display in the Neocon white paper Rebuilding America's Defenses (September 2000), published by the Project for the New American Century, a neocon think tank for the military-industrial complex.

"Retreat ... would call America’s status as the world’s leading power into question. As we have seen, even a small failure like that in Somalia or a halting and incomplete triumph as in the Balkans can cast doubt on American credibility. The failure to define a coherent global security and military strategy during the post-Cold-War period has invited challenges; states seeking to establish regional hegemony continue to probe for the limits of the American security perimeter.

“The pressing new problem of European security – instability in Southeastern Europe – will be best addressed by the continued stability operations in the Balkans by U.S. and NATO ground forces supported by land-based air forces. Likewise, the new opportunity for greater European stability offered by further NATO expansion will make demands first of all on Tomahawk cruise missiles have been the Navy weapon of choice in recent strike operations. ground and land-based air forces. 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.

The PNAC paper became wrapped into Bush's official National Security Policy of 2002. Could it be more clear in black and white? And that policy has been American doctrine for 20 years during which time the United States (and its Tag-along Allies) invaded Iraq (which had nothing to do with rooting out weapons of mass destruction), invaded Afghanistan (which had nothing to do with “smoking out” Al-Qaeda) and, one by one, incorporated the states of Eastern Europe into NATO and the global neoliberal economy.

Where was the “threat” justifying NATO expansion? At the time this enlargement of NATO took place there was no Soviet Army to speak of it. The army was a husk and the navy was rusting away. Russian infrastructure was being carved up and devoured by private investors with no allegiance to anything but their Swiss bank accounts. Ah!!! But in the inimitable language of the Neocon mavens, Russia was now a potential threat -- a possible harm that might possibly arise in the future.

One really has to wrap ones mind around the warped neocon mentality. The maintenance of American preeminence and credibility requires us to roam the world seeking to deter anything and anyone who might possibly present a threat to us at some future time. Preemptive deterrence. This is the “policy” of a school yard bully, plain and simple.

It is also important to recognize that current neocon full spectrum dominance includes everything from nuclear and conventional strategic was to secret black ops. And those black ops include ostensibly spontaneous “Orange Revolutions” organized at the grass roots by NGO's and the CIA. That is why Putin expelled Western NGO's. These subversive operations then get wrapped up in aspirational sentimentalities and peddled to a gullible public by the New York Slime.

That is what happened in the Ukraine. Anyone who swallows the New York Slime's version of the Maidan Revolution (Young Millenials singing “Love, Love, Love” -- I kid you not) should pursue a career in deep throating.

To say that the Ukraine had always been within the Russian sphere of influence would be a major understatement. As stated, the two countries have been tied together in much the same sort of way the United States and Mexico are bound together by geography, history and economics. Suffice to say that as of 2010, Russia was the Ukraine's principal trading partner. In that year, Victor Yanukovych was elected president of the Ukraine. The Great Obambi even hailed his free and fair election. This was the sweet talk the precedes a seduction. Previous governments in Kiev had been making overtures to the E.U., and Yanukovych was no exception. However, a comprehensive trade agreement with the EU would have impacted Ukraine's trade agreements with Russia and Yanukovych began treading water.

The situation was complicated by the fact that although the Ukraine might have been the bread basket of the East but it was a financial basket case. It needed loans; or more accurately said more loans. In 2013 the Ukraine asked for €20 billion (US$27 billion) in loans and aid from the EU. The EU counter offered €610 million ($838 million). Russia was willing to offer $15 billion, as well as cheaper gas prices. In addition, the EU demanded major changes to Ukraine's regulations and laws, but Russia did not.

When it was perceived that Yanukovych was inclining to accept the Russian offer, protests erupted in an early Spring. When the government suppressed the protests, the West imposed sanctions and things spiralled down from there. The West wanted Ukraine on the cheap and was prepared to use subversion to get it.

As Tolstoy observed, it is impossible to strategize history. There is never any one single motive or cause for a particular event or development. Rather history is an ineffable calculus of millions of individual impulses arising from their own reasons and coalescing or diverging in time. Although Ukrainians are part of the greater Slavic family of peoples, the nation itself is polyglot being formed by myriad migrations into the country. Over time it has been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, independent, and part of the Soviet Union. It is religiously divided between western and eastern rite Christians. With such an amazingly complex and convoluted history it is no surprise that everyone can cite precedents back to 890 A.D. for whatever position they want to hold. That said, its principal division today is between Russophone Ukrainians in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west.

In 2013, there certainly were peaceful protests, in the nature of public assemblies, on the part of western Ukrainians preferring affiliation with the E.U. But generally “overlooked” (i.e. suppressed) in the Western mudia was the fact that the strongest and most vocal among these pro West protestors were those Ukrainians who were so militantly nationalistic as to be easily confused with neo-Nazis. (And that's being as diplomatic as possible.) Chief among these were the Svoboda party, the descendant of WW2 collaborators with the Germans, Pravdi Sektor and, most recently, the Azov Brigade, the latter two being open and active militias, with a strong anti-semitic accent. (Unfortunately, in its crusade to sanitize reality, Youtube has taken down many of these “offensive” and “distressing” videos, meaning that one is forced to rely on official media slime for his dosage of “truth.”)

The European remembers of the EU and NATO were reluctant to push things too hard but the United States was not. “Fuck EU” said Undersecretary of State, Virginia Nuland, who funnelled support to anyone willing to take on Yanukovych by whatever means. Guess whom.

Once the “militants” physically toppled the government, Western technocrats and advisors came in to tidy up the situation by installing more “acceptable” puppets. No doubt western agents pulled some of the militants aside and strongly advised them not to flash 14-88 signs from within Parliament..... jeezus!

To anyone sitting in Moscow, the end-game of all this was clear. Ukraine was being dragged by force and violence into the EU/NATO sphere of influence, and with the dragging would come Crimea, home port of the Russian southern fleet. The Kremlin knew all about The Grand Chessboard and “pushing America's security eastward”. Putin reacted swiftly and unequivocally, as he should have. No leader anywhere can allow his country to deprived of its major naval installation.

Needless to say, the western mudia, particularly in the United States, went into paroxysms of hysteria about yet another Hitler threatening peace and democracy world wide. If anyone was threatening peace in the region it was the United States which managed to get people to forget that Yanukovych had been legitimately elected and now had been run out office in what was a violent coup spear-headed by neo-nazis who thereupon marched into Eastern Ukraine and burned down a building full of union leaders. Nice.

The United States (with its Euro Puppies wagging their tails in line) then proceeded to work on a soft-integration into NATO by supplying Ukraine with western technology and arms. One of the recipients of back-channel US funding was the Azov Brigade, which was told in so many words that needed to tone down its Nazi rhetoric (as in “if you want money from 'the Jews in Washington' you better be nice to the Jews in the Ukraine”.) Azov complied but no one in the Ukraine is fooled.

Ukraine is clearly in the sights of the neocons in Washington, as well as their puppies in Brussels. Incorporation of the country into the NATO “defence structure” is the next “inch eastward.” It is the next step toward amassing troops and missiles on Russia's border. Is it any surprise that Putin has amassed troops of his own?

According to USUK, Putin has a lot of cheek demanding assurances that Ukraine will not join NATO. Secretary Blinken piously states that as an independent and sovereign nation, the Ukraine is free to join or not join whomever and whatever it wants. Far be it for us to tell them what to do! That is true. Ukraine can apply to whomever it wants, but that does not mean that the application has to be accepted. NATO has its own “sovereign” right to decide who it wants to accept into its club and whose acceptance might be more trouble that it is worth.

People in the West, particularly in the United States, are very skilled at not putting two and two together. Just this past August, America withdrew from another one of its victories in a foreign land. No doubt the librul readers of the New York Slime heaved a sight of relief. “Ahh... at last we've learned to love peace and stay at home.” But what was it Biden said in announcing the withdrawal?

"And here’s a critical thing to understand: The world is changing.  We’re engaged in a serious competition with China.  We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.  We’re confronted with cyberattacks and nuclear proliferation. 

We have to shore up America’s competitive[ness] to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century.  And we can do both: fight terrorism and take on new threats that are here now and will continue to be here in the future.

  New? Ha ha. He just paraphrased Dick Cheney's Defence Planning Guide and ZBig's Chessboard. There is nothing new in this. The Ukraine is a pivotal flank in this new upcoming contest for Eurasia.

None of this is necessary. It is the result of a nation that, drunk on power, has publicly proclaimed that it will brook no compromises to its preeminence. Restoration of sanity lies with the German government, which alone has the clout to put an end to the insanity and which, if it will only overcome its historical masochism, has every interest in promoting cooperation and not conflict with Russia.

©woodchipgazette 2022

Maps as per fair use and courtesy B.B.C. 

It's All Arlo's Fault

America's New Civil War is the latest hot issue to bubble up in the info-stew of the murkan mainstream media. Gasping for air, pontificati -- mostly on the librul left -- bandy about words like divide and gap and violence or divorce. Of course, from an historical perspective -- that is, a perspective longer than the past two years -- it is a lot of stuff and nonsense. No surprise there.

America has always been divided. It's very inception only promised a “more perfect” Union. The nation has never enjoyed that shared cultural rootedness that obtains in countries like France, Germany, Sweden or Russia. That sense nous sommes chez nous that softens and ultimately neutralizes ideological and economic divisions.

This is not to say that these other countries have not experienced searing political conflicts. We would not be guilty of misinforming. But when the political framework has broken apart there yet remained a shared space to return to. Nous sommes Asterix! When America's constitutional container breaks there is nothing left but cultural incoherence.

The Second World War, by its very military-industrial nature, required a great “national effort” as the saying went. When the war was over, the people who ran the country realized that some national sense of Americanism had to be brought about if the country were to live up to its new imperial role, sub nom “leader of the free world.” Simply put, a shared sense of unity required a shared piece of the pie.

It was hardly rocket science. Even stone and bronze age societies understood that it was the God-King's duty to insure that everyone got fed from his royal graineries. Bismarck understood this, Teddy Roosevelt understood this and France, Germany and Sweden had each put in place the basics of the social (aka welfare) state even before the outbreak of war. When the war was over America finally brought up its rear.

However, America being the sort of place that it is, implementation of the welfare state was devolved onto the private sector. In other words, you can't have welfare unless somebody can make some money off of it! And so it was that providing economic security and social well-being was largely left to large corporations counterbalanced by equally large unions. The hard “charity” cases were left to the government.

For all its obvious defects, the system worked. The immediate post war period could well be called the Great Equalization. Jobs, housing, education, and health care were all broadly accessible. America provided something fairly unique in the world: freedom of movement and affordability which in turn gave rise to opportunity which is another way of saying that the future was nothing to fear.

This is not to say that there were no class differences. But these were not so pronounced as to be unbridgeable. In most states public education was as good as private and the very systemization of admissions and hiring (adopted from the military) tended to equalize opportunity.

The 50's and early 60's may have been culturally insipid, even sterile; but, for what it was worth, just about everyone participated in the new (and fun) mass consumer culture. Jack and Dick may have loathed one another, but if they were locked in a room together they would have ended up talking about football.

The Great Equalization excluded certain groups; religious nuts in Appalachia and Negroes just about everywhere. Otherwise, all modular Presbyterians drove to MacDonalds after Sunday services. All things considered, Truman and Eisenhower's fascism-lite was a great achievement which reached its apogee when the torch was passed to a new generation in 1960.

However, the achievement was not just about benefits. It was understood by all that the American Way of Life entailed obligations as well; and chief among these was universal military service. In fact, Saint Jack promised to extend the idea of service by creating the Peace Corps and, following the German model, initiated national fitness programs to make sure that youth were physically capable of serving. “Ask not what your country can do for you ....” was not cribbed from the Libertarian playbook.

If there remained a division in the country, it was between those in the North who felt military service was irksome and those in the South who were all yeehaw to enlist. But no one expected to evade the draft. It was fact of life and a common defining obligation shared by all men. Then came Robert McNamara.

As of 1948, all men 18 or older were eligible for a service commitment of 21 months. In 1951, as the Korean War got underway, the commitment was extended to two years, but exemptions were granted to full time students. A Universal Military Training provision which would have required 12 months military service for all males was never passed. In 1967 the Select Service Act was amended so as to end student deferments after four years of undergraduate study, leaving four years of draft exposure assuming a college graduation at age 22. In 1969, a yearly lottery system was introduced and student deferments were ended. If a man's number did not come up the first year, he was thereafter exempt forever. In 1973, the draft was abolished altogether.

What this brief summary of draft law shows is that the great principle of equal obligation was honoured mostly in the breach. At all relevant times, college students were exempt from the draft. In 1950 only 6.6% of the white population attended college. In 1960 that number had risen to 8.1% and, in 1970, it stood at 11.6% What these percents clearly signified is that the onus of military service fell mostly on the working and lower middle class. It is interesting to note that in 1940, the percent of whites in college stood at 4.9%. What this means is that the so-called great middle class achievement of the 50's only bumped up 1.7% of males into the “college class.” The other side of this same coin is that the majority of middle class men, and under, remained subject to the draft, while a ten percent upper and upper middle class could exempt themselves by affording to go to college. In other words, throughout the supposed socio-economic unity of the 50's and 60's there lay an insidious principle of division.

This divisive poison did not reveal its full effects until the Vietnam War began in earnest in 1965. As troop levels increased from year to year, so too the number of men actually drafted and so too the “importance” to privileged kids of their staying in school. I am convinced that Saint Jack would not have allowed this poison to seep. At least rhetorically (and rhetoric is important), he would have made the war an “all-together” sort of thing. He was an all-together type of guy and would have at least rallied all of us to ask what we could do for our country.

But McNamara, was a nuts and bolts kinda guy, for whom the country was a machine made of component parts. Machine America required engineers and doctors, ergo student deferments. While it also required mechanics and assembly line workers, these were more fungible. Worse yet, McNamara felt that the draft could be used to give the “disadvantaged” --- i.e., minorities and the poor -- the “training they needed” for life after wounding and death. He thus lowered the standards for draftees in order to catch more fish. McNamara's Morons they were called.

It is somewhat of a simplification to state that college kids were exempted from the draft whereas non-college kids were not. The military has a plethora of enlistment programs, most notably R.O.T.C.; and, as stated, there was still a draft liability after four years of college. Nevertheless, what it all boiled down to is that those in the upper end socio-economic strata could either avoid the draft altogether or delay-enlist as officers or flyboys, whereas those at the lower end of the spectrum got to be grunts. Whereas Kennedy might have created a contrary illusion, McNamara all but reveled in the division.

If you were 18-20 in 1966, you understood the matter very clearly. You could either stay in college or get drafted. If college didn't work out, you purchased a pyscho-medical deferment or simply ran away to Sweden or Canada.

Had the Vietnam War been a righteous war, the matter would have been simple enough: either you were a studious coward or you were not. But Vietnam was not a righteous war. Fully on the contrary, it was illegal, stupidly conceived and even more stupidly waged. If ever there were a war worth not participating in Vietnam was it.

This fact provided a certain moral cover for those who simply did not want to get drafted or have their lives “interrupted” as the complaint went. Of course, who in their right mind would want to get drafted into a war waged by incompetents like Westmoreland, from whose face stupidity all but oozed? Who would want to go get shot up in a war which the government assured us over and over and over again we were winning and that victory was just around the next rice paddy. Quite frankly, no one in their right mind.

But while this stance might have been politically or morally correct in the abstract, it covered a more troubling psychological issue: how could any man be sure that all his moral protestations were not simply cowardice disguised? He could not. Never. A conflict of interest undermined all protestations howsoever valid they may have been in the abstract. Those who went, not wanting to go, were on firmer ground.

It is probably fair to say that most men who think of enlisting do so out of universal desire to self-prove and be accepted as a man among men. In form or another this emulation of our fathers has obtained in all societies. The initial trials weathered, success brings individual confidence and social camaraderie.

But there is another, converse motivation as well, illustrated by a Boomer I knew who dropped out of school in order to enlist as a conscientious objector in a war he completely opposed. When I asked why he had done it, he answered very simply that he began 1965 with the conviction that II-S student deferments shouldn't exist during wartime. In other words, it was not right that some men of his generation should be marched off to war and others not. My friend accepted himself into the ranks of men in order to share their hardships.

These two motivations, neither of which is better than the other, flesh out what it means to be a fellow citizen, a social animal. Both motivations entail effort and endurance. Although each approaches the center from different sides both meet up in a sense of social solidarity born of sharing obligations within a common fate.

The sharing of obligations is more than “social construct;” it is embedded in our bio-psychic construct. Several years back, animal behaviorists at Emory University conducted an experiment with capuchin monkeys, in which the monkeys were had to do some sort of work, at the end of which they each got paid a cucumber. One day, with no lead up or explanation, at the end of the work-day, the scientists only paid cucumbers to half the crew. The monkeys went nuts. All of them were quite upset and even the capuchins that had been paid refused to work. The male instinct to join in to shoulder and to share, to equalize up and to equalize with is no different.

Everyone has his own story unique to his own circumstances, but what the Boomer Generation faced as a whole was a very simple choice: are we, Americans, in this together, or not? Do I, as a young healthy male, say “Not, I” as I watch another man, of my kind and age, being marched off to war? And if so, what does that say to all my protestations about brotherhood and country, and, of course, “doing the right thing” ?

The phrase My Country Right or Wrong, embraces an awful ambiguity. By those who protested the war it meant: my country whether it does right or wrong which of course embraced the supposed rightness of doing wrong. But to those who submitted to the draft it meant: right or wrong, my country. In other words, we don't have that thing we call country unless -- for better and for worse -- we all stand together among ourselves as one of a country.

This latter interpretation is nothing to be taken lightly. It means that one is willing to get one's self shot up for nothing good, for nothing noble except that of living the ideal of solidarity with one's fellow countrymen. I enlist, because my brother enlists and I cannot let him go alone.

Thus viewed, it can be seen that McNamara struck a terrible, divisive wedge into the feeble fabric of the American Gemeinschaft. And, the more privileged half of the Boomer Generation was more than happy to strike the wedge in even deeper. “Hell no! We won't go!” The depth of their moral commitment was cynically put to the test by Richard Nixon. Protests against the war fizzled into insignificance once the heat of the draft was removed.

In the decades that ensued, these Boomers, now become the Clinton Class, continued their pursuit of Me, Myself and Mine further perpetuating this country's economic divides and making a shambles of the Great Equalization of the 50's and early 60's. Smoking dope and rutting in the mud at Woodstock gave way to the pursuit of real estate under cover of religiosity or Aquarian spirituality. This was not a change of course, it was a continuation of that course which was implicit in turning one's backs on “those who were unlucky enough to get drafted.” Beneath all the lovey-dovey peace & kumbaya chanting, beneath “growing up at last and getting a job” lay the quiet little sin of turning one's back on one's own generation.

An estimated 400,000 attended Woodstock

 

The rationalization that one was helping those drafted by seeking to end the war they were drafted into was, like virtually all other liberal protestations, a canard. If you are your brother's keeper you share his fate with yourself and your wealth with his poverty. It's as plain and as simple as that. No circumlocutions needed.

In short, today's economic divide is no accident. It flows from a principle of societal division -- of voluntary civic alienation -- which was embraced by the privileged half of the country.

Sadly, the other half of this equation retained none of the higher ground it might have, as they fell into resentment, racism and retaliation that was exploited and engineered by the Republican Party which, we must never forget, is simply the other half of the privileged class.

First came Nixon who cunningly wove together disaffected Southerners resentful of integration with working class whites resentful of having been integrated into the military in a cause which was increasingly disparaged. Those who opposed the war never quite got the effect that protests in the rear have on those “at the front.” There is nothing like a bullet flying in your direction to distill things to the starkest of realities. You are either with me or you are not. There are no midway choices.

Then came Reagan who exploited these resentments further by injecting the working class with a narcotic, flashy, jingoistic militarism while at the same time destroying its unions. The barrage of militaristic and aggressive movies that hit the big screens in the 80's was the military industrial complex's answer to the hippy strobe light n' acid shows of the late 60's. They worked equally well.

Finally, came Clinton who, simply put, finished off the work of destroying the working class as such and then went on to push the lowest rung of all into the dirt of a lumpen sub-proletariat. Where was the New York Slime while all of this was going on? Somewhere in the Berkshires or the Hampton's one supposes.

What Reagan and Clinton in fact accomplished was to translate what was left of the working class into a volunteer/veteran class. Most of the old working class was left to rot away working in service jobs, shopping at Dollar Stores and dulling the pain with Oxycontyn. The luckier sergment got to avail themselves of enlistment opportunities. The military ...now highly technocratized... became the new working man's employer of first resort.

This achievement was itself the worst type of fascism possible. The Old Fascism had quaintly presupposed a universal militarization of society in which everyone classlessly was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. This style of fascism is still seen in places like Israel. America's New Fascism (Not-So-Lite) created a new military working class. Historically speaking, the development makes perfect sense once it is born in mind that the term “military industrial complex” refers to a marriage or partnership between the government and private industry or finance as expressed through military presence and power.

It stands to reason that this complex will create the class it needs. At the same time, this complex will shunt aside and ignore whatever human mass it does not need. This is a repeat of what happened in the later Roman Empire when, as it was said, the democracy of the forum was replaced with the democracy of the legionnaire's camp. At this point, however, the observation of one politician comes appropriately to mind.

“The ditch which separates [the lower middle] class, which is by no means economically well-off; from the manual labouring class is often deeper than people think. The reason for this division, which we may almost call enmity, lies in the fear that dominates a social group which has only just risen above the level of the manual labourer - a fear lest it may fall back into its old condition or at least be classed with the labourers.”

Thus, no one despises the poor and disadvantaged more than the new military working class which has rescued itself from the sub-proletariate swamp by donning a uniform. At the same time, it continues to loathe the college educated Clinton Class which continues to indulge itself with investments and pieties while engaging in various forms of sneering, naysaying and reproving of others. America is reduced to hierarchies of loathing, disparagement and resentment, each of course appealing to moral certainties au gout.

There is only one way out: a sharing of obligations .... of universal military service, of universal and equally burdensome taxation and uniform distribution of the basic benefits of state provided education, health care, housing, state guaranteed job opportunity and universal single payer pensions.

No democracy can ever exist without raucous and usually stupid factional frictions. But no democracy has ever existed without a broad, stable middle class and only a moderate disparity of wealth. Any other argument -- be it trans-rights, gun-rights, racism.... you name it... is a distraction. A distraction which the upper 10% be they Republicans or Democrats are very happy to indulge it, because it distracts everyone else from the one issue of supreme importance to them: the 401(k) Issue.

Do I really blame all of this on poor Arlo Guthrie? No, of course not. He was just a kid with a guitar. But his album Alice's Restaurant, was symptomatic of the irresponsible me-ism of his generation, and that turning away from a sense of shared national obligation has had the consequences I have described. No one side can escape its fault but, in my opinion, the greater fault lies with that part of the Boomer generation that renounced the drawbacks of being an American while making use of the benefits in pursuit of their own happiness.

A country cannot be founded on equality of rights, because rights are individual and centrifugal. It can only be founded on an equality of obligations because it is these alone which pull all together toward the core. Until Americans of all classes are willing to recongize that fact and to take real concret measures to bring them about, the country will continue to not exist in actual fact. “America” will continue to be simply the cauldron for mutual loathing and hateful slogans.