by Denis A. Conroy for The Saker Blog

It’s not a choice between war and peace. It’s a choice between war and endless war. It’s not appeasement. I think it’s better even to call it American self-interest”.

Michael Scheuer (commenting on American Foreign Policy).

For the state by its nature claims sovereignty, the right to an unlimited development of power, determined only by self-interest. It is by nature anarchistic”.

No state is free from militarism, which is inherent in the very concept of the sovereign state. There are merely differences of degree in the militarism of states”.

Christian Lous Lange.

In the American context, institutionalised barbarism appears to be the dynamic connecting individual self-interest to state self-interest. The Stars and Stripes, used as a proselytizing aphrodisiac to stimulate and connect opportunists with opportunity, continues to push a contumelious brand of fake democracy across the globe. Evidence of patriotic emotions blindly supporting the fulcrum of the militarised state, enable a latter-day Norse-God-of-War-Mythology to whitewash the collective ego by glorifying war. Hence the damage the US of A has wrought on the globe. Baptised in the waters of a military lore facilitating grandiosity, the consequences of war are relegated to an amnesia-zone where guilt, aside from memory, is expunged. It’s an age-old practice, group muscle and individual greed combining to strip the ‘other’ of sovereign values in pursuit of opportunities that afford the victor ever more privileges.

In the process, self-interest makes a significant number of people blind and the remainder, sharp sighted as birds of prey seeking their next ‘kill’. If the only criteria of judgement is the rule of power over the ‘other’ for the purpose of acquiring his or her resources, then history must teach us that civilisation is merely the gloss we in the West put on our criteria…like lipstick on a pig…to conceal the fact that the real goal all along was to give Mammon the whip hand in a color-coded reality to represent the white man’s burden as virtuous. What we judge to be our best chance of securing a place in the delusional nirvana we have created for ourselves while sitting in gated-communities where exclusivity reigns supreme, is merely the product of Capitalism’s fake truth-serum telling us that to be happy, we as misunderstood whites need to live behind ten -foot high concrete walls to be secure.

If we keep on believing that Capitalism (aka fake democracy) has a god given right to determine who should live and who should die in a world where regime change is used to erase opposition to America’s rapacious hegemony, then freedom of dissent, along with democracy will be thrown under the “Thy-Will-Be-Done” bus.

In the latter part of the 20th century, it became evident, that by not questioning the practices of privatisation, but instead, sheepishly supporting the Neo-Con-Dadaism narrative then used to suggest that unregulated business practices were the stuff of progress…the future…that this wilful blindness allowed the American public to conveniently avoid asking themselves why 20 million people of colour were murdered in the Middle East and many other areas of the world by their military in quest of ever more (booty) power.

Flouting their exclusivity from within gated walls, the perpetrators of these deeds are, to this very day protected like endangered fauna, whilst the victims of their abuse have become the dust wafting across the globe on the wings of an American Hallowed-Be-Thy-Tax-Dollar-Dream.

At which point it might be worth stopping a moment to observe how the growth of the American Empire…as empires that came before it did…require the destruction of insurgency movements that arose to obstruct the criterial rules the colonial powers intended to impose on them. And, as no state is free from militarism…which is inherent in all concepts of the sovereign state…and as there are merely differences of degree in the militarism of states…America, deeply involved in the exploitation of Middle East resources, had the temerity to rebrand the David and Goliath saga of courageous combat to suit its own version of The Great Game. Acting like it was the owner of the entire Middle East, it decided to do with it what it liked ( bomb it with impunity)… and as Muslim culture was ‘alien’ criteria…it decided to do what it does best, open its very large Hollywood-like mouth and rebrand all ‘David’ activists protecting themselves from the American ‘criteria-of-excellence’ (aka fake democracy) as terrorists.

It had become apparent to America that there were many David activists in different parts of the world resisting their ‘criteria of excellence’ so they commenced projects like “The Project for the New American Century” to deal with the recalcitrant ‘Davids’ and teach them that Westerners were the real enforcers of values…Pax Americana style!

And so it came to pass that the level of militarisation America had achieved was translated into a Thy-Kingdom-Cometh-From-Washington narrative to justify its expansionary dream of world dominance and set it against a backdrop of resistant third-world ‘Davids’…and the CIA were there to see that heads would roll : Patrice Lumumba in the Congo for instance, widely seen as a martyr for the wider Pan-African movement, only to disappear into the annals of third world historic narratives when the US choked off oxygen to this enlightened leadership, whose values, antithetical to the American hegemonic crusade, were deemed too radical.

Salvador Allende, Founder of the Socialist Party of Chile, assassinated in 1973 in second world narrative style by the CIA who were in Chile to protect America’s right to impose its imperial ‘criteria-of-excellence’ on Chile…and America’s ‘criteria-of-excellence’ meant systematic control over other people’s right to make fundamental decisions regarding their economic or political future.

The US-backed overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader in 1953; the coup in Guatemala engineered by the CIA; US funded and brutal “dirty wars” against leftists throughout Latin America in the 1970’s; and much more…like the Obama administration’s intervention in Yemen for the purpose of expanding the drone war there; the US backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 was another prominent example of toxic criteria joining together an interminable list of egregious war crimes perpetrated in Korea and Vietnam in the mid. 20th century, where more than six million people were killed attempting to forge a future for themselves beyond the political orbit of mega-power America, an engineering tour de force steeped in institutionalized barbarism by the sole super-power until other tech-giants arrived on the world stage…notably China and the revitalized Russian Federation…to curtail its rapacious inroads into so many smaller and vulnerable states like Syria where untold havoc was wrought on millions of innocent people.

Meanwhile, there are many people profiting from the mayhem of war. And stranger than strange, the warmongering spooks in Washington who were party to the atomization of so many innocent brown, black and yellow bodies across the globe…especially in the Muslim world… were still around and living in exceptional circumstances that allowed them to enjoy the spoils of war in comfort. They have names like Henri Kissinger, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama and many others who live behind security walls and revel in their misplaced glory, imagining themselves to be American crusaders of the first order. They may even have had to periodically return to the King James Bible to reacquaint themselves with the verity of Psalm 109:11 …The Song of The Slandered…so that they might stay in touch with the spirit of their stalwart enterprise.

“May his days be few; may another take his position.

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow

May his children wander as beggars; may they seek sustenance far from their ruined homes”.

”Mission accomplished” as George Bush and Bibi Netanyahu would say while ignoring the millions of refugees they have created.

Yet, outside the 10-foot-high security walls there are many Americans who abjure the folksy patriotism, the investment bruhaha concerning America’s God-given-right to bring a B. Grade Version of redemption… money as panacea…to the world. Troubled by a myopic homogeneous vision of what America stands for, free-thinking Americans must suffer enduring pains that define the inanity of a system that glorifies ignorance and fails utterly to heal the ills that pollute the health of the nation and the ecosystem. To have arrived at a point where business acumen is accepted as the all abiding panacea for…well…everything pertaining to human needs…is to uncritically consume the political gruel that has corrupted the intellectual faculties of state polity in the first instance. To do nothing but accept the limited worldview of the institutional barbarians who control the agenda is akin to assisting in the stillbirth of democracy.

To observe the hot wars, cold wars, tepid wars and the wars of duplicity that underpin modern day America is to witness a cancer of treasonous untruths despoil…tear apart…the American dream. America has succumbed to a media identity that requires 300 million people to hover around their T.V.’s, their iPhone SE, computers and the Hollywood cinematic verbiage that keeps the cosmetic mantra of American criteria within easy reach. The extraordinary proliferation of the electronic media has become phenomena that encloses the national psyche within a most dangerously septic sea of ignorance that allows no room for escape from its propaganda. The function of the screens is to force-feed Russophobia as well as enthusiastically spreading falsities to cloak America’s barbarous wars behind fetishisms that conceal truths while reinforcing the mythology of American exceptionalism. The American public remains mainly ignorant of the facts behind the war in Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine and appear happy to remain so…they ride their petitions…prayers…like Doctor Strangelove did riding a bomb believing himself invincible…Thy-Kingdom-Come-Thy-Will-Be-Done journey to hell. Dinosaurs like Hollywood and NATO remain star acts in an era that has lost all mobility.

Without doubt, the trajectory of the American Dream was influenced by the notion that God (the European variety) had bestowed upon America a franchise for the future that was based around the creation of wealth. But what transpired over time was consolidation of wealth and power, engineered by an elite who believed in shaping the ‘Dream’ from above…and above meant banks! By the end of the 20th century, smart money, smart phones, smart computers, smart-arses, smart drugs, smart brands and smart paid-for-politicians made it abundantly clear that the business of America was to invest money so that they could make more of the same. Claiming that usury is the ultimate good, The Wizards of Osmosis, operating from behind curtains within the deep state, projected hope per medium of shadowy images and spoke with booming voices against anyone who questioned their exceptionality, because their sole purpose was to see that their ‘Thy-Will-Be-Done’ doctrine would be accepted without any public consultation.

From outside of America, projection seems to be what America is all about. The self-serving biases in their cognitive and perceptual processes are distorted by their need to maintain and enhance self-esteem. Finding a place in the global community is fraught with insurmountable difficulties relating back to their crusader mentality. As a can-do people they seem to feel that the world is their oyster and want to rearrange it after their own image. After all, their ancestors came from Europe where these biases originated from, and we know that self-serving biases die hard. To Europeans, ‘pagan’ was a self-serving perception used to colonise foreigners and have them serve their conquerors. As of this era, they fail to understand that the world is already inhabited by a diversity of people and have very limited understanding of their cultures. This ignorance is reminiscent of an earlier saga in their history, when conquering the native Indians of the Americas was an occupation that was achieved on autopilot. So, what has changed?

“Self-interest makes some people blind, and others sharp-sighted” …Francois de La Rochefoucauld

However, in a world where language is continuously manipulated to serve one or another’s self-interest, America’s war on the Muslim world is a prime example of a double-speak that dares not admit that the U.S. is faced with an insurgency, rather than mere terrorism. The war of words, like military wars, the imposition of sanctions, knows no shame and is totally without honour; the war of words is used as a big stick to bludgeon all who would dare challenge the right of the hegemon to vilify, coerce, bully or bomb anyone who believe they can design a less venal system.

Hence the constant stream of propaganda and imputations that flow from Washington’s think tanks with the intent of undermining China’s geopolitical role in the world. Multiple factions in Washington exist solely to create propaganda weapons in the hope that they might undermine, if not sabotage China’s Silk Road strategies. Campaigns designed to portray BRI as a swamp of corruption, incompetent, a “debt” trap and “malign” abound to discredit Chinese behaviour.

But change is in the air which might challenge American hubris. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz pulling back the curtain to reveal show-ponies as mere donkeys when their tricks and illusions are stripped of their covering.

So, allow me to retrieve the words of Gough Whitlam, 21st Prime Minister of Australia from the mothballs and close the page:

“The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race”.

Denis a. Conroy
Freelance Writer
Australia