The article below illustrates what happens when ideologies die ...
except one, the will for power. There is nothing exciting offered today
except conquering the world, killing half the population and ruling the
stone age remnants with high tech. The alternatives are so fu*king
boring - saving this or that, not doing this or that, resisting this or
that, going back X years to some nostalgic equilibrium. Fu*k that. Let's
have some action!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/23/careening-toward-nuclear-war-the-political-paralysis-of-europe-russia-and-china/
Careening Toward Nuclear War: the Political Paralysis of Europe, Russia
and China
by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
Never since the Cuban Missile Crisis has there been such an unstable
situation in the global political system, including the system of
management of nuclear arms and US power.
To the already exceptionally tense and dangerous atmosphere around North
Korea there has now been added a crisis over Iran, which is pushing the
European powers and Russia to become aligned against the policies of USA
and Israel preparing a new, greater and, very probably, nuclear war
against Iran. A very serious political crisis is smoldering in
Washington itself, with some people believing it is the most serious in
the history of the United States.
In the most official way, in front of the representatives of all the
nations of the world, for the first time since the defeat of Nazi
Germany in 1945, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has
spelled out the threat of annihilating a nation of 25 million people.
His speech represents the negation of all achievements of human
civilization. And this speech did not provoke any serious, proportionate
or meaningful reaction in the world.
The absence of such reaction can be attributed to various factors and
different calculations. But its consequence is none other than to
legitimize that kind of threats today and their realization tomorrow.
Such a lack of reaction does not deter and discourage, it encourages and
facilitates the use of nuclear weapons and it increases the obvious risk
of a global catastrophe, something which was proven especially in the
20th century. In the wake of the 1st World War both camps believed the
other one was bluffing, and that, in any case, the conflict would not
last more than a few months. The conflict lasted four years and
destroyed all Europe.
The policy of trying to appease and accommodate Hitler has also been the
main policy of Britain, France and USSR, before the 2nd World War. It
only encouraged Nazi German aggression and facilitated the War. Germany
all but won it, its troops having been stopped only some miles from the
Kremlin. It was finally defeated, but only at an unbelievably enormous
cost paid by all European nations, and in particular by the Soviets, the
Yugoslavs, the Greeks and the British.
The deafening silence of Europe, the European Left, Russia and China
It is obvious that the actions and the policy of the US government under
President Trump took all major powers by surprise and shocked them.
They did not expect them, did not forestall them and now limit
themselves more or less to a role of spectator of actions that literally
could involve the survival of humanity.
Europe hopes it will wake one day with the Trump problem having been
resolved by itself. From time to time they say to Americans that what
they are doing is terrible and dangerous (it is indeed terrible and this
is exactly why they are doing it!). In Germany many top specialists on
foreign policy published an appeal in Zeit. They believe German
“anti-Americanism” is the danger, not the US policy that is fueling it!
The European Left seems interested only in defending pensions, and it is
not doing very well even at that. They don’t want to identify themselves
with a regime like the North Korean, but they forget that what is going
on has nothing to do with the type of the regime. On the contrary, the
external, imperialistic pressure on non-Western countries, beginning
from the USSR, has always been a strong factor contributing to the rise
of authoritarian types of government, as the best suited for a country
to oppose a threat of aggression. At the very least it can plausibly
justify this authoritarianism.
Western interventions in the Third World have played a great role in the
advent of authoritarian regimes. Imposing “democracy” was never the aim
of the West in the Arab and Muslim World and the results of 25 years of
disastrous wars in the Middle East are here for everybody to see. Even
in Russia it was the US administration which pushed and enthusiastically
supported the violent dissolution and bombing of the Russian Parliament
by President Yeltsin in 1993 (probably the most democratically elected
parliament in Russian history), in order to permit the passage of Soviet
property to a handful of oligarchs from 1994 onwards. “Democracy” seemed
useful only as a means for destroying the Soviet regime, not as a
system of government. Now the West criticizes the human rights record
of Putin’s government as it never did with the much more serious crimes
of the Yeltsin era, or it does not do with the regime imposed in Kiev
after a coup organized by the US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
In any case, to annihilate North Korea is not a method for imposing
democracy in that country.
What about the alternative centers like Russia and China? Moscow still
seems to be trying to gain as much as possible out of the supposedly
pro-Russian trends of Trump and has left most of the handling of the
Korean crisis to China. China wants at all costs to avoid any clash with
Americans. But if it abandons North Korea, President Xi is in reality
running the risk of experiencing, in a very different form and through
very different ways, his own “Gorbachev moment”.
One error brings more!
It is not easy of course, for political forces and people inside the US
and around the world which supported Trump, claiming he is a kind of
“anti-establishment”, “anti-war”, “anti-oligarchy”,
“anti-globalization”, “anti-NATO”, “pro-Russia” candidate, to accept the
degree to which they were deceived. Sometimes this love of Trump has
verged on the ridiculous . For instance, the quite popular Russian
newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, commenting on Trump’s election, drew a
parallel between his entering the White House and the storming of the
Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in October 1917!!! It defies not only
reason but every possible form of human imagination for one to confuse a
deal maker and casino owner, family friend of Murdoch and Netanyahu,
with Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution!
Sometimes, not always, the intentions behind such an enormous error of
judgment were good. People were becoming desperate about “globalization”
and US-driven Wars. They therefore tended to believe everything and
everybody who seemed to be an opponent. The same thing by the way
happened in the inter-war period, leading to the rise of fascism and
Nazism and to the 2nd World War.
To dismiss what Mr. Trump is now saying and doing, to dismiss the
serious threat to the world his administration represents on the
implicit or explicit excuse that he is not serious, he is mad, he is
bluffing, is not very convincing, especially coming from people who
until recently suggested to us that we should take very seriously what
the same Trump was promising, or rather what they thought he was
promising before he was elected. Trump is nothing other than what he and
his administration are doing.
Coherence behind Madness
Of course Trump himself is not consistent. Probably he is not even
wholly conscious of what he is doing. But history (or, more probably,
the forces trying to control and manipulate it, and who most probably
were also able to help Trump from behind the scenes to assume power)
needs exactly such a person. If he is really “mad”, as some people
claim, then he is the ideal candidate to apply the reckless “madman”
strategy. In dealing with Korea and the Middle East, indirectly with
China and Russia, Washington and its extremist allies are now trying to
bring the nuclear card into the game. If Trump himself is not fully
conscious of the terrible repercussions this game will have, he is more,
not less, effective to play the role assigned to him.
(I believe the Empire did the same under Reagan. They applied the
maximum of threats against the USSR, to provide the arguments for Soviet
reformers who had already accepted integration into the West through
surrender to the West. The threat to China now comes with an implicit
false promise: “Give us North Korea and we will let you develop
unimpeded”. If President Xi agrees to play this game, he runs the risk
of himself provoking, in a very different form and through very
different ways, what he is most afraid of: a Chinese “Gorbachev moment”.
One of the reasons the Chinese regime did not collapse like the Soviet
one, was that the Chinese Communist Party kept intact and central to its
communication policy the image of the West as an enemy).
The Empire hopes that by bringing nuclear arms and madness into the
equation, it will oblige the other players, who are rational, to succumb
to its demands. That is all that it is about. It is extremely dangerous,
it is madness, but, as Polonius said (Hamlet, Act II), there is a method
to it. The opposing forces are those lacking in method!
History, or those who are trying to control and manipulate it, needs
exactly this kind of character in order to achieve what is to be
achieved. Only by bringing the nuclear card into play, only by bringing
on a character who can persuade that he is ready to use it, can they
have a realistic, as they see it, hope for reversing the colossal,
potentially strategic, defeat they have already suffered in the Middle
East, with the introduction of Russian troops into Syria, and also to
avert the otherwise unavoidable consequences of the economic and
technological ascent of China. Their calculus is that the other world
players are “rational” and that they will not risk a global catastrophe.
By bringing uncertainty and irrationalism into world politics they hope
to win by having their opponents retreat.
As we already said, Trump is nothing other than what he is doing. In
economics he did not deliver all power to the … Soviets, but to Goldman
Sachs. In ecology, he launched a war against life. In social matters he
wants to curtail benefits to poor Americans. In geopolitics, during his
presidency, we have seen the appearance of enormous risks of nuclear
conflict in both Korea and the Middle East (if they remain limited
there), the testing of new, extremely destabilizing “conventional” and
nuclear weapons, a military threat against Venezuela, an extremely
aggressive development of NATO forces on the perimeter of Russia and of
US forces around China. Mosul, the second most important city of Iraq,
was flattened.
All that in just seven months! That can make any person of sound mind
ask the question: Are we going to be here at the end of his term?
Trump’s geopolitics are nothing other than a renewed, expanded, more
extremist and more clearly nuclear re-edition of the known neocon
program, spelled out initially by President George Bush in his famous
speech against the Axis of Evil. It is the organization of a proactive
drive to full world hegemony, in order both to limit the consequences of
the Chinese economic-technological ascent and to reverse the results of
the Russian intervention in Syria. If fulfilled, Trump’s goals will
transform Finance and US Empires into a totalitarian system dominating
the whole planet – or, they will lead to the termination of life.
Recently, Mr. Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister said that Western
decline is “objective” in character. This is true, but it is only a part
of truth. There is not such determinism in human history and Russian
history in particular testifies amply exactly that. In critical
historical junctures there are many possible results, as people may
react in different ways to a given objective situation. If you don’t
stop Western intervention in Libya, then you will have an intervention
in Syria. If you send troops to Syria, you will make the other side
think twice before escalating the conflict. This is an example of the
“correlation” between “objective” and “subjective” factors. If China for
instance, believes that by giving North Korea to the Americans it will
avoid a clash with them, it will risk confronting them under more
dangerous and difficult conditions, even if we avoid, which already
seems extremely difficult, the disastrous global, ecological,
civilizational and economic consequences of a Korean conflict and if
such a conflict remains contained and “limited”. Manoeuvring and
tactics of course have an important place in policy – but they cannot
substitute for strategy and they should not become a substitute for
taking the really hard decisions.
It is not that the Empire does not see what Mr. Lavrov sees. It is
exactly because it sees the same picture a determined fraction in its
leadership wants to do something about it! The “something” is to use its
influence on the President to push war into his agenda and create the
conditions that will render it unavoidable.
Crisis in the Palace
When in a system no politics is admitted, no open discussion of the
perspectives of society is permitted, whether by police or by indirect,
totalitarian control of the representatives of a given society (the
media and the political class) and by the systematic destruction of even
the capacity to formulate political thought, as happens now in modern
day Western societies, the problems and contradictions banned from the
public sphere do not disappear. Because they have objective roots, they
reappear at the very center of the system and are expressed there. A
classic example is the Soviet Union, which had banned any expression of
public disagreement and any possibility of open foreign influence. They
disappeared from society only to reappear at the center of the system,
inside its ruling nomenclatura, inside the Politburo and the Secretariat
of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party.
In Washington itself a political crisis is now smoldering (certain
commentators judge it to be the most serious in all the history of the
United States), naturally rendering even more serious and intrinsically
unstable the situation on the nuclear front. This has been demonstrated
beyond the shadow of a doubt through the exchanges of “moron” insults
and challenges to competitive IQ tests between President Trump and his
Secretary of State Tillerson.
The unprecedented statement by the Republican head of the Senate
Foreign Affairs Committee (one of the three most important people,
institutionally, as far as US foreign policy is concerned) that the
policies of President Trump could lead to the Third World War, are
absolutely characteristic of the atmosphere in Washington. Never in the
history of the United States have there been such public conflicts, at
such levels and on such subjects.
Even if we confine ourselves to what is on public sight, it becomes
clear that two camps are in opposition regarding war against both Iran
and Korea: a war which one has difficulty in imagining how it cannot be
nuclear and how it will remain limited. What is certain is that its
global repercussions, ecological, civilizational and economic will be
unprecedented.
The Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA made quite clear they
wish to exhaust all peaceful means of resolving the conflict with North
Korea and disagree with the view that Iran has violated its nuclear
agreement. Given the power of these three institutions in the USA, one
can easily understand that there is a hidden part of the iceberg. There
is a “Party of War”, which is able to exert pressure on Donald Trump, to
control him and manipulate him in one way or another. There is no other
explanation of all this Washington infighting.
We cannot easily prove the existence of this “War Party”: or describe
its exact structure. We have to deduce its existence by what is
happening, and what is happening simply cannot be explained in any other
way than by admitting its existence and considerable power and
influence. Like mathematicians had to introduce imaginary numbers, out
of the need to complete their system, not out of any human experience,
we could speak here of an “imaginary”, “unseen” so to say would be
Emperor, the first of this kind in Human History, representing the most
totalitarian and extremist forces in the leadership of the system. He
has to remain secret, because his program is simply not presentable.
We have seen the same “Party of War” in action in Iraq, in Libya, in
Syria, in Ukraine and on many other occasions. Probably it is
responsible for “letting 9/11 happen”, because if it did not happen it
would be extremely difficult to proceed with a dozen Middle Eastern wars
and interventions. Its preferred method is the sui generis “entryism”
into the US (and other countries’) establishment and the circumvention
of the normal institutional state mechanisms, something that happened in
all the lead-up to the Iraq war. This party existed all through the Cold
War and even before, from 1943, when an important part of the US and
British establishment began to work out a plan for launching a Third
World War against the Soviet Union.
This is the party which is now trying to push its war agenda through its
influence on Trump and which probably contributed from behind the scenes
to his election. If anybody has a better explanation of what is going
on, he has only to provide it.
There are suggestions in the media and suspicions that Mr. Kissinger,
Mr. Kushner or Mr. Netanyahu are behind the “Madman” strategy Mr. Trump
has opted for. Given the ideas and the past of all three of them, this
could be true. We still don’t have any proof of that, as we are not in a
position to know what they advise Mr. Trump and the network of those
relations. Maybe some people in the US services know better and maybe
this is the reason some of them have repeatedly undermine the plan of a
war against Iran, denying the false assumptions about his nuclear
program, used to justify a war.
Washington is currently abuzz with rumors that the American “deep state”
is preparing a kind of “palace coup” against Donald Trump, possibly
evoking Article 25 of the United States Constitution, a possibility
already mentioned by Steve Bannon, the dismissed far-right “ideologue”
and “strategist” of Mr. Trump. The Breitbart website, controlled by Mr.
Bannon, published on October 9th an article on “Columbus Day” entitled
“The Nuclear Option”. The article is interpretable as an indirect
encouragement to the President of the United States to inaugurate a new
historical era, as Columbus did with the discovery of America, by making
use of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. Note also that Mr. Trump’s
advisor on religious matters, Evangelist Pastor Robert Jeffress ,
explained, citing the epistle to Romans, that God has authorized Mr.
Trump to use whatever means are required to exterminate the North Korean
leader.
According to an article in the magazine Vanity Fair, reported also by
other mainstream US media, such as the NBC, the United States Secretary
of Defense Mr. Mattis has already held discussions with other
collaborators of the President on what they should do if he decides to
launch a nuclear attack.
According to the prevailing regulations, there is no legal way to stop
the execution of an order to launch a nuclear war. It is given by the
President of the United States and only by him, without asking
anybody!!! If he gives it, the US armed forces are obliged to carry it
out, without discussion. As was explained recently in reports published
in the American media, for such an order not to be executed, more than
one American military officer would be obliged to disobey it, with all
that would imply for them.
Now some people will probably say that it is not possible for the
Pentagon and the CIA to oppose plans that aim to US domination over the
world. After all, both institutions exist to pursue exactly that aim.
But in fact there is not any paradox here. It is true that those
institutions and the ruling class of the US in general want to use every
means to preserve US world domination. But a significant part of them
wants of course to dominate the world: they don’t want to destroy the
object of their domination, including the United States.
As a significant part of the US establishment and of the US ruling class
are becoming conscious of the risks inherent in the “madman”, “chaos”
strategy of Trump, it is only normal and fully predictable that they
will try to resist it, even by organizing “palace coups”. It is not at
all certain that they will manage to stop the President and the forces
behind from unleashing with his “fire and fury” a chain of events
potentially leading to a global catastrophe.
By their function and their position the US military and the Pentagon
are accustomed to making rational analysis of a given situation. They
are able to know and to calculate better than anybody else the real
dangers inherent in the “madman”, “chaos” strategy pursued by Trump in
the world and suggested by Netanyahu in the Middle East. The “rational”
kernel of this reckless strategy is that, if America pretends to be mad,
then the other players (Russia and China) will succumb to its pressure
to avoid a general catastrophe as they are rational.
An Example about the Power of the Example
Such a line of “mad” thinking, provides also with a motivation for the
Empire to launch a “limited war” against Korea (it could also be against
Iran), because that way they will be able to use this terrible example.
An example is always the best way to educate people. When Henry
Kissinger visited Europe in 1972, trying to deter the participation of
Communist Parties in the Italian and French governments and to torpedo
any détente with Soviet Union he said to his interlocutors: “Watch
closely what happens in Chile” (information the writer had from Jorge
McGinty, responsible for the foreign relations of the Chilean Socialist
Party). In 1973, the world was able to watch what happened to Chile and
Salvador Allende. Some people did not grasp the message fully, such as
Aldo Moro, who was abducted and executed four years later by the “Red
Brigades”.
We can’t know which of the two imperial camps will prevail. On one hand
we have the President of the USA with his enormous powers and a very
decisive party of war behind him. On the other we have numerous
important forces and institutions. Their problem is they lack a clear
strategic alternative to what the extremists are proposing. For example,
to accept defeat in the Middle East and co-manage the region with the
Russians is not easy to accept. But when a power has already done what
the US has done in the Middle East, it is very difficult also to propose
another successful alternative for the USA. There will be a cost for all
that happened and the US will not avoid it any way. The real choice is
behind a huge damage limitation operation and the generalization of
disaster and it is really hard for the people who have to take the
decisions and fix the strategies.
The fact that no serious reaction to such plans is visible from outside
the USA, or from Western societies, facilitates the extremists. For
example Roosevelt, Keynes, or European Social Democracy were able to
apply their politics, because the existence of the communist Soviet
Union and its challenge to Western capitalism it was projecting was
providing them with a very strong argument. They had to do something
otherwise the Communists would try to seize power.
Vice-versa, if one decides he can go on with a policy without anybody
willing to stop him, then he has a serious motivation to proceed.
Unfortunately, for the time being, almost all political players around
the world seem absolutely unprepared for what they see unfolding before
their eyes, and apparently prefer not to believe it! They hope that God
(or the US “deep” or just the normal state) will avert the unprecedented
threats in an “automatic”, “objective” way, without them bothering to do
anything significant.
War, the Left and Multi-polarism
The potential opponents of the Empire, not only do they facilitate in
this way the work of its extremist faction, they also lose a historic
opportunity. There is no more urgent and more important task now than to
save the world from nuclear war. If the European Left, or Russia, or
China will express that need in a clear political way, for everybody to
hear, then they will achieve enormous international political results.
For the so-called European “Radical Left”, the situation presents it
with a unique, golden possibility to take the initiative and to redress
the catastrophic situation in which it found itself after the collapse
and the capitulation of SYRIZA, in July 2015, by organizing a strong,
mass and internationally coordinated demonstration of its opposition to
war against Iran, North Korea and also Venezuela, which is equally under
threat.
As Rome developed its imperialism, it destroyed its inner democracy,
moving from the Republic to the Empire. If the so-called Left in the
West does not do something serious and brave to stop this course, it
will simply have no future whatsoever. And perhaps nobody else will have
either.
And if there is a chance of Europe reversing its course, moving in a
social, democratic and ecological direction, it cannot do it if it
remains a passive vassal of the United States, their banks and of NATO.
The aggregation of European opportunisms can only help a continental
catastrophe.
What is true of European Left is also true of Russia and China. They
both represent a possibility of counterbalancing an imperial power which
is in the process of becoming totalitarian. Russia has a formidable
military power, China a formidable economic power.
These are necessary but not sufficient elements to move to a multi-polar
system. But to do this you don’t need only force, hard and economic
(soft) power, you need also an alternative political and civilizational
vision, political (soft) and “smart” (strategic) powers, which Russia
and China at the moment lack. They have adopted many of the dominant
characteristics of Western Capitalism and a large part of their upper
classes want exactly that, they are dreaming of what long ago became the
nightmare of the most enlightened segments of the West!
It is somewhat schizophrenic to read, in Chinese and Russian newspapers,
critiques of the very sanctions China and Russia are voting against
North Korea. Nothing good will come out of such schizophrenia if
prolonged. Multi-polarism cannot be born automatically out of objective
conditions and it won’t be a simple result of rising Russian and Chinese
power. It has a chance only if it will be able to become a real
international political project.
A first step would be for Russia and China to make the bold move and,
instead of trying to appease Mr. Trump, USA and Israel, take the
initiative to clearly and loudly denounce his threats and form an
international front to deter any prospect of nuclear war. This will be a
gigantic political step in the direction of establishing a Multi-Polar
World.
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