Rarely has the imperial arrogance of the Washington political class been so succinctly expressed. We are talking about Mitch McConnell’s recent triple bank-shot rationale for inflicting still more misery and death on the god-forsaken peoples of Ukraine.
American support for Ukraine is not charity. It’s in our own direct interests – not least because degrading Russia helps to deter China.
What kind of sick fuck would demolish an entire nation and slaughter tens of thousands of its citizens in order to weaken its neighbor and historic suzerain—all for the purpose of sending a carom shot across the bow of rulers 3,600 miles away. And rulers, at that, who are no boon to their own citizens but also pose no threat to the liberty and safety of the people of Kentucky or any other part of the United States?
Indeed, even when President Truman and War Secretary Stimson ordered the cold-blooded killing of 214,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki their rulers actually did mean America harm and had already killed thousands of its soldiers from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima. But exactly where is the evidence that Beijing is assembling a massive armada of air, sea and land forces to invade the coast of California or is standing up a devastating first nuclear strike capacity to leave American cities in cinders before the awful nuclear retaliatory forces of the US could strike back?
So let’s cut to the chase: Without Washington’s dollars, weapons and hegemonic pressure the war in Ukraine would have been settled by partition long ago. The map of Ukraine above would be cut into two nations roughly at the faint blue line representing the Dnieper River and that would be that.
Yet for demented reasons that are truly hard to fathom Washington has found it necessary to reject this obvious option and, instead, conduct a red-hot proxy war against Russia and China. So doing it is annihilating far more innocent people for far less plausible reason than did Truman and Stimson in August 1945
The point here is that we are not talking merely about the kind of hawkish arms build-up overkill that Ronald Reagan needlessly launched in 1981. That was all about deterrence and intimidating the Kremlin’s totalitarian rulers of the day, but it didn’t involve the wanton destruction of a third nation’s innocents in their hundreds of thousands. Yet the malefic idea of fighting Russia to the death of the last 70-year-old Ukrainian draftee—in order to haze Xi Jinping—is all in a day’s work in today’s Imperial Washington.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that loathsome hacks like McConnell rise to the top of the heap on Capitol Hill. After nearly 60-years on the public teat this sawdust-for-brains fool doesn’t even recognize the nauseating predicate of his pronouncement. That is to say, the belief that the world is meant to be ruled from the banks of the Potomac and the horrific collateral damage from such arrangement shall be what it may.
That’s right. McConnell’s war cries are about preservation of Washington’s global hegemony, not America’s homeland security. Surely, even the slow-witted Senate Leader and his neocon confederates do not believe that either Russia or China pose an existential threat to the United States.
After all, how could they? The former has a puny GDP equal to just 7% of America’s and China is the product of a vast Ponzi scheme sitting atop $50 trillion of debt and a desperate need for the $3.5 trillion of annual export earnings that keep the whole house of cards afloat.
Stated differently, when China’s red rulers chose to stay in power by invading the US and Europe with shoes, shirts, sheets, sofas, stoves, lamps, furniture, toys and iPhones, they foreclosed the option of military attack once and for all. Retaining the custom of 4,000 Walmart’s and hundreds of billions of Amazon orders is what now keeps China’s empire of debt and malinvestment functioning, its hundreds of millions of industrial workers in paychecks and, therefore, it’s autocratic Chicom rulers from being hung by its exploited populace from the top of the CCTV headquarters in Beijing.
Needless to say, the phony neocon predicate that Russia and China are military threats to the America’s homeland security has fostered every manner of preposterous presumption and paranoia in the Imperial City. For instance, the detestable hawkish Senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, recently joined McConnell peddling today’s groundless version of the domino theory on behalf of more aid and weapons for Ukraine:
“The failure to provide them is going to be a stain on our country,” he said. “But more importantly, it’s going to imperil our national security, because Putin will keep moving against NATO countries, and we will be obligated by our treaty commitments to put troops on the ground.”
No, Putin is not about to invade Poland or the Baltics for that matter. And that’s to say nothing of marching through the Brandenburg Gate on the way to the Low Countries and France.
For crying out loud. If any such plan, intention or capability even remotely existed in Moscow, it would have been discovered years ago, and it would have been leaked to every CIA outlet in town including CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC and countless more. Yet when it comes to even a shred of evidence in support of the Big Lie that Putin is attempting to rebirth the old Soviet Empire there is nothing but crickets from that nation’s $90 billion per year intelligence apparatus—a planetary information vacuum cleaner so massive that it dwarfs Russia’s entire pre-Ukraine military budget.
To the contrary, Russian forces are in Ukraine today only after years of Putin’s clear warnings that bringing NATO missiles to within 40 minutes airtime of Moscow was a Russian security red line that could not be crossed, and for the same reasons that President Kennedy laid-down during the Cuban Missile Crisis 61-year ago.
Yet clowns like Blumenthal and McConnell get away with repeating these canards because Imperial Washington is blind to its own actual modus operandi. Namely, that the nation’s vastly inflated national security budget is actually about ruling the world, not providing for the homeland defense. In the form of a proper Fortress America configuration, in fact, the latter would cost perhaps $400 billion per year—a half trillion dollars less than the current monstrous expanse of the Warfare State.
Not surprisingly, the planetary pretensions of the latter are virtually limitless. For example, the Biden administration is currently racing to finish an updated economic assistance pact with the Marshall Islands, to complement similar agreements reached with Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia. Total funding would amount to $7.1 billion to renew the three pacts starting in FY 2024.
Needless to say, these three archipelagic nations occupy a spec so tiny in the expanse of the Pacific Ocean shown below that they are not even visible to the naked eye. Not one in a million denizens of the national security establishment could even locate them, and for good reason: In this day and age of ICBMs and hypersonic missiles why in the world would rational people want to maintain military bases on these protuberances from the deep Pacific? To intercept the next Chinese carrier battle group steaming toward Pearl Harbor?
Then again, we do use the term “carrier battle group” advisedly. China now has one 40-year-old rust bucket aircraft carrier purchased from the ex-Soviet Union and one home-constructed carrier still undergoing sea trials. Should need be, perhaps these could be taken out with attack submarine launched missiles long before reaching Pearl Harbor, and without the bother of bases and bribes to the statelets depicted below.
After all, the population of Palau is 22,000 including all the zeroes—along with 42,000 for the Marshall Islands and 104,000 souls in the Federated States of Micronesia. The combined population of 168,000 happens to have a per capita annual income of $6,200, which means the bribes being paid to their corrupt political leaders amount to $42,000 per capita or seven times more than their meager incomes!
Even Imperial Rome, in its weakest moments, never paid bribes that pointless and stupid.
At the same time, of course, that US public debt has crossed $33 trillion, which is actually a rearview mirror number. What is baked into the cake of the current Warfare State and Welfare State budgets—for which there is no chance of changing so long as the conservative party stumps up foolish leaders like Mitch McConnell—is $55 trillion of public debt by the early 2030s and $100 trillion long before mid-century. That is, if the whole shebang doesn’t blow sky high first.
And yet, and yet. The bipartisan blob represented by blood-thirsty dunces like McConnell and Blumenthal insist on upping the ante in Ukraine beyond the hideous sum of $115 billion already authorized in the name of what? The rule of law and the territorial integrity of nations?
We’d doubt whether those sacred rules were much considered when—
Libya was turned into a barbaric failed state by Washington’s bombing campaign against Khadafy or when—
Syria was reduced to mainly rubble by Washington funded terrorists or when—
Yemen became the site of a 21st century genocide directed by Washington’s surveillance and targeting apparatus or when—
The tolerable stability of Iraq under Hussein was splintered into a modern hellhole by junior Bush’ neocon madmen.
The fact is, Ukraine isn’t France—a nation separate and apart from Russia. To the contrary, its very name means “borderlands” in Russian, and has been an integral territory or vassal of Greater Russia for centuries. The only modern borders it has ever had were those established by three of history’s greatest tyrants after Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and the bloodthirsty Bolsheviks sized power in the region.
That’s right. McConnell would sacrifice the last able-bodied Ukrainian in order to enforce the dead-hand of the Soviet Presidium. Sick fuck hardly does justice to the depravity of it.
What is doubly heinous about it is that ever since these happenstance borders were relieved of their tyrannical enforcers in 1991, when the Soviet Union tumbled into the dustbin of history, the people of Ukraine have been voting for separation. Again, and again the overwhelming Russian-speaking majorities in the Donbass and Black Sea rim (red areas) voted for the pro-Russian candidate and the Ukrainians, Poles, Tartars and other inhabitants of the center and south voted for the anti-Russian candidate.
For avoidance of doubt here is the electoral map for both the first 1994 election and the 2010 election—the last honest election before the Washington sponsored Maidan coup of February 2014. On both sides of the divide the votes were 80-20 or more each way.
What idiot cannot see that a partition along these lines would end the carnage in a veritable heartbeat?
Ukraine Election Map, 1994
Ukraine Election Map, 2010
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
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