The United States, having learnt nothing from the 20th Century, is, quite characteristically, spoiling for a fight with one of the great success stories of our time, China, on the basis of nothing more than a doltishly unfounded fear of this success and an ever so faintly emerging spectre of American fragility. A Fragility across not only its military and political power, but, as well, across its bellicose and tottering brand of democracy.
Should life on Earth survive the ravages of its dominant form – humankind – and its mindlessly populist Pied Pipers, any kind of worthy recovery could only emerge from some very sober, and thus unlikely, reckoning.
For humankind, such a reckoning would have to thoroughly expose how it all came to pass; how all of the assorted Pied Pipers cast their wilfully swarming rabbles over their assorted cliffs of delusion onto the ragged rocks of reality.
Up front, this exposure would have to finger which of the most ambitious entities of humankind, over the millennia of its hapless evolution, should cop most of the blame for what had come to pass.
The facts about these entities have long been and are ever more amply available, but of course only to those (damned few) who really care to know. Facts which place the British and the Americans on top of the dark piles of those who have done the worst: the British for creating the model for dominance and the Americans, once such victims of it, for embracing it and taking it to such dizzyingly new heights with such careless, if in their minds sanctified, alacrity.
Both cloaked their ambition in notions of the greater good for their nationals and for their national superiority. The wealth, the power and the glory – the material benefits of which would, while going to their teeny weeny dominant classes, having been sublimated for the rest through prayerful regard for the munificence of The One who truly brought about their mightily just dominance of the heathen.
Their crimes against humankind are legion, remain largely un-conceded, and are by no means over.
In the making of the dominance model, Britain laid a solid foundation at home through skilful innovation in governance, manufacturing, engineering and science; coming, in time, to overcome their European rivals – especially to the extent that these advances projected into adventure, warfare and acquisition. Over the time of its ensuing imperial successes, Britain invaded, slaughtered, enslaved and plundered its way through India, Africa, the North American East, the Middle East, China and much of the Pacific islands. Other powerful European nations of the time made the best of what became the leftovers, bathing, along with the British, in the blessings of enrichment and empowerment bestowed upon them by the spiritual grace and favour of their common god.
The history of and the statistics for all of this are more accessible than ever and are truly shocking.
Emboldened by their success in throwing off the British imperial yoke in the 1770’s, and later persuading themselves that they had won WW2 for the West (which in fact, without the immense fortitude and the staggering losses of the Russians would most likely have been lost), and coming to see real prospects for themselves in the dominance stakes, Imperial America came into clearer being in the 1950’s.
For them at the beginning of that time Korea was a just cause, but one in which it learned that the dominantly powerful could hide mistakes and needless suffering, however gross. From then on, wealth and power and self-belief stirred them on to levels of assertive power and dominance and crime that the British in their time could only have envied and admired.
In 1956, having uncharacteristically sided with a hero of anti-imperialism, Egypt’s Gamel Abdul Nasser, against the British and the French, the Americans, in a great succession of concocted interventions visited great destruction and disruption – materially, politically, socially and of humanity – upon sovereign nations including, in no particular order, Iran, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, nations across Central and South America, and others across North Africa and the Middle East. And now, having learned nothing from these excesses, or perhaps no longer being able to back off from them, it is, quite characteristically, spoiling for a fight with one of the great success stories of our time, China, on the basis of nothing more than a doltishly unfounded fear of this success and an ever so faintly emerging spectre of American fragility. A Fragility across not only its military and political power, but, as well, across its bellicose and tottering brand of democracy.
We have yet to see the extent to which American insistence on retaining its exceptionalist place at the top of its view of the World Order can survive. Survive, that is, in the face of its growing discordance, its lies and disinformation and its adoring, ever growing, body of urges and lemmings. This especially, and immediately, in the context of current precipices such as China (uniquely of American concoction), Ukraine and Israel. Precipices that are unlikely to recede as long as Americans remain is such thrall of the spectrum of their Pied Pipers – their presidents and their generals (and their slavish followers elsewhere, such as in Australia) and, of course, their priests.
Robert Browning and the Brothers Grimm would have had a field day with this material.