The Post title parodies that remarkable and brave account of the German war in Western Europe during World War One, “All Quiet of the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I.
As Robert Parry wrote in Consortium News “If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
But this impervious narrative is an essential component of the drive to crush the Russian economy with sanctions and lowered oil prices, along with the attempts to encircle China via the East Asian Pivot.
Much like the sanctions imposed on Iran for decades because of their fictional nuclear weapons development, every political player West and East knows that the fictional Russian troops in Eastern Ukraine (aside from the Crimea) are a wonderful excuse to attempt to economically destroy the country. It is virtually impossible for the sanctioned country to prove the absence of something that did not exist in the first place. But as Cuba has so ably proved in the past 50 years, alternative strategies are possible and even beneficial.
The impact of crashing oil prices -however temporary- on all the major oil producers- including Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar as well as Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the shale oil industries of the U.S. and Canada , are unknown and unpredictable. Did the powers-that-be in Washington and London consider what the impacts of plunging oil prices would have on their jihadists in Syria and Iraq and their consequent capacity to buy more men and equipment? or even consider that weakening oil prices will strengthen China’s economic position in the world?- we may never know…
In response to these threats , Russia and China have launched a whole swathe of economic agreements between themselves and with other neighbouring countries . As Pepe Escobar describes it, the development of the new silk road via high speed rail links between China and the rest of Asia and Europe has begun at a startling rapid pace and will result in a completely changed political/economic dynamic in the world within a very short space of time that will also be out of the reach of U.S. and U.K . interests.
There is therefore urgent need for the UK and US war economies to move fast to eliminate these new threats as Western economies start to crumble and their capacity to control markets and other state and non-entities is progressively reduced.
Perhaps that haste is the reason for the level of incompetency shown by the State Department in putting “their man” Natalie Jaresko as Ukraine’s new Finance Minister. The contempt shown to Eastern Europeans by the US government in the appointment of this corrupt US citizen and State Department official as Ukraine’s Finance Minister is staggering, but yet remarkable for the lack of a response from the (for now) subjugated Western Ukrainians. Or the even more absurd Obama reaction to some hacker group infiltrating Sony and threatening the company for its film which encourages the assassination of a living head of state – something for which the company could in fact be indicted for in an international court of law; (were there such a neutral international player)
The recent reports from the U.S on the types and extent of torture US officials are prepared to disclose, is a tiny drop in the ocean of the countless examples of the extent to which US and UK governments have long been prepared to enslave, murder, torture and destroy indiscriminately if it serves their interests. While the British Empire’s brutality against those of other skin colour should need no further explanation, it is often useful to point out that the United States’ history of state terrorism and genocide is also a very long one; beginning with the terror and genocide against the Plains Indians in the late 18th century, to the US’s brutal colonizations of the Philippines and Caribbean in the 19th century and the genocide committed in the name of “democracy and freedom” in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq ( to name just a few). The 21st century is no exception to this long litany of terror, torture and murder by these two so-called “civilised” countries. The scale of devastation and horror inflicted by these two countries against other (‘foreign’) populations, has no equal.
That is not to say that those state entities the United States and the UK wish to destroy are themselves necessarily humanitarian and democratic; but it can be argued that -as in the case of post 1917 Russia, Weimar Germany, North Korea and Cambodia; where civic institutions are crushed by an overwhelmingly powerful outside force, then despotism can freely reign.
The United States , the United Kingdom and a few other ex-colonial powers, have no such excuse. It is interesting to note, that up until the development of the “Terrorist” threat post 9/11, the actions of those two states against their own citizens had been relatively benign; their emphasis has traditionally been on harming external states for commercial benefit; that locus appears to be changing into a more wide-ranging capacity to harm or destroy any individuals or entity within or without their state borders that impinge on the powerful “elite”s capacity to extract more money for itself. In all probability, this shift in focus is directly attributable to the dawning understanding that the days of Western hegemony over the world’s resources are numbered.
What is blindingly obvious in this analysis is the totally banale and infantile drivers for these constant wars, let alone their leaders’ complete lack of understanding and compassion for the suffering of others. And we should not forget the massive contribution to environmental destruction this 300 year old process has delivered. This is certainly not an intelligent process, although the processes of domination and extraction of plunder are often complex.
We can only watch in amazement at the psychopathic behaviours of key US officials delighting in the violent deaths of others -eg Dick Cheney, or Hilary Clinton (below)
or Obama joking about killer drones, knowing full well the impacts in families and communities of the thousands of innocent lives killed by these random killing machines.
In fact recent evidence on Hillary Clinton’s motivation’s for the war in Libya, reveal little else than the fact that she didn’t like Muammar Ghaddafi. Certainly there was absolutely no evidence of the genocide of Libyan civilians by Ghaddafi’s forces as was alleged and provided as rationale to U.S. supporting the jihadist forces there. Clinton’s maniacal delight in Ghaddafi’s brutal death is a warning to us all.
and the UK’s Blair and Jack Straw who simply refuse to acknowledge that their orders resulted in the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans based simply on their whim ( ‘I kill because I can’). It may be salutory to read Ahmad Baqawi’s damning analysis of the NATO intervention in Libya and the resultant total and deliberate destruction of Libya as a nation-state, or perhaps Peter Lee’s account of the brutal murder and destruction carried out by the West proxy’s in Syria in the name of “democracy and freedom”
In another more equitable world , those politicians would have long ago been convicted and sent to high security forensic mental health wards; or perhaps, as the highly respected American columnist William Pfaff notes -simply tried Nuremburg style and, if convicted on the evidence, hanged.
Links
John Pilger – The Coming War documentary’ campaign
New Antarctica 