In his exit interview with the American people, President Eisenhower famously warned us about the military-industrial complex. Nobody paid him the slightest mind, and a few years later, the M.I.C, already out of control, murdered John Kennedy. It’s not really even a ‘conspiracy theory’ anymore.
In his exit interview, given not to the people but to a neolib rag called The Atlantic, Barack Obama noted that while Ukraine was of very little consequence to US Imperial Security, it was of vital strategic importance to Russia. That was honest, although he had let his henchmen overthrow the democratically elected president of Ukraine two years earlier, which was not.
At this point seven years ago no one gave a shit about either Ukraine or Russia, much less Putin. You hadn’t been trained to hate him yet. Maybe you were vaguely amused, or rolled your eyes a couple times at his bare-chested public persona and shenanigans. Much like Donald Trump, no one took him seriously, almost right up until the fateful night Hillary the Anointed lost the game.
The Democrats blamed everyone from Jill Stein to black anti-feminists in Milwaukee; pretty much anyone but themselves. But most of all, they blamed that evil Russian election-meddler because trying to pin the blame there served the purposes of the Imperial war machine. Multiple schemes were hatched, launched, and funded trying to prove that Putin was to blame for Trump. Every one of them has now been exposed as manipulative and cynical bullshit–some people even went to prison for a change–but Trump Derangement Syndrome kept fanning the flames of Russiagate non-stop even so.
Meanwhile, we made it through the Donald’s term, and Covid, and even the first couple of years of Scranton Joe before the shit hit the fan. All through those eight years, the Empire’s own very real election meddling in Ukraine turned into a bloody civil war there between the ethnic Russian east and the Europe-facing deliberately installed puppets in the west of the country. Fifteen thousand people in Donetsk and Luhansk oblast were blown to bits by heroic Zelenskyy and his merry brigades of Banderist Nazis.
Finally in early ’22, he massed his armies across from the shattered rebellious capitals of those provinces and readied himself to commit genocide upon them for real. And Putin finally said: Enough, and crossed the border himself.
Yes it was an illegal invasion of a ‘sovereign’ nation, and a fake democracy besides. I don’t excuse it.
And yet. Do you recall what the Russian reaction was when the US invaded sovereign Iraq for literally no reason than that Bush and Cheney felt like it?
No. You don’t. Because there was no reaction, beyond a business-as-usual shrug–there go the capitalists, again.
It wasn’t their business, just like Ukraine isn’t any of ‘ours’.
I re-tell that story to tell you this one.
U.S. Is Lying About China Being A “Threat”! – Says Fmr Australian Prime Minister
China-hating makes even less sense than Russia-hating.
In the early 1990s, everyone was scared shitless about the evil Japanese beating the American Empire at its own capitalist game. China was if anything a passing afterthought.
Japan crashed and burned. But over the next 30 years, China slowly gunned their engines and then finally took off.
The Empire capitalists saw nothing but dollar signs. China was an ’emerging market’ of a billion and a half people, whoo-hoo! But that was the least of it. Those huddled masses weren’t just potential consumers. They’d be happy working for a tiny fraction of what the American working class would consider a living wage. And the good jobs flew out of the Rust Belt with a giant sucking sound, because Those People were much easier to exploit for profit than some uppity unionized machinist in Bethlehem, PA.
Chinese steel? Meh. Good enough. Stack that cash.
Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
‘Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore
China got big by making your boss big, and gutting the lives of your neighbors in that poor suburb next door.
So now you gonna hate China. For that. Instead of hating those “men sent the jobs away”. Those fine upstanding pillars of your community that fire up their Lambos and peel out on the souls of their countrymen with a Hi Oh Silver, singing the one about Let Them Drink Lead, down there in Flint and Jackson.
Or you’re gonna hate ’em because they don’t want to let go of one of their provinces. Not a raped colony like Hawaii, mind you, but an island that everyone in the world has agreed for 75 years is part of the One and Only China.
Your nice boss. Your Jen Psaki. Old Joe himself.
They lie and they lie and they kill and they kill and they despoil everything they touch and they teach you to hate.
I’m asking you nicely one more time.
Resist.