A Preemptive American Post Mortem
Why does this subhead refer to “preemptive?” In the first place, it’s a term that Americans understand and put to frequent use, usually in the context of war. Preemptive war is understood as the anticipatory use of force. It can either be construed as defense against imminent aggression, or simply a sneak attack. Where a given case lies on the continuum between one and the other depends upon a country’s values, interests and point of view. Preemptive war was the kernel of the Bush Doctrine, a set of foreign policy principles that paved the way for the US’s gratuitous invasion of Iraq in 2003, among other egregious international boutades. Insofar as the American demise looks evident and imminent, “preemptive” is the operative adjective for its post mortem.
When we were kids in a treehouse we subscribed to the myth that if you killed a snake, even cut his head off, he wouldn’t die until the sun went down. These are America’s last hours before sunset.
Each generation comes around with a new set of standards and values. Some of them make sense, advance the cause of humanity, and feel like progress. There’s the Renaissance, the American Revolution, the New Deal… Others, are senseless, destructive, inhumane. The Twenties were senseless, but not in the way the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s were. These fatal decades saw the widespread flowering of a set unthinkable ideologies, and saw the Depression, the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, Italian Fascism, German Nazism, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the specious desolation of Vietnam, all under the shadow of American exceptionalism and opportunism disguised as humanitarianism. That was the novelty that turned the 20th century into the American century. They co-opted it under false pretenses.
Revolutionary Weapons
Their weapons in this struggle were revolutionary. They were intangible–words. The Americans became the world’s consummate communicators. Never mind that a great part of what they communicated wasn’t true. That actually helped advance the American cause, which was a lie in itself. From the very inception of the United States at the end of the 18th century, they had an exaggerated exceptionalist conception of themselves. A prescient person in those times might have intuited the Americans’ vocation for conquest and dominance. Many of the observations that Alexis de Tocqueville made after his research trip around the US seeking novel solutions that might be applied in Europe, and published in his two-volume, Democracy in America, in 1835 and 1840, hold true to a surprising extent today, nearly two centuries later. Here, a few shining examples:
“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”
“There is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he is become their equal…”
“I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest that ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”
“Now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Big Data Changes the Game
The 20th century laid the ground work for today’s big-data, digital-communications, social media, high-speed-networked hackers’ and election fixers paradise (See Christopher Wiley’s book, Mindf*cked). This phenomenon is just another example of American communications black ops, both at home and around the world. American disengenuous whingeing about Russian hackers is unceasing, though they know very well themselves that the world’s largest and most important cyber-criminal organization is their own National Security Agency (NSA). Any self-respecting western media organization is aware of that, too, but they either don’t remember–or dare–to publish it.
The twenty first century arrived with a bitter surprise for the United Statesians. They found themselves mired in the dystopia brought on by the rule of greed, racism, and inequality in their country and were about to discover that they weren’t the only ones with ideas, initiatives, resources and allies. They had overlooked a relevant fact brought out recently by Evert-Jan Ouweneel, a Dutch academic, lecturer and visionary: over the past twenty centuries, the Chinese and the Hindus had dominated eighteen. The recent two-century lapse was due to unforeseen rapid industrialization in the West, but the Chinese in particular have shown they have overcome that hurdle and are barrelling towards a new supercharged normal.
Ouweneel sums up the current situation in a brief paragraph:
But things are changing dramatically again. China and India are catching up, with China behaving like a petrol engine and India like a diesel engine (needing more time to warm up). The leverage of the West is diminishing, their head start disappearing. And this time, China and India can combine their industrial power with their immense population. Once both countries are ‘up to date’ and ‘up to scale’, their huge work force and internal market will allow them to go above and beyond. China may have reached this point already, India is on its way.
Evert-Jan Ouweneel, Urbanlogics.eu
The American responses to the Chinese phenomenon were foreseeable. First they launched the Chinese imperialism ploy, attributing Chinese claims to sovereignty over Hong Kong and Taiwan to an infirm lust for territorial expansion. None of that. Both Hong Kong and Taiwan (Formosa) have their historical roots deep in the Chinese mainland and both have pertained to China at least since the early part of the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912, when it was finally brought down by a revolution led by Sun Zhongshan and his Revive China Society. China ruled Formosa (Taiwan) until Japan occupied the island during the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, and held it till 1945.
Following the end of World War II, the nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC), led by the Chiang Kai Chek’s Kuomintang (KMT), took refuge on Taiwan after losing control of mainland China to Mao Tse Tung and the Chinese communists. The KMT ruled Taiwan as a single-party state for forty years. China wants it back. The issue is complicated by the fact that the Taiwanese held their first presidential elections in 1996.
As for Hong Kong, Britain grabbed that Chinese city with classic British panache in 1841 during the first opium war–fought to secure the right of the British to continue to sell opium to the Chinese–and held onto it as long as they could, until 1997. Then they returned it–by treaty–to the Chinese fold. A case can be made for the fact that recent “democratic” breast beating in Hong Kong–very much in line with American-democracy-as-a-marketing-ploy–may be baseless.
Projecting American Military Superiority
The Unites States budget for 2021, part of $2.3 trillion spending package that includes pandemic relief and federal spending, includes $696 billion for the Pentagon. The full-year Pentagon spending bill represents a $2.6 billion increase over the 2020-enacted level but $2.1 billion less than President Donald Trump’s 2021 budget request. How many schools and hospitals does that sum represent? We’re not talking here about the full military budget, rather just the $2.6 billion increase over the previous year’s record sum.
There are many perfectly respectable countries in the world where this sort of spending on weapons of mass destruction would be considered mental illness. And, given the universal nature of nuclear warfare, all of these countries have skin in the game. But they have no say in the matter. They’re just standing by, awaiting some petulant US President’s next fit of pique. According to former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller, quoted in Forbes.com (July 9, 2021), there’s a 50-50 chance that Donald Trump will run for President again in 2024.
What would it take to precipitate such a war? Let’s look, for example, at American military provocations in the South China Sea, provocations which are currently under way. The name itself gives us a hint as to the gravity of the American swaggering. The “South China Sea” is not the South Louisiana Sea, nor the South Texas Sea… What are American warships doing careening about over there and inviting friends over for tea on the poop deck? What would the United States have to say to Chinese warships cavorting in the waters between Cuba and Florida?
Such is the Americans’ faith in their military superiority that, not only are they willing to risk nuclear winter, but they are spending their country’s life blood on it. The nuclear fetish goes something like this:
What would you rather have, America, schools at the levels of excellence of South Korea or Denmark, or more H-bombs?
More bombs!
But you already have more nuclear bombs than any other country in the world. Isn’t that enough?
No, we want more!
But even one nuke is enough to trigger a reaction that would end human life on earth forever.
Never mind, we want more!
Who are the only Americans with any possible interest, in promoting such an insane scenario? America’s all-powerful arms manufacturers, of course. Companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and dozens of others virtually own a controlling interest in the United States Congress, purchased with campaign contributions. Between their obscene wealth, their overriding greed, and the clout they wield in Washington, they are capable of precipitating the world’s next war. Which could be its last.
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Trump and All the Rest 