ERIC ZUESSE | 19.05.2017 | WORLD
A Progressive’s Argument that Trump Is Less Evil than Obama
To a progressive, the most important thing is to avoid a war between the U.S. and Russia — a war which has become likely after U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine bordering Russia and NATO’s then massing troops and weapons to several parts of and near Russia’s border. Any U.S.-Russia war would escalate beyond the use of non-nuclear arms at the moment when one of the two sides is losing that conventional war and has no possibility of avoiding being conquered by the other side except to unleash its already-deployed nuclear warheads (or «nuclear bombs»), which are 1,765 on Russia’s side, and 1,411 on America’s. (Such a nuclear conflict would be completed within less than 30 minutes; it would be the shortest war ever.)
The first side to launch nuclear forces would suffer less damage than the second to do so would (because some of the other side’s nukes would be destroyed in that attack), and therefore would ‘win’ that U.S.-Russia war in the standard military sense, though the planet itself would become uninhabitable afterwards (and so any such ‘win’ would be Pyrrhic). For either side to be conquered would be viewed by it as enslavement, and the leaders of the losing side would be killed by their own people if not by the conquerors; plus, there might be an escalation to nuclear even if none of the leaders want it; so, being the first to launch nuclear forces might be chosen as the less-catastrophic of the two available options in the event of a Russia-U.S. war; it is not an unlikely outcome, regardless of which side would be losing the conventional conflict.
To a progressive, the second-most important thing is to avoid global burning — out-of-control, runaway, escalation in atmospheric temperature, which would starve to death all humans but much slower than a U.S.-Russia war would. If the majority of climatologists are correct, then probably global burnout will happen even if concerted international action to prevent it is started now — probably we’re already too late to be able to avoid that outcome. The conservatives likely held off action against ‘global warming’ long enough to doom the planet.
Therefore, for two reasons, U.S.-Russia war is the world’s number-one concern: (1) U.S.-Russia war would produce hell-on-Earth much faster than global burning would: and, (2) It can be avoided (if the U.S. leadership backs off from its post-1990 goal of conquering Russia, which is possible for America’s leaders to do).
Since a progressive’s main focus is on getting the U.S. leadership to eliminate their overriding goal since 1990 of conquering Russia, Trump will here be compared with Obama, and with Obama’s chosen successor Hillary Clinton, on that particular issue:
Obama’s chosen successor was an ardent proponent of a «no-fly zone» being imposed by the U.S. in Syria — a sovereign nation that has been invaded by the U.S. (along with America’s jihadist boots-on-the-ground proxies that are financed by the Sauds who own Saudi Arabia and by the Thanis who own Qatar). Russia is defending the legitimate government of Syria, which the U.S. team are trying to overthrow and replace by jihadists. A U.S.-imposed no-fly zone there would require the U.S. to shoot down Syrian and Russian planes over Syrian territory. It would constitute a conventional war against Russia, using Syria as the battlefield. Hillary Clinton was clearly as evil as any politician has ever been. Not only did ‘the new Cold War’ (actually the hot proxy-war against Russia that the Obama regime started by overthrowing the democratically elected and Russia-friendly leader of Ukraine in 2014) start being planned by Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2011, but she was also willing to go hot against Russia over the battlefield of Syria.
So: if Clinton were now the U.S. President, then there would probably already be a conventional war between the U.S. and Russia in Syria. Furthermore, Obama had tried to set up his successor — whomever it would turn out to be — with a broken Syrian peace-negotiation process, as hard as possible to resolve the Syrian situation peaceably with Russia. Although Obama didn’t want to be the person who would pull the trigger against Russia, he wanted his successor to do so.
By contrast: Trump has been bluster against Russia (because of the U.S. aristocracy’s campaign to portray him as being Putin’s stooge or worse), and also against the government of Syria, but behind the scenes has been pursuing a negotiated settlement that is acceptable both to the Russian government and to the Syrian government.
Unlike Clinton-Obama, Trump is not aiming to conquer Russia.
On global burning, Trump is far worse even than Clinton would have been. But probably a miserable end will come much slower from his Presidency than it would be coming from a Presidency by Hillary Clinton.
In any case, only deeply misinformed people consider the United States to be, in any real sense, still a democracy. The issue instead is how bad the U.S. regime is. And, apparently, when considering the two options that the U.S. system gave us, we lucked out with Trump’s having won.
As regards the progressive issues that Bernie Sanders — Hillary’s opponent in the Democratic primaries — was promoting and had been fighting for throughout his political career, the U.S. aristocracy decided not to allow him to win the Presidency, though among the U.S. general electorate he was overwhelmingly the most-preferred (or least-opposed) Presidential candidate in any party. If he had won the Democratic nomination, then he would almost certainly have trounced Trump, and probably Congress and state houses also would be dominated by Democrats — and that would be a somewhat different (less fascist) Democratic Party from the one that now exists. But it just wasn’t possible, given the political realities in the U.S. That type of government doesn’t exist in America. America’s government is more conservative than America’s public are, and this is generally the case, because the aristocracy usually control a government, and they’re always more conservative than the public are. In that regard, America is a normal country. A Sanders win would have required, as a prerequisite, a certain type of abnormal country: one whose government is as progressive as its people are. This isn’t to say that the public are generally progressive, just that they’re always more progressive than the nation’s aristocracy is.
Uprooted Palestinian 
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
No comments:
Post a Comment