By Eric Zuesse
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On November 29th, Gallup headlined “Democrats Lead Surge in Belief US Should Be World Leader” and reported that “Three-fourths (75%) of Americans today think the United States has ‘a special responsibility to be the leading nation in world affairs,’ up from 66% in 2010. The surge is driven by Democrats, whose belief in this idea has increased from 61% eight years ago to 81% now.” This finding comes even after the lie-based and catastrophic US invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011 (and of so many others, such as Afghanistan, where the US and Sauds created the Taliban in 1979). Americans — now even increasingly — want ‘their’ (which is actually America’s billionaires’) Government to be virtually the world’s government, policing the world. They want this nation’s Government to be determining what international laws will be enforced around the world, and to be enforcing them.
Most Americans don’t want the United Nations to have power over the US (its billionaires’) Government, but instead want the US Government (its billionaires) to have power over the United Nations (which didn’t authorize any of those evil, lie-based, US invasions).
Not only would doing this bankrupt all constructive domestic functions (health, education, infrastructure, etc.) of the US federal Government, but it would also increase the global carnage, as if the US Government hasn’t already been doing enough of that, for decades now.
The leadership for this supremacist craving comes straight from America’s top, not from the masses that are being sampled by the Gallup organization, who only reflect it — they are duped by their leaders. Here is how US President Barack Obama (a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2009, for nothing at all but his ‘kindly’ but insincere verbiage when he had been a candidate) stated this widespread delusional American belief in American global moral supremacy, when addressing the graduating class at West Point Military Academy, on 28 May 2014:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation*. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come…America must always lead on the world stage.
[*Every other nation is therefore ‘dispensable’; we therefore now have “Amerika, Amerika über alles, über alles in der Welt”.]
This had certainly not been the objective of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he set up the U.N. just before his death in 1945; he instead wanted the U.N. to evolve into a democratic government of the world, with elected representatives of each and every one of the world’s governments — to evolve into becoming the global international republic — regardless of whether or not the US Government approves or disapproves of another nation’s government. The idea on which the U.N. was founded was not to involve the US Government in the internal affairs of other nations, not to be the judge jury and executioner of other governments that it doesn’t like, nor to dictate what other nations should or should not do within the given nation’s boundaries. FDR intended that there instead be democratically represented, at the U.N., each and every nation, and each and every people within that global government, where each of these national governments is (hopefully but not necessarily) a democracy.
FDR was just as opposed to dictatorship internationally, as he was opposed to dictatorship nationally, and he recognized that inevitably some governments will disapprove of other governments, but he was deeply committed to the view that a need exists for laws and law-enforcement between nations, on an international level, and not only within the individual nations, and that each nation is sacrosanct on its own internal laws. He respected national sovereignty, and opposed international empire. (This was his basic disagreement with Winston Churchill, then, and with American leaders such as Obama and Trump now.) Unlike President Obama (and evidently unlike the vast majority of today’s Americans) FDR didn’t want this international government to be an American function, but instead an entirely separate international governmental function, in which there is no international dictatorship whatsoever — not American, and not by any other country. He knew that this is the only stable basis for international peace, and for avoiding a world-annihilating World War III.
Barack Obama rejected FDR’s vision, and advocated for the United States as being (and even as if it already had been for a century) virtually the government over the entire world, which “must always lead on the world stage.” Adolf Hitler had had that very same international vision for his own country, Germany, “the Thousand-Year Reich,” but he lost World War II; and, then, when FDR died, Hitler’s vision increasingly took over in America, so that ideologically, FDR actually lost WW II, when Harry S. Truman took over the White House and increasingly thereafter, until today, when the US commits more invasions of foreign countries than do all other nations in the world combined. Americans (apparently, as shown in this and other polls) like this, and want more of it. Nobody else does.
For example, nobody (except the US and Saudi and Israeli aristocracies and their supporters worldwide, which are very few people) supports the US regime’s reinstitution of sanctions against Iran, which the US regime is imposing as the global dictator. America’s economic sanctions are like spitting into the face of FDR, who had opposed such imperialistic fascism in the more overtly military form when Hitler’s regime was imposing it. It’s also spitting at the U.N.
This latest Gallup finding displays an increase, but nothing that’s at all anomalous as compared to the decades-long reality of imperialistic US culture. For decades now, Gallup’s polling has shown that the most respected of all institutions by the American people is the nation’s military — more than the church, more than the Presidency, more than the US Supreme Court, more than the press, more than the schools, more than anything. America is invasion-nation. This is true even after the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of blatant lies, which destroyed Iraq — a nation that had never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States. The American people are, resolutely, bloodthirsty for conquest, even after having been fooled into that evilinvasion, and subsequent decades-long military occupation in Iraq, and after subsequent conquests or attempted conquests, in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere — all destroying nations that had never invaded nor even threatened America. Why? How did this mass-insanity, of evil, come to be?
How is this aggressive nationalism even possible, in America’s ‘democracy’? It’s actually no democracy at all, and the public are being constantly fooled to think that it is a democracy, and this deception is essential in order for the public to tolerate this Government, and to tolerate the media that lie for it. This widespread deceit requires constant cooperation of the ‘news’-media — and these are the same ‘news’-media that hid from the public, in 2002, that the US Government was outright lying about “WMD in Iraq.”
The public simply do not learn. That’s a tragic fact. Largely, this fact results from reality being hidden by the ‘news’-media; but, even now, long after the fake ‘news’ in 2002, about the US regime’s having possessed secret and conclusive evidence of “Saddam’s WMD,” the published ‘history’ about that invasion still does not acknowledge the public’s having been lied-to at that time, by its Government, and by the ‘news’-media. So, the public live, and culturally swim, in an ongoing river of lies, both as its being ‘news’, and subsequently as its having been ‘history’. This is why the public do not learn: they are being constantly deceived. And they (as Gallup’s polls prove) tolerate being constantly deceived. The public do not rebel against it. They don’t reject either the politicians, or the ‘news’-media. They don’t demand that the American public control the American Government and that America’s billionaires lose that control — especially over the ‘news’-media.
Honesty is no longer an operative American value, if it ever was. That’s how, and why, Big Brother (the operation by the international-corporate billionaires) grips Americans’ minds to support foreign Invasions. Americans support liars, and it all comes from the top; it’s directed from the top. It is bipartisan, from both Democratic Party billionaires and Republican Party billionaires. National politicians will lose their seats if they disobey.
A good example, of this Big-Brother operation, is America’s Politifact, the online site which is at America’s crossover where ‘news’ and ‘history’ meet one-another. It’s controlled by billionaires such as the one who founded Craigslist. Millions of Americans go to Politifact in order to determine what is true and what is false that is being widely published about current events. The present writer sometimes links to their articles, where I have independently verified that there are no misrepresentations in an article. But, like the ‘news’-media that it judges, Politifact is also a propaganda-agency for the (US-Saud-Israeli) Deep State, and so it deceives on the most critically important international matters.
An example of this occurred right after the US regime had overthrown, in February 2014 in a bloody coup, the democratically elected Government of Ukraine, and replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian racist fascist or nazi Government on Russia’s doorstep, a regime that was selected by the rabidly anti-Russian (but lying that it wasn’t) Obama regime. This Politifact article was dated 31 March 2014, right after over 90% of Crimeans had just voted in a referendum, to rejoin Russia, and to depart from Ukraine, which the Soviet dictator had transferred them to, separating them from Russia, in 1954. (None of that history of the matter was even mentioned by Politifact.)
The Politifact article was titled “Viral meme says United States has ‘invaded’ 22 countries in the past 20 years”, and it was designed to deceive readers into believing that “Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea” reflected the real instance of “invasion” that Americans should be outraged against — to deflect away from America’s recent history as being the world’s actual invasion-nation. This propaganda-article said nothing at all about either Crimea or Ukraine except in its opening line:
A Facebook meme argues that Americans are pretty two-faced when it comes to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea.”
It then proceeded to document that the exact number of American invasions during the prior 20 years wasn’t 22, and so Politifact declared the allegation “false” (as if the exact number were really the entire issue or even the main one, and as if America’s scandalous recent history of invasions were not).
So, it’s on account of such drowning-in-propaganda, that the US public not only respect what US President Dwight Eisenhower derogatorily called the “military-industrial complex,” but respect it above even the US Presidency itself, and above all other US institutions (as Gallup’s constant polling demonstrates to be the case).
Here’s the reality: The same group of no more than a thousand super-wealthy Americans control both the United States Government and the weapons-manufacturing firms (such as Lockheed Martin), which are the only corporations whose only customers are the US Government and its chosen allied governments. So, these few people actually control the US Government’s foreign relations, and foreign policies. They create and control their own markets. This is the most politically active group of America’s super-rich, because they own America’s international corporations and because their business as owners of the military ones is military policy and also diplomatic policy, including the conjoining of both of those at the CIA and NSA, including the many coups that they (via their Government) engineer.
They also control all of the nation’s major news-media, which report international affairs in such a manner as to determine which foreign governments will be perceived by the mass of Americans to constitute the nation’s ‘enemies’ and therefore to be suitable targets for the US military and CIA to invade and conquer or otherwise “regime-change” — such as have been the lands of North Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Venezuela, etc., at various times.
The weapons-manufacturers won’t have any markets, at all, if there are no ‘enemy’ nations that are deemed by the public to be suitable targets for their weapons. ‘Enemy’ nations, and not only ‘allies’ (or ‘allied’ nations), are necessary, in order for the military business to produce the most profits. Overwhelmingly, if not totally, the chosen ‘enemies’ are nations that have never invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States; and, so, in order to keep this Government-funded business (the war-profiteering and associated international natural-resources extractions businesses) growing and thriving, what’s essential is continuing control over the nation’s ‘news’-media.
As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1921, “the manufacture of consent” is an essential part of this entire operation. It happens via the media. Even Germany’s Nazis needed to do that. Any modern capitalist dictatorship (otherwise called “fascism”) does. The US regime, being a capitalist dictatorship, certainly does.
Physically, Hitler lost, but his ideology won, he won even as nazism (racist fascism) instead of merely as fascism, and this racism is shown because the US regime is rabidly racist anti-Russian (not merely anti-communist), and has been so for at least a century. (Maybe it’s what Obama actually had secretly in mind when he said “That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.” And Trump is no less a liar than Obama, and he continues this aim of ultimately conquering Russia.)
They say they’re only against Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, but Putin shows in all polls of Russians, even in non-Russian polls, to be far more favorably viewed by Russians than either Barack Obama or Donald Trump are viewed by Americans. This is why regime-change-in-Russia is increasingly becoming dominated by US economic sanctions and military, and less dominated by CIA and other coup-organizers. The actual dictatorship is in America, and it requires participation by its ‘news’-media. Demonizing ‘the enemy’ is therefore crucial. It is crucial preparation for any invasion.
The United States Government spends at least as much money on its military as do all of the other governments in the world combined. Its ‘news’-media (that is to say, the media that are owned by, and that are advertised in by, the corporations that are controlled by, the same small group of billionaires — America’s billionaires — who fund the political campaigns of both the Democratic Party’s and the Republican Party’s nominees for the US Congress and the Presidency) may be partisan for one or the other of the nation’s two political Parties, but they all are unitedly partisan for the international corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, that America’s billionaires control, and that sell only to the US Government and to the foreign governments that are allied with the US Government. They also are partisan for the US-based oil and gas and mining international corporations, which need to extract at the lowest costs possible, no matter how much the given extractee-nation’s public might suffer from the deal. “Three-fourths (75%) of Americans today think the United States has ‘a special responsibility to be the leading nation in world affairs,’” and the actual beneficiaries of this mass-insanity are the owners of those US-based international corporations, the military and extraction giants.
Anthony Cordesman, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, headlined on 15 August 2016, “US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen: What Are The Endstates?” and he said,“Once again, the United States does not seem to be learning from its past. The real test of victory is never tactical success or even ending a war on favorable military terms, it is what comes next.”
But he ignored the main reason why these invasions had occurred. America’s weapons-manufacturers won’t have any markets, at all, if there are no ‘enemy’ nations that are deemed by the American public to be suitable targets for their weapons. Cordesman is there calculating success and failure on the basis of the myths (such as that the US Government cares about those “Endstates”), not of the realities (that it craves targets). The realities focus upon the desires of the owners and executives of the weapons-manufacturers and the extraction-firms, for ongoing and increased profits and executive bonuses, and not on the needs of America’s soldiers nor on the national security of the American people. Least of all, do they focus upon the needs — such as the welfare, freedom, or democracy — of the Iraqi people, or of the Syrian people, or of the Libyan people, or of the Yemenite people.
It’s all just lies, PR. Those invasions served their actual main functions when they were occurring. “The Endstates” there are almost irrelevant to those real purposes, the purposes for which the invasions were, and are, actually being done.
Here’s an ideal example of this mass mind-control: On 19 November 2017, Josh Rogin at the Washington Post headlined “The US must prepare for Iran’s next move in Syria” and reported that:
A task force of senior former US diplomatic and military officials has come up with suggestions for how Trump could prevent Iran from taking over what’s left of liberated Syria and fulfill his own promise to contain Iranian influence in the region.“Most urgently…the United States must impose real obstacles to Tehran’s pursuit of total victory by the Assad regime in Syria,” the report by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America states. “Time is of the essence.”
The underlying presumption there was that the US regime has legitimate authorization to be occupying the parts of Syria it has invaded and now occupies, and that Iran does not. But the reality is that the US regime is occupying Syria instead of assisting Syria’s Government to defeat the US-Saud-Israeli invasion to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government, by stooges who will be selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and the reality is that Iran’s forces there are invitees who are instead assisting Syria’s Government against the Saudi-Israeli-American invasion. In other words: this WP article is basically all lies. Furthermore, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America is a front-organization for the fascist regime that rules Israel, and the WP hid that fact, too, so its cited ‘expert’ was a mere PR agency for Israel’s aristocracy. So, this is Deep-State propaganda, parading as ‘news’.
Americans actually pay their private good money to subscribe to (subsidize) such bad public ‘news’papers as that. The billionaire who happens to own that particular ‘news’paper (the WP), Jeff Bezos, had founded and leads Amazon, which receives almost all of its profits from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing division, which supplies the US ‘Defense’ Department, CIA, and NSA.
For example, “without AWS and Prime, Amazon lost $2 billion in the 1st quarter of FY18. … These losses come from Amazon’s retail business. About 60% of Amazon’s revenue comes from retail and that’s where Amazon is losing money.” Amazon is profitable because of what it sells mainly to the Government, but also to other large US international corporations, and they all want to conquer Syria. None opposes that evil goal. Although Bezos doesn’t like the Sauds, he has actually been (at least until the Khashoggi matter) one of their main US media champions for the Sauds to take over Syria. It’s all just a fool-the-public game. It works, it succeeds, and that’s what Gallup’s polls are demonstrating. The public never learns. It’s a fact, which has been proven in many different ways.
This reality extends also to other nations, allies of the US aristocracy, and not only to the US regime itself. For example, on 27 November 2018, a whistleblowing former UK Ambassador, Craig Murray, who is a personal friend of Julian Assange, headlined “Assange Never Met Manafort. Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies”, and he proved that Britain’s Guardian had lied with total, and totally undocumented (and probably even totally non-credible), fabrications, alleging that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks had secretly met (in 2013, 2015, and 2016) with Paul Manafort of the Trump campaign.
The UK, of course, is a vassal-nation of the US aristocracy, and the Guardian is run by Democratic Party propagandists (paid indirectly by Democratic Party and conservative Tony-Blair-wing Labour Party billionaires) and therefore fabricates in order to assist those Parties’ efforts to impeach Trump and to dislodge Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party’s leadership. However, each of America’s two political parties (like the UK’s aristocracy itself) represents America’s aristocracy, which, like Britain’s aristocracy, is united in its determination to eliminate Assange — they are as determined to do that to him, just as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud was determined to eliminate Jamal Khashoggi. ‘Democracy’? This? It is Big Brother.
Only if the population boycott lying individuals and organizations, is democracy even possible to exist in a nation. Democracy can’t possibly exist more than truth does. In political matters, deceit is always treachery; and its practitioners, whenever the evidence for it is overwhelming and irrefutable, should experience whatever the standard penalty is for treachery. Only in a land such as that, can democracy possibly exist. Elsewhere, it simply can’t. The only basis for democracy, is truth. Deceit is for dictators, not for democrats. And deceit reigns, in the US and in its allied countries. Is this really tolerable? Americans, at least, tolerate it.
When Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the far-right Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorialized against Obama on 10 October 2009, by saying that “What this suggests to us — and to the Norwegians — is the end of what has been called ‘American exceptionalism’.”
Little did anyone then know that after winning re-election upon the basis of such war-mongering lies from Obama, as that “America remains the one indispensable nation”, Obama in February 2014 would go so far as to perpetrate a bloody coup overthrowing the democratically elected Government of one “dispensable” nation, Ukraine. And then, on 28 May of 2014, Obama would be telling America’s future generals, that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation” and that Obama would, in that speech, explicitly malign Ukraine’s neighbor Russia.
He did it, in this speech, which implicitly called all nations except the US “dispensable.” He had carefully planned and orchestrated Americans’ hostility toward Russia. His successor, Trump, lied saying that he wanted to reverse Obama’s policies on this, and Trump promptly, once becoming elected, increased and expanded those policies. Whatever a deceitfully war-mongering country like this might be, it’s certainly no democracy. Because democracy cannot be built upon a ceaseless string of lies.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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