"The Drums of War"

[KoKo]

Drums of War

The American public is very confused right now, about what’s going on in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. So is Washington.

We don’t have the huge, divisive for-or-against war debate that we had a decade ago. Instead there’s an uneasy huffing and puffing from both political parties. It has the feeling of reluctant posturing, but cumulatively it sounds like the drumbeats of war.

It’s a deadly default strategy, and it’s only possible because of the absence of any sense of history.

Shock and Awe

In the USA, the 2003 invasion of Iraq is shrouded in a cloak of denial, recent though it was. The perpetrators, Bush & Cheney et al, have not only been let off the hook for the catastrophe, but are making speeches to packed conference halls, raising lusty stacks of campaign cash for their reactionary buddies, and appearing on TV in the role of esteemed geopolitical experts.

The American public has apparently failed to absorb the fact that this neo-con war — and what a con it was — transformed a high-functioning society into one of the most violent, chaotic places on Earth.


Imperial model



Making use of history is like painting on a big, wide canvas, from which we have to back up every so often to get a reality check. The further back we stand, the more we can see.

Consider the Middle East a century ago, when the mighty British Empire, Uncle Sam’s role model in the world-domination department, controlled a full quarter of Earth’s land mass.(1)

After the Great War, in 1919, the Brits and their imperial allies solemnly convened in the palace at Versailles to decide amongst themselves – the Arab delegates were not, of course, invited — how to divide up the vanquished Ottoman Empire. Out of the rubble, the gentlemen from London hand-picked three oil-rich provinces, cobbled them together and created the British Protectorate of Iraq.

Nobody at the time questioned this arbitrary re-drawing of borders. It was the way victors had dealt with the spoils of war for the past 5,000 years of patriarchal history.

These days, it is not considered kosher. The Great Powers now call themselves NATO, and they explain their actions rather differently. They speak of self-determination for all nations, human dignity for all peoples, and that kind of thing.

But meaning-seekers will get a much clearer sense of what’s going on in the world right now from the unapologetic imperialism of Victoria’s day.

The English saw themselves as “taking up the white man’s burden,” in the words of their great poet-propagandist Rudyard Kipling. Western Europeans in general were utterly certain of the superiority of the “civilized” races over those of the non-white peoples they ruled over. Even the peoples of Southeastern Europe — the Balkans — were deemed semi-barbaric.

England, France and Germany saw their right to supremacy as self-evident. It was a worldview shored up by contemporary religion and science, and championed by literature.

We in the 21st century imagine ourselves to have a far more sophisticated sense of geopolitical ethics. In contrast to those earlier times, we are democratic, rational and humane. We marvel at the arrogance with which an entire continent was divvied up by the rapacious European powers during the Scramble for Africa (1881-1914). We shake our heads sadly at the thought that, to the benighted Brits, it was unthinkable that the black majority would have a say in the process.(2)

The Trans-Pacific “Partnership”



Yet it seems to strike most Americans in 2015 as equally unthinkable that an Asian nation should have more influence in Asia than the USA has. Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement has been condemned for being a environmental travesty and a plutocratic power play, both of which it is. But even among its critics, few seem to have a problem with the underlying principle: that America should be able to throw its weight around in that part of the world.

We in the West seem to consider it quite normal for our president to want to “counterbalance China’s dominance in the Asian region.” A permanent military presence on the other side of the Pacific Ocean is presumed to be Uncle Sam’s right.

THE GREAT WAR:

I keep coming back to the First World War in an effort to understand the state of things now. The 1900-teens seem to have set in place all the key templates – geopolitical, technological, philosophical — for the modern age. It was the decade that saw Old Europe’s great empires go belly up in the dust, like giant prehistoric beasts.

I wonder: did Mssrs. Cheney, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war in Iraq study this period?

CONTINUED AT:

http://mothersky.com/2015/06/drums-of-war/

[Cal33]

1. It was exactly during Queen Victoria's day -- when the sun never set on the British Empire, and

loot was flowing into England's coffers from all her colonies, which made her the richest and most
powerful country in the world -- that one out of every eight women in London was a prostitute. It
was the only way for them to make a living. The poor English people never saw a penny of all
that loot.

Charles Dickens, who was a contemporary of the above times, was mostly observing and describing
the way many Englishmen and -women were living, when he wrote the Christmas Carol. Scrooge and
Cratchit were rather typical of how employers were paying their employees -- just enough to keep
body and soul together.

It's unfortunate that some of the English customs have passed on to us. Private schools and
universities for the wealthy, for instance. The Brits have become "socialized" for some time now, and
we are still struggling for some of the basic human rights that all of the advanced European countries
have already adopted. Thanks to Corporate America, which seems also to be interested in returning
to the old colonial days -- this time not as the colonized, but as the colonizer. That's what Corporate
America seems to have learned from English history.

[KoKo]

2. Good Points.......As a fan of Dickens there's much we can learn from a Re-Read

of his works and very entertaining for those who don't read but like the Drama..the BBC has put out quite a few interesting Mini-Series on Netfix (found in DVD's) that do a very good job of some of his works.

In our House not a Christmas Holiday goes by without several versions of Dickens "Christmas Carol" in all it's versions spanning decades being shown as we mix it up. The Wall Street Version: "Scrooged" is always liked by the Younger in our Family because it takes Dickens to another level more modern.

But, yes, English Heritage still is a model for much of the world which we have picked up in our War Allies: Canada, Great Britain, Australia with our (Free from British Rule) America leading the Pack. Some Irony there..I think. Doing the Same Old Same Old Model...and mostly getting bad results when the Populist in those countries rebels. It tends to end up with more Dictators and the PEOPLE repressed more.

[KoKo]

5. ...!

Still a Good Read....

[KoKo]

6. Time again for this.........After Paris Attacks

[polly7]

7. K&R. nt.