That Brazilian globetrotter, Pepe Escobar, has summarized the New Cold War in a recent article, The new European “arc of instability”. In that article, he published a paragraph from an email he received from the Saker, a former military intelligence analyst who lives outside his homeland of Russia but defends her strongly and intelligently in his comments on the Internet. Saker tells us:
“Putin is telling both the West and the Russian people that there is a long war in progress and that the Russian people have to morally be prepared to accept sacrifices for the survival of Russia. This is one more step in the ‘coming-out’ of what I call the ‘Eurasian Sovereignists’ in which the US [has] now openly declared as a Russophobic (Russia-hating and Russia-fearing) enemy, and the Europeans as a powerless colony. Military power is not directly a factor in this, the internal power balance between the pro-Western ‘Atlantic Integrationists’ and the ‘Eurasian Sovereignists’ is.”
(You can find more writings of the Saker at The Vineyard of the Saker or Russia Insider.)
All of this is interesting and extremely important but I’m going to deal with this specific idea of a “long war” and in a terrible insight into the moral degeneracy of the American ruling class but a degeneracy being endorsed by even those Americans who live local lives of moral integrity: the United States is waging a demonic war against all that exists to the extent it won’t bow to the American ruling class. Captain Ahab, he of utilitarian competence and moral insanity, is the normal American, as Melville feared back in the 1850s. (The results of recent American adventures in Asia and Africa and even in Detroit and Ferguson raise questions as to our competence in 2014, but that merely turns a moral tragedy into a greater farce.)
As I see matters, the American ruling class is waging a long war against nearly every entity and region on the face of the earth. I don’t exclude the American people or peoples or individual citizens nor do I exclude the various regions and cities of the United States. So far as I can tell, the American ruling class is comfortable only with gangster and bankster behavior, enforcing their desires upon others. I almost think they would be disappointed if everyone on earth were suddenly to obey Washington or Wall St. A great period of boredom would set in. There would be no reason for ambitious young Americans to go to Harvard or Stanford to learn how to play with the world as if it were a risk board and its men, women, and children were plastic pieces.
This moral sickness on the part of Americans, foreseen by the likes of Melville and Hawthorne in the 1850s and others since, is what doomed the peace dividend when the Soviet Union fell: we Americans, along with some of our allies in Europe and other regions, had built up bloated militaries and national security agencies which had no way to justify their existence unless they continued waging war upon…anyone and everyone. From the beginning there were Dr Strangeloves and bomb-crazy generals and politicians combining ignorance with an egocentric understanding of the world. Nearly all American leaders, including those religious leaders betraying God and flocks, came to enjoy this idea that we Americans know how human beings should live. All Americans are ever horrified to discover some peoples hate us for our DisneyWorlds and our McDonalds and our military bases in their backyards. Those who fear such a morally trashy culture and nation for the sake of their own children are as jingoistic as those who treat wars against largely defenseless countries as another spectator sport—see Dumber Every Day, With Beer in Hand and War on TV.
In a fit of paranoia, we Americans fell in behind our profiteering leaders to threaten war against the entire world and to actually wage it upon various countries, including two countries, Iraq and Libya, which were suffering under brutal leadership but were also advancing in many ways toward a stable and prosperous state. And, all the time, our leaders were using some American citizens to wage war upon the entirety of the citizenry.
I’ve covered much of this ground before and have little to add. I prefer to get back to my goal of developing ways of thought which can help us, or our descendants, to better shape our multitude of overlapping communities, including those of a political and military nature. Above, I gave some links to relevant essays I’ve written. The interested reader can also check out a recent essay I wrote trying to make larger-scale sense of this bad situation: Deep States and the Modern American Citizen. That essay contains links to other, related essays I’ve posted over the past 5 years or so which deal with conspiracies in the sense of deep-states or predatory classes. (A little warning: I prefer to speak in terms of classes or institutions and to reserve the word `conspiracy’ for specific criminal projects.)
Finally, for two different takes on the state of the American moral character, see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding and Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American. That first essay discusses the moral insanity which was already well-developed in the New Englanders of the 17th century as they waged war against Indians, even those who had become Christians, because they hadn’t become English middle-class Christians of the Puritan sort. There were, of course, other issues and the native Americans had their own brutal criminals, but my broad-brush statement holds when properly qualified.