Imperial Infantilism

March 21, 2022

Diplomacy is an essential skill in the century swiftly taking shape around us, but we find that hurling playground insults at the leader of another nation has become normal in post-9/11 Washington.

By Patrick Lawrence

Special to Consortium News

It’s getting downright difficult to keep track of all the epithets American statesmen, stateswomen, political leaders and legislators use to tell us just who Vladimir Putin is — and with what bottomless contempt we should regard the Russian president.

I long for the days when he was simply “Hitler.” Such as when Hillary Clinton compared him with der Führer after Moscow re-annexed Crimea in response to the coup the U.S. had just engineered in Kiev. That was back in 2014. There were few complications then: All we needed to do was hate him.

Now the names we have for Putin roll around among like pinballs. “Hitler” has fallen somewhat out of fashion, the hyperbole having proven too silly, or maybe because NATO is now arming a Nazi-infested regime.

He’s all sorts of other things too, keeping us well on the side of repugnance and hostility, and safely away from a serious, adult understanding of the man, the nation and what the man and the nation are doing — in Ukraine and elsewhere.

In an encounter with reporters last week, President Joe Biden described the Russian leader as “a war criminal.” This came as demands for direct U.S. intervention in Ukraine grow shriller. You have to love The New York Times, and especially its national-security clerk, David Sanger. He added that Biden “was speaking from the heart, his aides said.” A man of humane passions, our president.

You would have thought “war criminal” was enough, but no. Biden went on to call Putin “a murderous dictator, a pure thug.” Our Times reporter, who operates far too close to the spooks in my professional judgment, then explained, in case we missed it: “Mr. Biden and his top aides frame Mr. Putin as a pariah, an indiscriminate killer who should be standing trial at The Hague.”

See what I mean? You can’t keep track of this stuff….

It’s simply not easy to find truly good diplomats in the post–1945 annals of the American Foreign Service. I am talking about people who understand that one of the primary responsibilities of a diplomat is to understand how those on the other side of the table think and see things, what the other side wants and why.

Here’s why they don’t exist anymore: Simply stated, power obviates the need for serious statecraft. The powerful nation has no need of diplomacy. A figure such as George Kennan was the exception proving the rule, and he was an exception because he saw the need to understand how the world looked to the Soviet Union. Henry Kissinger proved the rule: For all his claim to diplomatic skill, Hank K. was a wielder of American power with a calculating mind, nothing more.

The rest follows naturally: Antony Blinken is not a serious diplomat. Samantha Power is not a serious diplomat. As a diplomat (and various other things), Hillary “He’s Hitler” Clinton is a walking calamity. Biden, who’s spent his career selling snake oil off the back of a buckwagon, is not a statesman of any kind, serious or otherwise.

We should consider when, precisely, calling other leaders names became an accepted feature of American “statecraft” (and I insist on the quotation marks.) When, why, and what are the consequences of this undignified practice?

Sept. 11

I date this phenomenon to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The lineup of secretaries of state and senior diplomats prior to the attacks in New York and Washington is other than brilliant, but it was by and large accepted that talking to one’s adversaries was at least as important (and often more so) as talking to one’s friends. It was the Bush II regime, with all its kooky ideologues in positions they never should have gotten near, that declared: “We don’t negotiate with our enemies.”…

Look where this has landed us. Every time I hear Biden call Putin or some other world leader, not to Washington’s liking, a name out of the American inventory of epithets it is a reminder of how grotesquely U.S. “statecraft” has been infantilized. We cannot be surprised. How much distance is there between the infantilization of the American public and the infantilization of the post–2001 excuse for diplomacy?..

Diplomacy is an essential skill in the century swiftly taking shape around us. But every time Biden or another American “leader” hurls one of their playground insults at the leader of another nation, (Putin as the Beelzebub du jour) they are reminding us: There will be no diplomacy emanating from Washington because they have no idea how to conduct it.

Power and coercion are all they know

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/21/patrick-lawrence-on-american-infantilism/

Caitlin Johnstone:The Jaw-Dropping Power of US Propaganda

March 20, 2022

If you use Twitter and engage with the subject of the war in Ukraine, you’ve probably noticed a verified account called The Kyiv Independent pop up while you’re scrolling through your feed which puts out highly biased content in favor of the Zelensky regime and the western powers which support it.

If you’re using a desktop browser, it will usually look like this:

As Pedro Gonzales recently documented in Human Events, The Kyiv “Independent” was slapped together a few months ago with what the Committee to Protect Journalists called “an emergency grant from the European Endowment for Democracy.”

The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the U.S. government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to advance U.S. interests. A page on an NED website says that “All EU member states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of the European Parliament and civil society experts.”

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy

A big fuss gets made about the power of the U.S. war machine, despite the fact that it tends to fail at the rather important task of winning wars. This is partly because the empire often doesn’t benefit from those wars ending quickly and partly because it’s hard to win wars when your entire military juggernaut is built entirely around generating the maximum amount of profit possible.

Where the real fuss ought to be made is the truly jaw-dropping power of the U.S. propaganda machine. So subtle and sophisticated that even relatively intelligent and well-informed people fail to see the strings that are pulling at their minds, but so powerful it shapes the world.

In the book Inventing Reality, published all the way back in 1986, Michael Parenti makes the following observation:

“For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news media. How we view issues, indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it labor unions, peace protesters, the Soviet Union, uprisings in Latin America, elections, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know of things except as they are depicted in the news.

Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They are still setting the agenda, defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or reject. The media exert a subtle, persistent influence in defining the scope of respectable political discourse, channeling public attention in directions that are essentially supportive of the existing politico-economic system.”

This was long before Twitter, before Google, before Mark Zuckerberg, before Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act allowing for news media to be bought up and consolidated under just a few oligarchic mega-corporations. And yet the exact same dynamic we see before us today was already in play, even back then. It’s just gotten a lot more complex.

You know what’s funny about this mad push to censor speech in the name of fighting “Russian propaganda” is that the people who are pushing it are indirectly admitting to a very important truth that they normally try not to draw too much attention to: the fact that it’s very possible to use media to manipulate the way people think, act, and vote at mass scale. The part that they don’t admit is that they themselves are far and away the very worst offenders in that area.

The status quo worldview requires two entirely contradictory positions to be held simultaneously: that Russian propaganda has a corrupting influence on public thought, but that orders of magnitude more wealthy and powerful oligarchic media institutions do not.

This is not sustainable. People are already struggling to keep their heads above water with the constant white-noise torrent of psychological abuse they’re being subjected to day after day. We’re on our way to finding out just how much mass-scale psychological manipulation the human brain can tolerate before it snaps if we don’t find some way to change our collective relationship with mental narrative first.

Or who knows? Maybe a healthy relationship with mental narrative lies on the other side of that snap.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/20/caitlin-johnstone-the-jaw-dropping-power-of-us-propaganda/

https://twitter.com/FDRLST/status/1505910852372910088?s=20&t=xYgfMqhVExGZ9_WdatDezA

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/21/high-quality-study-finds-preschool-enrollment-makes-children-learn-less-and-misbehave-more/

>>15917698

This is a really good article

https://twitter.com/gregkellyusa/status/1505909409872023553?s=20&t=xYgfMqhVExGZ9_WdatDezA

>>15917735

True and when so many perves go into education, its a destructive trap of childhood

>>15917730

Distraction for real world problems and the MSM doesnt want their power to be diminished

People are waking up though

>>15917696

So did swallowell ask a favor of HRC to down the plane?

>>15917669

Agreed, I’ve been talking to friends and they are considering all the options, one friend has his children in Catholic school because public is so bad, I said they are just as bad…he agreed

Time for parents to be able to take their tax dollars to schools or homeschooling now. Its beyond time.

Theres no way to deprogram your children when theyve gone to the public school system

My friends daughter is 21, and so filled with nonsense, the only advice i gave her, “question everyone and everything you’ve learned, even your professors”! I couldnt say anything more than that. Its sad she was a brilliant child.

>>15917664

Ukraine war is all about destroying the country to cover for Bidan and Hunters massive crimes, along with the rest of the cabal. They dont want Ukraine to still exist. They’d rather see it completely destroyed. All the evidence is there. NATO was always offered to get rid of NATO’s corruption WW

Fortunately all the evidence was collected years ago

>>15917632

Trump also admitted to Varney, he would send very old and useless equipment to Ukraine now. So did he do that then when he sent equipment before, i think so his interview with Varney was confusing to say the least. So it had some comms in it, is my guess

>>15917691

And Trump was not in a position to clean up Ukraine, he knew what had happened, but he got impeached for a phone call. Now Putin is cleanin up and revealing all the things they agreed on. Along with Xi!

This movie is really fascinating, the title should be

“How to take down the Cabal, by their own methods, Boomerang”

Or just

“Boomerang”

>>15917962

True

22 Mar, 2022 12:58

Kremlin responds to Zelensky’s referendum idea

Putting the peace terms up for a popular vote in Ukraine will harm the negotiations, Russia has said

Thats what I thought, Zelensky was trying to do this.

Russia has said that Kiev’s idea to put peace deal terms up for a referendum will only hurt the ongoing talks. Moscow launched a military campaign against Ukraine late last month.

“We're convinced that putting [the terms] before the public at this moment can only undermine the negotiations that are already going a lot slower and are less substantial than we want them to be,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested earlier that peace terms of “historical” importance may be the subject of a referendum. “The people will have to respond to certain … compromises,” he told reporters on Monday, adding that the details were still dependent on talks with Moscow.

The Russians and Ukrainians held several rounds of talks in Belarus, later switching to discussions via video link.

Zelensky reiterated that Kiev was seeking security guarantees from Russia and the West. Moscow, meanwhile, said that it wanted Ukraine to officially become a neutral country, renouncing its bid to join NATO, a US-led military bloc that Russia views as a threat.

Moscow further said it wanted the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, as well as for Kiev to recognize Crimea as a part of Russia, and the republics in Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.

Crimea, populated predominantly by Russian-speakers, voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia shortly after the 2014 coup in Kiev. The republics of Donetsk and Lugansk broke away from Ukraine the same year.

https://www.rt.com/russia/552471-kremlin-responds-zelensky-referendum/

22 Mar, 2022 14:23

‘A good Russian is a dead Russian’ posters spotted in UK

Britain’s Communist Party condemned the posters, calling them ‘a short goose-step’ from Nazism

(I’m not sure getting the UK communist party as support is the best strategy for Russia)

Britain’s Communist Party has called on authorities to “act swiftly” against posters depicting Russians as pigs and calling for their deaths. The communists – who view the war in Ukraine as a clash of capitalist powers – said that the posters recall the Nazi-era persecution of Jews.

The posters feature a pig in the colors of the Russian flag, along with the text “Good Russian = Dead Russian.” According to the Russian news outlet Readovka, they appeared in London, and the logo of London’s public transport corporation can be seen in the background of a photo shared by Readovka.

“IF YOU SEE ONE, RIP IT DOWN,” the Communist Party of Britain tweeted on Monday. “Authorities should act swiftly against such anti-worker posters,” the communists continued. “We need unity between people. Because the first picture below is just a short goose-step from the second.”

The second picture posted by the party showed anti-Jewish propaganda from wartime Poland.

It is unclear how many posters were put up, or whether they have been taken down by now. Likewise, it is unclear who put up the posters.

While the Communist Party of Britain has repeatedly drawn attention to the prevalence of Nazi ideology in the ranks of the Ukrainian military, it opposes both sides in the Ukraine/Russia conflict. The communists view Ukraine as fighting for the “expansionist NATO powers” and Russian President Vladimir Putin as protecting the interests of “Russia’s big business oligarchs.” Nevertheless, the communists, like Russia, see a demilitarized and neutral Ukraine as the war’s ideal end state.

The posters appeared amid a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the Western world. Russian musicians and performers have been blacklisted in the US and Europe for refusing to denounce Putin, Russian products have been pulled from the shelves in American stores, and Russian shops and restaurants have been vandalized from Berlin to Washington DC.

With punishing economic sanctions impacting the lives of ordinary Russians at home, Russian schoolchildren have reportedly faced bullying in European schools and one medical clinic in Munich, Germany even said it would refuse to treat Russian and Belarussian patients earlier this month, before reversing its decision amid a public outcry.

Earlier this month, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was taking note of “the unprecedented level of Russophobia” and that “those responsible will be brought to responsibility in accordance with the current law.”

https://www.rt.com/news/552477-dead-russian-posters-uk/

22 Mar, 2022 14:27

Six dozen Russian jets arrested abroad

How can a jet be arrested?

Arrests were made in line with international sanctions over the Ukraine attack, and some 800 planes are now registered inside Russia

Russia’s Minister of Transport Vitaly Savelyev said his country has lost 78 jets to Western sanctions. He also reported that nearly 800 planes out of Russia’s 1300 air fleet have now been registered inside the country’s jurisdiction.

“Almost 800 machines have been transferred [to the Russian aviation register]. We will secure them through a Russian insurance company. 78 machines have been lost,” the Russian minister declared amid a meeting of the Economic Policy Committee of the Federation Council on Tuesday.

The planes were arrested even in several countries that Russia considers friendly – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. The Russian authorities have tried to negotiate the buyout of the detained planes but to no avail. The lessors have demanded undisputed return of their property.

“We are looking for legal ways to negotiate with lessors and resolve this issue, but so far we have not succeeded. They do not want to negotiate compensation for their payment or a redemption of their property by Russian airlines,” Savelyev elaborated.

Earlier, on March 12, the Bermuda Civil Aviation Authority, which previously registered most Russian aircraft, issued a statement notifying that due to international sanctions on Russian aviation, the Bermuda Aircraft Registry is now unable to confidently approve Russian aircraft as being airworthy.

“International sanctions on the aviation sector have had a significant impact on the ability to sustain safety oversight on Russian operated aircraft. Therefore, the BCAA has provisionally suspended all Certificates of Airworthiness of those aircraft,” explained the statement.

On March 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law making amendments to the Air Code of the Russian Federation. The bill, introduced by the government and aimed at supporting Russia’s transport industry in the face of external sanctions, has allowed Russian air companies to register their leased foreign jets inside the country. The bill has also given them an opportunity to receive domestic airworthiness certificates.

However, at least one Russian air carrier, Red Wings, has already made a pledge to return all eight of its leased Airbus planes to the owner. The experts speculate that the company’s decision has to do with the fear that its own jets abroad might be arrested. Red Wings heavily relies on Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100.

A new round of sanctions against Russia followed the Kremlin’s decision to launch a military operation in Ukraine. The operation started on February 24. Soon after, the United States, Canada, and all EU states closed their airspace to Russian jets. Moscow has responded reciprocally. As a part of anti-Russian sanctions, Boeing and Airbus have suspended any maintenance of all aircraft leased by Russian carriers.

According to Russian authorities, the sole goal of the restrictions is to hurt the Russian people. President Putin has described anti-Russian sanctions as “a total undisguised aggression” and “a war waged by economic, political, and informational means.”

https://www.rt.com/russia/552474-russian-jets-arrested-abroad/

https://twitter.com/SteveDeaceShow/status/1506285789038235662?s=20&t=xYgfMqhVExGZ9_WdatDezA

He’s taking about communists in our country

https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1506261968319098890?s=20&t=xYgfMqhVExGZ9_WdatDezA

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1506247159414464515?s=20&t=xYgfMqhVExGZ9_WdatDezA

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1506241995362209801?s=20&t=xYgfMqhVExGZ9_WdatDezA

>>15918263

The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its course over the next decade or so.This is the generational theory I laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.

The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”

Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the Netherlands.

Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.

In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.

At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.

THE FIRST TURNING IS CALLED A HIGH.

This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the conformity….

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/87922-the-fourth-turning-why-american-crisis-may-last-until-2030?type=macro%2Cmarket-insights

>>15918282

AND FINALLY WE ENTER THE FOURTH TURNING, WHICH IS A CRISIS.

This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.

In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030. If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.

Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).

To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.

Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/87922-the-fourth-turning-why-american-crisis-may-last-until-2030?type=macro%2Cmarket-insights

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1506011020917149697?s=20&t=KJJw2gXN4lk8kbMQPj8VOA