The manic Western warmongering instinct is still viral and a potentially catastrophic danger.
In line with its fateful imperial implosion, the United States-led military machine known as NATO is desperately cranking up on all cylinders – in order to incite war tensions in both of the world’s hemispheres.
The global picture is at once condemnable and outrageous, and yet consumers of Western corporate media are numbed with lies, sophistry, distractions and blandishments.
Check out, for a laugh, this video of Canadian parliamentarians posing as concerned democrats by parading around in pink high heels. Seriously, is that their biggest concern? And as usual, the media follow suit making sure the Western public is saturated with such trivia.
In the coming weeks and months, the Cold War-era North Atlantic Treaty Organization is conducting its biggest-ever war maneuvers not only in its usual transatlantic domain but also in the Asia-Pacific.
The war maneuvers in Europe are reportedly the biggest ever since NATO was formed in 1949 following the defeat of Nazi Germany. So too are the war drills in Asia-Pacific. Together, they confirm that China is in NATO’s cross-hairs along with Russia.
But this provocative maneuvering – let’s just call it what is: aggression – is somehow normalized by Western corporate media.
At a time too when the Western public is being brutally crushed by dictatorial economic austerity, as our interview discusses this week.
Indeed, Western news media have become an utter embarrassment and affront to ordinary public intelligence and decency. Self-proclaimed bastions of journalism and public information, such as the New York Times and the BBC, are masters in the use of syrupy syntax to cover up the U.S.-led global war mobilization as “defensive exercises” when in reality it should be plain for most people to see that the nefarious purpose is to inflame tensions and assault global peace and security.
It is criminally reckless for Washington and its allies to militarize the world’s hemispheres simultaneously at a time of already fraught tensions with nuclear powers Russia and China. And, it should be reiterated, those relations have been made fraught by relentless demonization of Russia and China as aggressive, expansionist powers when in reality it is the U.S.-led Western imperialist axis that is guilty of projecting its own depredations.
Russia sought a political security arrangement before the conflict erupted in Ukraine last year. Moscow was ignored by the West. China has repeatedly advocated for an end to Cold War mentality and for multipolar dialogue and cooperation. Beijing is wantonly disparaged and caricatured by Washington and Europe as “autocratic” and a “security threat”.
The Americans and their vassals use narcissistic self-regarding rhetoric about rules-based order and world democracy while in practice they exploit every opportunity to ratchet up conflict. That’s because militarism, war, conflict, division and tensions – death and destruction – are the lifeblood of American-led capitalism.
NATO’s so-called Defender war drills start this month in Europe and will cascade into multiple other large-scale maneuvers bearing similarly corny names such as Noble Jump and Dynamic Guard (George Orwell eat your heart out!).
It was the BALTOPS war games last June that provided the cover for the eventual blowing up of the Russian Nord Stream gas pipelines in September by U.S. navy divers, under the personal orders of President Joe Biden, according to Seymour Hersh.
This year sees the biggest deployment of United States troops and aircraft to the European continent since 1949. The New York Times hails the “U.S. is back at the heart of European defense”. The sheer idiocy and gullibility of the New York Times and other Western media are staggering.
The forthcoming NATO operations will stretch from Iceland in the North Sea to Germany and the Baltic Sea, all the way down to Romania and the Black Sea. The massive mobilization involves all members of the 30-nation NATO bloc plus partner countries. The purpose is declared by military commanders to be “offensive simulation” and forming a “war-fighting alliance”. And yet the Western media keep telling us it’s all about “defenses”. Such media are thus complicit in normalizing aggression.
Significantly, the NATO members are increasingly cohered under a single United States’ military command and key objectives are “interoperability” and “rapid deployment”. New member Finland is to participate which this year doubles the NATO force proximity to Russia’s northwest frontier.
Germany is to serve as the fulcrum location for all the NATO forces during the coming drills. According to German air force commander Lt General Ingo Gerhardt, “a message is being sent to Russia”, as quoted by the U.S. Air Force Times.
What message could that be? A brazen and odious echo of Operation Barbarossa, the massive invasion by Nazi Germany of the Soviet Union in June 1941 which resulted in up to 30 million Soviet citizens dying.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the United States and its NATO partners are to hold record-breaking war drills in the Asia-Pacific. Surely, “North Atlantic (sic) Treaty Organization” should invalidate the mandate for such mobilization in the Pacific. But there you go. The world is not enough!
Those “war games” known as Talisman Sabre will involve the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany as well as Australia and New Zealand. Provocatively, military forces from Japan are also slated to join the maneuvers along with South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and others. Those games come on the back of Washington’s newly formed AUKUS alliance with Britain and Australia which will see the latter becoming a nuclear submarine hub for the United States in order to increase its targeting of China. The unprecedented maneuvers in the Asia-Pacific also follow a spate of statements by Pentagon commanders explicitly calling for readiness to fight a war with China.
So, here we have two momentous military events occurring this summer involving Germany and Japan, the two defeated aggressor powers of World War Two which inflicted colossal death and suffering on Russian and Chinese people. China’s death toll inflicted by imperial Japan is put at 20 million.
And yet these same two nations – Germany and Japan – with their despicable history of war crimes are featuring again in Neo-imperial aggression under the leadership of Washington. Any survivor of World War Two must surely be astounded by the horrendous déjà vu. Anybody in their right mind should also be horrified.
The main impetus for this depravity is the death throes of American imperialism and its capitalist economy. The United States and its Western minions are all undergoing an existential crisis of historic failure in their capitalist societies. As in earlier periods of history, the way out of such recurring crises in the capitalist system is to wage war. The First and Second World Wars were the hideous outcomes with a combined death toll of up to 100 million people.
Today, the U.S.-led capitalist Western nations are in the same dead-end situation. That is why the American executive of the Western capitalist system – the banks, corporations, oligarchs and so on – are dragooning their political and media flunkies to incite war at all costs. As in previous periods, war is much preferred to, say, a socialist revolution against the capitalist order. The question is though, this time the Western warmongers might not be able to execute their vile escape route because a) because Russia and China are too strong, and b) because this time political revolutions in Western societies might just materialize.
Nevertheless, the manic Western warmongering instinct is still viral and a potentially catastrophic danger.
Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is increasingly seen as a disaster: militarily, politically and financially. The recent Pentagon leaks testify to that absolute debacle and bankruptcy of Western media propagandizing. Up to $200 billion have been splurged by Western states on this futile war over this past year while Western societies are falling apart from poverty and deprivation.
Rather than pulling back from their abysmal error and criminal miscalculations, the U.S.-led war machine is doubling down to crank up tensions and aggression toward Russia and China. The war machine by definition doesn’t know of any other way.
If the Western news media had a modicum of the independence and public service ethos that they endlessly boast about, they would be calling out the warmongers with obvious critical questions and observations.
But the American, European and Australian media are part of the problem. They do not offer even a remote glimmer of solution. For such media organizations are bought and paid for by the Western oligarchy that runs the capitalist war racket.
Here’s the ultimate proof. The U.S.-led NATO warmongers are all but waging war in every corner of the globe and yet the Goebbels-like media propaganda services are trying to tell us that it’s all for the noble “defense of the world”. They are exposed by their own abject absurdity.