armati wrote:Just seems odd, with all the interest in the kavanaugh soap opera you would think people would be interested in Trumps un speech.
It's not that odd. The Kavanaugh soap opera will, unfortunately, have real consequences for how the U.S. is governed moving forward. Trump's speech will not.
armati wrote:
Paul Craig Roberts points out
"The lies that Trump told yesterday about Iran and Venezuela are like the lies that Washington told about Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria, lies that were used to justify military actions that have destroyed the lives and prospects of millions of peoples. Trump, like his predecessors, sees these crimes against humanity as good deeds because they advance Washington and Israeli interests."
Other than the nonsense about trying to blame Israel for American foreign policy, I would agree with most of that.
Still, it's not really a "development" of any kind. It's just business-as-usual. Imperialist powers need to have enemies. If they weren't constantly at war with someone, their own people would realize how fundamentally useless the military-industrial complex is and demand its dismantling. In order to safeguard their existence, imperialists have to constantly develop and groom foreign bogeymen to frighten their own subjects and to go to war against. If you need an explanation of why, just read Orwell's
1984. If you've already read it, read it again. It's not just a novel, it's a primer on
realpolitik.Trump's demonizing of Iran is not much different than Bush's demonizing of Iraq a decade earlier, but lest you start to think that this is some kind of uniquely American problem, it isn't. Amerika is just the dominant imperialist power right now, so it's the one playing these games. Go back to earlier empires, and you'll see the British demonizing first the Zulus and then the Boers to invade there, you'll see the French demonizing the newly-freed Haitians to justify screwing over their nascent attempt at creating a new republic, you'll see the Dutch demonizing the Majapahit Empire and other native powers in southeast Asia to justify gobbling them up, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Amerika's military-industrial complex is not something new. It's heir to a tradition of exploitation that stretches back through time past the German
Junker class, the Japanese
Samurai, the medieval knight, the Parthian
cataphract, the Roman Legion, and so on down the line to Akkadian and Chaldean warlords.
Plunder is an easier way to make a living than growing a crop, so the rise of a warrior class is a feature of every civilization. Directly plundering one's own subjects, however, leads to rebellions and civil wars, so inevitably the warrior-class parasites look for foreign plunder. On doing so, however, they soon find a loophole to exploit: due to the tribal nature of the human psyche, as long as the tribe is at war with another tribe, the subjects will
willingly submit to being plundered, in order to contribute the to Eternal War of Us Versus Them. Thus, as long as they can stay at war, they can have their cake and eat it too: bring home plunder from foreign lands,
and plunder their willing victims at home, in the name of Making Babylon Great Again or whatever.