<nettime> Bankruptcy of ideologies ... except one

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The article below illustrates what happens when ideologies die ... 
except one, the will for power. There is nothing exciting offered today 
except conquering the world, killing half the population and ruling the 
stone age remnants with high tech. The alternatives are so fu*king 
boring - saving this or that, not doing this or that, resisting this or 
that, going back X years to some nostalgic equilibrium. Fu*k that. Let's 
have some action!


https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/23/careening-toward-nuclear-war-the-political-paralysis-of-europe-russia-and-china/


Careening Toward Nuclear War: the Political Paralysis of Europe, Russia 
and China
by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos

Never since the Cuban Missile Crisis has there been such an unstable 
situation in the global political system, including the system of 
management of nuclear arms and US power.
To the already exceptionally tense and dangerous atmosphere around North 
Korea there has now been added a crisis over Iran, which is pushing the 
European powers and Russia to become aligned against the policies of USA 
and Israel preparing a new, greater and, very probably, nuclear war 
against Iran. A very serious political crisis is smoldering in 
Washington itself, with some people believing it is the most serious in 
the history of the United States.
In the most official way, in front of the representatives of all the 
nations of the world, for the first time since the defeat of Nazi 
Germany in 1945, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has 
spelled out the threat of annihilating a nation of 25 million people.
His speech represents the negation of all achievements of human 
civilization. And this speech did not provoke any serious, proportionate 
or meaningful reaction in the world.
The absence of such reaction can be attributed to various factors and 
different calculations. But its consequence is none other than to 
legitimize that kind of threats today and their  realization tomorrow.
Such a lack of reaction does not deter and discourage, it encourages and 
facilitates the use of nuclear weapons and it increases the obvious risk 
of a global catastrophe, something which was proven especially in the 
20th century. In the wake of the 1st World War both camps believed the 
other one was bluffing, and that, in any case, the conflict would not 
last more than a few months. The conflict lasted four years and 
destroyed all Europe.
The policy of trying to appease and accommodate Hitler has also been the 
main policy of Britain, France and USSR, before the 2nd World War. It 
only encouraged Nazi German aggression and facilitated the War. Germany 
all but won it, its troops having been stopped only some miles from the 
Kremlin. It was finally defeated, but only at an unbelievably enormous 
cost paid by all European nations, and in particular by the Soviets, the 
Yugoslavs, the Greeks and the British.
The deafening silence of Europe, the European Left, Russia and China

It is obvious that the actions and the policy of the US government under 
President Trump took all major powers by surprise and shocked them. 
They did not expect them, did not forestall them and now limit 
themselves more or less to a role of spectator of actions that literally 
could involve the survival of humanity.
Europe hopes it will wake one day with the Trump problem having been 
resolved by itself. From time to time they say to Americans that what 
they are doing is terrible and dangerous (it is indeed terrible and this 
is exactly why they are doing it!). In Germany many top specialists on 
foreign policy published an appeal in Zeit. They believe German 
“anti-Americanism” is the danger, not the US policy that is fueling it!
The European Left seems interested only in defending pensions, and it is 
not doing very well even at that. They don’t want to identify themselves 
with a regime like the North Korean, but they forget that what is going 
on has nothing to do with the type of the regime. On the contrary, the 
external, imperialistic pressure on non-Western countries, beginning 
from the USSR, has always been a strong factor contributing to the rise 
of authoritarian types of government, as the best suited for a country 
to oppose a threat of aggression. At the very least it can plausibly 
justify this authoritarianism.
Western interventions in the Third World have played a great role in the 
advent of authoritarian regimes. Imposing “democracy” was never the aim 
of the West in the Arab and Muslim World and the results of 25 years of 
disastrous wars in the Middle East are here for everybody to see. Even 
in Russia it was the US administration which pushed and enthusiastically 
supported the violent dissolution and bombing of the Russian Parliament 
by President Yeltsin in 1993 (probably the most democratically elected 
parliament in Russian history), in order to permit the passage of Soviet 
property to a handful of oligarchs from 1994 onwards. “Democracy” seemed 
useful only as a means for destroying   the Soviet regime, not as a 
system of government. Now the West criticizes  the human rights record 
of Putin’s government as it never did with the much more serious crimes 
of the Yeltsin era, or it does not do with the regime imposed in Kiev 
after a coup organized by the US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
In any case, to annihilate North Korea is not a method for imposing 
democracy in that country.
What about the alternative centers like Russia and China? Moscow still 
seems to be trying   to gain as much as possible out of the supposedly 
pro-Russian trends of Trump and has left most of the handling of the 
Korean crisis to China. China wants at all costs to avoid any clash with 
Americans. But if it abandons North Korea, President Xi is in reality 
running the risk of experiencing, in a very different form and through 
very different ways, his own “Gorbachev moment”.
One error brings more!

It is not easy of course, for political forces and people inside the US 
and around the world which supported Trump, claiming he is a kind of 
“anti-establishment”, “anti-war”, “anti-oligarchy”, 
“anti-globalization”, “anti-NATO”, “pro-Russia” candidate, to accept the 
degree to which they were deceived. Sometimes this love of Trump has 
verged on the ridiculous . For instance, the quite popular Russian 
newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, commenting on Trump’s election, drew a 
parallel between his entering the White House and the storming of the 
Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in October 1917!!! It defies not only 
reason but every possible form of human imagination for one to confuse a 
deal maker and casino owner, family friend of Murdoch and Netanyahu, 
with Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution!
Sometimes, not always, the intentions behind such an enormous error of 
judgment were good. People were becoming desperate about “globalization” 
and US-driven Wars. They therefore tended to believe everything and 
everybody who seemed to be an opponent. The same thing by the way 
happened in the inter-war period, leading to the rise of fascism and 
Nazism and to the 2nd World War.
To dismiss what Mr. Trump is now saying and doing, to dismiss the 
serious threat to the world his administration represents on the 
implicit or explicit excuse that he is not serious, he is mad, he is 
bluffing, is not very convincing, especially coming from people who 
until recently suggested to us that we should take very seriously what 
the same Trump was promising, or rather what they thought he was 
promising before he was elected. Trump is nothing other than what he and 
his administration are doing.
Coherence behind Madness

Of course Trump himself is not consistent. Probably he is not even 
wholly conscious of what he is doing. But history (or, more probably, 
the forces trying to control and manipulate it, and who most probably 
were also able to help Trump from behind the scenes to assume power) 
needs exactly such a person. If he is really “mad”, as some people 
claim, then he is the ideal candidate to apply the reckless “madman” 
strategy. In dealing with Korea and the Middle East, indirectly with 
China and Russia, Washington and its extremist allies are now trying to 
bring the nuclear card into the game. If Trump himself is not fully 
conscious of the terrible repercussions this game will have, he is more, 
not less, effective to play the role assigned to him.
(I believe the Empire did the same under Reagan. They applied the 
maximum of threats against the USSR, to provide the arguments for Soviet 
reformers who had already accepted integration into the West through 
surrender to the West. The threat to China now comes with an implicit 
false promise: “Give us North Korea and we will let you develop 
unimpeded”. If President Xi agrees to play this game, he runs the risk 
of himself provoking, in a very different form and through very 
different ways, what he is most afraid of: a Chinese “Gorbachev moment”. 
One of the reasons the Chinese regime did not collapse like the Soviet 
one, was that the Chinese Communist Party kept intact and central to its 
communication policy the image of the West as an enemy).
The Empire hopes that by bringing nuclear arms and madness into the 
equation, it will oblige the other players, who are rational, to succumb 
to its demands. That is all that it is about. It is extremely dangerous, 
it is madness, but, as Polonius said (Hamlet, Act II), there is a method 
to it. The opposing forces are those lacking in method!
History, or those who are trying to control and manipulate it, needs 
exactly this kind of character in order to achieve what is to be 
achieved. Only by bringing the nuclear card into play, only by bringing 
on a character who can persuade that he is ready to use it, can they 
have a realistic, as they see it, hope for reversing the colossal, 
potentially strategic, defeat they have already suffered in the Middle 
East, with the introduction of Russian troops into Syria, and also to 
avert the otherwise unavoidable consequences of the economic and 
technological ascent of China.  Their calculus is that the other world 
players are “rational” and that they will not risk a global catastrophe. 
By bringing uncertainty and irrationalism into world politics they hope 
to win by having their opponents retreat.
As we already said, Trump is nothing other than what he is doing. In 
economics he did not deliver all power to the … Soviets, but to Goldman 
Sachs. In ecology, he launched a war against life. In social matters he 
wants to curtail benefits to poor Americans. In geopolitics, during his 
presidency, we have seen the appearance of enormous risks of nuclear 
conflict in both Korea and the Middle East (if they remain limited 
there), the testing of new, extremely destabilizing “conventional” and 
nuclear weapons, a military threat against Venezuela, an extremely 
aggressive development of NATO forces on the perimeter of Russia and of 
US forces around China. Mosul, the second most important city of Iraq, 
was flattened.
All that in just seven months! That can make any person of sound mind 
ask the question: Are we going to be here at the end of his term?
Trump’s geopolitics are nothing other than a renewed, expanded, more 
extremist and more clearly nuclear re-edition of the known neocon 
program, spelled out initially by President George Bush in his famous 
speech against the Axis of Evil. It is the organization of a proactive 
drive to full world hegemony, in order both to limit the consequences of 
the Chinese economic-technological ascent and to reverse the results of 
the Russian intervention in Syria.  If fulfilled, Trump’s goals will 
transform Finance and US Empires into a totalitarian system dominating 
the whole planet – or, they will lead to the termination of life.
Recently, Mr. Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister said that Western 
decline is “objective” in character. This is true, but it is only a part 
of truth. There is not such determinism in human history and Russian 
history in particular testifies amply exactly that. In critical 
historical junctures there are many possible results, as people may 
react in different ways to a given objective situation.  If you don’t 
stop Western intervention in Libya, then you will have an intervention 
in Syria. If you send troops to Syria, you will make the other side 
think twice before escalating the conflict. This is an example of the 
“correlation” between “objective” and “subjective” factors. If China for 
instance, believes that by giving North Korea to the Americans it will 
avoid a clash with them, it will risk confronting them under more 
dangerous and difficult conditions, even if we avoid, which already 
seems extremely difficult, the disastrous global, ecological, 
civilizational and economic consequences of a Korean conflict and if 
such a conflict remains contained and “limited”. Manoeuvring  and 
tactics of course have an important place in policy – but they cannot 
substitute for strategy and they should not become a substitute for 
taking the really hard decisions.
It is not that the Empire does not see what Mr. Lavrov sees. It is 
exactly because it sees the same picture a determined fraction in its 
leadership wants to do something about it! The “something” is to use its 
influence on the President to push war into his agenda and create the 
conditions that will render it unavoidable.
 Crisis in the Palace

When in a system no politics is admitted, no open discussion of the 
perspectives of society is permitted, whether by police or by indirect, 
totalitarian control of the representatives of a given society (the 
media and the political class) and by the systematic destruction of even 
the capacity to formulate political thought, as happens now in modern 
day Western societies, the problems and contradictions banned from the 
public sphere do not disappear. Because they have objective roots, they 
reappear at the very center of the system and are expressed there. A 
classic example is the Soviet Union, which had banned any expression of 
public disagreement and any possibility of open foreign influence. They 
disappeared from society only to reappear at the center of the system, 
inside its ruling nomenclatura, inside the Politburo and the Secretariat 
of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party.
In Washington itself a political crisis is now smoldering (certain 
commentators judge it to be the most serious in all the history of the 
United States), naturally rendering even more serious and intrinsically 
unstable the situation on the nuclear front. This has been demonstrated 
beyond the shadow of a doubt through the exchanges of “moron” insults 
and challenges to competitive IQ tests between President Trump and his 
Secretary of State Tillerson.
The unprecedented statement  by the Republican head of the Senate 
Foreign Affairs Committee (one of the three most important people, 
institutionally, as far as US foreign policy is concerned) that the 
policies of President Trump could lead to the Third World War, are 
absolutely characteristic of the atmosphere in Washington. Never in the 
history of the United States have there been such public conflicts, at 
such levels and on such subjects.
Even if we confine ourselves to what is on public sight, it becomes 
clear that two camps are in opposition regarding war against both Iran 
and Korea:  a war which one has difficulty in imagining how it cannot be 
nuclear and how it will remain limited. What is certain is that its 
global repercussions, ecological, civilizational and economic will be 
unprecedented.
The Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA made quite clear they 
wish to exhaust all peaceful means of resolving the conflict with North 
Korea and disagree with the view that Iran has violated its nuclear 
agreement. Given the power of these three institutions in the USA, one 
can easily understand that there is a hidden part of the iceberg.  There 
is a “Party of War”, which is able to exert pressure on Donald Trump, to 
control him and manipulate him in one way or another. There is no other 
explanation of all this Washington infighting.
We cannot easily prove the existence of this “War Party”: or describe 
its exact structure. We have to deduce its existence by what is 
happening, and what is happening simply cannot be explained in any other 
way than by admitting its existence and considerable power and 
influence. Like mathematicians had to introduce imaginary numbers, out 
of the need to complete their system, not out of any human experience, 
we could speak here of an “imaginary”, “unseen” so to say would be 
Emperor, the first of this kind in Human History, representing the most 
totalitarian and extremist forces in the leadership of the system. He 
has to remain secret, because his program is simply not presentable.
We have seen the same “Party of War” in action in Iraq, in Libya, in 
Syria, in Ukraine and on many other occasions. Probably it is 
responsible for “letting 9/11 happen”, because if it did not happen it 
would be extremely difficult to proceed with a dozen Middle Eastern wars 
and interventions. Its preferred method is the sui generis “entryism” 
into the US (and other countries’) establishment and the circumvention 
of the normal institutional state mechanisms, something that happened in 
all the lead-up to the Iraq war. This party existed all through the Cold 
War and even before, from 1943, when an important part of the US and 
British establishment began to work out a plan for launching a Third 
World War against the Soviet Union.
This is the party which is now trying to push its war agenda through its 
influence on Trump and which probably contributed from behind the scenes 
to his election. If anybody has a better explanation of what is going 
on, he has only to provide it.
There are suggestions in the media and suspicions that Mr. Kissinger, 
Mr. Kushner or Mr. Netanyahu are behind the “Madman” strategy Mr. Trump 
has opted for. Given the ideas and the past of all three of them, this 
could be true. We still don’t have any proof of that, as we are not in a 
position to know what they advise Mr. Trump and the network of those 
relations. Maybe some people in the US services know better and maybe 
this is the reason some of them have repeatedly undermine the plan of a 
war against Iran, denying the false assumptions about his nuclear 
program, used to justify a war.
Washington is currently abuzz with rumors that the American “deep state” 
is preparing a kind of “palace coup” against Donald Trump, possibly 
evoking Article 25 of the United States Constitution, a possibility 
already mentioned by Steve Bannon, the dismissed far-right “ideologue” 
and “strategist” of Mr. Trump. The Breitbart website, controlled by Mr. 
Bannon, published on October 9th an article on “Columbus Day” entitled 
“The Nuclear Option”. The article is interpretable as an indirect 
encouragement to the President of the United States to inaugurate a new 
historical era, as Columbus did with the discovery of America, by making 
use of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. Note also that Mr. Trump’s 
advisor on religious matters,  Evangelist Pastor Robert Jeffress , 
explained, citing  the epistle to Romans, that God has authorized Mr. 
Trump to use whatever means are required to exterminate the North Korean 
leader.
According to an article in the magazine Vanity Fair, reported also by 
other mainstream US media, such as the NBC, the United States Secretary 
of Defense Mr. Mattis has already held discussions with other 
collaborators of the President on what they should do if he decides to 
launch a nuclear attack.
According to the prevailing regulations, there is no legal way to stop 
the execution of an order to launch a nuclear war. It is given by the 
President of the United States and only by him, without asking 
anybody!!!  If he gives it, the US armed forces are obliged to carry it 
out, without discussion. As was explained recently in reports published 
in the American media, for such an order not to be executed, more than 
one American military officer would be obliged to disobey it, with all 
that would imply for them.
Now some people will probably say that it is not possible for the 
Pentagon and the CIA to oppose plans that aim to US domination over the 
world. After all, both institutions exist to pursue exactly that aim.
But in fact there is not any paradox here. It is true that those 
institutions and the ruling class of the US in general want to use every 
means to preserve US world domination. But a significant part of them 
wants of course to dominate the world: they don’t want to destroy the 
object of their domination, including the United States.
As a significant part of the US establishment and of the US ruling class 
are becoming conscious of the risks inherent in the “madman”, “chaos” 
strategy of Trump, it is only normal and fully predictable that they 
will try to resist it, even by organizing “palace coups”. It is not at 
all certain that they will manage to stop the President and the forces 
behind from unleashing with his “fire and fury” a chain of events 
potentially leading to a global catastrophe.
By their function and their position the US military and the Pentagon 
are accustomed to making rational analysis of a given situation. They 
are able to know and to calculate better than anybody else the real 
dangers inherent in the “madman”, “chaos” strategy pursued by Trump in 
the world and suggested by Netanyahu in the Middle East. The “rational” 
kernel of this reckless strategy is that, if America pretends to be mad, 
then the other players (Russia and China) will succumb to its pressure 
to avoid a general catastrophe as they are rational.
An Example about the Power of the Example

Such a line of “mad” thinking, provides also with a motivation for the 
Empire to launch a “limited war” against Korea (it could also be against 
Iran), because that way they will be able to use this terrible example. 
An example is always the best way to educate people. When Henry 
Kissinger visited Europe in 1972, trying to deter the participation of 
Communist Parties in the Italian and French governments and to torpedo 
any détente with Soviet Union he said to his interlocutors: “Watch 
closely what happens in Chile” (information the writer had from Jorge 
McGinty, responsible for the foreign relations of the Chilean Socialist 
Party). In 1973, the world was able to watch what happened to Chile and 
Salvador Allende. Some people did not grasp the message fully, such as 
Aldo Moro, who was abducted and executed four years later by the “Red 
Brigades”.
We can’t know which of the two imperial camps will prevail. On one hand 
we have the President of the USA with his enormous powers and a very 
decisive party of war behind him. On the other we have numerous 
important forces and institutions. Their problem is they lack a clear 
strategic alternative to what the extremists are proposing. For example, 
to accept defeat in the Middle East and co-manage the region with the 
Russians is not easy to accept. But when a power has already done what 
the US has done in the Middle East, it is very difficult also to propose 
another successful alternative for the USA. There will be a cost for all 
that happened and the US will not avoid it any way. The real choice is 
behind a huge damage limitation operation and the generalization of 
disaster and it is really hard for the people who have to take the 
decisions and fix the strategies.
The fact that no serious reaction to such plans is visible from outside 
the USA, or from Western societies, facilitates the extremists. For 
example Roosevelt, Keynes, or European Social Democracy were able to 
apply their politics, because the existence of the communist Soviet 
Union and its challenge to Western capitalism it was projecting was 
providing them with a very strong argument. They had to do something 
otherwise the Communists would try to seize power.
Vice-versa, if one decides he can go on with a policy without anybody 
willing to stop him, then he has a serious motivation to proceed.
Unfortunately, for the time being, almost all political players around 
the world seem absolutely unprepared for what they see unfolding before 
their eyes, and apparently prefer not to believe it! They hope that God 
(or the US “deep” or just the normal state) will avert the unprecedented 
threats in an “automatic”, “objective” way, without them bothering to do 
anything significant.
War, the Left and Multi-polarism

The potential opponents of the Empire, not only do they facilitate in 
this way the work of its extremist faction, they also lose a historic 
opportunity. There is no more urgent and more important task now than to 
save the world from nuclear war. If the European Left, or Russia, or 
China will express that need in a clear political way, for everybody to 
hear, then they will achieve enormous international political results.
For the so-called European “Radical Left”, the situation presents it 
with a unique, golden possibility to take the initiative and to redress 
the catastrophic situation in which it found itself after the collapse 
and the capitulation of SYRIZA, in July 2015, by organizing a strong, 
mass and internationally coordinated demonstration of its opposition to 
war against Iran, North Korea and also Venezuela, which is equally under 
threat.
As Rome developed its imperialism, it destroyed its inner democracy, 
moving from the Republic to the Empire. If the so-called Left in the 
West does not do something serious and brave to stop this course, it 
will simply have no future whatsoever. And perhaps nobody else will have 
either.
And if there is a chance of Europe reversing its course, moving in a 
social, democratic and ecological direction, it cannot do it if it 
remains a passive vassal of the United States, their banks and of NATO. 
The aggregation of European opportunisms can only help a continental 
catastrophe.
What is true of European Left is also true of Russia and China. They 
both represent a possibility of counterbalancing an imperial power which 
is in the process of becoming totalitarian. Russia has a formidable 
military power, China a formidable economic power.
These are necessary but not sufficient elements to move to a multi-polar 
system. But to do this you don’t need only force, hard and economic 
(soft) power, you need also an alternative political and civilizational 
vision, political (soft) and “smart” (strategic) powers, which Russia 
and China at the moment lack.  They have adopted many of the dominant 
characteristics of Western Capitalism and a large part of their upper 
classes want exactly that, they are dreaming of what long ago became the 
nightmare of the most enlightened segments of the West!
It is somewhat schizophrenic to read, in Chinese and Russian newspapers, 
critiques of the very sanctions China and Russia are voting against 
North Korea. Nothing good will come out of such schizophrenia if 
prolonged. Multi-polarism cannot be born automatically out of objective 
conditions and it won’t be a simple result of rising Russian and Chinese 
power. It has a chance only if it will be able to become a real 
international political project.
A first step would be for Russia and China to make the bold move and, 
instead of trying to appease Mr. Trump, USA and Israel, take the 
initiative to clearly and loudly denounce his threats and form an 
international front to deter any prospect of nuclear war. This will be a 
gigantic political step in the direction of establishing a Multi-Polar 
World.
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