EH here. This is a long read, too long -- 9114 words -- and if I don't send it out God knows how much longer it will get. It lacks a proper conclusion, but then I'd probably go on another 2-3 thousand more words. I am hoping the readers here will make suggestions, find problems, and help me get this monster out of my hair.
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Unwittingly or intentionally (we suspect in many cases, the latter), socialist left parties, trade unions, ecological activists and left wing intellectuals have mostly become no more than useful idiots to further the agenda of ‘progressive’ global capitalism. Their ‘zero’ ideology now couched as ‘the Science,’ e.g. eliminating Covid, carbon emissions, and the role of biological sex as the basis of social and legal policy – serves a clear function within the capitalist ideological system. Like the puritanical ethical codes of wider woke culture, this dissociated and corporate formula-fed belief system exists to make the actual agenda of the global capitalist class seem reasonable. In the terms of the new leftist doublethink, a global regime of surveillance, controlled speech and collapsed living standards pursued in the name of the permanence of the capitalist financial system is not only the least we can do, it is also not enough.
Radical politics has sunk to Starmer’s shrill cry: “I agree with the government, but I would go further!” ("Left Lockdown Sceptics Is Now the Real Left")
I began writing this article as an analysis of Paul Street's “The Ukraine War One Year in: Nine False Narratives,” published on February 24 in Counterpunch, but my intention soon became broader, with Street's article used as case in point to a larger criticism of what “the radical left” has come to mean and intend in the US specifically and the West more generally. The above quote from Real Left encompasses much of what I'm been thinking these last years, particularly since the left/liberal hysterical reaction to Trump's presidency, and it is with great relief to find a growing number of people writing in accordance with my views.
Street's article concludes regarding the US and Russia with “Don’t pick imperial sides. Be a communist anti-imperialist. Choose revolution against the reckless anarchy of (the imperialist world) capital(ist system), starting with taking up the struggle against fascism and capitalism-imperialism in your own country.” However, Street's statement, that the two countries are equally guilty of imperialism and capitalism so Communists should ignore this Ukrainian disaster, is belied by the fact that he condemns Putin and what Street considers Russia's criminal and unjustified invasion much more than he condemns Biden and NATO's nations more generally. As I will explore in this analysis, the woke lens through which Street looks obscures, perhaps even for himself, the fact that he is on the side of the US in this Ukrainian disaster.
Street and most Amerikans who consider themselves on the left see woke ideology as a means by which to create revolution. One would think that it would dawn on Street and his sort that there is a reason capitalist Amerika's power institutions, from corporations to education high and low to Democratic politicians to the military, are dominated by those taking up the woke cause, and that lies in the fact that wokery divides the population while any chance of a real people's revolution would require unification. Somehow this reality goes unseen by many, perhaps because, like all -isms, wokeism risks an incapacity to see the larger picture, to ignore factors that don't fit. As more clear-headed Marxists such as Adolph Reed have pointed out, woke ideology, for all its purported revolutionary potential, leaves the capitalist power structure untouched and has devolved into politically neutralized performances, applauded by the white liberals like the Boondocks' Huey Freeman in that cartoon's premiere episode, “The Garden Party.” Reed writes in “Tokens of the White Left,”
The prevailing take on black politics is part of a deep cynicism. As we spin further and further away from mundane political struggles, there is ever less pressure on the star black voices to engage politics concretely. Instead of analysis of the way that black people and politics connect with the institutional exercise of power, we get either utterly predictable rehearsals of standard bromides and litanies – reminiscent of a Las Vegas act gone stale ("we need to build coalitions of the oppressed [here include a string of groups] that are multiracial but guard against racism, sexism, homophobia," et cetera, ad nauseam) – or the glib sophistries that fly under the "culturalpolitics" flag.
In terms of class and capitalism, placing women and people of minority colors and genders does not change things in essence. Ask yourself, for instance, if the placing of women in power positions and high-income professions this last half century has changed anything in terms of creating a more peaceful, economically equitable and harmonious world, and reflect on that for a minute. To be clear, I am definitely not saying that women should not be in positions of power. Women have proven to be as capable and intelligent as men as doctors, lawyers, politicians, administrators, executives, etc, which has been enormous progress since my childhood, but also as capable of treachery and warmongering in support of capitalism. Are we to believe that any identity group in the US will save us? I know it's a most unpopular thing to say, but the power motive is deadly for us all, not just certain identity groups, particularly in a capitalist environment where competition for wealth, which equals power when you have enough of it, is the utmost goal. For the woke, power tactics are the entire game.
Street's wokery is evident in his introduction, where he writes “If you stake out a consistent communist anti-imperialist position on the Ukraine War, as I try to do in this essay, one group of white male lefties calls you a NATO fan and another group of white male lefties calls you a Putinist. Both charges are absurd and idiotic.” Those unfamiliar with woke rhetoric (if such humans still exist in the West) might ask what the white maleness of these critics has to do with it; aren't the arguments themselves the issue, not the color and sex of the bodies that voice them? Those familiar might ask how this white lefty man can believe he can differentiate himself from those “absurd and idiotic” white lefty men. After all, if he took his critical race and gender theories all that seriously, he would realize that as a white man he just can't help his evil white male propensities and would do better to sit down and shut up. As Angela Nagle joked, Lenin himself wouldn't have been allowed to speak at the 2019 DSA conference. Of course, she had to say it on Tucker Carlson's show because criticism of wokery is verboten on most all leftish media. Plus the woke lack a sense of irony and humor generally. And by the way, the DSA canceled Adolph Reed in 2020 for suggesting Marxists get back to class issues.
Street certainly succeeds in showing he is no Putinist, but as for denying the charge of being a NATO fan, he does less well – or rather, his position puts him effectively on the side of NATO whatever his intentions. Although Street insists he's not taking sides, this article is a clear condemnation of Putin while Biden gets off easy.
Woke politics seeks to foist its cultural mores on the world in the name of anti-authoritarianism. What Street and his woke comrades despise as fascist and authoritarian is the same thing George Soros and Klaus Schwab do: nationalism, meaning those who resist globalism and a new world order with new cultural values. Russia under Putin's leadership is seen as the quintessence of that resistance with its return to Orthodox Christianity and love of mother Russia, and to Street, Putin is the epitome of white Christian nationalists, that most hated of human specimen, just like the deplorables he deplores. To Street, Putin is a woman-hater because he celebrates motherhood rather than women with beards, penises, lipstick, and flirty dresses. This he considers authoritarian despite the fact that these new norms have been legislated in the West, with those opposing them considered domestic terrorists guilty of hate crime. Is this not authoritarian?
If not for this lens Street looks at everything through, he might see things quite differently, because in Putin's speeches he has expressed views of the US's criminal empirical actions that Street would agree with enthusiastically. But he doesn't, and his exhortation to the left to ignore this oncoming world war is, to use his word, an absurd and frankly idiotic position to take, and given the rancor he expresses against Putin, which far outweighs his rhetoric regarding Biden, he's not convincing. Calling Biden a “longtime imperialist” and “aggressive neo-Cold Warrior and Iraq invasion leader” is one thing, well known and factually verifiable descriptives. Calling Putin a “fascist pig” and “rabid fascist dog” is quite another, an order of character assassination he does not inflict on Biden. In fact, if you look at another of Street's recent articles, “Joe Biden's State of the Union Address: A Marxist Perspective,” you don't find a single example of the sort of slurring descriptives he reserves for Putin. I don't know if Biden's constant reading the woke script on his telepromptor has anything to do with it, but wonder what else it could be. If there's one thing woke ideologues despise, it's someone in power who will not tow their line, and Biden certainly does. It's about all he's got, but apparently enough to get some slack on his war-mongering in Ukraine and his as-yet entirely disclosed meddling long before that.
Again, Street concludes that Communists should not take sides in the Ukraine War and instead “begin by taking up the struggle against fascism and capitalism-imperialism in your own country.” So here are two questions. First, how does he define fascism, and second, how does one struggle against imperialism if the focus is limited to domestic affairs? But before getting to that, I'll have a look at Street's view of the Ukraine War.
Street's Spotty Historical Account
Street spends a good amount of space in “The Ukraine War One Year In: Nine False Narratives” writing about the history of the war. He begins with the false narrative that “Russia's criminal invasion was unjustified and unprovoked” and seeks to argue that although it was provoked it was unjustified and criminal. He concludes this section with, “History matters – or at least it ought to.” However, for the most part his history review is myopic and spotty; there is, for example, no mention anywhere in this article of the Maidan “revolution” or Ukraine's bloody attack of ethnic Russians in Donbass, which was accelerating when Putin decided to finally put a stop to it with his “special military operation.” As the MSM would have it, the debacle in Ukraine mostly in 2022.
Street believes Russia could have negotiated his way out of this war and a peace will eventually be negotiated, at which point the world will pretty much go back to normal, give or take a million or more dead. Both points are highly questionable, as is his contention that the invasion was criminal and unjustifiable, ie against international law. He cherry-picks the history of the debacle to make his point and does not indicate any awareness that winning in Ukraine is an existential crisis both for the US's existence as global hegemon and for Russia's existence as a sovereign nation working with BRICS+ and the BRI to create a new multipolar world of cooperation. He in no way gives truck to the possibility that cooperation is something “the fascist pig Putin” is capable of, contending that Putin's intent is just as imperialistic as the US's but Russia is too militarily weak to act on that overriding impulse:
Russia certainly has capitalist-imperialist reasons to want to increase its power over resource-rich Ukraine. But Putin lacks the military capacity to “eliminate Ukraine.” He has never seriously pursued the military strategy and political measures –preparation of a puppet government – required for such a fantastic objective. He has repeatedly voiced (yes, qualified and contingent) recognition of Ukrainian sovereignty and a lack of interest in occupying Ukraine. He has repeatedly stated his main reason for (yes, criminally) invading: Ukraine’s accelerating movement towards the expansionist Western military and economic alliance on the southwestern doorstep of Russia, which has been repeatedly invaded through Ukraine with disastrous consequences.
In this first false narrative section, he quotes George Beebe, former CIA Russia analyst and Director of Grand Strategy for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft writing in November 2022, emphasizing with italics that Beebe is “no Putin apologist.” Referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, Beebe notes
It reached the point where Ukraine and Georgia—two states of great geostrategic but also of political and emotional resonance for Russia – were declared to be future NATO members, back in 2008. That has been a great source of instability and it’s one of the big reasons we’re in the situation that we are in Ukraine.
Also,
And Europe could have handled this differently as well. One of the things the Russians said repeatedly was their top priority was getting assurances that Ukraine would not be part of the NATO alliance. The Russians wanted not only that Ukraine not be in NATO, but that NATO not be in Ukraine. Russia saw that the United States and NATO were fairly robustly increasing their military presence in Ukraine over time. I think the Russians worried that if that were to continue their ability to preclude it some months or years down the road would be much less. The United States and NATO refused to discuss that issue at all, and the Russians were quite counterproductive in how they attempted to force our hand. They engaged to a great degree in coercive diplomacy, putting a gun to our head and saying ‘Let’s make a deal or else.’ Obviously, that’s not conducive to constructive, diplomatic discourse.”
No, it was not conducive to constructive, diplomatic discourse, but the reality is that the Clinton administration had promised Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not admit member nations east of East Germany, a promise quickly broken, with the US defending that betrayal because it was not put in writing. Putin the lawyer would not have made that error, although most in the world know that the US has seldom honored its promises, documented or not. Finally drawing a red line to this encroachment after eight years of thousands of ethnic Russians being slaughtered by Ukrainian Nazis without interference from the Ukraine government was to Street, in agreement with Beebe, like "putting a gun to the West's head." But in order to appear “fair and balanced,” Street adds to Beebe's analysis:
Here we might add some specificity. In early September of 2021, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House, where the aggressive neo-Cold Warrior and Iraq invasion leader Joe Biden said that the US “firmly committed” to “Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations.” Two months later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, signed the “US-Ukraine Charter on StrategicPartnership,” which “underscore[d] … a commitment to Ukraine’s implementation of the deep and comprehensive reforms necessary for full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” That reaffirmed Washington’s dedication to the “2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration,” which declared the goal of Ukraine joining NATO. In the year preceding Putin’s move, Ukraine was proceeding rapidly toward NATO integration. It conducted military exercises with NATO countries on land and sea and in the air.
Street's sixth false narrative is the US and the West's contention that they are involved in Ukraine to defend Ukraine's right to self-determination. Street responds with “That’s a lie. That’s not 'all.'” In other words, he does not deny that this is part of it. Rob Urie, in “Russia, Ukraine, and International Law,” suggests otherwise. He questions whether Ukraine is indeed a self-determined nation to begin with: “There are now reports of multiple instances where Ukraine had come to terms with the Russians but was subsequently told that there is no deal by the Americans. Is this evidence of Ukrainian sovereignty?” Also, Boris Johnson shut down Putin's negotiations with Zelensky, and it's no secret that the Minsk Accords were a ruse to buy time in order to get Ukraine's military ready for war. Remember that Putin has questioned whether Ukraine should be considered a sovereign nation; after all, the name “Ukraine” means borderland in Russian, which is why some refer to it as “the Ukraine,” and it was decided by Lenin to be a satellite region within the Soviet system when the distinction mattered little.
Urie and others have pointed to the Minsk Accords and the intentional failure of Zelensky and NATO members to implement them in order to argue against Beebe and Street's conclusion that Putin could have negotiated his way out of the heightening tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Urie reasons that if the Accords had been implemented it could be discerned whether Putin was negotiating in good faith by whether or not he stopped at the Donbas border. We'll never know, but at this point we do know that Western puppet Zelensky and NATO were not. Urie writes, “It is the American people who are being played here. The Biden administration is precluding future negotiations by proving the Americans to be untrustworthy negotiating partners.”
This belies Street's accusation that Putin has been unreasonable in failing to negotiate with the US. There will be no international law as long as the US remains the hegemon imposing “rules-based order” on the world, which means in effect that “the rules hold for thee but not for me, and we'll change them whenever we want to.” Quoting Beebe, Street insists “We could have simply said officially and formally, 'Ukraine’s not going to be in NATO.' We wouldn’t even have had to say ‘never.’” This is ludicrous. By February 24, 2022, Putin had cleared his mind of any hope that the US empire, which he refers to as “the Empire of Lies,” is capable of negotiating in good faith. No doubt Street must know that, so why is he pretending otherwise?
Urie, along with Scott Ritter, has pointed to the UN Charter's Article 51 for justification of Russia's “special military operation” in Ukraine; Putin himself announced his special military operation was legal due to that article.Urie asks "at what point does provocation turn into instigation?" Ritter makes an expanded case for the legal justification of thre war in “Russia,Ukraine and the Law of War: Crime of Agression”:
Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine for the ostensible purpose of eliminating neo-Nazi affiliated military formations accused of carrying out acts of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass, and for dismantling a Ukrainian military Russia believed served as a de facto proxy of the NATO military alliance.
Putin laid out a detailed case for pre-emption, detailing the threat that NATO’s eastward expansion posed to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s ongoing military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass.
“[T]he showdown between Russia and these forces,” Putin said, “cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.” NATO and Ukraine, Putin declared,
“did not leave us [Russia] any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action. The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with permission of Russia’s Federation Council, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22, I made a decision to carry out a special military operation.”
Unfortunately for Bellinger and those who share his legal opinion, a previous U.S. presidential administration, that of William Jefferson Clinton, had previously crafted a novel legal theory based upon the right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.
The Clinton administration argued that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it was, in fact, dominated by the United States, claimed such a status.
While the credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense” collapsed when it transpired that its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide that created, not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity, turned out to be little more than a covert provocation carried out by the C.I.A. for the sole purpose of creating the conditions for NATO military intervention. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/11/edvulliamy.peterbeaumont
While one may be able to mount a legal challenge to Russia’s contention that its joint operation with Russia’s newly recognized independent nations of Lugansk and Donetsk constitutes a “regional security or self-defense organization” as regards “anticipatory collective self-defense actions” under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.
Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led “special military operation.” [OSCE figures show an increase of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]
Finally, Russia has articulated claims about Ukraine’s intent regarding nuclear weapons, and in particular efforts to manufacture a so-called “dirty bomb”, which have yet to be proven or disproven. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a reference to seeking a nuclear weapon in February at the Munich Security Conference.]
The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on fact, not fiction.
While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground.
What Does Street Call Fascist?
Fascist is a word that gets hurled around a lot these days, meaning different things to different people. I located eight passages in which he used the term.
Biden “couldn’t give more than a measly 30 seconds – half a minute – of his 2023 State of the Union Address to the ongoing and escalating right-wing neofascist assault on women’s reproductive rights in his own country.”
“ But there plenty of Russian Nazis and if either of the two adjacent nations qualifies as fascist the title definitely goes to Russia, whose anti-feminist and LGBT-bashing strongman President is a far-right white nationalist hero, agent, and leader across the West.
“No love for the rabid fascist dog Putin, but the bear was poked, and quite egregiously, by Uncle Sam and his European allies.”
“The authoritarian Putin has recently taken to absurdly linking Ukraine’s supposed Nazism to its purported effort to attack Russia with “LGBT ideology.” That is darkly hilarious given fascism’s visceral hatred and targeting of gay and transgender rights.”
“Yes, the fascist pig Putin voiced some Great Russian hyperbole along those lines in his speech announcing the invasion one year ago, and Russia certainly has capitalist-imperialist reasons to want to increase its power over resource-rich Ukraine.”
“The United States is a crooked corporate and imperial plutocracy with fading bourgeois democratic institutions captured by an unelected dictatorship of capital and heading down its own distinctive path of Christian white nationalist neofascism.
The USA, sponsor of the vicious Saudi Arabian dictatorship and the judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid regime of Israel, has been the mass murderous patron, supplier, trainer, friend, agent and cover-provided of arch-authoritarian and Third World fascist regimes around the world for nearly eight decades.
“Don’t pick imperial sides. Be a communist anti-imperialist. Choose revolution against the reckless anarchy of (the imperialist world) capital(ist system), starting with taking up the struggle against fascism and capitalism-imperialism in your own country.
One thing's for sure: by fascist Street does not mean Mussolini's famous definition, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” If he did he would have called the US fascist, but he only uses it regarding the US in terms of “the [domestic] struggle against fascism,” implying that there still much of a struggle. In the majority of cases, given the above quotes as well as his emphases elsewhere, the struggle against those who oppose abortion rights and infringe upon the LGBT community's demands, emphasis on the T. The fervor against encroaching fascism reached fever pitch during the Trump administration. Street wrote a book about it; scads of people did. Chomsky gobsmacked the TDS left when he said that Trump was the only“statesman” in the US calling for peace, but he still said he was “worse than Hitler” to soften the blow.
Street would do well to consider Mussolini's definition of fascism. If he did, he might take off his woke glasses and wonder how it is that so many of his views are reflected in the rhetoric of the Biden administration. It is disparaging that in conversing with those Amerikans who consider themselves radical leftists, they end up talking just like Democrats.
To some leftists' minds, including mine, the US has long been a fascist country, and Trump as Prez was not some seismic intensification of fascism, no worse than those preceding him if you looked at the policies and ignored the fevered spin, and in some ways better. Like, for instance, wanting to normalize relations with Russia. But anyone on the left who didn't think Trump's win was not earthshakingly awful and would not express alarm often and hystericallyenough became persona non grata and tossed in the right-wing bin. The overwhelming obsession was to get Trump thrown out of office – to what end, I wondered – so Pence could be Prez? Trump, like every other “leader of the free world,” did some terrible things, but one that sets him apart and particularly aggrieves me, counter to most of “the left,” is that his presidency had a lot to do with wokery spreading like wildfire throughout the land, starting with the Evergreen State College riot, which was a reaction to his win, and now the main topic in most every newsfeed the general public comes across, although the Covid plandemic hysteria nearly overtook the issue's prominence.
Fight Imperialism by Destroying the West
I've asked how Street proposes to fight imperialism in the domestic sphere, and given what I've read of him, his answer would seem to be to keep the state legislating woke power, promote body autonomy in matters of women's rights (except for mandated and Covid pharmaceuticals, the toxicity of which he remains stubbornly ignorant), make sure the poor can get their jabs, destroy Trump and his fans, work with liberals in the Democratic Party, promote anti-carbon dioxide environmental activism, and I'm not sure what else because I'm not exactly an avid reader of his, knowing him mainly as a regular at Counterpunch, once the gold standard of left journalism in the US, and from the enthusiastic thumbs-ups he gets from self-described Marxist radicals who boast about their latest Covid booster jab. But one sure way to destroy imperialism is to get rid of nations so no one cannot take over another, to have one big nation-free globe where people can be moved freely anywhere in the world, given they have their health passport, and transforming citizens of nations into mobile widgets for wherever human hands are needed at a given time in a global technosphere. That sounds great for the globalist oligarchs; not so great for the demos, who would lack even the semblance of representation or the security of living in a place with a culture they share. In fact, who needs cultures? For these types, culture, specifically all Western culture, is divisive and if culture is necessary, the project should be to create a new one that every human in the world can share. By edict, if necessary, which is actually a project being enacted in the West. The left's cry for “workers of the world unite” is used to defend globalized power in a diminishing number of hands thanks to zooming wealth creation for the fewer and fewer and impoverishment for the more and more “useless eaters” – the opposite of putting power into the hands of the workers as Marx envisioned, although the Davos/WEF folks make it seem sort of like Communism. US nationalists, who are terrified of the idea as their culture is trashed, as in white trash, think Communism is what it is. And who can blame them? And exactly how is this making Communism appealing to the masses?
The US is currently attacking one major nuclear power by proxy while simultaneously saber rattling and preparing for war with another by2025. Perhaps to some this looks like a compelling show of strength, but to others it resembles something analogous to the desperately violent gestures of a rabid madman chained to a cement wall. Meanwhile, the economy looks to be on its way to a major economic meltdown that could make the Great Depression look like a cake walk, and culturally, the populace has perhaps never been more polarized. Biden shows undeniable signs of senile dementia, shaking hands with ghosts and mumbling incoherently, etc, which those who vote Democrat don't much notice. (And most who identify as leftists do vote blue, being told every four years in the “progressive” press that it's never been more important to keep those fascist Republicans out.) Meanwhile, the Democrat's political appointments are being made based on color and gender identities and their woke feelings about them more than anything else, so we have a gay man in charge of transportation who talks about fixing the problem of racist bridges while ignoring all the derailing trains as much as possible, including the one that created a toxic chemical catastrophe in Ohio. The guy (sorry, but he is) in charge of nuclear waste steals suitcases of designer dresses at airports and wears them during public appearances. Biden stated publicly that the latest Supreme Court appointment had to go to a black woman, and it seems that the other qualification that mattered most was her inability to define what a woman is. The guy put in charge of the Monkeypox epidemic, a scare that didn't work out too well, is proud to announce he's into S&M and Satanism. On and on. These installments seem designed to outrage the deplorables more than finding the best people for the job.
In "The Plan to Wreck America," Mike Whitney, who has been writing about the poisonous jabs in such articles as “It All Makes Sense Once You Realize They Want to Kill Us” and many more since the beginning of this plandemic scam, has an idea of what's afoot, which is that it all makes sense once you realize they want to kill America. He looks at all the seemingly unrelated crazed incidents that have flooded the Amerikan public's consciousness and smells a distinctively CIAish odor.
. . . are the mandated injections, the forced lockdowns, the aggressive government-implemented censorship, the dubious presidential elections, the burning of food processing plants, the derailing of trains, the attacks on the power grid, the BLM-Antifa riots, the drag queen shows for schoolchildren, the maniacal focus on gender issues, and glitzy public show-trials merely random incidents occurring spontaneously during a period of great social change or are they, in fact, evidence of a stealthily orchestrated operation conducted by agents of the state acting on behalf of their elite benefactors? We already know that the FBI, the DOJ and the intel agencies were directly involved in Russiagate –which was a covert attack on the sitting president of the United States. So, the question is not “whether” these agencies are actively involved in other acts of treachery but, rather, to what extent these acts impact the lives or ordinary Americans, our politics and the country? (“The Plan to Wreck America”
Is it merely coincidental that all such incidents are happening simultaneously? Whitney notices that they are unrelated but for one thing: they all produce terror and chaos. He asks if it could be possible that the CIA would hatch such a diabolical plan. Yes it could, he answers, and points to Cynthia Chung's “Operation Gladio: How NATO Conducted a Secret War Against European Citizens and Their Democratically Elected Governments.” Chung quotes Yves Guerin-Serac, whom she describes as “a war hero, agent provocateur, assassin, bomber, intelligence agent, Messianic Catholic, and the intellectual grandmaster behind the ‘Strategy of Tension’ essential to the success of Operation Gladio,” and also “an open fascist, [who] would not be the first to use false-flag tactics that were blamed on communists and used to justify more stringent police and military control from the state….”
“Our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to be to create the conditions favoring the installation of chaos in all of the regime’s structures…In our view the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of Communist and pro-Soviet activities…Moreover, we have people who have infiltrated these groups.”
“Two forms of terrorism can provoke such a situation [breakdown of the state]: blind terrorism (committing massacres indiscriminately which cause a large number of victims), and selective terrorism (eliminate chosen persons)…
This destruction of the state must be carried out under the cover of ‘communist activities.’ After that, we must intervene at the heart of the military, the juridical power and the church, in order to influence popular opinion, suggest a solution, and clearly demonstrate the weakness of the present legal apparatus. Popular opinion must be polarized in such a way, that we are being presented as the only instrument capable of saving the nation.”
Whitney suggests that it is possible that such a plan is operational at present. Because otherwise, what the hell is going on? For Street and like woke Communists, as well as literature departments and museums, Western culture with its norms and values needs to be destroyed because it has been developed and promoted within a capitalist environment, and therefore everything it values supports capitalism, including its arts, so those must also be destroyed along with it. It's a remarkable thing to say that the only significant motivation to produce anything in a capitalist society is, essentially and necessarily, whether consciously or unconsciously, an evil one, but that is the logical conclusion to their postmodern thinking. Capitalism is thus seen as just as systemic as racism, everywhere and in everything. I might point out that wokery is also the product of Western thinking, being hatched in the likes of Harvard. Marxism is also a Western product, by the way. Take the project of destroying the West in order to save it far enough, and it starts to look like the proverbial ouroboros consuming its own tail.
The basics of Guerin-Serac's plan fit quite neatly into the chaos we have been experiencing in recent years. Certainly polarization is at a peak here in the US. Since the Trump election and attendant mass flooding of woke propaganda, political conversations have become very difficult unless there is solid agreement on all points. Civil discussions between those with varying political opinions have become a distant, vague memory. Then came the Covid propaganda, which deepened the polarization while wreaking incredible financial harms to millions. Businesses deemed unnecessary were shuttered and those who refused the jab were thrown out of work, while the mega-corporations remained essential and prospered wildly. “Anti-vaxxers” were vilified as anti-social fiends who would be the death of us all. Those who questioned “the science,” even those scientists who had been eminent in their fields, were scoffed at and some even lost their careers. Those who did the scoffing, censoring and ejecting, even the scientists, haven't seemed to understand what science is; essentially, a process of truth seeking was reified into a command to be followed without question. Meanwhile, excess deaths and serious injuries were mounting.
Science, particularly the biological sciences, became politicized and degraded as a result. The woke fixation on the transgender issue created the alarming result that biologists and doctors were pressured to believe an essentially religious idea that some people are born in the “wrong” body and that medicine through hormonal treatments and sex-change operations could solve the error, ideally before adolescence worsened the problem. The idea that obesity is unhealthy was demonized and doctors were lectured to refrain from saying otherwise.
An Amerikan version of Antifa joined BLM protests and encouraged vandalism, property destruction and looting, which the authorities allowed on the basis that racism is a health problem even more vital than Covid, so those protests were applauded, despite even numerous homicides, while the rest of the country remained in lockdown. Not coincidentally these protests disappeared once Trump was out of office as if racism had been dealt with, while in reality it had been inflamed. The January 6th protesters at the Capitol were deemed insurrectionists – a strange attempt at a coup, surely, in that they were unarmed andwelcomed in by the police, the only fatality was a woman shot by a policeman.
Meanwhile, education, which has long been overtaken by liberals, has been preaching wokery to the young, dividing parents from children and children from each other. Black children are encouraged to think that systemic racism will forever hold them back, and white children informed that they are personally responsible for this by virtue of their very existence. Those parents who object to both this and Covid mandates which dictate masking and Covid “vaccines” to children, who are in no danger from Covid and real danger from the jabs, are considered domestic terrorists as well. Academic standards, which had been pushed to be raised under the Bush and Obama administration, have been lowered in the name of healing racism, and protests that this will harm the prospects of black children (and all children) are considered right-wing and regressive.
Surveillance and censorship of wrongthink is intensifying in publishing, whether online or the production of actual books, which are increasingly read on electronic devises, and the previous, at least ostensible purpose of higher education – the development of critical thinking and the Enlightenment goal of truthseeking – has been deemed a violent enterprise to be eradicated as a danger to the young.
I could go on, but does this look like an infliction of terror and chaos yet?
Simon Elmer sees a similar state of affairs in the UK. In his recent article “Virtue and Terror: How the New Normal Was Created,” he notes that
. . . universal education, which has always served to indoctrinate citizens into the dominant ideology, has been transformed into more or less explicit propaganda for the changing values and pressing needs of Western capitalism far beyond how we vote. Globalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics, environmental fundamentalism, the orthodoxies of woke and now the dogma and cultic practices of biosecurity are all products of the neoliberalisation of our education, media and culture industries.
The result of this ideological co-ordination of every sector of our society is that the most educated demographic in human history, the middle classes of the West, is now the most easily manipulated populace in history. A century and more of universal suffrage and education has created not ‘rule by the people’ but a demos in thrall to the ever-expanding technologies of biopower.
The systemic exploitation of this flaw in our democracy means that our lives are now effectively ruled by the most gullible, the most afraid, the most obedient and the most compliant members of our society, on the grounds that they constitute a democratic consensus. It is not by chance that every crisis manufactured to justify removing our freedoms is turned into a ‘health’ crisis.
As in Whitney's “The Plan to Wreck America,” Elmer's article brings together a number of issues that may seem disparate but are not. Elmer defines totalitarianism thus:
Totalitarianism is not only the agreement but the dogmatic insistence of the vast majority of the population of a society and all those in positions of power that what is clearly, evidently and demonstrably false is true.
How to get to such a place? It is by first eradicating the idea that there is a truth to uncover, and this is the postmodern turn. Elmer on this:
The accusation of ‘conspiracy theorist’ by which anyone opposing or even questioning Government policy continues, still, to be dismissed by our representatives in Parliament, slandered in mainstream and social media, and now criminalised by our Government, judiciary and police forces, is the dark seed of our postmodernity come to fruition. Where modernity understood the truth to be concealed beneath the surface reality of things and sought to excavate it from beneath the lies of the powerful, postmodernity views reality itself as constituted by those surfaces, beneath which there is only the abyss of competing opinions, whose will to power produces a truth that is therefore always contingent, always a product of power, regardless of any purchase that truth may have on the world.
The game is to first say there are no truths and then to turn around and legislate some, particularly ones that everyone can see are false but most are too cowardly to point out because those who do are punished severely. The woke turn is to pull out of this postmodernist murk “truths” like this example Elmer supplies:
A man in a dress is now a woman if those with the legislative power to punish us for denying it say he is.
This is exactly how woke ideology leads to totalitarianism. So perhaps it is not so surprising that this New Normal, woked-up “left” continues to believe that Covid is a plague from which only Big Pharma can save us, incredible and stupid and ignorant as it may sound to those not under the spell. Elmer again:
It is on this mutual agreement to insist on the truth of a lie that nobody believes that a totalitarian society is made. This describes, precisely, the society we are living in now. Everything — every last thing without exception — that we’ve been told about the ‘pandemic’ over the last three years has been a lie. Nothing we have been told is true. Whether we did or do choose to believe it is not a question of opinion, or what we grandly call ‘our’ politics, or even of our trust in authority.
Ironically, it was Chomsky who took the left down this garden path. Ironic because his debate with Michel Foucault in 1971was seminal for the left, a modernist arguing against Foucault's postmodernist view that truth is a mere social construct and thus not a truth at all, and then through his leftist authority proclaiming that any questioning of governmental explanations of events, no matter how obviously false, should be ignored as diversions. Like JFK's assassination, like 9/11, like the Covid scamdemic. Chomsky went so far as to say that the unjabbed have a moral obligation to the larger society and how they would feed themselves is their problem.
And finally, the children. There's a fight going on now about what the public schools can teach regarding gender. This New Normal “left” is outraged by the Florida governor Ron DeSantis's Parental Rights in Education Bill because it bans classroom instruction and conversation about sexual orientation and gender identity for public school students in kindergarten through third grade. That means it's OK to do so by the time the kids are eight, at which time it's fine and perfectly lawful to instruct children that a man is a woman if he says so. But this “left” dissembles about it, calling it the "Don't Say Gay" law, as in this recent article, which states that the law “bans state public school teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in class.” It's outrageous to these “leftists” that they cannot discuss this with five year olds. Get 'em while they're young.
What would Paul Street think of the above? I'm pretty sure he would think it's all fascist claptrap, what with his being on the side of the liberals who have kept themselves totally ignorant of the fact that everything they've been told about the great Covid threat has been a lie, who think that all of Western thought is racist and elitist (excluding the likes of his), and that those Trump-loving working class deplorables infesting the flyover states with their guns and unwashed whiteness are the greatest threat to progress toward a Marxist future. Yep. The working class is now the enemy of Marxism.
What Street Means by Authoritarian, and Who's the Nazi?
Street uses the word authoritarian three times in his article:
“The authoritarian Putin has recently taken to absurdly linking Ukraine’s supposed Nazism to its purported effort to attack Russia with “LGBT ideology.” That is darkly hilarious given fascism’s visceral hatred and targeting of gay and transgender rights.”
“It is indisputable that Russia is an authoritarian state: look at, among other things, Putin’s draconian arrest and imprisonment of thousands of Russians for daring to speak out against his criminal war, including some who have been punished just for calling it a war.”
“The USA, sponsor of the vicious Saudi Arabian dictatorship and the judeo-fascist occupation and apartheid regime of Israel, has been the mass murderous patron, supplier, trainer, friend, agent and cover-provided of arch-authoritarian and Third World fascist regimes around the world for nearly eight decades.”
Interesting that Street does not mention that those Third World fascist regimes were largely installed by the US and does not use the term authoritarian to describe the US either. Yes, it is indeed authoritarian to take political prisoners, so let's be even-handed here and employ a whataboutism. Street enthusiastically applauds the largest FBI manhunt in US history and the imprisonment of January 6th protesters, often on such charges as “parading,” or even nothing more than being in the Capitol environs. They have often been imprisoned for up to a year before trial. For two years February 6th prisoners, unlike others, were denied medical care, family visits, and religious services. So obviously Street does not concern himself with authoritarian measures as long as they're to the benefit of the Democratic Party. His problem with the January 6th show trial aren't the flagrant lies flying around the room describing it as a bloodbath and such, but the fact that they didn't go far enough.
In his list of false narratives regarding the Ukraine debacle, the fourth one is “Ukraine is a Nazi State Hellbent on Crushing Virtuous Mother Russia,” calling it “Orwellian nonsense” and arguing that ". . there are plenty of Russian Nazis and if either of the two adjacent nations qualifies as fascist the title definitely goes to Russia," his italics, "whose anti-feminist and LGBT-bashing strongman President is a far-right white nationalist hero, agent, and leader across the West.” While conceding “a terrible Ukrainian history of genocidal collaboration with the Third Reich” and that there remain Nazis in Ukraine, he fails to mention that Stepan Bandera remains a national hero celebrated without the Jewish Zelensky's objection, or that the Azov troops sport Nazi symbols on their uniforms and tatooed on their arms, evident even while being given awards by Jon Stewart at Disney World.
Again, deciding which is the Nazi state seems to be in large part one of who accepts the woke faith. I'm not sure if Ukrainians do but last I checked most of them are Orthodox Christians, the Russian churches of theirs having being shut down and their priests imprisoned and even killed (no mention of that authoritarianism in Street's world, who would likely accept ABC's claim that it was Russians who done it). Certainly Russia has returned to its conservative Christian roots since the fall of the Soviet system, for which we can at least in part thank the arms race, sanctions, and soft CIA culture power. It is true that Putin has banned what he calls LGBT propaganda, but there is a difference between living peaceably with the non-heterosexual on the one hand and celebrating them to the point of something that looks like a fetish, which is everywhere apparent in the US, and Putin has decided that living peaceably is fine but celebratory propaganda is not. We'll see where this goes but so far I haven't heard any accounts of Russians being imprisoned or thown off of cliffs for their sexuality. I'm not sure where Street gets the “anti-feminist” character of Russia other than that Putin is pro-family and would like to see the population increase. Abortion is legal in Russia.
Street would likely agree that those who don't want their kids being taught with books featuring illustrations of 15-year-old boys giving blowjobs are domestic terrorists, although I'm assuming the woke would object strongly if the illustrations were of girls doing that. The woke see no problem with affirmation of gender dysphoria as the only route to take when a ten-year old girl suddenly decides she's in “the wrong body” and feels like a boy. Rachel Levine says it's “the science.” And those domestic terrorists would foil “the science” and not allow 10-year-olds to be put on puberty blockers, the long-term consequences of which are still unknown, but hey, what a fascinating adventure for our children! It looks like a whole lot of our children's souls were put in the wrong body! How'd that happen? Like all the woke, defending those of the LBGT “community” means foremost the radical transgender movement, which goes rabid on lesbians who won't have sex with people with penises and argue using basic biological facts, and have the gall to defend women's rights to their own sports and intimate female-only spaces, from prisons to changing rooms. These same radical transgenders look down on male gays as just more repulsive “cis” now that normal Amerikans have no problem welcoming them into their suburbs. How this counts as a community is beyond me. And how this respects the larger population is too. Democracy is anathema to the woke.
The other reason Street cites is that Zelensky is Jewish, a word he also emphasizes with italics, considering any collaboration between the Jewish Zelensky and neo-Nazis to be absolutely impossible, but how would this be much different than the US/NATO using Muslim terrorist organizations to do their dirty work, as they've been doing in the Mideast for decades and continue to do in Syria? No, it's hardly absolutely impossible. In fact, the joining of Nazis and Zionists for common goals has historic precedence.
For these two reasons, Street concludes that it's the Russians, those responsible for defeating the Nazis at the cost of some 27 million Russian lives, are the Nazis in this Ukraine proxy battleground. And although Street does call this a proxy war, he does not seem to entirely get that Ukraine is not the issue for any Western power, that Russia is not fighting Ukraine but the entire West on the West's chosen battleground, and the West has baldly stated that they are willing to sacrifice the entire Ukrainian population (what's left of it since massive emigration, with Russia being nation-destination number one) to maintain US global hegemony. It follows that in defending Ukraine against Russia, Street is effectively defending US global hegemony against Russia while casting a blind eye to the fact that Ukraine and its people are being destroyed.
And this is not all about Russia merely, but China, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, and the majority of those living in the Global South, who are happy for the chance to get out from under US “aid” such as IMF loans that effectively turn their countries' resources into grist for the capitalist mill, as well as threats of sanctions, regime change coups and military invasions. BRICS+ promises poor nations lacking the power to defend themselves from US intrusion, an alliance that is economic only, free of meddling with their politics or culture, with development of those nations that will benefit all. Is it any wonder that most nations are taking them up on it? What do they have to lose? Which brings me to the last of Street's list of false narratives I'm going to discuss, the third one: “Civilization Itself is Most and Critically at Stake in the Struggle to Defeat Russia in Ukraine.”
The World beyond the West and Conclusion
Street is right to call out the European propensity to assume that civilization is a Western thing. He quotes historian Andrew Bacevich, who questions why protecting Ukraine is considered far more important than rescuing Haiti, Sudan, Rohingya or Myanmar. Part of the answer, it is true and beyond obvious, is that the West is Eurocentric. The other part, though, one that Street does not consider, is that waging war on those countries does not risk WWIII, while de facto going to war with Russia and planning for war with China not far down the road, definitely does.
In considering Russia's involvement in BRICS+ and BRI, the world outside the West has a much different attitude toward the Ukraine War, which is not surprising in that most of the world has considered the US the foremost danger to world peace for some time, with Israel being second. For this reason, it is to Haiti, Sudan, and all the little nonwestern country quite consequential that Russia prevails in this war if they hope to get out from under Uncle Sam's boot. In the end, it is to the West's hope also - not the neocons and neolibs - but the people of these countries. Those in power have proven time and time again that the plebs are not their concern, not the deplorables of the US or the German people or, in the long run, the managerial/professional class that serves state power, whose jobs look to be up for slashing should AI be extensively employed. But that's an issue for another article, and this one is too long already.
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