The Collective Suicide Machine

The return of the Taliban to power will be one more signpost of the end of the American empire — and nobody will be held accountable.

[scheerpost.com]

{Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.}

Virtually every progressive talking point raised in the democratic debates has been muted. As have those who spoke of them. Lost in distracting fake Jan 6th trials which no one essential too will be held accountable, Biden has been given thumbs up by virtually the entire democratic party with mere lip service occasionally being uttered, business as usual again.

{Twain knew that foreign occupations, designed to enrich the ruling elites, use occupied populations as laboratory rats to perfect techniques of control that soon migrate back to the homeland. It was the brutal colonial policing practices in the Philippines, which included a vast spy network along with routine beatings, torture, and executions, which became the model for centralized domestic policing and intelligence gathering in the United States. Israeli’s arms, surveillance and drone industries test their products on the Palestinians.}

{It is one of the dark ironies that it was the American empire, led by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, which spawned the mess in Afghanistan. Brzezinski oversaw a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation to arm, train and equip the Taliban to fight the Soviets. This clandestine effort sidelined the secular, democratic opposition and assured the ascendancy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, along with the spread of its radical Islam into Soviet Central Asia, once Soviet forces withdrew. The American empire would, years later, find itself desperately trying to destroy its own creation.}

But hey, lets try it again.

{But the attacks gave the ruling elites, lusting for control of the Middle East, especially Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks, the excuse to carry out the greatest strategic blunder in American history — the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war, including then Senator Joe Biden, knew little about the countries being invaded, did not grasp the limits of industrial and technocratic war or the inevitable blowback that would see the United States reviled throughout the Muslim world. They believed they could implant client regimes by force throughout the region, use the oil revenues in Iraq, since the war in Afghanistan would be over in a matter of weeks, to cover the cost of reconstruction and magically restore American global hegemony. It did the opposite.}

{Those of us who spoke out against the idiocy of the looming bloodlust were slandered, denied media platforms, and cast into the wilderness, where most of us remain. Those who sold us the war kept their megaphones, a reward for their service to empire and the military-industrial complex. It did not matter how cynical or foolish they were.}

This is why people like Chris Hedges, Jesse Ventura, Abby Martin, Rick Sanchez, and Lee Camp find themselves on RT America and on sites that will provide them a place for their independent articles. Or like Robert Parry who developed his own site in 1995, the first Internet news source. Within MSCM the whole truth with not be tolerated.

{The death blow to the American empire will, as McCoy writes, be the loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This loss will plunge the United States into a crippling, and prolonged depression. It will force a massive contraction of the global military footprint.

The ugly, squalid face of empire, with the loss of the dollar as the reserve currency, will become familiar at home. The bleak economic landscape, with its decay and hopelessness, will accelerate an array of violent and self-destructive pathologies including mass shootings, hate crimes, opioid and heroin overdoses, morbid obesity, suicides, gambling, and alcoholism. The state will increasingly dispense with the fiction of the rule of law to rely exclusively on militarized police, essentially internal armies of occupation, and the prisons and jails, which already hold 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States represents less than 5 percent of global population.}

All it took was a capitalist way of addressing a virus to expose how weak our economy and society is. And if that failed approach wasn't bad enough, as a stronger variant takes over the US, their answer is apply it again. I highly doubt many people are really aware of what's going on around them though. As I see people everywhere I go roaming around seemingly blissful.

Reports today are coming out that the vaccine being used isn't going to stop variants about to come. Those vaccinated are breeding grounds for it to mutate into an unstoppable death sentence? As another report last week said those vaccinated are carrying more of the virus than those not when tested. You're like a magnet now to help the spread? Apply more of the same failed policy though.

I wish I could afford to move to China and or had a more diverse way of making means to do so.

{Our demise will probably come more swiftly than we imagine. When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, empires become “brittle.” An economy heavily dependent on massive government subsidies to produce primarily weapons and munitions, as well as fund military adventurism, will go into a tailspin with a heavily depreciated dollar, falling to perhaps a third of its former value. Prices will dramatically rise because of the steep increase in the cost of imports. Wages in real terms will decline. The devaluation of Treasury bonds will make paying for our massive deficits onerous, perhaps impossible. The unemployment level will climb to depression era levels. Social assistance programs, because of a contracting budget, will be sharply curtailed or eliminated. This dystopian world will fuel the rage and hyper nationalism that put Donald Trump in the White House. It will spawn an authoritarian state to keep order and, I expect, a Christianized fascism.}

In other words. We're going to become what we've done to other countries with our embargoes and sanctions without embargoes and sanction. You might want to revisit Abby Martins trip to Venezuela to refreshen your understanding of what's coming home to roost. And Trump is just waiting in the background on a 4 year campaigning agenda ready to step right back in. And he has a growing fascist element ready to march into DC again. As the actions of the democratic party are presently fueling the assurance of its potential takeover. They sure the hell aren't attempting to reduce this potential as "working across the aisle" is the never ending call of action to what ever arises.

{The tools of control on the outer reaches of empire, already part of our existence, will become ubiquitous. The wholesale surveillance, the abolition of basic civil liberties, militarized police authorized to use indiscriminate lethal force, the use of drones and satellites to keep us monitored and fearful, along with the censorship of the press and social media, familiar to Iraqis or Afghans, will define America. We are not the first empire to suffer this fate. It is a familiar ending. Imperialism and militarism are poisons that eradicate the separation of powers, designed to prevent tyranny, and extinguish democracy. If those who orchestrated these crimes are not held accountable, and this means organizing sustained mass resistance, we will pay the price, and we may pay it soon, for their hubris and greed.}

Hedges pretty much writes his articles along the lines of the same narrative. The above being a vast amount of that narrative. You can almost quarterly apply that narrative to current events and new policies to see this being played out. Assange and Murray's current jailing. Biden and the democrats going all out within false narratives of being able to work across the aisle while at the same time republicans are clearly fighting back. Conceivably collaborate I'll argue. It's been Biden history with republican's after all.