Liar-Leaders:The"Class War"is now white hot
The West is an orphanage for abandoned electorates.
What manner of soul is his to whom high truth is but the plaything of a feverish hour,
A dangling ladder to the ghost of power!— Archibald Lampman (ca1898)
Seventy five years ago America made an historic blunder that haunts it to this today. They thought by building a daunting global military presence and establishing the US dollar as the global currency they could control the world to their liking. As President Harry S. Truman said in 1945 when the first atomic bomb was successfully tested, “Now we can do what we want.” This became the motto of an empire surreptitiously in the making.
At about the same time George F. Keenan, the country’s top diplomat, warned it was only a matter of time before the multitudes of Asia would rise to claim their place in the sun and the USA must be prepared for that eventuality. The “welcome” mat has been thrown out as unremitting brinkmanship, histrionic petulance and threatened nuclear war; all at a time when planetary survival depends on a harmonic and focused international relations among all nations, large and small.
Eisenhower’s, famous farewell speech of 1960 unwittingly announced the birthing of the empire as the Military Industrial Congressional Complex(MICC) was under way. The assassinations of the 1960s, most prominently Kennedy and King, paved the way for the empires emergence. All presidents there after were captive to the MICC and the expediencies of corporate wars for corporate profits.
The age of imperialism and the reckless predatory corporate capitalism practiced by the intransigent West is over. Global survival and the attendant challenges require holistic processes and thinking. Perpetual wars serve only to sabotage planetary survival and are sociocidal.
Asia has emerged has the new economic power house by weight of its majority position, and strategic economic management… they have learned the ways of the West and used them on their own terms to their own benefit.
It must be mentioned here that presently the West is incapable of achieving China’s “economic miracle” because governments in the West no longer control the levers of power. These were handed over to the private corporate sector half a century ago with the arrival of neoliberalism as the death knell of democracy and the abdication of sovereign government.
The USA was so foolish as to ship its industrial base to China, for enhanced corporate profits, and adopting financial capitalism; all at a time when a robust industrial base is still the keystone of any country’s success.
The USA is in the very precarious position where it is a warfare state and its economy is only sustainable where it is waging perpetual war on behalf of profiteering war mongers, and crazed ideologues. All utterly instrumental to ruining the countries future.
Militarism has its limits; ultimately thriving economies come to rule the world, especially so when they represent 70% of the world’s population. This is a bitter pill for the West to swallow as it sees its dominance fading as an inevitable cycle of history, The rise of the East poses no real threat to the West; as the war mongers so fatuously use the “threat” to justify nuclear war.
It is already becoming clear with the emergence of BRICS and the multipolar world that peace and security for all nations in the future must be based on diplomacy, reciprocity, the international rule of law, and the right of all nations to exist. The days of globalist barbarism are past.
As surely as empires rise, they also fall, some graciously(eg. the USSR) and some violently, as we are witnessing now. There were four empires that collapsed in the 20th century; the US empire just happens to be the first of the 21st.
We are in an age of hybrid wars where they are fought on many fronts and in many ways. The “genius” of humankind has been to monetize and weaponize everything under the sun.
The “class war” is one war that is always percolating in the back ground(“Class conflict, or class struggle, refers to the economic antagonism and political tension that exist among social classes”)
We ask why our leaders are such blatant liars? It is because they have hidden agendas based on ruthlessly exploiting the public good to serve the vested interests they actually serve. They are in service to the ruinous ideologies deeply embedded in Western civilization…. imperialism, predatory capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, warfare and others.
Their agenda is to erase democracy, nation states and atomize the public into an amorphous mass they can manipulate at will through rigorous authoritarianism, suppression of civil liberties and controlling the narrative. Freedom of the press and speech are constantly under threat and are being pushed ever further to the margins.
Leadership in the West is analogous to criminals desperately trying to hide their crimes, their incompetencies and betrayal. Their duplicities and hypocrisies become ever so apparent as they have lost control of their propagandist narrative essential to their survival—war, in these times, is revelation on steroids.
As wars escalate and the social contracts shattered the betrayal becomes more and more deeply etched. The tensions of the “class war” become white hot as the abyss between the traitors and the betrayed electorates is volcanic and there is a growing backlash.
We are witnessing the climactic point in the class wars where the traitors are willing to cannibalize their own cultures in the cause of futile foreign wars.
Forty years ago British prime minister Margaret Thatcher announced there is no such thing as societies. She was the godmother of neoliberalism, along with Ronald Reagan as godfather, and a harbinger of things to come. Now Britain’s most recent neoliberal PM ( the reviled Tony Blair was the first) Keir Starmer is now finishing off Britain massively slashing public spending , including senior pensions— all to finance war against Russia and beyond.
Neoliberalism was a declaration of war on societies/nation states and in turn the ultimate class war where wealth is privatized and debt socialized. Wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of the very few recklessly exploiting majorities rendered powerless and disenfranchised. Elections have thus become no more than window dressing for a vicious totalitarianism where wars are fought at every level and every way.
Empires throughout history have always been willing to cannibalize their own cultures to fight foreign wars. But never to the extent we are seeing now where the consequences are so global, devastating and utterly predictable— “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
The West is an orphanage of abandoned electorates, where leaders are compulsive liars and we are suffering systemic collapse, as psychotic ideologues indulge their delusional fantasies.
The class war is a war where rights and liberties are abrogated, where liar leaders know no shame, know no noblesse oblige, know no decency, know no honor and parasitically cannibalize the populations they are supposed to serve.
Takeaways:
Why do we have liar-leadership?:
Politicians are ex officio partners to the vested interests controlling them.
The denigration and marginalization of government is a stated goal of the neoliberal ideology.
Under neoliberalism political parties are liquidated and merged as one.
The “pack mentality” prevails; not following the narrative of the pack results in rejection from it.
Political parties by definition ultimately become totalitarian. (Here) (Here)
Afterword
Poets must be allowed their final say:
The Modern Politician (ca1898)
What manner of soul is his to whom high truth is but the plaything of a feverish hour,
A dangling ladder to the ghost of power!
Gone are the grandeurs of the world's iron youth,
When kings were mighty, being made by swords.
Now comes the transit age, the age of brass,
When clowns into the vacant empires pass,
Blinding the multitude with specious words.
To them faith, kinship, truth and verity,
Man's sacred rights and every holiest thing,
Are but the counters at a desperate play,
Flippant and reckless what the end may be,
So that they glitter, each his little day,
The little mimic of a vanished king.
At the risk of sounding like an old broken record...I attribute much of this malaise to the advent of 'smart phones'...Phone gossip is much more interesting than keeping abreast of what is going on out there in the real world.
Excellent post, and thanks for the poem. All of it seems elegiac at this point, but at least we have that much.