NATO's Glassy Megalomania

When militarism becomes megalomania and bankrupts the West

NATO headquarters Brussels Belgium, architectural megalomania in the fascist tradition

Excuse me while I go heavy handed but I have come to the conclusion the fate of the West is being sealed by the unspoken truths we just can’t face, don’t want to talk about, too many are bribed to not talk, and the majority are willing to muddle on in an advanced state of chaos. Needless to say there are powerful despotic forces busily working as agents of chaos full of spite knowing they are playing a losing game.

The one thing Donald Trump and I agree on is that America has to be made great again. So too will the 32 nation states that comprise the West/NATO as they have for too long been playing follow the leader and lost their will and to think and act in their own interests. Their governments are redundant and no longer democratic. I include the American republic as presidents speak mainly for the empire and in too many ways have forsaken the republic.

We must be painfully aware that presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors are a by product of the lobbyists who control them fighting the empires wars with no regard for costs; human, social, and monetary. Politicians of the West have become terrorists in well-tailored suits.

Trump may be able to start the process in a crude sort of way, but the changes required are so attitudinal and fundamental we are looking at generational change involving several administrations willing and determined to say out with old and in with the new.

The first steps forward are repudiating war and empire. To renounce these is to renounce megalomania:—”someone{some nation} who has an unnaturally strong wish for power and control, or thinks that they are much more important and powerful than they really are.”

Megalomania is manifested in many ways, architecture is one more. NATO headquarters pictured above is architecture as megalomania. Even Donald Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul, when he first saw it was astounded by the size of it.

Fascist architecture is “warfare” meant to astound and intimidate. It is intended to send the message that the state, the empire is absolute, all powerful and has dominion and unchallenged control over the peoples.

Like Sacré-Cœur pictured below, gothic cathedrals loomed over cities and towns of the Middle Ages inspiring populations to religion. NATO HQ is an invocation to war and militarism as a permanent state of being.

NATO is a fraudulent invocation as it claims to be a defense alliance, when it is really devoted to war on a global scale as is evident from its recent 75th Summit in Washington, home base of the empire.

It is no longer the “NA” as in North Atlantic, it has gone global expanding into the Pacific preparing for war against China. It accounts for 65% of global annual military and claims to stand for peace! It provoked the war in Ukraine and is readying for war against China. The fact that its legitimacy is not challenged is testimony to just how thoroughly the West is colonized, how effective propaganda has been, and how passive populations have become.

Sacré-Cœur, Paris

Fascist Colosseum, presently used as an opera house

“Between 1933 and his suicide in 1945, Adolf Hitler embarked on audacious – and deadly – programs to establish Germany’s supremacy. But his unprecedented campaign of destruction and murder is not the focus here; rather, it’s his plans to remake – literally, to rebuild – his adopted homeland of Germany. In particular, he planned to establish Berlin, renamed as “Germania,” as the center of his thousand-year Third Reich. The Führer’s expansive fantasies of imperious, extravagantly scaled structures led directly to forced relocations and slave labor, resulting in, at minimum, tens of thousands of deaths.”—Kevin Martin

Albert Speer’s Pantheon/”Volkeshalle” based on a sketch by Adolf Hitler. Notice how the scale of the Pantheon reduces human figures to ants on an ant hill invoking blind obedience and subservience to the state and its implied permanence. As Glancy points out below the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years and ended after eight.

“Speer had based his design on a sketch of the Roman temple made by Hitler himself in 1925, while in 1938 Hitler had made a point of visiting the Pantheon on an official trip to Rome. The Pantheon had been created for an empire that survived four centuries. The Volkshalle would go one better: it was to symbolize an empire planned to endure a thousand years. In the event, the Third Reich missed its target by 998 years, and neither the Volkshalle nor Germania were built.”—Jonathan Glancey

Like the “Volkeshalle” of years gone by, the interior of the NATO war temple is intended to stagger the imagination and intimidate. Is NATO HQ a substitute for Volkeshalle never built?

As architecture is a manifestation of megalomania so too is government spending. NATO member states are required to spend 2% of their GDP in support. America spends a trillion dollars a year on its military, just as the interest on its national debt is also a trillion dollars a year.

Canada was in the hot seat at the recent summit as it is not hitting the 2% mark and I know why. Though it is rarely mentioned Canada among numerous other obligations to NATO, has just bought 88 F35JSF fighters for 70 billion dollars, which means we will be paying out almost 2 billion dollars annually for 40 years to buy and maintain them.

Each jet costs about 109 million dollars and can be shot down by ground to air missiles costing much less, which means they will be used sparingly in an era where drones and missiles control air space of wars. They will be used even less by smaller NATO countries who struggle to maintain them becoming so-called “hangered” aircraft— pretty to look at too expensive to use. The first will not be delivered until 2026 and the final delivery will be in 2032.

The F-35 might be considered corporate welfare for the manufacturer. As the F-35 is considered a Fifth-generation jet, the Sixth generation is already on the drawing board.

In the vicinity where I live there are two hospitals desperately needing to be doubled in size.

As wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands, humanist values are in full decline, and slothful mediocrity becomes the norm.

Where and when did megalomania in all its manifestations originate in Western Civilization? It started over fifty years ago when the neoliberal ideology was formally adopted by Western governments in full abdication to corporate power and predatory capitalism. Too much unaccountable power in too few hands where everybody and everything is a commodity, for sale, monetized, for bribery or for killing. Wars become no more than, in corporate jargon “hostile take overs.”

If you take a closer at fascist architecture of the Third Reich it is faceless, monolithic, full of foreboding and resembling mausoleums for morbid and self-destructive ideologies and those who espouse them. The collapse of the West is the direct result of too many ideologies left to destroy democracy and common sense.

The day will come when NATO’s glassy megalomania will also become a opera house and the world’s largest botanical garden, as the West is fighting wars it can no longer afford. Just as the Third Reich lasted 8 years, a little shy of the intended 1000.

For Further reading:

NATO like Biden is a senile threat to world peace

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