Our Scapegoating Societies: Loss of Pride and Place

Defining our societies by endless scapegoating, hate and aggression directed at others is a dismal existence and a profound loss of pride and place.

“Today, the U.S. and EU Security ‘Élite’ have been so ‘successful’ with their equally exaggerated anti-Russian propaganda that they too, are trapped by it. Even if they wanted to (which they don’t), a replacement security architecture may simply prove ‘unnegotiable’ for years to come.”— Alastair Crooke, SCF

The helter-skelter, busy-body West has run out of steam. It discarded decency, democracy and diplomacy for the sake of empire; now in full collapse.

There is much common ground between low- and high-tech terrorism, between the terrorism of religious fanatics and that of market fanatics, that of the hopeless and that of the powerful, that of the psychopath on the loose and that of the cold-blooded uniformed professional. They all share the disrespect for human life. Eduardo Galeano, The Theater of Good and Evil

I have been writing about scapegoating for a long time as it is one of our great human failings. We all do it in our daily lives on any number of issues, some minor some major. Ultimately to save ourselves, our souls, and our integrity we have to recognize when we are scapegoating and hold ourselves accountable.

It comes too easily to blame others and justify our own shortcomings by vilifying and demonizing others. To use others as our whipping boys is tedious and disgraceful way of dodging our own responsibilities and culpabilities. When it happens between individuals and groups there are consequences. When it happens between major world powers it is capable of destroying whole countries and civilizations, and resulting in endless wars and suspended animation where progress on so many issues is frozen in time.

It is difficult to try and see the world as it is, with some objectivity, and to think and see holistically. Especially when we are victims of a tyrannical status quo where thinking and feeling are so regimented and lies and propaganda are accepted as truth. We are expected to assume despotism with passive indifference, where truths and dissenting views are criminalized. We come to live in a virtual ghetto as automatons.

We are programed to hate and vilify by the dogs of war as they can only justify their wars and genocides through creating fictitious enemies, degrading others and indulging in wanton racism— all ultimately internalized in our own societies.

When we become scapegoating societies there is a loss of pride and place as everything bad that happens is blamed on others. We never take responsibility for our criminality but scapegoat others.

We become captive to the scapegoaters the war mongers, the power mongers who trade in warfare, deceit and hypocrisy. They are the finger pointers, the false prophets and the despots.

When societies attempt to sustain themselves on such spurious values as hate racism, scapegoating, lying, lawlessness, war and propaganda, chaos and social disintegration follow as night follows day.

As Alastair Crooke observes in the above quote, the West is now “trapped” in its own machinations and its pending collapse. Where it has so viciously pursued “Full Spectrum Dominance” it is marginalizing itself as the rest of the world moves on to more humane values.

Russia and China are not the villains of the peace. They are mature societies who have seen more than their share of wars, revolutions and famines. Consequently their focus is on peace and prosperity. They have shown great forbearance in the face of the West’s endless insults, vilification and arrogance. Their forbearance in the face of endless Western aggressions and treachery renders them de facto world leaders for the peace and harmony essential to planetary survival.

The West is now stymied because it has over invested in too many ruinous ideologies, militarism being one of several. For the sake of empire it has played an “all in”game, sacrificing nation states in hot pursuit of complete global hegemony.

Russia and China are the world’s only two sovereign nation states and refuse to allow themselves to fall victim to the West’s despotic ideologies so ruinous to nation states world wide— now in recovery after the collapse of globalization.

With militarism the empire put all its eggs in one basket. It assumed the world would be won by an overstretched global militarism of air and sea power when it failed to realize the final determinant would be economic as the East forged into the lead by force of populations and sound economic planning. A brutal practitioner of hard power it never occurred to them soft power, lifting all boats, would win the day.

NATO is the embodiment of the West’s hypocrisy and scapegoating as it claims to be a peace alliance when it is the greatest threat to world peace and security and the captive proxy to Washington’s hegemonic ambitions and the conquest of all of Eurasia. No civilization can sustain such a blatant hypocrisy when it means forever wars, its member states are slave states to its wars suffering acute societal degradation.

The greatest threat to world peace is that the empire is so obsessed with warfare and militarism, to repudiate these would relegate it powerless and on the margins. Rather than transition away from warfare it is fighting to the bitter end. The challenge for the world community is to ease the empire into an immediate retirement. Where other empires, most recently the USSR, have slipped out of existence peacefully, the American Empire is less than gracious when it comes to accepting the edicts and cycles of history. Its fatuous claim of being “exceptional” has become a nuclear threat to planetary survival.

Brzezinski’s Grand Chess board was the audacity of over wrought triumphalism, as no nation can dominate the world especially when the empire has been suffering from overstretch for decades and the homeland is socially and fiscally bankrupt paying the costs of the parasitic empire’s wars.

Alienation is the business of empires destroying homelands of others and creating waves of refugees fleeing for their lives. Simultaneously fragmenting and looting their own homelands rendered destitute and alienated.

Defining our societies by endless scapegoating, hate and aggression directed at others is a dismal existence and a profound loss of pride and place.

The gathering storm and the well tailored terrorists

In my younger days we were blessed with post war affluence. The American Dream was being fulfilled, there was a new Chevy in every driveway, home ownership was easily achieved, good jobs and education were very much available. J.K. Galbraith wrote his The Affluent Society.

The people of the Western Civilization, considered ourselves “The Free World.” Even so there was a gathering storm, as there were wars being fought too frequently in too many venues, there was the well-crafted Cold War, the simmering communist threat and the on again, off again threat of nuclear annihilation.

Toward the end of the century it was obvious the storm clouds were gathering and the harbingers of doom became more explicit. The 1960s was the decade of assassinations, the 1970's saw the rise of corporate power and predatory capitalism. The 1980s saw the arrival of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s bastard child— Neoliberalism— governments abdicated to free market values, citizens reduced to consumers, everything under the sun was monetized, privatized and deregulated. Profits came before people and wars became serial hostile takeovers for profiteering corporations, as the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) raped the Republic.

The 1990s was the decade of berserk triumphalism. The USSR had collapsed and the unipolar world emerged. The USA was the now the sole superpower and quickly seized the moment declaring the PNAC, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, Full Spectrum Dominance(FSD), and Brzezinski published his blueprint for WW lll and the conquest of Eurasia.

In 2001 Galeano’s well-tailored terrorists arrived on the scene and declared their war on terror, no holds barred, anything goes, you are either with them or against them. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, were all on the hit list.

Then came the Ukraine war, one war too many, as wars eventually become so ruinously Pyrrhic and self-defeating. The empire blew its cover as wars are also revelation. Especially when a doddering president gloats in public, smirks in all the wrong places, indiscreetly revealing the real the reason the war is being fought and who blew up the famous pipelines.

Now we are in the darkest times where the trap has been sprung on those who set it, the scapegoats are ascendant, and we must win back our loss of pride and place.