NB Commentary: This is a well researched
article with links. A must read for anyone who is interested in what is really
going on with the Selection of Hillary Clinton for the next President of the
US. I have included direct links listed in this article at the bottom along
with pics and videos.
"God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.”— Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, during the US annexation of the Philippines, 1898.
A
grotesque power-fest at the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia left me feeling about Hillary Clinton the way P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster felt about his Aunt Agatha—“the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.” There is something disquieting and secretively lascivious about her open-mouthed cackle. She doesn't so much laugh as lusts. She reminded me, too, of the mythical basilisk in the bestiary at the convention—the queen among the serpents. The basilisk of legend, wearing a king’s crown on his head, is only twelve-fingers long, but his venom withers all living plants in his wake. His gaze is enough to kill, according to Pliny the Elder. Only the droppings of a weasel have the potent odor to kill him, but it didn't work with this basilisk. Her weasel endorsed her, embraced her, kissed her. His odor and her venom neutralized each other and merged into the unity party of the Serpent and the Weasel.
Her party’s opponent is Charybdis, “a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers” according to Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). As if that were not enough, this Charybdis is reputed to be the troll of a foreign monster, Mandrake, the Demon in the Kremlin. Neither the basilisk’s party nor Charybdis’ own party, a sort of mollusk like the Kraken, likes him. See here and here.
I’m
raving, you say? This is the Age of Empire, and empire breeds monsters. We live
with them now. Imperialism is our political and economic reality. Nothing
material or substantial can be reformed within this colossal juggernaut. Yet,
we continue to pretend that this has no bearing on our lives. In 2003 alone,
the Iraq invasion cost $60 billion, three times the yearly budget for
education, yet, we wonder why schools are starving for funds. When we clamor
for reforms without mentioning imperialism, it is as if we were told we would
be dead in three weeks and reacted by scheduling an appointment for a facelift.
A
facelift is exactly what elections have produced in the last two decades. Bill
Clinton’s Nero, saxophone in lieu of harp; George Bush’s Claudius, malapropisms
for stutters; Obama’s Titus, fortunate son, charm and treachery—they are all
faces of imperialism, exceptionalism, hegemony, capital penetration,
globalization, neoliberal recolonization, “full spectrum dominance,”
“rebalance.” They are the CEOs of international capitalism in the White House.
Their charge is to do away with the sovereignty of nations, economically when
possible, militarily when necessary. They destabilize and destroy whole
countries through open, economic, proxy, or clandestine wars; they organize and
train terrorist organizations; they foment regime change; they privatize the public
wealth; they impose deadly economic reforms on countries they in debt in
perpetuity; they launch economic sanctions, often in tandem or in the run-up to
war. The goal they serve is the domination of the planet to extract resources,
secure markets, and depress wages. In Haiti, workers are paid 62 cents per
hour. Why would any sane investor hire an American worker for $7 per hour when
a Haitian, whose dependent country has stripped him/her of all workers’
protection rights, works for pennies?
We are
the Lotus Eaters, if we don’t know the cost and suffering of imperialism.
In
this predatory process, the masters of the world—the economic elite—have
amassed mountains of money over tree decades, and are desperate for
“opportunities” for investment. They know that money must move, or it dies. At
this stage of disinvestment in industrialization in the capitalist centers
because of diminished returns, money becomes the chief export commodity. To
secure astronomical returns, lands and resources that belong to other people
must be seized and controlled. To achieve this goal, they need a strong,
autocratic, and authoritarian state and an appointed dictator. An imperator, head of the army, whose rule is
characterized by weak legislative and judicial branches.
Ruthless,
ambitious, violent, and conniving, Hillary Clinton’s Roman imperial analog is
Agrippina, Nero’s mother and Claudius’ niece and murderous wife. Her ferocious
chemistry makes her kindred by choice to the ferocity of the empire. The two
are bound by “elective affinities”– Die
Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) of Goethe’s third novel, which examines the
possibility that human passions are ruled by chemical affinities , the
preference of one substance for another. I am convinced that the imperial
candidate with the most affinities with the ruling elite is Hillary Clinton. If
Donald Trump is sincere in saying he wants peace with Russia, he would have to
be a Titan to reverse a centenary robotic American foreign policy by 360
degrees. That would go against all the laws of political motion, including
inertia, which were set down at the birth of the United States. The prize was
always to be fabled Eurasia—“he who controls Eurasia controls the world,” wrote
that other cobra-eyed basilisk, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinsk, the veteran
Zbiggus Dickus of foreign lunacy at the State Department and the NSA.
And so
this woman, the Agrippina on the Potomac, will sit behind the “grand
chessboard,” playing with human pawns. She will make a good empress, even
though less than 40 percent of the country’s voters consider her “trustworthy.”
But the people’s trust is irrelevant. They are themselves untrustworthy. Having
come out from under the spell of “charming” Obama to realize that he was a
magician’s trick, the people are spinning off center—the “extreme center,” as
Tariq Ali wittily calls it. The people need whipping back into the herd. For
that, a virago will do. She will ride rough-shod with Sin and Death, the moral
allies of the empire, over hurdles of sovereignties and international law. She
will further ravish the already enfeebled Constitution before eating it whole
because the inevitable cost of an expansionist foreign policy is the loss of
economic and political freedom at home.
They all trust her. She has affinities
with them all.
The Financiers
$2.5 million.
There
was no way that the new world order of financial monopoly capitalism would
consider for CEO of the neoliberal empire someone like Bernie Sanders, not
because he was “progressive” but because he was “regressive,” and in their view
no doubt an unrealistic fantasist. The idea of bringing back the New Deal, a
liberal order they had been overthrowing since the 1980s, must have had them
belly-laughing in private, but they saw no harm so long as the senator from
Vermont fed the illusion in the people that capitalism could be reformed and
become a good thing. Ditto for Donald Trump: his regression consists of
offering the people another fantasy, a return to a long gone Fordist America,
the industrial powerhouse of the planet, in which American workers were the
“aristocrats” of labor. At one point in history, Detroit was the capital of
this aristocracy, the best-paid white workers in the world. Thus, both
candidates offer a spectacle to the voters of a quarrel with their respective
parties, but not with their parties’ de-facto bi-partisan pursuit of economic
world supremacy. All the same they were useful. They helped to deflect,
diffuse, confuse, and veil that stark, existential reality that is the cause of
our woes and those of the planet: American economic and military expansion—the
weasel more so than Charybdis.
Hillary
Clinton is not a retro-fantasist, apart from being a fantasist of the
neoliberal order. Her fantasy is their fantasy. Thus they back her.
The Liberal Humanitarian Carnivores
The
liberal humanitarians trust Hillary’s exemplary ability to sell a war crime as
a service to humanity.
The modern idea of “humanitarian war” is as old as
Columbus; as old as the conquistadores. White, civilized Europeans, arriving in the “New
World,” killed “savages” in order to civilize whoever survived. And then worked
them to death and took their lands. In that tradition, the modern liberal
humanitarian must be a flesh-eater. “A liberal society cannot be defended by
herbivores. We need carnivores to save us,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, former
Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in
a New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004. There is no need to recite
the litany of Hillary Clinton’s bloody deeds since 1990. Gary Leupp covers them
comprehensively in a 2015 CounterPunch article but for carnivorism, who can forget her
maenad-possessed laughter on watching the tearing apart of Qaddafi’s flesh on
video—a scene reminiscent of Euripides’ tragedy, “The Bacchae”?
Bill
Clinton’s administration in the 1990s disemboweled Yugoslavia on humanitarian
grounds, after portraying it as the resurgence of the genocidal Third Reich and
its president, Slobodan Milosevic, as the new Hitler. Milosevic, by the way,
has just been exonerated of all crimes for which Clinton’s kangaroo
International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia had formerly condemned him. In
2003, casting her vote for the invasion of Iraq, Hillary Clinton cited the
persecution of Milosevic as the example to follow for removing Saddam Hussein.
It’s worth listening to her self-assurance in demonizing a man she, and Bill
Clinton’s administration, knew to be innocent of the charges—knew because they trumped them up:
"We and our NATO allies did not depose Mr. Milosevic, who was responsible for more than a quarter of a million people being killed in the 1990s. Instead, by stopping his aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo, and keeping on the tough sanctions, we created the conditions in which his own people threw him out and led to his being in the dock being tried for war crimes as we speak."
But
Bill Clinton didn’t just scrap Yugoslavia; he junked international law by
removing from the Security Council the legal monopoly on authorizing war. He
set a precedent in the Kosovo War by claiming Responsibility to Protect (R2P),
which gives humanitarian intervention the pseudo-legal means to overthrow a
sovereign state. The UN Charter specifically disallows humanitarian
intervention for a very good reason: it was that responsibility Hitler’s rogue
regime claimed for invading Poland—the protection of German minorities—to start
WW II.
Never
mind. The Kosovo precedent opened the gates to all the “humanitarian” wars that
followed, including Hillary Clinton’s war on Libya in 2009, consistent with her
approval of her husband’s intervention in Kosovo. During a meeting with Code
Pink on 6 March 2003 at the US Capitol, defending her vote in favor of
attacking Iraq, Senator Clinton applauded her husband’s war in Kosovo, claiming
that he saved Kosovar Albanian from ethnic cleansing—a lie—while commending his
initiative to go it alone, without the “international community’s” consent:
"With respect to whose responsibility it is to disarm Saddam Hussein, I do not believe that given the attitudes of many people in the world community today that there would be a willingness to take on very difficult problems were it not for United States leadership. And I am talking specifically about what had to be done in Bosnia and Kosovo, where my husband could not get a Security Council resolution to save the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing. And we did it alone as the United States, and we had to do it alone. It would have been far preferable if the Russians and others had agreed to do it through the United Nations — they would not. I’m happy that, in the face of such horrible suffering, we did act."
She’s
praising here her husband’s international crime, the interference with a
country’s sovereignty for fictional humanitarian reasons. No, the goal of the
war in Kosovo was not ethnic defense (Bill Clinton’s policy throughout the 90s
in the former Yugoslavia was to foment and prey on ethnic anarchy) but the
expansionist penetration of a foreign territory and the construction of one of
the largest military bases in Europe, at Camp Bondsteel, costing the American
people a good chunk of social services—possibly, his welfare “reform,” for
example.
Liberal
humanitarian warmongers peddle the ludicrous claim that “America is the
essential country” (Madeleine Albright) for safeguarding liberal democracy
throughout the world, sublimely indifferent to the evidence that the world
can’t wait to get America’s essentialism off its back. Hillary Clinton’s
belligerent foreign policy is notorious. She has promised to bomb Iran. She has
managed and supervised the destruction of Libya. She has organized the coups in
Paraguay and Honduras. Her neo-con team at the State Department funded and
organized the coup in Ukraine, Nazified its political, military, and cultural
life, triggering a civil war (while calling Putin “Hitler”).
 |
| HRC-Syria Policy |
There’s no reason to believe that her carnivorous
humanitarian resources have been depleted since then. While Secretary of State
for Obama, she authorized the sale
of weapons to Qatar that she knew would go
to the Libyan rebels to topple Qaddafi and then go to Syria to arm al Qaeda to
overthrow Assad. She denied any involvement under oath. In an exclusive
interview with The Telegraph,
her campaign foreign policy adviser, Jeremy Bash, former Chief of Staff at the
Pentagon and CIA, said that she would work to get President Assad “out of
there”:
Julian Assange says “1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection” proves she sold weapons to ISIS in Syria.
"A Clinton administration will not shrink from making clear to the world exactly what the Assad regime is. It is a murderous regime that violates human rights; that has violated international law; used chemical weapons against his own people; has killed hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of children.
If Assad is as guilty as she was sure at the time Milosevic was, we’re in for another international crime."
On Russia, the Council on Foreign Relations reports that
she’s calling for strengthening NATO and “tougher measures against Putin to
punish him for invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea as well as for supporting
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.” “I remain convinced,” they quote her, “that
we need a concerted effort to really up the cost on Russia and, in particular,
on Putin.” She considers that Russia’s intervention in Syria creates “chaos”:
"I think it’s important too that the United States make it very clear to Putin that it’s not acceptable for him to be in Syria creating more chaos, bombing people on behalf of Assad, and we can’t do that if we don’t take more of a leadership position, which is what I’m advocating."
Russia Today blames Clinton’s outrageous Russophobia—“Hillary Clinton is the Bachman Turner Overdrive of US politics”–on Obama’s mistake for allowing the Neo-con contingent to dominate the State Department:
Obama’s
other mistake was to allow Hillary, as Secretary of State, to retain neocon
holdovers from the Bush administration on her Eastern Europe team. Even more
incredibly, Kerry then inherited them for the second term. “Obama allowed US
officials on the ground (in Ukraine and elsewhere) to pursue a grossly
irresponsible and provocative anti-Russian policy,” Anatol Lieven recently told
the Valdai Club. “What on earth, one may ask, was Victoria Nuland, a
neo-conservative State Department official married to the arch neocon Robert
Kagan, doing in the Obama administration at all, given that her attitudes run
clearly counter to his?”Lieven also pointed out that “figures like Nuland are
still favored by Hillary Clinton (Kagan is now moving into her political camp)
and much of the US foreign and security establishment; and that with regard to
Russia, that establishment is still conditioned to pursue what are in effect
Cold War attitudes.”
The Neo-Cons and “New” Imperialists
Hillary Clinton represents the
personification of rehabilitated imperialism, the overarching geopolitical
focus of American politics. That is why she will be the establishment’s
choice—tested and proven. She will press hard against the political independence
of Russia and the economic rise of China, a pressure that encapsulates American
foreign policy in the foreseeable future.
Neo-con
and neo-liberal promoters of the “new imperialism” are Western regime
intellectuals and historians such as Max Boot, Niall Ferguson, and Michael
Ignatieff.
As a
result, by 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, media pundits were busy
domesticating the word “empire.” American propaganda had proscribed the word
for decades on account of there being only one empire, which was “evil”: the
USSR. With the Soviet Union gone, America congratulated itself on being #1, the
sole super-power, the essential country, and, the old standby, the exceptional
country. None of these brands resonated with the force that the scope of
conquering the world required. To make matters worse, critics of the invasion
of Afghanistan and Iraq, were floating the un-American term “imperialism.”
Something had to be done. With the evil empire dead, the good empire could
re-emerge. Max Boot, Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at Council on
Foreign Relations, proposed “an American might to promote American
ideals”–messianic political morality at the point of a gun. He explained.
"In the early twentieth century, Americans talked of spreading Anglo-Saxon civilization and taking up the ‘white man’s burden’; today they talk of spreading democracy and defending human rights. Whatever you call it, this represents an idealistic impulse that has always been a big part in America’s impetus for going to war."
Soon
after 9/11, 2001, Boot had already invoked this impetuous idealism to respond
to the lament of suffering nations pining for the . . . return of a
British-style imperial ministration.
Afghanistan
and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign
administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith
helmets.
And in 2002, Boot wrote, “Imperialism used to be the
white man’s burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop
being necessary because it is politically incorrect” (New York Times Magazine, July 28, 2002). Neoconservative William Kristol, of The Weekly Standard, said more tersely on Fox television at the time, “if
people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.”If there is a place on earth
that is testy about Western imperialism, that place is China. If there is an
American official who has sorely tested China’s anti-colonial sensibility, that
person is Clinton. As First Lady, she rousingly declared that “women’s rights
are human rights” in Beijing at the UN World Conference on Women in 1995. As
Secretary of State, in 2011, she denounced China’s “deplorable” record of human
rights in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Again in 2011, she proposed a US policy toward China as
one “of advancing democracy and human rights” in a Foreign
Policy article, titled “America’s Pacific
Century.”
To Chinese officials’ ear this aggressive insistence on
human rights sounded suspiciously like a systematic call for color revolution
in China. Her hostile intent, had already become apparent in 2010. At the ASEAN
Regional Forum in Hanoi, she confirmed China’s suspicion that she advocated a
US policy of containment by intervening in the territorial disputes of the
South China Sea. Recommending a “rebalance” of power in the disputed
areas, she
asserted that the US had “a national
interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and
respect for international law in the South China Sea.”
China’s Foreign Minister at the time, Yang Jiechi, at
first walked out of the meeting, only to return an hour later with the ominous
reminderthat “China is a big country and other
countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”
On the unpopular Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement, a pact
China correctly perceives as economic containment, she said in her debate with
Bernie Sanders on 4 February 2016 that she now opposes it after having
strenuously and enthusiastically supported it as Obama’s Secretary of State
until 2012 and beyond. Her flip-flops on the TPT are well documented here.
These three affinities—with finance, war, and
imperialism—make Hillary Clinton the perfect mate for president of the
financial-imperial White House. Picture her in jodhpurs and pith helmet astride
the financial bull, taking on the “white woman’s burden,” and riding the
humanitarian “savage wars for peace.” Stop worrying about Donald Trump
“Charybdis” and learn to avoid where the Basilisk treads, which will be
difficult. You can prepare by reviewing her record as “empire-slayer” here.
 |
| "I urged him to bomb." - Hillary Clinton |
In
choosing between presidential candidates today, it’s best to stick to Bertie
Wooster’s advice about aunts: “It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and
good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the
cloven hoof.”
Links:
Sources: DNC warned
of hack months before
Hillary Clinton Wins Historic Nomination
Lead
Attorney In Anti-Clinton DNC Fraud Case Mysteriously Found Dead
'Unfit to be
president': Obama hammers Trump with harshest comments yet
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/02/barack-obama-donald-trump-president-republican-party
Julian
Assange says “1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection” proves she sold
weapons to ISIS in Syria [Video]
Hillary Clinton will
reset Syria policy against 'murderous' Assad regime
Syria anniversary:
the psychopaths are unstoppable
Hillary Clinton says
the United States needs to work with Russia
President
Hillary? If you think Russian-American relations are bad now, you ain't seen
nothing yet
U.S.
takes a tougher tone with China
Hillary
Clinton flip-flops on Trans-Pacific Partnership
Hillary Clinton
Pro-War and Imperialism Record in Bullet Points
http://www.empireslayer.org/2013/11/hilary-clinton-pro-war-and-imperialism.html
George Soros donates $8 million to boost Hillary
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Thanks for your comment. Peace, NB