Category Archives: Globalism

Dying For Nothing Day

America, Globalism, Government, Hillary Clinton, Military, Neoconservatism, The State, War

A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can ~ ilana (2003)

It is the habit on the Memorial Day weekend to thank uniformed men for their sacrifice. My sympathies go out to Americans who fight phantoms in far-flung destinations. I’m sorry they’ve been snookered into living, dying and killing for a lie. But I cannot honor that lie, or those who give their lives for it, and take the lives of others in America’s many recreational wars. I mourn for them, as I have from day one, but I can’t honor them.

I am sorry for those who’ve enlisted thinking they’d fight for their countrymen and were subjected to one backdoor draft after another in the cause of illegal, unjust wars and assorted informal attacks. My heart hurts for you, but I won’t worship at Moloch’s feet to make you feel better.

I honor those sad, sad draftees to Vietnam and to WW II. The first valiant batch had no option; the same goes for the last, which fought a just war. I grew up in Israel, so I honor those men who stopped Arab armies from overrunning our homes. In 1973, we came especially close to annihilation.

I can legitimately claim to know of flesh-and-blood heroes who fought so that I could emerge from the bomb shelter (in the wars of 67 and 73) and proceed with my kid life. I always stood in their honor and wept when the sirens wailed once a year. Every Israeli stops on that day, wherever he is, and stands still in remembrance. We would have died or been overrun by Arabs if not for those brave men who defended the homeland, and not some far-away imperial project.

But can we Americans, in 2013, make such a claim? Can we truly claim that members of the American military killed Iraqis or Afghanis or Libyans so that we may … do what? Remind me?

What I learned growing up in a war-torn region is that a brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can.”

Ultimately, it is “for the love of a brother-in-arms, and ‘Big Brother’ be damned,” explained Robert Glisson. This is why they of the “Patriot Guard Riders,” his band of brothers, truly fought. Men fight for one another and not for the causes imputed to them by the cowards who send them to battle.

The military is still a government job; a career path with huge risks. How fast the so-called small government types forget this immutable truth. From the appropriately titled Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program (which the military has become):

“When Republicans and conservatives cavil about the gargantuan growth of government, they target the state’s welfare apparatus and spare its war machine. Unbeknown to these factions, the military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small. Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while excluding the military mammoth.”—ILANA (Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program.)

AND, from Classical Liberalism And State Schemes:

We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because (supposedly) upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.
“philanthropic” wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects, if you will. The warfare state, like the welfare state, is thus inimical to the classical liberal creed. Therefore, government’s duties in the classical liberal tradition are negative, not positive; to protect freedoms, not to plan projects. As I’ve written, “In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government (‘great purposes’ in Bush Babble), the poorer and less free the people.”

*Image credit

UPDATED (4/10): NEW COLUMN & VIEWING: U.S. Cancels Countries, Kills Ancient Concept Of Neutrality

America, Ancient History, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Race, Russia, The West, War

NEW COLUMN  IS “U.S. Cancels Countries, Kills Ancient Concept Of Neutrality.” It is now featured on WND.COM , The Unz Review, The New American, CNSNews. and American Renaissance, where “Ukrainian Refugees and Race” as a “Look-Away Issue” was the focus.

Excerpt:

… what do you know! Some countries have opted for political neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, choosing the classically liberal position—it opposes sanctions, as these are as useless in achieving political ends as they are ruthless in their effects on the most vulnerable. As far as their ultimate outcome—embargoed are counterproductive. What works is high-level diplomacy.

Chief among the countries that wish to remain politically neutral toward Russia and commercially engaged with it—while urging a diplomatic resolution to the conflict—are Hungary, Serbia (which sagely “bans its citizens from fighting in conflicts abroad”), China and India.

Spurred on by puppet President Volodymyr Zelensky and his American puppeteers, these countries, especially China and India, have been menaced by the Biden administration for maintaining military and commercial ties with Russia.

The concept of neutrality is an important part of Western Civilization. As expounded in one scholarly tract, “the concept of respect for neutrals appears early in Greek history and remains a nearly constant feature of Classical wars.”

By threatening to punish nations for practicing detached political neutrality in the matter of Ukraine and Russia, even as these neutrals call for comity between countries, and urge a diplomatic, peaceful resolution to the conflagration, things China and India have done—The Empire is working to sunder, as in obliterate, the time-honored, civilizing concept of political neutrality. Judging from its silence, the Stupid Party seconds the Evil Party on the matter. …

… THE REST. U.S. Cancels Countries, Kills Ancient Concept Of Neutrality” is on WND.COM and The Unz Review, The New American, CNSNews and American Renaissance.

WATCH “U.S. Cancels Countries; Kills Ancient, Civilizing Concept Of Neutrality” & SUBSCRIBE:

UPDATED (4/10): Recommended is the geopolitical analysis of Brazilian Pepe Escobar, once an analyst for quite a few leftist publications, now confined to the few outposts of critical thinking remaining.

The Z-Man (Zelensky) Is America’s Perfect Prototype Neocon Puppet, Down To Our National Cliches

America, Conservatism, Democracy, Egalitarianism, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

In his cameo appearance before the US Congress, the Z-Man deftly drew on all the cliches of American life in the shallow end:

Volodymyr Zelensky vaporized about democracy [“it made us dumb“], our values [“in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions, values are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police“], and MLK (Martin Luther King), offering his incoherent, bizarre twist on the “I have a dream” U.S. ubiquity:

I have a dream. I have a need. I need to protect our skies. I need your help, which means the same you feel when you hear the words I have a dream.”

Translated: When the Z-Man tells you he needs your help, you should feel the same as when you hear MLK’s “I have a dream.” Or, something.

I have a dream. I have a need, too, Mr. Z. Some quid pro quo, perhaps? The following is as true as when I wrote it in 2011, during the Egyptian Lotus Revolution. This from “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians …“:

‘I know nothing so miserable as a democracy without liberty,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-1800s. He speaks for me. I find myself unable to get lathered-up about democracy for others, while I live in the democratic despotism that contemporary America has become. …

…More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.

Zelensky is America’s perfect, prototype Jacobin puppet.

Put it this way, if the American people (an inchoate meaningless phrase I countenance here for the sake of argument) were threatened by an invasion—American leaders would hold court from their safe rooms and underground luxury bunkers and give cheery addresses (in syntax as fractured and similarly studded with non sequiturs), while the bombs fell ON US.

Churchillian they’d rate themselves.

BY ©2022 ILANA MERCER

Why Russia And Every Other Non-Puppet Nation-State Fear The USA

America, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Russia, THE ELITES, War

The only reason you, dear reader, are confident that America is a benevolent actor in the world is because you are told as much every hour of the day by the foreign-policy establishment and its malignant media-congressional-industrial-complex offshoots. How many countries has the USA invaded for the purpose of regime change since the early 1990s? Scores. And that’s without the color-coded, regime-change revolutions it instigates.

Russia’s foreign meddling since the early 1990s is insignificant by comparison.

With that in mind, read the best primer on the current, unnecessary, US-manufactured conflict between Russia and the United States:Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia“:

“… The reason this is a new Cuban missile crisis only more foreboding is that America has sundered what Cohen has referred to as the Parity Principle—the custom in diplomacy of considering both sides to a conflict. Leaders and thinkers who attempt to avert conflict with Russia are thoroughly demonized and destroyed, even accused of treason. Naturally licit behavior—comity or diplomacy with Russia—is criminalized by a Federal Government that has enough laws on the books to indicts each one of us, if it so desired. Witness the Helsinki summit, for which Trump’s diplomacy saw him branded a traitor. Anyone who wants to reduce pressure with Moscow is run out of town.

So far, the political storyline du jour has been manufactured by America’s gilded elites. To this, DC operative Karl Rove confessed during the era of Bush II: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’ When you’re the most powerful entity in the world, as the US government certainly was—you get to manufacture your own parallel universe with its unique rules of evidence and standards of proof. What’s more, as the mightiest rule-maker, you can coerce other earthlings into ‘sharing’ your alternate reality. And when war is on the horizon, America’s elites enter a state of hysterical mass contagion, almost like animals in-heat.

Why wage a war in furtherance of interests not our own? ask paleoconservative patriots like Messrs. Pat Buchanan and Tucker Carlson. The question, alas, is a non-sequitur, as it is incorrectly premised on the false notion that the United States government and Department of State conduct foreign policy in the interest of the American people. The assumption of congruity between US foreign policy and the interests of the American people is utterly false.

No such congruity exists. US State craft is driven, first, by the arrogance of power and delusions of ideological superiority, as well as by self-serving elite concerns. The US ruling interests to prevail are those of ‘The Blob’ (the permanent foreign policy establishment), military-industrial-complex, a media also engaged in expedient myth-making, not news reporting, crooked corporate elites, and a sanctions-giddy US Congress, in which there are currently no pro-détente thinkers (nor thinkers, for that matter).

To remain powerful, these factions must reflexively project power. Because the relationship between the elites and the American people is zero sum, the stronger the elites aforementioned get; the weaker and more imperiled the American People become. … ”

... READ THE REST: “Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia

*Image courtesy Marisol Nostromo