Over the past few days, Pandora’s Box was opened after the much-anticipated release of John Pliger’s latest documentary entitled The Coming War on China.
John Pilger 2016 1:52:35
The Coming War on China is a warning that nuclear war is not only imaginable, but a ‘contingency,’ says the Pentagon. The greatest build-up of Nato military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia, and some 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. But these happenings are of course not reported as United States antagonism. Instead, there is a familiar drumbeat of war, the kind of the old “yellow peril,” a restoration of the psychology of fear that embedded public consciousness for most of the 20th century. The aim of this film is to break the silence, and as the centenaries of the First World War presently remind us, horrific conflict can begin all too easily. By recounting the secret and forgotten history of the rapacious actions of great power against China throughout the decades, such as the destruction of the Marshall Islands and the Opium wars, The Coming War on China is also a report of an inspiring popular resistance to nuclear weapons, military bases and warmongering of the United States, of which little is known in the West.
Shortly after its release on December 7 on RT America, on December 9, the Washington Post published the following article: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House which was followed up aggressively with similar reporting in the mainstream corporate media around the world. Interestingly, this same Washington Post has ties to the CIA and it was very instrumental in propagating the propaganda of the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq to justify its invasions after 911. (Please see: Eleven Years On: How ‘The Washington Post’ Helped Give Us the Iraq War, The CIA Never Ever Lies, Former Acting CIA Director Calls Russian Interference In Election ‘The Political Equivalent Of 9/11’, The Deep State versus Donald Trump: Stop the CIA Coup, and The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere.)
All of this in light of a report 4 days before the American Elections on November 7: Nato puts 300,000 ground troops on ‘high alert’ as tensions with Russia mount which in light of the coming war with China, suggest that both Russia and China were both in the crosshairs of American foreign military policies all along.
And finally last night, I came across this Facebook post by Robert Reich, which to my mind suggests that the endgame of the Russian election-hacking propaganda was to influence the electoral college vote on December 19, (and if all else fail to block Trump, to raise national sentiments for all out war against Russia!) Here is what he wrote:
Several of you have asked me how you can reach Electors, who will decide a week from today whether Trump should be our next president. See below for how to contact them.
There are three major reasons why the framers of the Constitution established the Electoral College, to reject the popular vote:
1. To stop a demagogue from becoming president. At the Constitutional Convention, arguing in support of the Electoral College, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said he was “against a popular election” for president because the people would be “misled by a few designing men.” In Federalist No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the electors would prevent those with “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” from becoming president. They would also stop anyone who would “convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements.” Check 1 against Trump.
2. To stop foreign interference in an election. Check 2 against Trump. The CIA has provided incontrovertible evidence that Russia interfered in the presidential election in order to help Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Trump has business entanglements in Russia and other foreign countries, the extent to which are unknown because Trump has not released his tax returns.
3. To prevent poor administration of government. In Federalist No. 68. Hamilton wrote that “the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration,” and for that reason, he said, the electors should be “able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration.”
Check three against Trump, who has no government experience and whose character and temperament – as revealed both from his personal history and his campaign – are arguably inconsistent with good government. The chief ethics officers of the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administrations say electors shouldn’t choose Trump because he won’t put his assets into a blind trust.
Modern-day conservatives favor so-called “originalist” understandings of the Constitution, looking to history and to the original texts of our founding documents for guidance. On this basis, electors have every ground for refusing to make Donald Trump president of the United States.
What do you think?”
So it is patently clear that the Global and National Capitalists are now in a panicked-frenzy to sabotage the confirmation by the electoral college votes, despite President-Elect Trump’s election victory that has put a spanner in their war plans, and this is manifesting as the mother of all Insecurities in remaking the New World Order in their own image!
But to understand why this is going on in the most “civilised and developed” nation in the world, and to appreciate that President Elect Trump is not the cause but the symptom of a very dysfunctional economic and political system, one has to explicate the shadows from within the collective unconscious of corporate and capitalist culture and realise how they have gerrymandered the rules of engagement for self-serving purposes. And consequently, over the years they have aided and abetted the undermining of the social fabric and environmental foundations of the society that they were “entrusted” to steward with their neoliberal “trickle-down” and austerity policies.
So when you have elections, it is the disgruntled masses that make their discontents known, even if the majority rule has the potential to undermine the already fragile social cohesion. It is not that one party or one individual is solely responsible, but it is the dysfunctional system itself that has resulted in these entangled webs of self-defeating machinations, that is crying out for deeper reflection and corrections.
The article that best explains the shadows of the capitalist neoliberal collective unconscious, was by Henry Giroux: Trump’s Second Gilded Age: Overcoming the Rule of Billionaires and Militarists. It is worth the read in its entirety. Here is what he concludes:
“Trump’s presence in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason; it also points to the withering of civic attachments, the collapse of politics into the spectacle of celebrity culture, the decline of public life, the use of violence and fear to numb people into shock, and a willingness to transform politics into a pathology. Trump’s administration will produce a great deal of violence in American society, particularly among the ranks of the most vulnerable: poor children, minorities of color, immigrants, women, climate change advocates, Muslims, and those protesting a Trump presidency. What must be made clear is that Trump’s election and the damage he will do to American society will stay and fester in American society for quite some time because he is only symptomatic of the darker forces that have been smoldering in American politics for the last 40 years. What cannot be exaggerated or easily dismissed is that Trump is the end result of a long standing series of attacks on democracy and that his presence in the American political landscape has put democracy on trial. While mass civil demonstrations have and continue to erupt over Trump’s election, what is more crucial to understand is that something more serious needs to be addressed. We have to acknowledge that at this particular moment in American history the real issue is not simply about resisting Donald Trump’s insidious values and anti-democratic policies but whether a political system can be reclaimed in which a notion of radical democracy can be deepened, strengthened and sustained. Yet, under a Trump presidency, it will be more difficult to sustain, construct, and nurture those public spheres that sustain critique, informed dialogue, and a work to expand the radical imagination. If democracy is to prevail in and through the threat of “dark times,” it is crucial that the avenues of critique and possibility become central to any new understanding of politics. If the authoritarianism of the Trump era is to be challenged, it must begin with a politics that is comprehensive in its attempts to understand the intersectionality of diverse forces of oppression and resistance. That is, on the one hand, it must move towards developing analyses that address the existing state of authoritarianism through a totalizing lens that brings together the diverse registers of oppression and how they are both connected and mutually reinforce each other. On the other hand, such a politics must, as Robin D.G. Kelley has noted, “move beyond stopgap alliances”[22] and work to unite single issue movements into a more comprehensive and broad-based social movement that can make a viable claim to a resistance that is as integrated as it is powerful. For too long progressive cultural workers and activists have adhered to a narrative about domination that relies mostly on remaking economic structures and presenting to the public what might be called a barrage of demystifying facts and an aesthetics of transgression. What they have ignored is that people also internalize oppression and that domination is about not only the crisis of economics, images that deaden the imagination, and the misrepresentation of reality, but also about the crisis of agency, identification, meaning, and desire.
The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics where the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in the bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth is a discourse that legitimates plundering the earths’ resources and exhibits a pathological disdain for community and public values that has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the dark side of politics under Donald Trump’s Presidency. The rule of the billionaires and militarists threaten not just democracy but the existence of the planet. The stakes for both justice, if not survival, are more important than ever. There is no room for resignation, internecine squabbles, and despair. Resistance must take on the challenge of creating an informed public, the need to develop new forms of non-violent resistance, and mobilize a collective sense of outrage mixed with a need for disciplined and focus action.
Pressing the claim for social justice and economic equality means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.”
And, to add more wisdom to this enlightenment, there were a spate of articles that highlighted even further the insecurities of the capitalists from evonomics.com. Here are a few that caught my attention, with the links to the articles below the memes.
The clincher for me that made the penny drop and was the inspiration for this blog article was an interview given in the above mentioned documentary The Coming War on China, which is reproduced below:
So what happens next? Where do we turn for guidance? How do we acknowledge that we have a national and global insecurity problem hidden in the shadows of our collective unconsciousness and that if we do not achnowledge them and bring them forward for conscious reflection and corrections, the global and national capitalists will project their insecurities unto everyone else but themselves, including the designated enemies within and also without, including China and Russia.
I sensed this state of affairs and the root cause earlier and attempted to identify the deep causes in Globalisation of National Insecurity: Enlightening the Shadows of US Dysfunctional Hegemonic Imperialism. However, this US Dysfunctional Hegemonic Imperialism was painted with a broad stroke, but I now understand where ground zero of this dysfunction lies – not with the majority of the people, but with the capitalists and their protective, deceptive, fear mongering and warmongering Deep State, inclusive of the CIA, which have a record of interfering with other governments around the world and are now ready to pounce on its own in plain daylight of its own self-destruction, the ultimate consequence of “a tangled web they weave, when first they practice to deceive.“
Interestingly, the Truth, Reconciliation and Healing process has already begun. The Truth behind the capitalist machinations and insecurities were revealed by Robert F Kennedy Jr at North Dakota recently.
Published on Nov 16, 2016
Robert F Kennedy Jr. gives speech at Standing Rock about the North Dakota Access Pipeline, exposing the big oil companies, banks, and the establishment.
And the Reconciliation and Healing, although symbolic at this stage, has also begun!
Forgiveness Ceremony Unites Veterans And Natives At Standing Rock Casino
Here is an excerpt from the article:
“12/05/2016 04:55 pm ET | Updated Dec 06, 2016
On Monday, Native Americans conducted a forgiveness ceremony with U.S. veterans at the Standing Rock casino, giving the veterans an opportunity to atone for military actions conducted against Natives throughout history.
In celebration of Standing Rock protesters’ victory Sunday in halting construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, Leonard Crow Dog formally forgave Wes Clark Jr., the son of retired U.S. Army general and former supreme commander at NATO, Wesley Clark Sr.
Salon published Clark’s apology to the Natives, which read as follows:
Many of us, me particularly, are from the units that have hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. When we took still more land and then we took your children and then we tried to make your language and we tried to eliminate your language that God gave you, and the Creator gave you. We didn’t respect you, we polluted your Earth, we’ve hurt you in so many ways but we’ve come to say that we are sorry. We are at your service and we beg for your forgiveness.
This was a historically symbolic gesture forgiving centuries of oppression against Natives and honoring their partnership in defending the land from the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Chief Leonard Crow Dog offered forgiveness and urged for world peace, responding that “we do not own the land, the land owns us.”
There is a sort of poetic justice here, as ground zero of this Age of the Great Turn is occurring in North Dakota between the First Peoples, Veteran Militarists and Capitalists, as it was the exploitation and dislocation of the First Peoples in the Americas, Africa and the Marshal Islands via the Military under the orders of the Global capitalists that may have also been the ground zero of our collective dysfunctional and maladaptive unconsciousness that got us to this point in our history.
Please take time to reflect and meditate on this article and its links to see if can help nudge and shift your perspective as we collectively bring our minds, hearts, hands and policies together in global unity to help create a more national and globally secure society and regenerating and flourishing environment for our generation and the next seven and more to come.
This will require us digging deep into our personal and collective unconsciousness, and by reading and sharing with others our insights and understanding, I am confident we could continue our global truth, reconciliation and healing exercise, and once again, make humanity whole again!!
