COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Russia's Foreign
Minister paves the way for a consensus-driven world order in a landmark speech”
Lavrov is absolutely right.
There is a gradual evolution taking place in world affairs.
It is gradual, but it is inevitable.
It is a point I have been making for a decade in my own
writing.
I think the new hostility between the US and Russia today reflects
American awareness of this new reality.
Henry Kissinger was just quoted by a Russian scholar as saying
American-Russian relations are at their lowest in 50 years, and he is a man who
should know.
America's establishment is bit panicked I think with the
realization about where things are headed.
So, there is a new aggressive American self-assertion in
Europe, trying to make sure Russia is as hamstrung there as possible.
Everything from the coup in Ukraine and the constant attack on Russian news
sources to immense hype taking place in NATO and demands for new spending are
about this reality.
America has tried to stop Russian gas from entering Europe
for decades, and it has increased efforts recently despite the obvious fact
that Russian gas and German industry are a marriage made in heaven.
America also is starting to get aggressive about its people
reading or seeing Russian media. In the past, during the last Cold War,
America's press, always subservient to the demands of security services such as
CIA and the FBI, had the public to itself to convince of the official
interpretation of the world.
That is no longer true. Russian press offers reliable
information in many cases running against the official American narrative, as
does at least a portion of the much-maligned independent press on the Internet.
Information, as Americans know, is a powerful tool. After
all, perhaps America's most significant, original contribution to the modern
world is the art and science of marketing and advertising, the ways to
influence opinion and drive sales, including sales of government views.
Clearly, contemporary Russia has grasped that concept and is
operating very effectively on the information battlefield, as it were. We have
some competition at last, which, as Americans who traditionally embrace a free
economy know, is essential for a healthy economy of any kind, and that applies
to markets for information as much as it does to markets for washing machines.
I do think we have rather dangerous times ahead with the
blind and trashing efforts of America's establishment to regain its momentum
and dominance. Seriously bad decisions may easily be made where pride and fear
become involved. Washington has many very dark and devious characters in
important positions. And we have seen already how they have entangled Trump and
prevented him from accomplishing a few worthwhile things so many of us hoped to
see, including reduced conflict with Russia and an end to the Neocon Wars and
coups.
The whole ugly process America is going through reminds me
of the situation we see in Israel, only of course on a vastly greater scale.
Israel's establishment understands certain realities are unavoidable parts of
its future, and it acts aggressively in many directions in a desperate attempt
to alter its fate.
In Israel's case, it realizes, among other things, that its
population prospects are glum with low birthrates for Jews and higher
birthrates for Arabic people combined with the extremely low prospects for new
pools of immigrants. Israel simply faces a declining (Jewish) population
without big pools of immigrants.
But who wants to go live in Israel today except a few
fanatics and some American-Israeli businessmen, who know they can always return
to American when things get sour, out to make a quick profit on some projects?
For ordinary people, Israel offers little to nothing.
The ethos and ideology which fired-up Israel 75 years ago
are dying, unavoidably and certainly. Like all painful events in history,
humanity slowly but unavoidably forgets. Nature built us this way for
resilience and survival. Youth growing up cannot have any first-hand
experience, only textbooks and museums. The actual Holocaust generation is
virtually gone.
This is why we see all the desperate efforts at building
Holocaust museums everywhere and publishing books on the subject, but this is
all largely futile with the march of time and evolution. I am reminded of the
famous statue of Ozymandias slowly crumbling away in the desert.
You know, the Vietnam War was a pivotal point of my early
life. It was the reason I left the land of my birth. America killed perhaps
three million people in the world’s great post-WWII Holocaust, and despite
monuments and movies and books, it is being forgotten by the population at
large. Many young Americans today do not even know what you are talking about
when it comes to the subject of this massive, decade-long horror.
So, too, the ethos and ideology which saturated American
society for decades after WWII. The sense of being the world's good guys, the incomparable
victors, the "big generation" striding the earth and distributing the
blessings of freedom to everyone. Superman and “the American way.” Jimmy
Stewart in his pressed WWII uniform with tears in his eyes. It was an illusion,
of course, and, like all illusions, it fades.
The reality today is a vicious establishment fighting almost
endless dirty colonial wars and fomenting coups and generally making a lot of
people miserable. Even America's press can no longer hide all these realities
dawning on the public’s awareness. You cannot, as the old saying goes, turn a
sow's ear into a silk purse.
The truth is that America has only gotten uglier with each
passing year. It is often said "the American Dream" is dead, and it
very much is. No more jobs galore, which in the 1950-60s was owing to the fact
that all the world's competition was all flat on its back. No, there is serious
competition on many fronts, and short of a massive war, it is not going away
but only getting stronger.
But the ugliness extends much further than to jobs. Who,
thirty years ago, could have guessed America’s government would establish a
vast organized effort at extrajudicial killing, something not different, except
in its technology, from what the old Argentine military junta practiced when it
made large numbers of people “disappear?”
And with that fading reality for America, a lot of other
things, many illusions and fantasies, begin to fade. Trump's election campaign,
as far as domestic matters go, was an effort to fire things like jobs and
optimism back up, but that was always doomed to fail. You cannot re-create what
was a unique situation of 1959.
America, like Israel, has a long, huge process of adjustment
ahead of it, adjustments to dealing with the new realities and not just slogans
and old memories. It must in many ways become a different place than it has
been, than it has been portrayed in Hollywood films for decades, than the myths
to which so many ordinary Americans cling and try desperately to keep alive.
