The obsessive focus of the U.S. media on the upcoming election is evocative of countries where life has the singular misfortune of being dependent on politics. Elections in Serbia this spring were of crucial import for the country’s survival — let alone future — yet the campaign there seemed almost subdued when compared to the anxiety currently on display in America. In Bosnia, every election is a war of words reminiscent of the country’s brutal sectarian conflict; and with the government apparatus choking the very life out of the remnants of productive economy, securing a public sinecure or preventing an opponent from doing so is sometimes literally a matter of life and death. Yet even this country, smaller than West Virginia and with the estimated population of the city of Los Angeles, seems less frantic about elections than the U.S.
It’s bad enough when the mainstream media obsess about the vote, but when it becomes impossible to watch a cat video or a viral Korean pop hit without 30 seconds of someone pontificating worriedly about Barack S. Obama or W. Mitt Romney, things must be truly dire.
Whither the Difference?
Looking at the policies embraced by both the incumbent and the challenger, however, an outside observer must wonder what all the fuss is about. Obama and the Democrats have already demonstrated they have no intention of dismantling the Empire to tackle the problems at home; rather, they want to double down on both. Well, so do Romney and the Republicans that endorsed him. Ron Paul’s calls to audit the Federal Reserve and the Pentagon were treated as heresy, and the party bosses went so far as to change the rules in order to sideline and suppress Paul’s supporters.
Both parties wish to tax and spend, both favor conflict and conquest, both believe the current expanse of government power is good and necessary. The only real difference is which special interest groups will get better rations at the government trough for the next four years, at everyone else’s expense. Whether it’s butter and bombs, or bombs and butter — either way, the country ends up broke, and a lot of people around the world end up dead. Or, in Imperial parlance, “liberated” and enjoying the fruits of democracy.
Relativistic Logic
In theory, democracy ought to be a simple mechanism of decision-making by majority vote. However, it has been elevated to near-religious status in the West, while losing much of its meaning in the process. For example, the Russian elections this spring were ruled “undemocratic” by the United States, the self-designated arbiter of democracy. It did not matter than Russians could choose between more than two political options, or that a greater percentage of them voted than Americans ever bother to, or that every polling station was equipped with live-broadcasting webcams to ensure fairness. The Empire gets to decide what democracy is. The massively fraudulent elections rigged by its clients in Serbia, for example, were deemed perfectly fine.
You see, it doesn’t matter what is being done, only who is doing it – and to whom. Whatever produces the results desired by the Empire is good; anything else is evil that must be eradicated. The ironic thing is that this “logic” was first made mainstream by Karl Marx, while the “who/whom” axiom was articulated by V. I. Lenin.
Cold War, Reheated
It was the total mobilization of society in the Cold War with the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union that transformed the American republic into today’s Atlantic Empire. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the exuberant imperialists embraced what they considered the End of History. But while the Russians learned from their ordeal under Communism, the West ended up embracing many of its tenets: political correctness, “hate crimes,” the managerial state, politics as struggle between not just classes but ever-fragmenting interest groups… and of course, interventionism.
Czech president Vaclav Klaus upbraided the European Union for sliding into Communism, while Russia’s Vladimir Putin warned America in no unclear terms about the perils of hegemonic dreams. Their words fell on deaf ears.
Four years ago, Washington chose to establish the “Republic of Kosovo” on occupied Serbian territory, over unequivocal Russian objections. In August that year, Russia retaliated by dealing a humiliating defeat to America’s client regime in Georgia. One of the promises made by candidate Obama was a “reset” of hostilities with Russia, and in March 2009, his Secretary of State made a big show of presenting her Russian counterpart with a peace offering: a red button, with the Russian word for “reset.” Except the translation was wrong, and the word mean “overload” instead.
Subsequent events suggest this was less of an embarrassing gaffe, and more of a Freudian slip. Last year, Moscow was content to watch the “sandstorm” revolutions in North Africa, and even voted in favor of a UN resolution establishing a no-fly zone over Libya. But when NATO used that as a fig leaf for full-scale invasion, culminating in the disgusting dismemberment of Libya’s ruler as Washington cheered, the Russians were livid. Moscow has since done everything to prevent a repeat of the Libyan scenario in Syria.
Empire’s reaction was to rail against Russia’s “autocratic” government, dispute the presidential and parliamentary elections, and fund the opposition “activists” scraped from the margins of Russian politics. In turn, Moscow passed a law patterned after the American FARA, seeking to restrict influence of foreign-funded activism. But the real escalation was yet to come.
Desecrating for Democracy
One of the “activist” groups funded by American taxpayers has fought a war on Russian culture for years. They painted genitals on a drawbridge in St. Petersburg, held an orgy at a Moscow museum, and sexually assaulted frozen food at a supermarket, but none of these stunts so much as registered on the radar of most Russians. So their handlers decided on another approach, and set up a “punk rock band” of five masked women, called “Pussy Riot.” In English, of course. Three of the “PR” members then barged into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and unleashed a profanity-laced tirade at the clergy and the faithful.
The spin machine then kicked in and painted the trio as brave activists defying the “oppressive” Russian state and the Orthodox Church, while claiming their stunt was a “punk prayer.” The facts of the case were buried under the layers of propaganda, with even the non-mainstream media filtering the case through the lens of their preferred narrative.
When the three “rioters” were sentenced in mid-August, howls of protest arose in the Western media sphere, with only a few noting the immense hypocrisy at hand. One astute observer even explained that the Russophobic media storm made a harsh sentence all but inevitable, and that the women were deliberately sacrificed for Imperial purposes. To no avail.
The Impenetrable Bubble
No amount of logic, facts or arguments seems to make a dent in the media narrative. It isn’t just the Imperial establishment that is wrapped in a virtual world of its own making; the general public has been sucked into the virtual-reality matrix as well. Having internalized the Marxist-Leninist pseudo-logic, neither the rulers nor the ruled are capable of seeing themselves through the eyes of others, recognizing a principle, or even remembering their own founding values. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to communicate with someone so obsessed with perception management that they’ve lost the ability to recognize reality entirely.
While the American economy implodes and American society fragments into ever more bitterly antagonistic sub-groups, Washingtonians live in a pocket dimension of cushy government and contractor jobs, courtesy of the fleeced taxpayers and the Fed’s manipulation of money and debt. Whoever gets elected this November will keep killing foreigners (and occasionally Americans), bailing out the banksters and covering for cronies. But the electorate is supposed to argue over abortion, gay marriage, medical care, and “diversity.”
Whether you vote for Kang or Kodos, the Empire is what you’ll get. Isn’t democracy grand?
