USA and the West: Delusion and Destruction Before Defeat

A Losing Empire Thrashing Out While Gaslighting The Citizenry

The ruling class of the US (and by extension the West) is displaying a total inability to grasp any chance of a reasonable agreement with the Other 7 Billion as its power declines and the 500 plus years of Western global dominance and destruction come to an end. The costs of that dominance has been immense: the destruction of innumerable peoples and cultures, brutal wars, the subjugation of much of the world, racialized enslavement, and ecological destruction are just a few. Instead of focusing on climate change and the other ecological issues that threaten humanity as a whole the ruling classes have decided to go down fighting.

With this we see a new level of barbarism and disparagement of the Other, or is it simply a return to form? A US ruling class that has had no issues with its own genocidal project to create its North American lebensraum now has its bought and paid for Congress vote to provide more money to the Military Industrial Complex to facilitate the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the “suicide by Russia” of Ukraine, and the planned sacrifice of the Taiwanese at the hands of their Chinese brothers and sisters. At the same time the technology screws are tightened upon China, well after that horse has bolted; the only result will be the diminution of the Western computer technology industries. At the same time as the West starts to erect its own iron curtain to stop itself utilizing cheap Russian energy and advanced Chinese technology.

That the West is losing Eurasia (excluding the declining European archipelago) and Africa is becoming more evident each day. The latest examples being the passing of the anti-foreign interference law by the Georgian government (overcoming the defeat in 2023, and with a majority which removes the traitorous president’s ability to nullify it), and the US military’s forced exit from Niger (after the exit of French troops, and perhaps soon to be followed by Chad). At home, the US is a hollowed out wreck surviving from one financial bubble to the next for the past two decades while its population becomes more precarious and divided. With a ruling class pathetically reduced to attempting to control or ban a platform that allows citizens to share short videos because even that provides an avenue for the destruction of its propaganda.

The time of the “liberal democratic” manufacturing of consent has ended and much more explicit coercion is required. The US Congress recently renewed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act that not only extends for another 2 years the warrantless wiretapping of foreigners that has been going on for many years, but also greatly expands the scope of the wiretapping. This was played down by the compliant US mainstream media, but properly reported by the ACLU:

Expanding the definition of “electronic communications service providers,” which allows the government to force a wide range of U.S. businesses to give the NSA access to their wifi routers, phones, and other communications equipment.

Requiring completely suspicionless searches of Section 702 data for non-U.S. persons seeking permission to enter the country, including visa holders who are longtime residents of the United States and are returning from travel.

Weakening the FISA Court’s ability to obtain independent input from experts on civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy when the government secretly seeks permission to conduct novel forms of surveillance.

Ever since the Homeland Security Act that was quickly passed in the wake of 9/11 (and the strange mailing of anthrax spores to media figures and some of the Act’s opponents), the US Bill of Rights has been rendered significantly meaningless. The expansion of the FISA provisions, the proof of extensive secret security state/media provider censorship collusion shown with the Twitter Papers, the heavy-handed focus on the combating of “misinformation” (i.e. non-officially sanctioned reporting and opinions), the outright banning of alternative media sources (now extending to TikTok), and the intensifying disparagement of the official enemies (e.g. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba), would all play well into the plot of 1984. The US has been here before, in the 1917-1921 period of outright fascism implemented by Wilson as he dragged an unwilling citizenry into the world war and the post-WW2 McCarthyite era of the 1940s to 1960s.

As Matt Taibbi has documented a full blown “Censorship Industrial Complex” has been put in place, to squash any views not aligned with the interests of the dominant section of the US ruling class. The mainstream media have of course attempted to quash any coverage of their own connivance with the security state in extensive censorship and the creation of evidence-less propaganda narratives such as purported links between President Trump and the Russian state.

This is being repeated across the West, as expenditures are re-oriented away from increasing the security of the citizenry through the social state and toward warmongering and military expenditure profiteering. Thankfully, the West is a pale shadow of what it was at its peak as it continues the economic and social downward decline produced by an ever avaricious, extractive and plundering ruling class that has increasingly focused such energies on the home front as more and more of the Other 7 billion refuse to be used and abused. The incredible gains of the general populace that functioning socialized health care systems, old age pensions, social welfare, and other state expenditures brought will be further destroyed. The West is returning to a period of private affluence for the few, precarious existence for the many, and general public squalor reminiscent of the time before the Second World War. While the organs of the ruling class (the state, the media, the schools and universities etc.) are utilized to not only manufacture consent but increasingly to coerce and discipline the citizenry. Unfortunately for Central and South America, the US considers it to be an extended part of the Homeland and will therefore do whatever is required to bring it under its thumb as the US global dominance shrinks.

At the very time when the US (and Western) ruling class should be doing what it did in the post-WW2 period, accept some level of inclusion of working people in the benefit of economic growth in the face of the communist challenge (in the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet Union was rapidly growing and many other nations were seeing communism in a positive light), it is instead deepening its profiteering extractive destruction of the welfare of the many at home. As a report by the US Federal Trade Commission documented a large part of the recent inflation in groceries was due to the oligopolistic grocery chains expanding their profit margins. Profiteering and extraction has extended throughout the US and Western societies, extending like an octopus to areas such as prisons, water supplies, and healthcare; with private equity as the front echelon of destruction. In the post-WW2 period, the US enjoyed an extremely positive international image, in the current period its image is irretrievably tarnished by its destruction of other societies, its increasing military failures, its now open support for genocide, and the increasing public squalor, immiseration and social conflict at home.

Domestic extraction is now being deepened even in the previously socially-democratic and welfare state supporting Europe, as defence budgets are increased (a huge new profit flow for the US MIC), and billions sent to Ukraine, while public expenditures are slashed. In the 2010s such policies had been forced upon Greece by the ruling class serving EU bureaucracy, and upon the UK by its own ruling elite, but this is now extending throughout Europe. For example the German budget has significantly more money for defence spending, and more money for Ukraine, while slashing climate-related spending (including subsidies that ameliorated the rise in energy prices due to the Russia sanctions) and cutting social spending.

At the same time the censorship industrial complex has been rapidly expanding across Europe and the UK, with Palestinian supporters being cancelled and directly restricted from giving talks and attending conferences by the state. Karl Marx stated that “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce.” If Nazi Germany was the tragedy, an increasingly fascistic German state once again treating Russia as an enemy to be subjugated while facilitating a Zionist genocide must be the farce. Silencing an actual Jewish Holocaust survivor for her criticism of the Zionist regime.

There is also the increasing misuse of the terms “misinformation” (anything the ruling establishment disagrees with, for example the truth about Gaza and Ukraine), and “hate speech” (cast as a wide and ambiguous net that allows for the criminalization of free speech and a general chilling of public discourse). The recent Scottish “hate speech” law and the increasing visits of British police to individual’s homes in relation to speech crimes are indicative of a general trend.

Nearly every day we are provided with another example of the increasing inability of Western corporations and Western governments to adequately function, whether it be the unpunished criminal negligence of Boeing, the open monopolistic/oligopolistic profiteering of so many corporations, the bought and paid for nature of politicians, the servile quisling nature of so many Canadian, Australian, Japanese and European ruling class vassals, the incredibly costly and shambolic nature of the Western military industrial complexes, and the desperate attempts to keep the multi-decade financial bubble alive. All in service of a squalid and rabidly extractive ruling class that has little or no interest in the national interest.

The Western Empire will not go quietly into the night, rather it will go noisily as a failing and flailing squalid mess, unfortunately greatly harming many of the Western common people who just want to live a good life along the way; while continually gaslighting them through ever present propaganda and censorship. It is the way of empires and their ruling classes. As their ability to take tribute from other nations through whatever means necessary recedes, the reduction in power becomes self-feeding. It may hang on in a redoubt for a while, as with the British Empire and the Sterling Zone (The Americas and the other white settler colonies, European and Japanese vassals), but its weakening state will finally overcome it. The drive to create such a redoubt is shown by the bullying of the Mexican government by the US state to not support Chinese manufacturers in setting up shop in Mexico.

Anyone looking at elections to change the course of Western nations are extremely delusional about the nature of Western governments, which are bought and paid for by the ruling classes. In the UK, the Labour Party has now been made “safe for democracy” after the purging of everything Corbyn and a return to capitalist-extraction friendly Blairism. In the US any return to Trump would simply deepen the corruption and profiteering while not really changing much about foreign policy; the same for the Conservatives in Canada. In Italy, Meloni has shown how quickly fascists start playing their main role as fake populist friends of the capitalist ruling classes. The same may happen in France with the National Front and Germany with the AfD (with perhaps some lessening of tensions with Russia). Plus ca change plus c’est le meme chose as the saying goes.