April 23, 2022

 

 

 MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Illusion of Liberal Democracy—America’s Long Record of Destruction Continues

Friends,

In a recent issue of Chronicles Magazine (March/April 2022) my friend Paul Gottfried, Editor-in-Chief, writes about the perilous condition of genuine liberty in modern Germany (“Germany, Harbinger of the Abyss,” pp. 6-8). Germany has become, in numerous ways, the most authoritarian, controlled, and “woke” country in all of Europe. And each successive new restriction on personal or corporate expression, each new statute limiting not only what one can say or write in public, but what one can even think in private, is done in the name of “protecting our [German] democracy.”

As Paul points out—and has documented in several detailed studies, including most recently his volume, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (Cornell University, 2021)—this is not something that occurred over night, or even over the past couple decades. It began actually with German defeat in the Second World War in 1945 and the subsequent implementation of the Marshall Plan and the explicit and wide-ranging “denazification” and purification in occupied Germany of everything that smacked or hinted not just of “fascism,” but of anything that honored or “glorified” German tradition and heritage.

As neoconservative writer Alan Bloom once so aptly expressed it (in his The Closing of the American Mind): “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” We Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.”  

But that imposition of “freedom and equality” which Bloom glowingly describes is in actuality but a series of steps and actions that have occurred over the past seventy years, an enduring and constant process—a “long march,” to appropriate a phrase applied to the Communist Chinese Revolution of Chairman Ma0—that began with innocent-sounding promises and goals, but progressively has become more and more oppressive and destructive of our historic institutions and true liberty.

But always in the name of advancing—and then defending—"our democracy”: the same phrase that a Nancy Pelosi or any of a number of prominent American politicians, both Democrat and Republican, employ so frequently these days. Think here of Senators Lindsey Graham and Ben Sasse, and their enthusiasm to inject American boys into every forlorn desert or jungle civil war around the world, or most recently into Ukraine, in a conflict that should not involve us one tittle.

Most of us, upon reflection, can recall events over the past three decades, sometimes watershed moments, when “defending our democracy” has meant sending American boys into various armed “police actions” and “interventions”:

--Into Yugoslavia, which resulted in the creation of the state of Kosovo—the ancient homeland of Serbians—now an Islamist state in the heart of Europe, protected by NATO, which native Serbs have been forcibly driven out of, killed, or made refugees in their own country;

--Into Somalia, where war lords reigned in the streets of its capital, Mogadishu, and Americans became choice targets—the war lords continue to reign supreme;

--Into Iraq, in search of weapons of mass destruction that the bumbling George W. Bush and Colin Powell solemnly told us were there, but weren’t. And then the attempt to create a liberal democracy out of warring factions, ending up with the most radical Muslim group (Sh’ia) in charge and hundreds of thousands of native Christians either murdered or as refugees from a land which had been their home since Apostolic times;

--Into Libya, where American actions to remove and assassinate the once-dangerous dictator, Mu’ammar Al-Gaddafi (2011), resulted in a far worse situation in that country with rival tribes and factions engaged in constant violence and civil war…and hundreds of thousands of emigrants headed for Italy and southern Europe;

--Into Syria, where the late globalist Senator John McCain demanded American intervention to support “free and democratic Syrians” and in an attempt to give the Russians a bloody nose, only to discover that McCain’s (and our) allies were the real terrorists and Islamists, guilty of massacres and “war crimes” against native Syrian Christians who almost unanimously supported President Bashar al-Assad. Those “war crimes” will most likely never be prosecuted, because those extremists were “on our side”;

--Into Afghanistan, ostensibly to find and either kill or arrest Osama bin Laden, who, with Al-Qaeda, was held responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  But where the original mission soon developed into a disastrous twenty-year civil war, underwritten by billions of dollars in American support, with several thousand Americans dead and wounded, and 176,000 Afghanis killed: 46,319 civilians, 69,095 military and police and at least 52,893 opposition fighters, not to mention the millions of refugees and displaced persons. Of course, American military occupation was accompanied by the accustomed pilgrimage of wide-eyed “advisors,” instructors in how to “set up a democratic state,” zealous social justice warriors and “woke” evangelists determined to create a liberal bastion in that country, all to naught in a matter of a few tragic days in August 2021.

And now, apparently not learning a thing from these previous disasters—indeed, studiously ignoring them—the Neoconservatives and their journals (e.g., National Review, Wall Street Journal) and their think tanks, the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties, a solid phalanx of Leftists (now suddenly all in for war!), and the near-unanimity of the media are pushing once again to get us into violent conflict, this time in Ukraine. Indeed, already the permanent American foreign policy establishment—the heart of the global Deep State—is urging greatly increased intervention...how far will this go? Voices on both the establishment left and right have thrown caution to the wind. Senator Graham and a goodly number of politicos want a no-fly zone and perhaps boots on the ground.

With its mostly obedient minions in NATO and the European Union, the Biden administration and leading apparatchiks in both political parties now in fact seek to prolong the conflict in Ukraine, and their motives are becoming ever so clear as that conflict drags on. Indeed, what is happening in that corner of Eastern Europe has become for the United States and its subservient allies a real proxy war, a fact now noted by certain Russian commentators who see the deepening American/NATO involvement as a kind of actual beginning of World War III.

Of the various objectives in the Ukrainian conflict—among them a constant source of new profitable contracts for arms dealers; shifting American attention away from the enlargement of the Federal government and its control over our lives at home; diversion from the real border crisis along the Rio Grande River; and the so-called “defense of liberal democracy” in a country (Ukraine) which by no means is a “democracy”—a major, perhaps overriding  motive is this: to bleed Russia dry and potentially secure “regime change” in Moscow (another “color revolution”).

A quick overview of the leftist and neoconservative media (there is little difference between them on Ukraine), the articles and reports from its most prominent “opinion” shapers, clearly illustrates this—that’s one thing the literati amongst them cannot hide. Indeed, in their hysteria for more war they are quite open about it. 

Russia and also Hungary (to a lesser extent because it is smaller and less important geostrategically) stand in the way of completing the great “global reset” in Europe, and the consolidation of that interlocking managerial world complex which has been in the planning since before the creation of the United Nations after World War II, indeed in the febrile thoughts of definable globalists since Colonel Edward House during the Wilson presidency.

Early in his tenure as Russian president Vladimir Putin, like Boris Yeltsin before him, made efforts to join a greater, all-inclusive Europe, even going so far as sounding out the possibility of some form of NATO association. Despite Secretary Jim Baker’s promise (during the George H. W. Bush administration) to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not advance even “one inch” eastward in the post-Communist years, it did just that. And every attempt at Russian cooperation—and its desire to be a partner—was rebuffed. Instead, a succession of hostile “color revolutions” on its borders from Tbilisi, Georgia (2008), to Kiev, Ukraine (February 2014), greeted Moscow.

But more than that. Rebuffed in his efforts to establish a certain parity and understanding with the West, President Putin (after 2000) fell back on his country’s long history and traditions, specifically its cultural and religious heritage. Instead of slavishly copying the West as it plunged deeper into the morass of cultural, racial and sexual decadence, and what amounted to a rejection of its Christian heritage, Russia (like Hungary under Viktor Orban) opted for a different course, a trajectory based profoundly in the ancient faith of the Russian people and an effort to bring together various strands of Russian history into a usable past on which to base its future.

Whether staunch Russian action in defending the traditional family and one man/one woman marriage, or its restrictions of LGBTQ activity in Russian schools, or its public exaltation of and support for Russian Orthodox Christianity, none of these directions since the early 2000s endeared President Putin and the Russians to the managerial elites in the West. And, perhaps more importantly, Russia refused to go along with the globalist “reset”—that was not and is not the kind of cooperation that Moscow was looking for.

So, now, the increasingly evident goal is to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine as much as possible, and potentially provoke regime change in Moscow. And the poor Ukrainian populace in this protracted struggle are the victims, not just of the Russian invasion, but of the callous managerial bureaucrats in their expensive sinecures and walled-off estates in Washington and Brussels and Geneva. Those elites will only see the approved images projected by the Mainstream Media of the war crimes which in fact they have fomented (but are largely blamed on the Russians)…and they will, most likely, never have to pay a price for their actions.

But there will be justice. As in so many other situations, historically, it may not be in this world, but in the next.