February 27, 2023

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Hubris of the Globalists is Leading Us to Nuclear Conflagration

Friends,

I pass on today the printed opening monologue from the Tucker Carlson Tonight program, from Friday, February 24. I believe it to be one of most succinct and accessible opinion pieces Carlson has ever offered, ranging over a variety of topics, all of which are interrelated. In reading through this online essay what he has done is to connect the dots, assisting us to understand the broader (and ultimately fatal) implications of “Deep State” globalist foreign policy, its innate and degenerate corruption, its willingness to engage in the subversion of real American interests and risk World War III, and its utter condescension and hatred for the citizens of this country. [Carlson’s program is the only telecast on Fox News I can watch these days without wanting to pick up a shoe and throwing it at my television set; the network, along with the entirety of the Murdoch media empire, has embraced a Neoconservative, Never Trump position, and has become, essentially, the “right wing” of the Deep State swamp.]

No doubt Carlson could have given more detail—there is quite a bit of factual information out there supporting his analysis that too many Americans, cocooned by a monolithic, profoundly-warped US media, never see and never have access to. But that would have required a book-length essay of hundreds of pages to do what he has done here. And, most likely, would have been less effective and reached fewer people than the summary he does provide.

We—our nation and Western Europe—are on a runaway train, with a senile idiot conductor who receives his orders and prompting from crazed and truly diabolical apparatchiks. We are sitting on a volcano, to quote Sir Simon Rattle, and it may well engulf and incinerate us all. Sadly, widely-disseminated rational views on foreign policy like those voiced by Tucker Carlson are far too rare these days.

Here is his monologue:

TUCKER CARLSON: Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the endpoint of a much longer story

TUCKER CARLSON: Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the endpoint of a much longer story (msn.com)

Tucker Carlson • Friday, February 24, 2023

The war in Ukraine began a year ago today, on February 24, 2022, when the Russian military rolled across the eastern border of their country. But in many ways, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was the endpoint of a much longer story. The propaganda campaign designed to convince Americans to take sides in this conflict — a conflict that has nothing, strictly speaking, to do with them or with America — that effort began many years earlier. 

We’d peg it to July 22, 2016. That’s the day that WikiLeaks published thousands of emails from the servers of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Those emails proved that party officials had rigged the Democratic process, the primary process, in favor of Hillary Clinton, and against the insurgent populist candidate that year, Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Within days, the chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, resigned in disgrace. The WikiLeaks scandal broke on the same day that Hillary Clinton chose her running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, and it overshadowed the nominating convention that followed. 

But, more significantly, the WikiLeaks scandal threatened to split the Democratic Party into pieces. More than 13 million Bernie Sanders voters, many of them young people, learned that the process they had always believed in, was in fact a sham. They had been cheated.

Democratic leaders had to act quickly in the face of this, to deflect blame from themselves onto someone else. The DNC’s servers, they claimed, had been hacked by the Russian military. The goal was to hurt Hillary Clinton, whom the Russians feared for her strength and wisdom, and to help Donald Trump, whom they controlled. Russia hacked the servers, in order to hack the election. That was their story. The Washington Post ran with it the first day, as if it were true.

But there was never any evidence that it was true. Almost seven years later, there is still no evidence. The DNC’s story about its servers is a lie. But, as a political strategy, that lie worked flawlessly. Russia made the perfect villain. It was a White, Christian country with a traditional social structure. It was everything the Democratic Party already opposed. The foreign policy apparatus in Washington was happy to hate Russia again. After 40 years of Cold War, hating Russia was muscle memory.

So, soon the leaders of both parties in Washington signed on to the Russia collusion hoax. It had the twin benefits of paralyzing the Trump administration, which it did, and justifying the expansion of the national security state. As the years passed and the rhetoric intensified, hysteria set in. After a while, anyone with a heterodox opinion — from right-wingers to avowed-socialists — could be accused of working secretly for Vladimir Putin. Many were accused, and some were destroyed by it. It was a textbook witch-hunt, far more effective than McCarthyism.

And unlike McCarthyism, it never ended. Russia remained America’s greatest enemy, even as China emerged as America’s greatest threat. Over time, the lie that Democrats told to hide their crimes in the 2016 primaries, came to dominate America’s foreign policy, and then to imperil America itself. For generations, statesmen and diplomats worked to prevent other great powers from aligning as a block against the U.S. The idea was pretty straightforward: You might be able to beat one strong country, but if a couple of strong countries ever got together, you would lose. This is why Richard Nixon went to China: to make sure the Chinese government didn’t align with Brezhnev, with the Russians.

Donald Trump understood this very clearly: "Russia will never be our closest ally," he said. "But if Russia ever becomes China’s ally, we’re in deep trouble." The combination of natural resources, military and economic power — and sheer population — would make the Russian-Chinese alliance the most powerful force in the world. The United States would soon be dethroned, we’d be taking orders. As Trump put it, there is no reason to make Russia our enemy and there are many reasons not to.

It was a sound case, but official Washington ignored him. Their response, shouted in unison: "Shut up Putin stooge." And then they set about trying to provoke a war with Russia. Now they have succeeded. 

But the war we are fighting in Ukraine is not against Russia alone, but also against Russia’s newest ally, the People’s Republic of China. What Donald Trump predicted has happened, and in the worst way. If the war in Ukraine continues, we will lose no matter how it ends. The world order is being reshuffled as we watch, and by the time it’s over, the U.S. will no longer be at the top of the deck. That is very obvious to the rest of the world.

But what’s fascinating is how few Americans seem to understand what's happening or its consequences. But how would they know? No one in American politics or media will tell them the truth. Since the first hours after the invasion, Americans have been fed a steady diet of increasingly absurd lies about Ukraine. Google and Facebook have joined with the Biden administration to censor any factual information that contradicts the official storyline. It’s dystopian. 

Joe Biden’s first remarks about the war gave no hint we’d be sending advanced weapons systems and American military advisors to Ukraine, then supporting the entire Ukrainian government and its pension system with hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars. No, Joe Biden mentioned only sanctions, which are free. Sanctions he suggested would be enough. Here he is, a year ago today:

PRESIDENT BIDEN 2022: The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity... This aggression cannot go unanswered. If it did, the consequences for America would be much worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom... Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war, and now he and his country will bear the consequences. Today, I'm authorizing additional strong sanctions.

Strong sanctions. That'll do it. Now, the goal at that point, a year ago today, you may remember this, was to push Russian forces back into their own country to reverse the invasion. And that seemed reasonable to most people. It did not seem like the beginning of a third world war, but it was exactly that. And by December, Lindsey Graham was confident enough to say so out loud. Here he is.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: How does this war end? When Russia breaks and they take Putin out. Anything short of that, the war is going to continue to ask the Ukrainians to give Russia part of their country after all this death and destruction is not going to happen. To signal a cease fire, Russia will take the opportunity to rearm and come at them again. So we're in it to win it and the only way you're going to win it is to break the Russian military and have somebody in Russia take Putin out.

So we're going to, says Lindsey Graham confidently, continue pouring billions into Ukraine until they, "take Putin out." 

Does Putin know this? Well, we have no idea. We're not allowed to see Russian media in this country. That's too much information for Americans to handle. But if Putin does know that we plan to kill him, wouldn't he fight back with nuclear weapons? Why wouldn't he fight back with nuclear weapons? No one in the United States seems to be allowed to wonder that, much less have a conversation about it out loud. 

Instead, we're treated to more lectures about democracy. Ukraine is a democracy, we're told. That's why we're on the side of Ukraine. The problem is that is a lie. Ukraine is not a democracy. Ukraine is a corrupt one-party state. Ukraine has none of the freedoms that define democratic governance: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. Ukraine is the least free place in all of Europe and probably for that reason, it is Joe Biden's favorite place. 

So for those who understand what is actually happening and what Ukraine is actually like, it is very frustrating to watch Biden say this again and again. It is galling to be lectured about democracy by a man who took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don't believe it was even real. 

Joe Biden has never had the majority of Americans' support for a single day of the Ukraine war. In fact, Joe Biden is far less popular in the United States than Vladimir Putin is in Russia. That is not an endorsement of Putin. It's just true. And it says everything about Joe Biden's tenuous legitimacy. Democracy? Please. We're adults. Stop lying to us. 

So what happens next in this war? Well, according to our elderly Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, the war in Ukraine will go on forever, and so will our support for Zelenskyy.

SECRETARY YELLEN: Let me make clear, the United States and the allies, our support for Ukraine will be lasting and is unconditional.

Unconditional support for Ukraine. Unconditional support for a nation most Americans know nothing about and couldn't find on a map. Unconditional support – that's a profound statement. Outside of your immediate family how many people would you pledge unconditional support to? How many countries would you pledge unconditional support to? This is insane when you think about it. 

But the people in charge of this disaster aren't thinking the way that most Americans do. The Atlantic magazine commemorated the anniversary of the war by commissioning a piece today by Tom Nichols. Nichols is a thoroughly silly foreign policy establishment parasite, who apparently is taken seriously by other ne'er-do-wells and dumb people in Washington. But the piece is fascinating. In it, he inadvertently reveals the point of this war in the clearest possible terms: "Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow's armies and eventually rebuilding a better world."

Oh, defeating Moscow's armies and building a better world. Perfect, thank you, Tom Nichols. Adding those items to this week's to-do list. 

Unspecified in the piece is exactly how we plan to do this, how we plan to defeat Russia and its ally, China, and then build utopia. The piece is notably light on details.

 Now you'd feel a little better hearing all this if Tom Nichols and others like him in Washington had a track record that suggested they could do any of this, a track record of competence and success. They don't. Nichols himself seems to spend most of his life arguing with other people on Twitter. He's never achieved anything at all that we're aware of, but then virtually none of them have achieved anything. Biden's chief Ukraine strategist, Victoria Nuland – you would not hire her to plan spring break. She couldn't do it. She doesn't have the skills.

Now, these very same people, these demonstrably incompetent people, say they plan to rebuild a better world. All right, that seems ambitious. How about starting with Baltimore before moving on to total global transformation? Shouldn't we fix the biggest city in Maryland first? 

Under the leadership of people like Tom Nichols and Victoria Nuland, neoliberal geniuses with grand plans, Baltimore has devolved into third world chaos. But then so has Iraq, so has Libya and so has every other place these people have decided to "rebuild." 

It should spur a moment of silence and self-reflection in the U.S. State Department that the moment Western diplomats and NGOs left the country, Afghanistan got safer. There are far fewer killings in Kabul now than there were 18 months ago. Pedestrians in Kabul can walk to dinner at night without being murdered. Now, that fact doesn't tell the whole story of Afghanistan, of course, but we shouldn't ignore that fact. It means something. 

If you spend billions trying to make a place better, and it gets worse, you have an obligation to think about why. Maybe you're doing it wrong. Maybe you're not as powerful and clever as you thought you were. Maybe there's a problem with your formula. 

But none of this ever occurs to people like Tom Nichols and Victoria Nuland and for that matter, Joe Biden. The more discredited they are, the more self-confident they become. They see every failure as evidence that their talents are more desperately needed than ever. What is this? Well, it's called hubris.

Hubris is the delusion that causes people to mistake themselves for God. They imagine they have power and wisdom and foresight they don't actually possess, that no human does. Hubris is a species of mental illness. These people are unwell. They're crazy and there's nothing more dangerous than that. 

Hubris has caused more suffering than polio. It's caused more deaths than smallpox, and apparently we're in the middle of another epidemic of it.

                                           February 21, 2023

 

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Universality of the Southern Cause:

The Confederacy and Naples

Friends,

Some years ago (summer 1974) when I was completing a doctorate in history and political science in Europe, I made a journey south from Rome to the Italian city of Naples. Earlier, before traveling to Europe on a Richard Weaver Fellowship, I had managed to read two engrossing volumes on the Bourbon monarchy of the Kingdom of Naples by Sir Harold Acton. The old Kingdom of Naples (or of “Two Sicilies,” as it was formally called) had been conquered by the freebooter Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Red Shirts,” in cooperation with the northern, liberal Italian Kingdom of Piedmont Savoy, in the early months of 1861.

That resolutely traditionalist country, basically all of southern Italy and Sicily, fascinated me. The Neapolitan kingdom was perhaps the most anti-liberal, traditionalist nation in all of Europe prior to it disappearance by conquest into the new centralized Italian state. Its capital, Naples, was an international center of culture and brilliance; musicians, composers, writers, and artists from all round Europe congregated there. All of that would end after Italian occupation. And southern Italy, “Due Sicilia,” would descend into an extended era of poverty, subjugation, and eventual neglect, much like that inflicted on the states of the Confederacy after the War Between the States.

But what was more intriguing for me was to learn that after the surrender of King Francis II and his small Neapolitan army at the fortress of Gaeta in late February 1861 (after an heroic four month siege), several thousand army regulars of the Royal Neapolitan Army clandestinely boarded ships, evaded a British cordon, and managed to sail for New Orleans to volunteer for the newly-formed Confederate Army. The first ships arrived from Naples with 884 former members of the army of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies to take up arms for the Confederacy in early 1861. That number of Neapolitan volunteers soon rose to approximately 2000.

Initially, they were enlisted in several Louisiana Confederate units, including the 10^th Louisiana Infantry and eventually other regiments, including a European Brigade which counted traditionalist Catholic volunteers from Spain (mostly royalist Carlists, who arrived by way of Mexico), France (French Legitimists, supporters of the old French Bourbon monarchy), Ireland, and a few from Austria. There were Protestant volunteers, as well, with soldiers coming from England and German lands.

The Neapolitan volunteers fought at most of the major actions in the Trans-Mississippi. When the war ended, some returned to Italy, but others remained in the Southland, where their descendants continue to reside.

From Harold Acton I knew that the small Italian walled commune of Civitella del Tronto, atop a mountain in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, had been the last bastion of resistance to the northern Italian liberals, yielding finally on March 20, 1861. There in that remote mountain town is a museum (Museo delle Armi e Mappe antiche) dedicated to the history of armaments and the military of old Italy. And among its exhibits is a memorable one dedicated to the veterans who fought both for the long-gone Kingdom of Naples and also for the Southern Confederacy. A large Battle Flag is displayed (I assume it is still there) honoring those men, along with other items and relics. Both the Royal Neapolitan standard and the Battle Flag are customarily flown outside on occasion.

It was indeed one location I had to visit.

  

And it raised a question—why did those conservative, mostly Catholic traditionalists leave their home countries and come to the newly-created Confederate States of America and offer their services? What did they see in our new nation that convinced them to make such a sacrifice on behalf of a country not their own?

In reading European contemporary newspapers, correspondence, and journals from the period it became apparent to me that those men, that “band of brothers,” understood instinctively that the Cause of the South was an international cause, one which stood forthrightly against a headlong plunge into modernism, opposed to the worldwide ravages of revolution, liberal democracy and the eventual destruction of age-old customs and beliefs. The South they saw as a hierarchical society based in the real and absolute inequalities of Nature. The South stood against the encroachments of unrestricted capitalism and the philosophical underpinnings that supported that reality. The leaders of the South, albeit mostly Protestant, were descendants of the Cavaliers, and thus represented the best and noblest Americans, to be emulated and admired, as opposed to the Yankee scions of the New England Puritans.

Many of the foreign volunteers had already fought in struggles against liberalism in their own countries, and, as in the cases of Naples and Spain, had been on the losing side. This was the case with my Spanish friend, the Baron de Montevilla, whose ancestor fought both in Spain in the Carlist Wars, and later for the Confederacy. When an acquaintance asked his ancestor, “How can you justify fighting for two lost causes?,” he replied: “A lost cause is never really lost if the fight is for what is true and what is right.” (see “Paladins of Christian Civilization: The Universality of the Confederate Cause,” Confederate Veteran, September/October 2017 )

That very favorable view of the Confederacy and its leaders, if certainly debatable, was exemplified in the foreign conservative press by its glowing portraits of men such as Robert E. Lee, Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Jeb Stuart, but also of such figures as the brilliant writer General James Johnston Pettigrew (whose volume Notes on Spain and the Spaniards is undoubtedly one of the finest and most philosophical “travel journals” that any American has written (and deserves to be more widely-known), “Stonewall” Jackson’s chaplain, Robert Lewis Dabney (whose writings are equally impressive), and various others.

The similarities between the defeated and prostrate South, and the defeated and downtrodden former Neapolitan kingdom are, in some ways, remarkable—not just in the losing wars forced upon them, but in the survival of memory and a continuing devotion to heritage.

Just as defenders of Confederate heritage, in organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Order of the Confederate Rose, are devoted to honoring their ancestors and defending the Cause for which they, in many cases, gave their lives, some southern Italians, descendants of those defenders at Gaeta and Civitella del Tronto, likewise seek to keep the memory and traditions of their forefathers alive. And in recent years, in active organizations such as the Associazione Culturale Neo-Borbonica (ACNB), they do exactly that all across the former territories of the ancient Kingdom of Naples.

Several years ago the ACNB issued a manifesto, a statement not only of principles but a summary of history. As you read the translation below (which I have tweaked just a bit), perhaps you will notice the dramatic analogies between the history of our Southland and of the Neapolitan lands, and why the cause of neither is yet extinguished.

WHY WE ARE NEO-BOURBONS

"On the cold afternoon of December 27, 1894, in the town of Arco, province of Trento, Francesco II of Bourbon, the last king of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (Naples), died. The Bourbon dynasty no longer governed Southern Italy after a reign of 126 years. One hundred years after the death of King Francesco, no one remembers the Bourbons except as a negative symbol of the past. Never has history been so unkind and maliciously falsified as it has been with this king and with this dynasty. 126 years of prestige and of glory, of art and culture, of theatres and factories, of laws and achievements, of public works and archeological excavations, of order, of security, of riches, and of generosity have---all has been erased from our collective memory.

"The Piedmontese from the North, with the self-interested complicity of the English and the French, invaded the peaceful Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which extended from Latium [Rome] to Sicily over all of Southern Italy. Francesco II, at 24 years age, found himself fighting an unexpected and undesired war against his "Italian brothers"…. the Neapolitan army fought valiantly alongside its king and its heroic queen, Maria Sofia, who was barely nineteen. It surrendered after 93 days of siege at the fortress of Gaeta, at dawn on February 14, 1861. Thousands of heroic citizens of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies died on the battlefield. In the same way, subsequently during the decade of the 1860s, thousands of men, women, and children perished in a reconstruction campaign against Southerners - they were called "bandits" or "brigands", but they were, in fact, the last soldiers and defenders of a history, a tradition, and a culture that seemed to die with them forever.

"But what were conditions before this fatal unification of Italy? Certainly, everything was not perfect, but it is worth noting that Naples was the capital of a kingdom born seven centuries earlier. Together with London, Paris and Vienna, Naples was an essential point of reference with regards to both political and cultural affairs in Italy and in Europe….

"It is a fact that Piedmont carried away 80 million ducats cash from our banks (more than $ 1,000,000,000). It is a fact that we had more than 5,000 factories (among the great nations in the world). It is a fact that the streets of our beautiful cities were full of tourists that came from every part of the world. It is a fact that the Piedmontese made us pay more than twice the level of taxes we paid before unification. After unification, due to widespread hunger, more than five million emigrants left their families and homes and would never again see their native land. In the streets of our cities, we no longer saw tourists. Our factories were soon closed and still today we buy, eat, drink, wear, and use only products that come from Northern Italy. One cannot say today that Southern Italians live well; the average income of a Northern Italian is twice that of a Southerner; the ten poorest cities in Italy are all in the South. With unemployment, poor services, government crises, untenable immigration from Africa, and the collapse of a flawed political system, a rosy future for our children is highly unlikely. From the elementary school texts to those used by college students, we hear a tale much different than the truth. In 150 years, they have made us ashamed of being Southerners. They have said that our dialects were "vulgar", that our traditions were uncivilized, that being a "Southerner" or a "Bourbon" meant being backward, nostalgic, ignorant, or uncivilized. We have begun, as Tacitus wrote two thousand years ago, to "admire their way of life, of dress or of speech, forgetting our own and thinking that theirs was civilization when it was only a ploy to dominate us."

"Until 1860, the citizens of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were respected and esteemed in all the world because they were citizens of an ancient and prestigious kingdom…. We were respected and esteemed because we were subjects of a king that belonged to the Bourbon dynasty - an ancient dynasty but one capable of governing with wisdom and love. Upon all of this came the unbearable weight of the destruction of our historical consciousness, of our culture, of our traditions, and of our identity - the pain of the destruction of our white flags with gold fleurs-de-lis, our national anthem, and of all the symbols that were respected by the ancient and glorious Neapolitan nation. The Bourbons showed all the pride and dignity of being Southerners until the very end, when, on the earthworks of Gaeta, they behaved as heroes and fought night and day beneath the violent and incessant bombardment of the Piedmontese invaders. They wanted to defend, right until the end, 126 years of glorious and splendid history - 126 years of Bourbon civilization.

"Francesco II left Naples amidst tears and embraces to avoid a massacre of his people - a people he knew so well, whose language was his own. Many people got rich with the unification of Italy, but not the Bourbons. Francesco II - little Francesco or "Franceschiello" as he was affectionately called - left his kingdom not taking with him one dime of money. The Italian government never gave back that which belonged to his family, and even today has never done so. Francesco II never returned to Naples. He died at age 58 in a hotel room in Arco di Trento [then part of Austria] comforted only by his great faith in God and by a profoundly Christian sense of acceptance, but without ever forgetting, even in the last days of his life, the country of his father and of his grandfather - his own native land. Only since 1984 does he lie next to his wife and his tiny daughter Maria Cristina in the Bourbon chapel of the Church of Santa Chiara in Naples. Few are those who remember him - he who was guilty only of having been on our side, among the defeated.

"Why then be a Bourbon today? Because the time has finally come to understand who we were and who we can be. The time has come to begin to uncover our lost roots and to give to our children the roots they never knew - to give to them a sense of pride in being Southern Italian. To be a Bourbon means to understand history. To be a Neo-Bourbon means to have understood history with the desire and drive to construct a revived history on the base of the old for all the people of Southern Italy. Certainly the Bourbon period was not the "Golden Age," and one cannot say we would have entered into a "Golden Age" if the Bourbons had continued to reign. But no one can deny that, during that cold winter of 161 years ago, the people of Southern Italy ceased to be a People. 161 years ago, Southern Italy ceased to be a nation. The historical memory and consciousness…began to be extinguished on the battlements of Gaeta.

"Some may call us "nostalgic", but how can one not be when one walks through the streets of our run-down and degraded cities or passes before our ancient buildings, churches, and monuments, now lost or forgotten? Yes, we are nostalgic and proud of being such, but our looking back serves a purpose. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to understand what are the real causes of our current problems in Southern Italy and how we can find the road toward a better future. The system and the ideology that have governed our politics and our culture for a century and a half have demonstrated that they are based on a deliberate lie. Southern politicians and intellectuals over the last century, closed off in isolation from the world around them, soiled the memory of the House of Bourbon of the Two Sicilies, but also demonstrated their incapability of representing or loving their own South.

"Honesty, dignity, loyalty, courage, religious faith, wisdom, respect for history, love of art, affection for the land and the people of the Two Sicilies - these were the fundamental characteristics of all the Bourbon kings of Naples. Fortified by these examples and by these symbols we can and must liberate ourselves from the systems and ideologies that are already collapsing into ruins and which are responsible for having destroyed the past and the present of an entire people and of putting their future in jeopardy.

"Let us recover our historical memory - recover our pride in being Southerners - and walk together on the long road towards the salvation of our ancient nation and of our ancient dignity." (ASSOCIAZIONE CULTURALE NEO-BORBONICA  http://www.neoborbonici.it/portal/ )

*****

The defenders of heritage and memory, in both the American South and the Italian South, remember who they are and where they come from. And despite defeat, suppression and scorn, and unceasing attacks on their culture and history, they intuitively understand, as Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno expressed it in his volume, The Tragic Sense of Life, “Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”

 

[NOTE: Just as “Dixie” is the unofficial national anthem of the American Southland, so in the old Kingdom of Naples, the “Inno Nazionale Regno delle Due Sicilie” (National Hymn of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) remains popular as a symbol of Southern Italian history, heritage, and resistance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2xdGRUW8-g ]

 

 

 

                                            February 2, 2023

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

In Ukraine

Friends,

Four critical forces stand behind and vigorously motivate American and NATO policies in Ukraine. These forces support without apparent limitation the globalist-controlled and corrupt the Zelensky government in Kiev in its never-ending war against Russia. And like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of the last book of the New Testament, these Armies of the Night propel us, ineluctably and seemingly without concern for what lies ahead, towards nuclear Armageddon.

How has this been possible? How is it that the American citizenry, indeed, the citizenry in most European countries have, for the most part, supinely accepted this state of affairs?

Rationally and geopolitically, the conflict in Ukraine really should be of minor concern to us. It is not our role to be the world's policeman and to intervene in every conflict, in every distant corner of the world. We have, I would suggest, no actual strategic interest there, except maybe to encourage a peaceful settlement. The Russians were not threatening us or NATO in any discernible or major way. Ukraine is in their backyard, not ours. And yet, we find ourselves mired in an ever-expanding, ever-widening conflict in a country that most Americans cannot even find on a map that may well result in World War III. 

Most of the responsibility for what has happened we must bear. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary James Baker promised Gorbachev that NATO would never expand to the borders of Russia (in return for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR). Yet, that is exactly what occurred. Then followed the "color revolutions"/coups d'etats in Tbilisi, Kiev, etc., with the instrumentality and complicity of American international finance and agents on the ground (read Victoria Nuland, etc.) which only intensified legitimate Russian mistrust and hostility.

The watershed moment for Russia was the ouster of a legitimately-elected Russia-friendly Ukrainian president by an American-fomented coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014 and his replacement by a hand-picked American minion, followed by the intensification of widespread Ukrainian government persecution of the Russian majority in the Donbas eastern regions...followed by a dramatic uptick in that anti-Russian persecution in the Donbas in late 2021 and early 2022. 

Author Ben Abelow has succinctly outlined what followed in his excellent primer, How the West Brought War to Ukraine. That brief volume is strongly endorsed by such authorities as Profs. John Mearsheimer and Paul Robinson, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and others, and remains a superb text on the conflict. 

Certainly, a case can be made that the Russian incursion into Ukraine was a strategic mistake, ironically, because it was exactly what our foreign policy elites desired...an opportunity to take on the Russians directly by military means, using Ukraine as a helpless proxy, and perhaps effecting regime change in Moscow, or at least eliminating Russia as an obstacle to American global suzerainty. Still, President Putin believed, arguably, he had no other option. Nevertheless, it played into the hands of the War Party. 

Over the past two decades our nation has shown an almost complete unwillingness to pursue any kind of negotiations with Russia about peace in Ukraine (e.g., the repeated torpedoing by the US of Minsk I and II). War serves OUR foreign policy purposes, and we managed to maneuver the Russians into making the first major offensive action. 

Who, then, are these four forces that have pushed us dangerously into a conflict we should have never engaged in? What are the real reasons behind their hysterical and limitless advocacy, such that dozens of media outlets and most of our political leaders appear to have lost any scintilla of rational judgment? 

First, perhaps the least visible but most effective force is what President Dwight Eisenhower termed more than sixty years ago “the military/industrial complex,” that is, the immensely powerful and influential military contractors and their complex web of control and influence, both in and out of the halls of power in DC, in our armed services, and in our politics. Each year billions of dollars in profits are generated for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Goldman Sachs, and other supra-nationals. War in Ukraine has been an incredible financial boon for them—missiles, tanks, armaments and equipment of all kinds. They must be built and purchased (usually at inflated and exorbitant prices). And the pockets of our politicians are always ready for a fat share, not to mention the opened pockets of the corrupt thuggery who currently run Ukraine (and dozens of other American client states).  

Then there is the zealous opposition of the fanatical Left to what they perceive is the rise of a Neo-Tsarist Christian populism and neo-fascism (anti-LGBTQ, etc.) in Moscow. Russia under Putin has become for them the locus of opposition to their universalist program of a New World Order, opposition to a global world reset, involving NATO, the USA, the EU, and the World Economic Forum. In a moment of candor Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) summarized (October 25, 2022) the official (if unspoken) American and globalist stance on the conflict and the real issues involved:

“Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes. It is a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export. In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism.”

Raskin is a far Leftist and Jewish, and his message is often just as frenzied and fanatical as that of any member of the Squad in Congress.  With one major difference: he’s highly placed and well connected, a part of the Democrat leadership establishment. So when he speaks, he speaks with some authority for the party and its leadership. But not only for the Democratic Party, but for those forces internationally who understand fully that Russia and its president stand athwart their path to a form of post-Marxist global hegemony, far worse than anything Joseph Stalin ever dreamed up. 

Next, there are the Neoconservatives and their frenzied hatred for Russia (many of the Neocons have a Trotskyite and Labor Zionist genealogy which recalls the anti-semitism of Imperial Russia in the Pale of Settlement). It is the Neocons who have advocated never ending war whether in Ukraine, or Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Bosnia, etc., in their zealous quest to impose what they conceive of as "liberal democracy" worldwide (what my mentor Russell Kirk once called disdainfully a "pax Americana"). It is not uncommon to see a Brian Kilmeade on Fox or read a Rich Lowry in the pages of the once-admirable National Review, espouse this viewpoint expressed with unrestrained vigor.  

Joined to these forces are what we could call the “ground troops”—the vast majority of those who support American policies in Ukraine: those not-too-well-read, or simply dependent on the establishment media, which is completely one-sided on the conflict, for their information. Their views may well be based on a receptivity to continuing "anti-Russian" sentiment left over from the Cold War (similar to the anti-German sentiment which survived WW II) which many Americans partake of.  

These forces have fueled an extremely dangerous cocktail. If someone opposes it, he is immediately shouted down as a "Putin apologist" or a supporter of "the new Hitler": all of which is rubbish. But, sad to say, it seems to be working. I asked in my columns more than once...Are there not any grown-ups in the room? Or, are we fated to drift onward to a conflagration of terrible proportions?  

In St. John of Patmos’s Book of the Apocalypse he recounts that in a dream the Lamb of God summons and reveals to him four creatures that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. Over the centuries these Four Horsemen have been variously identified in Christian eschatology as harbingers of the Last Judgment and End Times. The first horseman in St. John’s revelation, riding a white horse and carrying a bow, has been seen to symbolize and invoke conquest, pestilence or perhaps even the coming of the Antichrist. The second horseman, riding upon a blood red horse, carries a sword and is seen to be creator of war, conflict, and anarchy. The rider on the third horse is viewed as a merchant and rides a black horse symbolizing famine. Lastly, the final rider upon the pale horse represents Death and the powers of Hell. And as the Evangelist tells us:  "They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth." 

The Military/Industrial complex, with its extensive and foul tentacles, may be seen symbolically to ride the black horse of greed, financial domination, and famine. The Neocons and their epigones can be represented by a rider seated on a red horse, zealously advancing conflict, anarchy, and fratricidal war. 

The pale horse, whose rider symbolizes death and enthrallment by the powers of Hell, could well represent the mass of humanity, beguiled and woefully misled by the first three horsemen, and whose headlong movement like lemmings will result in the destruction and the collapse of the world—and of civilization—as we have known it. It is not hard to visualize such figures as Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell prominent in this group.

Finally, the unleashed and fanatical Left rides the white horse of conquest, pestilence, and heralding of the Antichrist, proclaiming the end of Christian civilization and the triumph of what Irish poet William Butler Yeats calls the “Rough Beast” (in his eschatological poem from 1919, “The Second Coming”): the return of a triumphant Satan, once held in check for twenty centuries by a “Rocking Cradle” but now loosed upon the world.

It is not too esoteric to suggest that the USA and the world now find themselves in a situation where, to follow Yeats again,

  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity….”

Are there voices yet who would sound the clarion call and their warnings be heeded? Indeed, are there any grand figures like the prophets of the Old Testament who could plead successfully for us to turn away from war, criminality, and evil? Or, has our civilization become so infected and decayed that it has run its course?

That question, for the moment, remains unanswered.