If Washington, NATO, and Zelensky had refused to play against Russia, history would have gone quite differently from how it’s gone since the war started. If they hadn’t entered into a war where they were compelled to adopt an impractical way of operating, where they waste their resources on costly military equipment that Russia consistently destroys, they would have defeated Russia in half a year. They could have learned from their initial mistakes, and quit earlier so they could salvage the situation. Or simply not have started the war. Not that it matters anymore, because Ukraine has been successfully demilitarized while the NATO powers themselves increasingly struggle to keep up with Kiev’s needs. And more importantly, Russia has already won the economic war.
The strategists on the NATO side willingly handicapped themselves in the war because the longer the conflict went on, the more hope they thought they’d have of winning where it truly matters, which is in the economic realm. Yet because this plan has been shown to be naive, as Russia continues to handle the war’s economic consequences vastly better than the U.S. or the EU countries, in retrospect it’s clear that their better option was to not have created the conditions for the war to have started in the first place.
The longer the imperialists have prolonged this war, the costlier it’s gotten for them. The more the imperialist countries have experienced an acceleration in their social decline, the more the peripheral countries have united against Washington’s destructive schemes, and the more the empire’s propagandists have been forced to do damage control over the Nazis Biden is aiding. It’s the same story that past declining empires have experienced, where they’ve done drastic things to try to regain their shrinking influence and then unintentionally sped up this process.
We’re at a point where whenever Washingto’s narrative managers say Russia has supposedly blown up another piece of infrastructure that’s critical to Russia’s own interests, nobody outside the aggressively pro-NATO circles truly believes this. Everyone has seen how Seymour Hersh revealed the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. And then how the media had to implicitly admit Hersh had credibility by reporting that U.S. officials knew of the industrial sabotage plot months plot in advance. So the decline in public support for Ukraine aid that we’ve been seeing since last fall is going to continue. There’s no false flag atrocity story the narrative managers can put forth that will undo this shift in mass consciousness. In growing proportions, the people in the imperial center are recognizing that their material interests are opposed to those of the war machine. Which they’ve long somewhat known, but only now are prompted to fully see, because this is the war that’s destroying their lives with inflation.
As Pepe Escobar reports, to try to maintain the dollar hegemony which they depend on to keep the imperial project stable, the neocons are next going to effectively declare war on Brazil, India, Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, and the other “swing state” countries in the new cold war:
U.S. Think Tank Land – inebriated by their self-created aura of power – always telegraphs in advance what they’re up to…that’s the case with the incoming American War on BRICS as outlined by the chairman of the New York-based Eurasia Group…The message is unmistakable: “The threat of a Sino-Russian co-optation of an expanded BRICS—and through it, of the global south—is real, and it needs to be addressed.” And here are the recipes to address it. Invite most swing states to the G-7 (that was a miserable failure). “More high-level visits by key U.S. diplomats” (welcome to cookie distributor Vicky Nuland). And last but not least, Mafia tactics, as in a “nimbler trade strategy that begins to crack the nut of access to the U.S. market.” The swing state manifesto could not but let the Top Cat out of the bag, predicting, rather praying that “U.S.-China tensions rise dramatically and turn into a Cold War-style confrontation.” That’s already happening – unleashed by the Hegemon. So what would be the follow-up? The much sought after and spun-to-death “decoupling”, forcing the swing states to “align more closely with one side or the other”. It’s “you’re with us or against us” all over again.
This means the next step in Washington’s process of self-underming reaction to its own decline is to stop trying to co-exist with Latin America. Which is something it’s had to do in order to remain at least somewhat economically stable at the same time that has the costly Russia sanctions in place. When the Ukraine proxy war’s disastrous consequences for the empire become fully apparent, which Escobar says will likely happen in mid-summer, so will the disastrous consequences of our government’s recent austerity policies. The Federal Reserve’s scheme to give employers more leverage by driving down living standards, and the latest social safety net cuts from the recent debt ceiling debate outcome, will both bring a new economic shock to U.S. workers and let them see what a scam the war was. They’ll fully learn a truth that many of them are already in the process of learning: that to believe the narratives the Democratic Party tells about global affairs is to be fooled into betraying one’s own interests as a worker.
With the knowledge from this lesson increasingly part of our mass consciousness, the people are initially reacting by becoming open to the arguments of the anti-NATO movement. The task of Marxists at this stage is to warn the people that if they encounter an org which claims to represent this movement, yet takes the “neither NATO nor Russia stance,” they should avoid that org. An org like that is a Democrat front group pretending to be communist. Then they should seek out one which narratively backs Russia’s efforts at fighting Banderite fascism and U.S. hegemony. Or, if such an org isn’t in their area, start their own political project that’s based in this principled anti-imperialist stance. Then work to link this project up with the other groups that are serious about defying NATO. We need to build an anti-imperialist coalition, one that’s not insular but capable of reaching those outside of the “left” spaces.
By creating a synthesis between the domestic battles of the imperial center’s communist movement—most prominently the labor struggle and the struggle for liberating the internal colonies—and the international struggle, we in the beast’s heart can fulfill our own responsibility in this fight. That being to defeat the empire from within, freeing both us and the neo-colonies which Washington can maintain control over even amid its decline. We can’t succeed if the struggle of BRICs and the other global anti-hegemonic forces isn’t successful, yet they also can’t fully succeed if we don’t work to render our government’s warmaking operations untenable. We can do this by combating the empire’s psyops.
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