Fire the Bodyguard, Part Three

Capitalism, the Indispensible System

America, the Indispensible Nation

“Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, called America the ‘indispensable nation’ a decade ago.”

So writes the Wall Street Journal in its lead editorial on Oct. 10, 2009, commenting on the Nobel Peace Prize award to President Barack Obama (attached). The Journal reveled in the delicious irony of Madam Albright’s remark:

Mr. Obama sees the U.S. differently, as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, "can't be met by any one leader or any one nation." What this suggests to us—and to the Norwegians—is the end of what has been called "American exceptionalism." This is the view that U.S. values have universal application and should be promoted without apology, and defended with military force when necessary.

No doubt the former Secretary of State wishes she hadn’t uttered her memorable phrase, or at least that President Obama’s critics hadn’t pounced on it.

But the Journal misinterprets the Nobel Committee’s agenda. It is precisely because “American exceptionalism” has become the world’s rule that the prize was bestowed. Far from attacking American values, the Nobel Committee – and President Obama – reaffirmed them. In the Journal’s own words, “Mr. Obama sees the U.S. … as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, ‘can't be met by any one leader or any one nation’.”

“American exceptionalism” never had anything to do with America’s global power. In decrying the hegemonic presumption associated with being the world’s only superpower, both the Committee and the President actually repudiated the traditional European reliance on upholding powerful states in securing a peaceful and orderly world, through old-fashioned Realpolitik, balance-of-power calculations, and deterrence. Exceptionalism has always stood apart from that “Old World” realm, and counterposed to it the values associated with the American Enlightenment, the values of national self-determination, human rights, anti-imperialism and radical individualism. Exceptionalist doctrine crystallized in the 19^th Century era of American isolation from Europe’s “corruption” and “decadence” and its entangling games of power politics.

Covert European anti-Americanism undoubtedly contributed to the motives of the Nobel Committee, but the values which the Committee publically rewarded, and which President Obama acknowledged in his message of acceptance, were affirmations of precisely the exceptionalism that made America a unique nation, and as such were a fundamental rejection of what might be termed “European exceptionalism.”

The source of the confusion between the ideals of  “American exceptionalism” and the realities of American power lies in the old bipolar world which emerged as the de facto result of World War II. America was obliged to become a superpower by virtue of the fact that if it didn’t, the Soviet Union, by default, would have had the field to itself – unacceptable to everyone (except the Soviets), even the still quite anti-American Europeans. But now the confusion has different roots. The Soviets are defeated, but America remains – as the world’s only superpower!

America now finds itself in a position not unlike that of the world’s economic system, capitalism: hegemonic by virtue of having no substantial  opposition! And the putative opponents of both of these hegemonies end up strengthening them with their anti-establishment effusions. The proponents of American power seek to defend its superpower status by inventing surrogate after surrogate for the old Soviet menace, ranging from Saddam’s Iraq, to Iran, to North Korea, to Islamic terrorism, to rising Chinese economic power, to reborn Russian totalitarianism. You name it, there’s an expert who will forecast it. But the world, and Americans, grow jaded. So the enemies of American power retaliate by seeking to weaken American might. Of course to do so they must strengthen all the global Americanizing tendencies they so loathe.

America defeats her antagonists with the wall of indispensability: you can’t beat somebody with nobody. In other words, if you want to tear down America, you can only do it by Americanizing the world. And that’s where capitalism, the indispensible system, comes in.

Want to defeat America? You’ll have to beat her at her own game.

The Treason of the Right

Sauce for the Gander:

The Treason of the Right

By Tom A. Milstein

July 4, 2002

The Treason of the Liberals – The Goose

For almost half a century, the “Vital Center” of American politics was defined by the dominance of the New Deal coalition of liberals, labor, and minorities. The heritage of FDR and of his redefinition of the role of government in the lives of Americans became the ruling paradigm of electoral politics.  The New Deal was perceived to have confronted the Depression, unified the populace, led the country through the Second World War, and saved America. Its heirs, through subsequent Democratic administrations, would ride into office on the same principles that had secured FDR an unprecedented 4 Presidential terms. Even Republicans had to acquiesce in the all-powerful New Deal model that defined the terms of political discourse.

There was of course significant resistance to the dominance of the New Deal in American life. But it took the New Deal’s enemies 20 years in the political wilderness to find a tactic to begin to undermine its overwhelming popularity, and another 20 years before this tactic finally bore fruit. The key to political redemption for the Republican Right arrived when the always leaky boat of Soviet-American amity foundered on the shoals of Cold War superpower rivalry.

            The Cold War permitted the Republican right to call into question the patriotic credentials of many liberal ideologues associated with the New Deal, thus lending credence to the Right’s longstanding indictment of New Deal “big government” as a socialist plot against American free enterprise virtues. Prior to the Cold War, such charges were rejected by most Americans as reactionary slanders emanating from the Big Business-dominated party of the Great Depression. But after McCarthy, the Rosenberg trial, and the Alger Hiss affair, more and more Americans were prepared to accept the Republican line that the New Deal had indeed been “soft on Communism” and that Democrats could not be trusted to lead the nation against the menace of Soviet totalitarianism.

            Democrats were inclined to dismiss the Republican attack as mere red-baiting propaganda. The fact, however, is that with this attack the Republicans had found a lever by which to attack not only liberal ideological illusions about Communism, but also to discredit the entire apparatus of New Deal intervention in private enterprise. This attack climaxed in the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency of the United States on a platform of overthrowing the New Deal – the real content of the “Reagan Revolution.” And the momentum of the Reagan victory has not faltered to the present day. Not only have the New Deal’s many progressive regulatory, social welfare and pro-labor legislative achievements been undermined or altogether repealed, but the very instrument of these achievements – the federal government as the countervailing democratic arm of the people against the oligarchic power of Big Business and the rich – stands discredited as a quasi-despotic menace to everyday American liberties.

            Liberals still tend to dismiss the success of the Republican counterrevolution against the New Deal as the product of sheer demagogy, and of the general gullibility of the American people in being susceptible to such demagogy. But the Soviet archives, which became available to scholars after the collapse of the Soviet Union, tell a disturbingly different story. They reveal a pattern of energetic Soviet infiltration of the New Deal, mostly through the medium of liberal intellectuals and bureaucrats in the federal government, that is rather astonishing. Some of this infiltration operated through the Communist Party USA, and some of it was run through Russian military and civil intelligence. But all of it amounted to a subversive campaign originally aimed at turning the Liberal-Left camp in American politics into a tool of Soviet foreign policy, and then, when World War II began, at disarming the American government in the struggle against Soviet imperialism. This documentary record quite belies the Liberal whining about absolute innocence and victimization (“Careers ruined! Witchhunt!”) still widespread today.

The treason of certain liberals, of course, had nothing to do with the merits of the New Deal. The Republican equation of Communist totalitarianism with New Deal reforms was completely self-serving. In fact, both the Republican Right and the fellow-traveling Left had a shared interest in maintaining this false amalgam. The Right used it to tear down the New Deal and weaken Big Government. The Stalinoid Left exploited the popularity of New Deal social reforms as a defensive bunker, behind which pro-Soviet sympathies could be disguised as “progressive” politics. Liberalism’s ambivalence toward Communist totalitarianism nevertheless supplied the Republican party with the firepower it needed to blast its way back into political respectability, and gave Ronald Reagan the firepower he needed to accomplish what previous Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon failed to do, even when they won elections: blow the New Deal to smithereens.

The Treason of the Conservatives – The Gander

The old saying applies here: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Republican Right now finds itself in the same un-American stewpot in which it was only too pleased to locate the liberal Democrats during the Cold War. Only now, treason originates not with ideology, the liberal Left’s God That Failed, but with money, the conservative Right’s God That Succeeded.

The vicious and bloodthirsty attack on America that took place on September 11, 2001 was carried out by mostly Saudi Arabian and Egyptian nationals who acted at the behest of a radical Islamic doctrine inspired by Wahhabi religious fanatics. These fanatics, fervent religious totalitarians subsidized by the wealth of the Saudi oil cartel, led by a scion of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest family, and inspired by the official theology of the Saudi state, organized a worldwide criminal conspiracy and gained control of a ruined state, Afghanistan. From this secure base, they launched numerous attacks on American interests around the world, taking hundreds of lives. Eventually they crossed a border hardly dreamed of by the Soviets or the Nazis, attacking America in its homeland. That they did these hateful things is testimony to the totalitarian intensity of their version of the Islamic faith, to its annihilative hatred of the West, of modernity and of modernity’s great symbol, America.

But 9/11 is also testimony to something else, something indigenous to America: a genuine Fifth Column of American supporters of Saudi Arabia, motivated not by worship of Allah, but of the Almighty dollar, whose pagan rites are performed at the Shrine of the Oil Cartel. American defenders of the oil cartel maintain a sublime and criminal indifference to the raging anti-Americanism of their Saudi clients, an indifference sustained by the steady flow of liquid gold from the Middle Eastern oil patch. It was this Fifth Column of oil-based wealth that left America defenseless against the plots of Osama bin Laden – not by being his co-conspirators, but by systematically shielding their revered honeypot, Saudi Arabia, from the Congressional, intelligence and military scrutiny to which its role as bin Laden’s shadow bank and church entitle it.

Cartel wealth pays for vast influence in and among the rich in America, operating through the great multinational banking and brokerage houses, the energy companies, the media conglomerates, the conservative think tanks, and all the other eminently respectable institutions of the rich. The tentacles of this influence uncoil across America like a vast octopus made out of money – oil money. In this respect it behaves quite similarly to Rightist depictions of Communist influence in America during the McCarthy era, except that its power derives from the power of money rather than ideology.

This Saudi octopus reaches into the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Department, and all the other agencies of the Federal Government charged by the Constitution with the responsibility for protecting and defending the American people from foreign attack. It also intervenes in American electoral politics, mainly by deploying its vast supplies of wealth in and through the party of wealth, the Republican party. This party has no natural defenses against the power of money, since it is organically incapable of imagining that money and patriotism can ever come into contradiction. Just as much of the old Liberal left operated with the disastrous slogan “No enemies on the Left,” the Republican Right operates on the principle of “No enemies on the way to the bank.”

With subversive techniques no less sinister than those employed by Soviet agents in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, Saudi wealth, operating mainly through its conservative Republican stooges, neutralizes the nation’s defenses. The role of Saudi Arabia in the world is depicted as “moderate,” even as American military bases are blown up, American naval vessels are attacked, and American embassies are truck-bombed by Al Qaeda operatives subsidized by Saudi wealth and inspired by Saudi Wahhabi religious doctrine. Any American intelligence agent, military or civilian, who tries to explore this Saudi role soon learns how careers are ruined in government service.

            The American henchmen of the Saudi oil cartel need to be exposed by the uncorrupted media; they need to be investigated by Congressional committees and American security organizations just as their Left-wing cousins were in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Their wealth must not be allowed to shield them from inquiry, any more than political influence and social connections were permitted to protect Alger Hiss. If their service to the Saudis is found to transgress the bounds of patriotism, they should be brought to the same bar of justice that the Rosenbergs and Hiss were. There cannot be a double standard in this country, one for leftist traitors and another for their rightist kin.

Osama bin Laden slaughtered more Americans on September 11, 2001 than the Japanese sneak attack killed on December 7, 1941. Notwithstanding the partially successful American military campaign in Afghanistan, the death of those Americans remains unavenged as long as the oil cartel survives. Whoever seeks to distract American attention from this goal is guilty of placing private financial advantage over duty to country. Such persons are scoundrels. Let them – at long last – be shamed, and driven from the legitimate counsels of the Republic.

Goose Story

Sauce for the Gander:

The Treason of the Right

By Tom A. Milstein

July 4, 2002

The Treason of the Liberals – The Goose

For almost half a century, the “Vital Center” of American politics was defined by the dominance of the New Deal coalition of liberals, labor, and minorities. The heritage of FDR and of his redefinition of the role of government in the lives of Americans became the ruling paradigm of electoral politics.  The New Deal was perceived to have confronted the Depression, unified the populace, led the country through the Second World War, and saved America. Its heirs, through subsequent Democratic administrations, would ride into office on the same principles that had secured FDR an unprecedented 4 Presidential terms. Even Republicans had to acquiesce in the all-powerful New Deal model that defined the terms of political discourse.

There was of course significant resistance to the dominance of the New Deal in American life. But it took the New Deal’s enemies 20 years in the political wilderness to find a tactic to begin to undermine its overwhelming popularity, and another 20 years before this tactic finally bore fruit. The key to political redemption for the Republican Right arrived when the always leaky boat of Soviet-American amity foundered on the shoals of Cold War superpower rivalry.

            The Cold War permitted the Republican right to call into question the patriotic credentials of many liberal ideologues associated with the New Deal, thus lending credence to the Right’s longstanding indictment of New Deal “big government” as a socialist plot against American free enterprise virtues. Prior to the Cold War, such charges were rejected by most Americans as reactionary slanders emanating from the Big Business-dominated party of the Great Depression. But after McCarthy, the Rosenberg trial, and the Alger Hiss affair, more and more Americans were prepared to accept the Republican line that the New Deal had indeed been “soft on Communism” and that Democrats could not be trusted to lead the nation against the menace of Soviet totalitarianism.

            Democrats were inclined to dismiss the Republican attack as mere red-baiting propaganda. The fact, however, is that with this attack the Republicans had found a lever by which to attack not only liberal ideological illusions about Communism, but also to discredit the entire apparatus of New Deal intervention in private enterprise. This attack climaxed in the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency of the United States on a platform of overthrowing the New Deal – the real content of the “Reagan Revolution.” And the momentum of the Reagan victory has not faltered to the present day. Not only have the New Deal’s many progressive regulatory, social welfare and pro-labor legislative achievements been undermined or altogether repealed, but the very instrument of these achievements – the federal government as the countervailing democratic arm of the people against the oligarchic power of Big Business and the rich – stands discredited as a quasi-despotic menace to everyday American liberties.

            Liberals still tend to dismiss the success of the Republican counterrevolution against the New Deal as the product of sheer demagogy, and of the general gullibility of the American people in being susceptible to such demagogy. But the Soviet archives, which became available to scholars after the collapse of the Soviet Union, tell a disturbingly different story. They reveal a pattern of energetic Soviet infiltration of the New Deal, mostly through the medium of liberal intellectuals and bureaucrats in the federal government, that is rather astonishing. Some of this infiltration operated through the Communist Party USA, and some of it was run through Russian military and civil intelligence. But all of it amounted to a subversive campaign originally aimed at turning the Liberal-Left camp in American politics into a tool of Soviet foreign policy, and then, when World War II began, at disarming the American government in the struggle against Soviet imperialism. This documentary record quite belies the Liberal whining about absolute innocence and victimization (“Careers ruined! Witchhunt!”) still widespread today.

The treason of certain liberals, of course, had nothing to do with the merits of the New Deal. The Republican equation of Communist totalitarianism with New Deal reforms was completely self-serving. In fact, both the Republican Right and the fellow-traveling Left had a shared interest in maintaining this false amalgam. The Right used it to tear down the New Deal and weaken Big Government. The Stalinoid Left exploited the popularity of New Deal social reforms as a defensive bunker, behind which pro-Soviet sympathies could be disguised as “progressive” politics. Liberalism’s ambivalence toward Communist totalitarianism nevertheless supplied the Republican party with the firepower it needed to blast its way back into political respectability, and gave Ronald Reagan the firepower he needed to accomplish what previous Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon failed to do, even when they won elections: blow the New Deal to smithereens.

The Treason of the Conservatives – The Gander

The old saying applies here: what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Republican Right now finds itself in the same un-American stewpot in which it was only too pleased to locate the liberal Democrats during the Cold War. Only now, treason originates not with ideology, the liberal Left’s God That Failed, but with money, the conservative Right’s God That Succeeded.

The vicious and bloodthirsty attack on America that took place on September 11, 2001 was carried out by mostly Saudi Arabian and Egyptian nationals who acted at the behest of a radical Islamic doctrine inspired by Wahhabi religious fanatics. These fanatics, fervent religious totalitarians subsidized by the wealth of the Saudi oil cartel, led by a scion of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest family, and inspired by the official theology of the Saudi state, organized a worldwide criminal conspiracy and gained control of a ruined state, Afghanistan. From this secure base, they launched numerous attacks on American interests around the world, taking hundreds of lives. Eventually they crossed a border hardly dreamed of by the Soviets or the Nazis, attacking America in its homeland. That they did these hateful things is testimony to the totalitarian intensity of their version of the Islamic faith, to its annihilative hatred of the West, of modernity and of modernity’s great symbol, America.

But 9/11 is also testimony to something else, something indigenous to America: a genuine Fifth Column of American supporters of Saudi Arabia, motivated not by worship of Allah, but of the Almighty dollar, whose pagan rites are performed at the Shrine of the Oil Cartel. American defenders of the oil cartel maintain a sublime and criminal indifference to the raging anti-Americanism of their Saudi clients, an indifference sustained by the steady flow of liquid gold from the Middle Eastern oil patch. It was this Fifth Column of oil-based wealth that left America defenseless against the plots of Osama bin Laden – not by being his co-conspirators, but by systematically shielding their revered honeypot, Saudi Arabia, from the Congressional, intelligence and military scrutiny to which its role as bin Laden’s shadow bank and church entitle it.

Cartel wealth pays for vast influence in and among the rich in America, operating through the great multinational banking and brokerage houses, the energy companies, the media conglomerates, the conservative think tanks, and all the other eminently respectable institutions of the rich. The tentacles of this influence uncoil across America like a vast octopus made out of money – oil money. In this respect it behaves quite similarly to Rightist depictions of Communist influence in America during the McCarthy era, except that its power derives from the power of money rather than ideology.

This Saudi octopus reaches into the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Defense Department, and all the other agencies of the Federal Government charged by the Constitution with the responsibility for protecting and defending the American people from foreign attack. It also intervenes in American electoral politics, mainly by deploying its vast supplies of wealth in and through the party of wealth, the Republican party. This party has no natural defenses against the power of money, since it is organically incapable of imagining that money and patriotism can ever come into contradiction. Just as much of the old Liberal left operated with the disastrous slogan “No enemies on the Left,” the Republican Right operates on the principle of “No enemies on the way to the bank.”

With subversive techniques no less sinister than those employed by Soviet agents in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, Saudi wealth, operating mainly through its conservative Republican stooges, neutralizes the nation’s defenses. The role of Saudi Arabia in the world is depicted as “moderate,” even as American military bases are blown up, American naval vessels are attacked, and American embassies are truck-bombed by Al Qaeda operatives subsidized by Saudi wealth and inspired by Saudi Wahhabi religious doctrine. Any American intelligence agent, military or civilian, who tries to explore this Saudi role soon learns how careers are ruined in government service.

            The American henchmen of the Saudi oil cartel need to be exposed by the uncorrupted media; they need to be investigated by Congressional committees and American security organizations just as their Left-wing cousins were in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Their wealth must not be allowed to shield them from inquiry, any more than political influence and social connections were permitted to protect Alger Hiss. If their service to the Saudis is found to transgress the bounds of patriotism, they should be brought to the same bar of justice that the Rosenbergs and Hiss were. There cannot be a double standard in this country, one for leftist traitors and another for their rightist kin.

Osama bin Laden slaughtered more Americans on September 11, 2001 than the Japanese sneak attack killed on December 7, 1941. Notwithstanding the partially successful American military campaign in Afghanistan, the death of those Americans remains unavenged as long as the oil cartel survives. Whoever seeks to distract American attention from this goal is guilty of placing private financial advantage over duty to country. Such persons are scoundrels. Let them – at long last – be shamed, and driven from the legitimate counsels of the Republic.