No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power!
When the oppressed man finds no justice,
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals
With fearless heart to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as stars themselves.

-Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell’s Rutli Oath

Who would have thought that Canada would ever be a spark plug for a freedom movement against tyranny?

As the editor of a Canadian geopolitical magazine for over 10 years and author of four books on Canadian History, I am a bit embarrassed to say that I certainly didn’t think that Canadians had this in them.

The “monarchy of the north” certainly isn’t something that exudes revolutionary sentiment- having been founded on such non-revolutionary principles as “Peace, Order and Good Governance” which have stood in stark contrast to the significantly more inspiring “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” enshrined in the founding documents of our southern cousins. Even our founding 1867 document (drafted over a champagne fueled month of hedonism in 1864) explicitly calls out the purpose of confederation not as a means of “supporting the general welfare” as was the case of the USA’s constitution in 1787, but rather “to promote the interests of the British Empire”.

But here it is.

Countless thousands of patriots have driven across the country to bunker down in Ottawa in peace and high festive spirits which I had to see with my own eyes to believe demanding something so simple and un-tainted by ideology: freedom to work, provide for families and a respect for basic rights as laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (a 1982 upgrade to the embarrassingly oligarchical British North America Act of 1867).

Mainstream media and political hacks have been working overtime to paint the Freedom convoy that converged on Ottawa on January 29 as an “insurrectionist movement” full of “white supremacists”, “Russian stooges”, and “Nazis” out to “overthrow the government”. Even the Bank of England’s former governor (and World Economic Forum Trustee) Mark Carney chimed in on February 7 stating that “this is sedition” and that “those who are still helping to extend this occupation must be identified and punished to the full force of the law”. Carney, the perennial financial darling of Goldman Sachs and the City of London (and Prime Ministerial hopeful) called for a targeting of all those who donated money to this domestic terror operation.

Faced with an organic civil rights movement of blue-collar truckers, farmers and tens of thousands of supporters who have convened on Canada’s capital to demand a restoration of their basic freedoms, the current Liberal government has failed to show even an ounce of humanity or capacity to negotiate. This shouldn’t be a surprise for those who have seen the hypocrisy of neo-liberal “rules-based” order ideologues in action over the past few years who are quick to celebrate the “liberty” of citizens of Ukraine, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang when the outcome benefits the geopolitical aims of detached technocrats hungry for global hegemony. The moment genuine self-organized labor movements arise demanding basic rights be recognized, then the masks comes off and the rage of tyrants show their true faces.

So instead of negotiation and discussion around principled constitutional issues as the protestors have requested, we have instead seen only threats, slander and more threats ranging from cutting off $10 million of funding raised on GoFundMe on February 4, and then another $8 million raised on GiveSendGo on February 10. We have seen the government impose a state of emergency first in the city of Ottawa followed by a full province wide state of emergency on February 11 justifying cutting off vital supplies of fuel to those truckers and their families who have been camped out in -22 degree Celsius temperatures. Edicts making it illegal to provide supplies to the protestors under threat of fines ranging up to $100 thousand dollars and one year in prison have been drafted and the patriotic citizens who have organized for their right to not live under a dictatorship have been stigmatized by the media relentlessly as “insurgents”.

Emergency Measures Act invoked

Then on February 14, Justin Trudeau, followed by Deputy Prime Minister and WEF-Trustee Chrystia Freeland took turns announcing the invocation of the Emergency Measures Act which itself had formerly been known as “The War Measures Act” last invoked nearly 50 years earlier by Justin’s father Pierre Elliot Trudeau as a “solution” to the RCMP-directed terror cells deployed across Quebec and culminating in the month-long ‘October Crisis’ of 1970. The name was changed in 1988 although it is in function entirely identical.

Under the Emergency Measures Act, the Deep State of Canada managing Trudeau has adopted the Mark Carney program outlined on February 7 of targeting bank accounts of all Canadians either involved with the convoy directly or having supported the convoy via online donations or cryptocurrencies. What might those individuals suffer for the crime of having offered support or participation in the protests? Those ‘deplorable insurgents’ are facing the threat of seeing their bank accounts indefinitely frozen, and if they own businesses, having their insurance policies cancelled. The ‘big 5’ banks of Canada have thus been “deputized” and given full legal protections from being sued by those whose lives will be damaged by the shutdown of bank accounts.

One thing has become apparent thus far: the threats are not working with truckers and other protestors renewing their commitments to remain in place and even four Provincial Premiers (from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Manitoba) denouncing the emergency measures.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has also loudly denounced the Act saying “the federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the emergencies act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: The act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes… Emergencies Act can only be invoked when a situation ‘seriously threatens the ability of the government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada’ and when the situation ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada”.

Fissures Across the Establishment

Due to the inflexible Borg-like inability to negotiate with an organic civil rights movement suffered by all technocratic Davos-creatures, major fissures have begun to break throughout the political establishment of Canada.

Already two members of the Liberal Party have gone renegade breaking with Canada’s holy system of whips and loyalty to party above conscience demanding that Trudeau repeal the immensely unpopular and useless covid measures. On February 8, Liberal MP Joel Lightbound commented that Trudeau’s vile generalizations of the protestors have only served to “wedge divide and stigmatize” Canadians making the point that he has only seen a wide diversity of races attend the freedom convoy in Ottawa and across the provinces. One day later, a second Liberal MP Yves Robillard broke party ranks re-emphasizing his support for Lightbound’s statements and warned that many others within the party share these dissenting views and will soon speak out if changes are not effected soon.

In the Conservative Party, a coup of sorts took place on February 3 when opposition leader Erin O’Toole was ousted by his own caucus for sounding too much like a World Economic Forum ghoul and for the first time in over two years, an actual counter voice of opposition can be heard in the halls of parliament with demands by every single Conservative member of parliament to end the lockdown mandates and support the nation-wide protest movement.

On provincial levels, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and PEI have announced a repeal of their covid mandates including vaccination passports, while Quebec has stepped back from the anti-vaccination tax which was threatened by Premier Legault until only a week ago.

Even NDP head Jagmeet Singh who had labelled all protestors white supremacists just a few days ago reversed his tune- perhaps due to the overwhelming presence of Sikhs in the federal and provincial convoys.

Freedom Convoy Nightmares for Technocrats in USA and Europe

Meanwhile the Biden Administration has given its full support to Justin Trudeau to use the full force of federal power to shut down the protests (conflagrating the blockade of US-Canada trade in Windsor and Manitoba as being tied directly to the Ottawa protests… which it isn’t).

Perhaps Biden is concerned that the example of the convoy has spread not only across nations of the Trans Atlantic Community and Five Eyes cage, but also to the USA itself where a parallel American freedom convoy will leave Southern California for Washington D.C. on March 5 involving tens of thousands of American truckers.

Former Obama Asst. Sec. of Homeland Security and frequent CNN commentator Juliette Kayyem delivered her disturbing comments to this festering problem which must be stopped at all costs saying: “Trust me, I will not run out of ways to make this hurt: cancel their insurance; suspend their drivers licenses’ prohibit any future regulatory certification for truckers etc. Have we learned nothing? These things faster when there are no consequences”

How this process will unfold in the coming days and weeks is impossible to determine. The illusion of liberal democracy which fueled self-aggrandizing virtue signaling technocrats lecturing “bad” authoritarian states of Eurasia how freedom should work has collapsed.

One thing is certain.

Those tyrants living in their ivory tower echo chambers demanding the world to conform to their ideal post-nation state utopias are panicking as they have no idea how to interact with actual human beings organizing themselves around such non-mathematical principles as “freedom”, “justice” and “rights” which are inalienable to all citizens- even if they live under a monarchy.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

“Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and lobal Sustainable Development” 4 February 2022. (English) (Russian).

This document is the grand strategic manifesto of a new world order and there is much more to be said about it than what follows. I believe that 4 February 2022 will be remembered as the proclamation of a new disposition of world power and relationships.

It is a truly new order of things, not the old “new world order” which was based on US supremacy. And it is most certainly not the so-called Rules-Based International Order in which one side makes up the rules, breaks them when it wants to and orders everyone else to obey. (A perfect example of the mutability of the “rules” is that gay rights are very important in Russia but not at all in Washington’s new “major ally” of Qatar.) The old “new world order” was always about making them conform to us: “The foremost goal of US strategy should be to cause China’s ruling elites to conclude that it is in China’s best interests to continue operating within the US-led liberal international order…”

The Russian-Chinese document speaks much of “democracy” but it’s a different vision than the one common in the West. The West today is focussed on the process of democracy – was the voting up to acceptable standards? Did the opposition have a fair chance? were there enough candidates? was the advertising even-handed? were “administrative resources” used to shift the vote? and like questions. Never mind that the West is often hypocritical in its discussion – microscopes analyse the treatment of dissidents in Russia and but the house arrest and treason charges against opposition figures in Ukraine are ignored – these are the metrics used in the West’s assessment of whether a country is “democratic” or not. Now it may well be that fifty or sixty years ago concentrating on the process of democracy was appropriate but it is very questionable whether it is today. This one graph, showing the relationship between productivity and wages and compensation shows that all is not well. Up until the late 1970s, the two curves kept step with each other – the “rising tide” was indeed lifting all boats. Afterwards, however, they diverge until today there is a considerable gap between the two “Productivity has grown 3.5x as much as pay”. The rising tide is floating only a few super yachts. The richest one percent owned six times as much as the bottom fifty percent in 1989, now it’s 15 times as much. A Princeton University study in 2014 concluded “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose“. These findings suggest that, however good the process may be, the δεμος does not have much κρατος.

The Russian-Chinese document speaks of the results of democracy.

The sides believe that democracy is a means of citizens’ participation in the government of their country with the view to improving the well-being of population and implementing the principle of popular government.

Note the purpose: “improving the well-being of population”. Whatever one may say about the process of the governance of China or Russia, no one can doubt that the well-being of the population has mightily improved in both countries. We shall see for the future how this holds up but the document describes a different approach to democracy: don’t concentrate on the process and assume the results will follow – which they are not doing in the USA in particular and the West in general – but instead never mind the process, ask whether the are results desirable? Throughout the document – fifty times – we see the word “development” (“развитие” in the Russian version).

The sides believe that peace, development and cooperation lie at the core of the modern international system.

A world in which everyone has a chance to get rich. And who can doubt that the government in Beijing knows how to do that? We will see, in the coming world competition of ideas, which approach is more attractive and successful.

A second theme, repeated throughout the document is that all countries are equal and they have their own ways of doing things, it is their right to do this, no one may preach to them and no one may interfere with them.

The sides call for the establishment of a new kind of relationship between world powers on the basis of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation.

This is what might be called a descriptive take on the world rather than the prescriptive take more common in the West. To explain what I mean, let us consider Soviet-Polish relations. Although it’s very unfashionable to admit it today, Warsaw, as the first country to form a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany and by its refusal to allow Soviet troops into its territory to fight Germany, played a consequential role in the outbreak of the war. Poland suffered terribly, losing 20-25% of its population and was liberated by the Soviet Army after immense destruction. Stalin then designed a Poland which, for the first time in its long history, included all of the historical Polish lands and no irredentist minorities. Then imposed the blessing – or so Moscow saw it – of socialism and transformed Poland into a loyal ally of the USSR. Except that, the moment it became clear that the tanks weren’t coming, Poland quit the alliance, threw off socialism and turned to NATO and the EU. All the “fraternal, socialist, ally” rhetoric turned out to be empty declarations of people compelled to say them. In other words, the lesson is that you can’t change a country except temporarily by force or very slowly over a very long time. Moscow has learned this lesson. Hence my use of the world “descriptive” – countries, quite simply, are what they are and outsiders can’t change them; therefore outsiders have to live with them. It’s that simple: the prescriptive notion – we have the truth and you should follow it (we must make Beijing follow the “US-led liberal international order”) simply can’t be done. Therefore, the emphasis throughout the document that countries are as they are and are to be treated as equals is firmly based on reality. You can’t make a particular country go along with your notions of propriety but you still have to deal with it: treat it as it is. The West has long lost sight of this despite its numerous failures of prescription: even if the Western ideas actually were “better”, you can’t bomb Afghans into accepting them. Therefore, this position in the document is quite simply realistic and practical.

I have said before that Russia, in the communist days, was an “exceptionalist state” and so was China under Mao. They then regarded themselves as a pattern for others to follow – a pattern that others should follow – and the USSR imposed that pattern on many of its neighbours. Both Beijing and Moscow have learned that exceptionalism is a route to failure. Therefore, what I am calling a “descriptive” approach to world variety is the result of the failure of trying a prescriptive approach. This is not, therefore, a point of view adopted to gull people into acquiescence, it is one that is based on cold, bitter experience. It is a lesson that Washington has not yet learned: exceptionalism is a road to a blind alley, as Putin put it a quarter century ago. It is, in fact, something the West should remember: “Westphalianism” is the principle of cuius regio, eius religio adopted after Europeans had torn themselves apart trying to impose religion on each other. Not uniformity, but variety. The China-Russia manifesto is rooted on a truth that not only they, but Europe as a whole, have learned the hard way.

The Chinese-Russia relationship is described as follows:

They reaffirm that the new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ”forbidden“ areas of cooperation, strengthening of bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.

Time will show just what is meant by this but it is clear that it is a relationship both deep and wide. A complete commonality of interest which is not uniformity of interest. (It will be amusing to watch Western “experts” fail to get that distinction.) And not one to be easily split apart as some naïve people in Washington think. They trust each other and neither trusts Washington.

Finally, the new world order that they are calling for is described as:

The sides reiterate the need for consolidation, not division of the international community, the need for cooperation, not confrontation. The sides oppose the return of international relations to the state of confrontation between major powers, when the weak fall prey to the strong. The sides intend to resist attempts to substitute universally recognized formats and mechanisms that are consistent with international law for rules elaborated in private by certain nations or blocs of nations…

A new world order for all, not just those who accept “the better way”.

I would expect, as details are filled in at the “strategic” and “operational” level, that this “grand strategic vision” will prove to be widely attractive across the globe. Washington and its allies will, no doubt, concentrate on the many criticisms of its behaviour, but the manifesto is positive in tone.

People are attracted to success and the West doesn’t project that any more.

Russia Observer via unz.com

“What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people.”

What did John Adams mean when he wrote this to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, after both had served as president?

Adams was saying that America, the country that took up arms and fought for its independence from the British, was already a nation — before 1775.

America preexisted the Constitution, Adams is saying. America had been conceived and born before he and Jefferson began to write its Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776. America had come into being even before Lexington and Concord in 1775.

A corollary of what Adams wrote is that America, and the republic created by the Constitution, are not the same thing.

While America is a country, a republic is the form of government created for that country in Philadelphia in 1787.

“A republic if you can keep it,” said Ben Franklin to the lady who had asked what kind of government they had created for the already existing nation, when he emerged from that constitutional convention.

What, then, are our elites bewailing when they say that populists, rightists and Trumpists have put “our democracy” at risk?

Answer: It is not America the country or America the nation they are referring to, but our political system as it has evolved.

And what is the nature of the threat they see?

A precondition of democracy is that the results of elections be recognized and respected, and if repeatedly challenged, this is a mortal threat. And this is the present peril.

Yet, there are other preconditions, not only for democracies but for countries, that were enumerated in The Federalist Papers:

“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs … ”

“This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”

John Jay was describing the preconditions of a nation, a country, a people. Do these preconditions still exist in America?

“One united people”? “A band of brethren”? A common ancestry, common religion, common language, common customs and manners?

That may describe the America of 1789. Does it describe the America of 2022? Or does Jay’s phrase, “a number of unsocial, jealous and alien sovereignties,” better describe the America of today?

Hillary Clinton once wrote off half of Trump’s supporters, nearly one-fourth of the nation, as “a basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic … bigots,” who are “irredeemable.”

Assume that our elites, who often echo what Hillary Clinton said of the populist Trumpist right, agree with her.

Why would virtuous liberals wish to continue in political association with people like this? Why would they not declare that, if an election again delivers rule to such people, we want no part of the system or polity that produced so intolerable an outcome?

Why would the capture of all three branches of government by people such as Hillary Clinton describes not be cause for dissolving the Union?

How could democracy be a superior form of government, if it could deliver the republic to people such as these, and perhaps twice?

If the progressives’ enemies are “Nazis” and “fascists,” why would progressives not rise in resistance and reject their rule, rather than cooperate with them in the governance of the country?

Why would good people not battle to overturn an election that produced a majority for such “deplorables”?

Do the commands of democracy take precedence over the demands of decency? Rather than govern in concert with people like this, why not get as far removed from them as possible?

The point here: Not only may the preconditions of democracy be disappearing, but the preconditions of nationhood may be disintegrating.

Again, the American right is today routinely compared to Nazis, fascists and Klansmen. Why would good liberal Democrats accept an electoral victory and future rule by Nazis and fascists rather than seek to overturn it, by whatever means necessary?

And how do you hold up American democracy as a model to mankind if, after two centuries, it has produced scores of millions of citizens like those described by Hillary Clinton?

And, again, if the preconditions of democracy are vanishing, and the preconditions of nationhood are disappearing, is not secession of some kind inevitable and even desirable?

Ultimately, the logic of our situation must lead us to consider something like this. Western Maryland’s attempt to secede and join West Virginia, and Eastern Oregon’s attempt to secede and join Idaho, may be harbingers of what is to come.

creators.com

The surveillance activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Portland and other American cities earlier this year is reminiscent of FBI-CIA-NSA efforts to disrupt anti-Vietnam protest groups in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2021, FBI agents, dressed in plainclothes,  were embedded in Portland’s racial justice protests.  Agents alerted local police to potential arrests. The Department of Justice and its Office of the Inspector General must investigate these activities closely because they replicate the illegal activities of the FBI’s counterintelligence program during the Cold War.

The FBI has been conducting domestic surveillance operations since its inception in the 1920s, marking nearly a hundred years of violating the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Very few of these operations involved the investigation and gathering of evidence of a serious crime, the only justification for FBI surveillance.  J. Edgar Hoover, appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in1924, amassed illegal powers of surveillance that enabled him to conduct extra-legal tracking of activists, collect compromising information, and even to threaten and intimidate sitting presidents.

Hoover created the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1950s to counter the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, but it morphed into a program of covert and illegal activities to disrupt numerous political organizations, particularly the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights organizations of the 1960s and 1970s.  He exaggerated the threat of communism to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.  (The Pentagon similarly exaggerates the Russian and Chinese threats to elicit greater defense spending, such as the record-setting budget that President Biden signed on Monday.)  When Supreme Court decisions made it more difficult to prosecute individuals for their political opinions, Hoover formalized a covert “dirty tricks” program that included illegal wiretaps, forged documents, and burglaries.

The FBI programs were ostensibly designed to protect U.S. national security, but targets were typically nonviolent and had no connections with foreign powers.  Martin Luther King Jr. became a major target when he emerged as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement. Hoover authorized an anonymous blackmail letter to King in 1964, urging him to commit suicide.  The FBI worked to widen the rift between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, which ultimately led to Malcolm’s assassination in 1965.

COINTELPRO soon expanded to include the illegal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense.  From the Church Committee hearings in 1975, we learned that NSA worked with Western Union to collect copies of telegrams that entered and left the United States.  The FBI worked with AT&T to eavesdrop on domestic political opponents and civil rights advocates.  The CIA program, aptly named Operation Chaos, was late to the game in 1967, cooperating with the White House to investigate the anti-war movement and to find evidence of Soviet control.  There was none.  In any event, the CIA charter prevents any involvement in domestic operations for any reason.

The Congress developed a law to regulate surveillance for national security purposes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which led to the creation of a secret court that approved nearly every U.S. request for secret surveillance against U.S. citizens.  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ultimately expanded secret powers that allowed warrantless surveillance on domestic soil.  A top-secret FISA Court order required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed to domestic calls to NSA.

The NSA’s involvement in massive surveillance against U.S. citizens was exposed by the revelations of Edward Snowden ten years ago.  Snowden leaked an internal NSA directive that told its employees to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities.  It noted, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”  Snowden has been vilified, although his public service alerted the entire country to the dangers of massive surveillance.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has a full slate of possible investigations regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the role of the FBI in Portland and other U.S. cities must not be ignored. (It is noteworthy that there was no FBI presence on the Hill on January 6.)  FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress in September 2020 that the domestic terrorist investigations were “properly predicated” regarding “violent anarchist extremists.”  He provided no evidence to support the surveillance of political gatherings, which demands a high bar to allow such activities.  Unfortunately, we know a great deal more about the surveillance activities of Russia and China against its own citizens than we know about the role of the FBI in “spying” on democracy at home.

Following a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General has begun an investigation of the FBI’s role in Portland.  The Portland protests were consistent with free speech activities that didn’t require a FBI presence.  The FBI is authorized to conduct surveillance when there is a threat of federal crimes or a risk to national security.  The Department of Homeland also took part in the surveillance, compiling intelligence reports on protesters without any legal justification.  DHS did its best to conceal identities and affiliations of its officials.

George Orwell’s “1984” represented the all-seeing state with a two-way television set installed in every home.  Today’s location-tracking cell phones provide actual access and too much power over our lives.  There is far too much unmonitored federal surveillance and unregulated cyber-surveillance.  The combination of modern technology; a seemingly unlimited budget for intelligence operations; and the secret accumulation of a surveillance bureaucracy has created an unacceptable degree of “spying on democracy.”

Unfortunately, the American public has ignored policies and political actions that in fact weaken U.S. stature abroad and our democracy at home.  The anti-war movement and the arms control lobby are endangered institutions. According to the New York Times, U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians with virtually no effort from the Pentagon to discern how many were killed and what went wrong.  According to Airwars, a nonprofit organization, the United States has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,00 civilian deaths.

The Pentagon and the CIA used sadistic torture and abuse, but faced no accountability.  CIA Director John Brennan even tried to block the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of these programs, but suffered no consequences despite the obvious violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.  Meanwhile, President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex have been ignored.  As a result, our bloated defense spending has limited opportunities to expand needed domestic programs and to rebuild infrastructure.

It takes physical courage to fight our wars, but it takes moral courage to expose the illegalities of our military involvement.  We need more dissidents and whistleblowers to expose the secrecy and lies that often accompany our national security decision making.  The overuse of secrecy limits our debate on foreign policy and deprives citizens of information needed to debate life-and-death issues. A culture of openness is needed to remedy the decision making of the past 20 years that resulted in so much harm to our governance and democracy.

counterpunch.org

By Bradley DEVLIN

Recently, Ukrainian authorities announced former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko under formal investigation for high treason, the same charge his predecessor was convicted of just two years ago. Does this sound like a kind of democracy worth shedding American blood to save?

The treasonous activity, according to Ukrainian officials, is his alleged material support of pro-Russia separatist forces in the Donbas. The investigation into the Ukrainian former President emerged from similar charges brought against Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian lawmaker in the For Life Party with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, for allegedly working with officials in Poroshenko’s administration to buy coal mines in the Donbas to finance separatist efforts. The For Life Party has denied any wrongdoing by Medvedchuk, who has spent the past six months under house arrest.

Poroshenko’s European Solidarity Party has also stood behind the former President. A statement from European Solidarity Party’s Oleksander Turchynov claimed that the allegations against Poroshenko were a fabrication from current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and would “turn into a farce just like all the previous ones.”

The allegations against Poroshenko are shocking, much less because he staked the precipice of his political career on taking back the Crimean Peninsula from Russia and quashing the separatists, whom he called terrorists and likened to Somali pirates, in the Donbas. During his tenure, Poroshenko ratcheted up Ukraine’s war in the Donbas to put the screws on Russia-backed separatists.

Poroshenko is now the second consecutive Ukrainian president to face accusations of high treason after leaving power. His predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was convicted of high treason, among other crimes, in January of 2019 for his actions against the Euromaidan demonstrators and his capitulation to the Russian military that wanted to intervene to support him. His sentence, handed down in absentia because he still resides in exile in Russia, was 13 years in prison.

Yanukovych was ousted from power in February 2014 after violent clashes between Euromaidan demonstrators and Ukrainian police forces, which resulted in the deaths of well over 100 protestors and 18 police officers. The Euromaidan demonstrations broke out in the wake of Yanukovych’s decision to back away from the Association Agreement with the European Union after Russia gave the Ukrainians an economic ultimatum and Brussels refused to acknowledge the reality of the destabilizing unrest.

It’s easy to write off Yanukovych, an ethnic Russian, as another Putin puppet, as the western media and political establishment has since his ousting. But Yanukovych’s tenure is much more complex than his opponents would have you believe. An ethnic Russian himself, Yanukovych was elected in 2010 by getting just over one-third of the country’s vote, primarily from ethnically-Russian regions. Instantly, Yanukovych found himself between a rock and a hard place. His constituents from ethnically Russian areas were not as keen on furthering European integration as western Ukrainians were, and neither the Association Agreement nor a customs union deal with Russia had the support of a majority of Ukrainians. Yanukovych was expected to continue down the path of European integration, and did for quite some time before the aforementioned ultimatum given to him by Putin.

Rather than recognizing the bind that Ukraine found itself in and that Yanukovych had successfully enacted a number of hotly-contested liberal reforms Brussels demanded with two-thirds majority support in the Verkhovna Rada, the E.U. continued to make big asks of Ukraine. One such demand was dialing back the criminal prosecution brought against former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko for abusing her power during a negotiation of a gas deal with Russia in 2009, which resulted in a seven-year prison sentence in 2011. The U.S. and a number of European countries, even Russia, suggested it was a political prosecution. Brussels claimed Ukraine jeopardized a trade agreement with the E.U. if it failed to release Tymoshenko from prison to receive medical treatment abroad. However, the Rada failed to pass a motion for Tymoshenko’s release.

The negotiations now laid in shambles, and though Yanukovych called for a trilateral negotiation between Ukraine, the E.U, and Russia, but Brussels refused. Thus, the Euromaidan protests, openly egged on by the United States and other western nations, continued to gain momentum, causing Yanukovych to turn to Russia in a last ditch effort to prevent further destabilization. The effort obviously failed.

Certainly, the western liberal establishment bears responsibility for Ukrainian democracy’s current shortcomings, where former leaders are summarily charged with high treason. The truth is that Ukraine is just another country our foreign policy blob destabilized so they could say they saved it sometime in the future. Now, the foreign policy establishment thinks that time has come, and wants us believe that protecting this democracy is worth risking a war with Russia, in which an untold number of American soldiers will die.

theamericanconservative.com

By Patrick LAWRENCE

How fitting that Joe Biden’s first year in the White House ends with his long-touted Summit for Democracy, a two-day affair that ended last Friday. I can’t decide whether the occasion was more farce than embarrassment or if it was the other way around.

Either way, it stands as just the right signature for an administration that, not quite 12 months in, proves farcical and embarrassing all at once.

I predicted last spring, when the White House announced its intention to organize this caper, that it wouldn’t have the nerve to go through with it. Julian Assange was in prison for the crime of journalism, coup operations were active in several socialist democracies in Latin America, there were human rights abuses galore and American democracy was nothing more than a hollow conceit for all the world to see: The hypocrisy seemed too much even for a man who has made a political career out of lies, gross corruption, and misrepresentations of true intent.

I was wrong. I overestimated the raw political intelligence of the otherwise stupid people running the United States as our 46th president wanders the White House corridors and dozes his way, Reagan-style, through his days.

It was a virtual affair, 111 heads of state sitting before screens in 111 capital cities around the world ostensibly to raise high the banner of democratic “values” and practice and fight the good fight against the great authoritarian Other. Straight out of the box, a problem: The U.S. supports more authoritarian regimes than you’ve had hot dinners. It has done so for many decades, and the Biden administration has changed this not one jot. Atop this there is the liberal authoritarianism that besets us at home.

Dividing the World into Blocs

In truth, the Summit for Democracy had very little to do with democracy by any sophisticated definition and much to do with dividing the world into we-and-they blocs of the kind Washington thrived on for the Cold War’s four decades. The president who purports to stand for unity at home cultivates disunity abroad at every turn. An excellent way at the 21^st century, Mr. President.

The sad conclusion is that “democracy,” like “human rights,” is now reduced to a shoulder patch to be worn by those still willing to pledge allegiance to “the rules-based international order,” Washington’s latest euphemism for American hegemony. The events of last Thursday and Friday were about geopolitical alliances and an idea of democracy that has less to do with Demos, a self-governing citizenry, than with political economies defined by neoliberal orthodoxies in one or another of its forms.

The list of participants reflected this. There was Ukraine, a corrupt oligarchy supported by openly declared neo–Nazis; apartheid Israel, which can be considered a democracy only if one is racist, and Colombia, ruled by an anti-democratic regime of U.S.–backed neoliberals given to violent repression and political assassinations. The inclusion of Taiwan, which, despite its accomplishments, is not a nation-state, was sheer provocation in the service of Washington’s determination to cultivate maximum tension with China.

U,S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during the virtual Summit for Democracy on Dec. 8. (State Department, Freddie Everett)

Among the excluded were Iran, which is fairly understood as a functioning democracy with a flawed constitution, and Nicaragua, which just held national elections with a 65 percent participation rate.

This is what I mean by farce. On to the embarrassments. These are multiple, but let us focus on two.

In my read, the Summit for Democracy put on full display precisely what it was intended to submerge. This is the first of its embarrassments. Democracy as the West has defined it is broken. Those who have historically stood as its trustees broke it.

Two Versions of Democratic Government

The industrialized nations of the West have entertained two versions of democratic government since the politically eventful 18^th century. There is popular democracy and its variant, elite democracy.

In the U.S. this was roughly speaking the Hamilton–Jefferson divide. Closer to our time, this defined the tension between Bernie Sanders and the mainstream of the Democratic Party. In Britain, it is the difference between Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, who has restored the Labour Party’s elite leadership as first consolidated by Tony Blair in the 1990s and 2000s.

With no exception I can think of, the Atlantic world is now governed by elite democrats favoring a highly corporatized version of neoliberalism. And they have more or less systematically destroyed democracy in the Western mode as they defend their power, privilege and corporate funding against popular democratic insurgencies. This is done in the name of democracy, of course, just as the Summit for Democracy was at bottom an anti-democratic exercise.

I have called those actually running the Biden administration, in addition to the president, stupid. This is not a matter of mere name-calling. It is because they entirely miss one of the core realities of the 21^st century.

Parity between the West and non–West, as argued severally in this space, now emerges as an inevitable feature of our time, whether one approves of it (as I do, emphatically) or not. This means something very important in the matter of political processes and political legitimacy.

It means democracy can no longer be defined according to narrow Western standards — nor should it ever have been. It means democracy will assume many different forms because it has to be understood as arising from very different histories, cultures and political traditions. It means democracy in one nation is bound not to look very much like democracy in another. And it means the long, long assumption that non–Western nations must model their democratic practices on the West’s is a thing of the past.

Exercise in Denial 

Biden and his minders, as they bandy about their classifications of nations as “democratic” and “authoritarian” in the old Freedom House mold, entirely miss this turn in history’s wheel. The Summit for Democracy, read in this way, was an extravagant exercise in denial. And this is what I mean by stupid.

Is Cuba a democratic nation? Is Venezuela? Is Nicaragua? Is Iraq? No answers in these and numerous other cases are worth considering if they do not take into account the complexities attaching to the question itself. Biden and his foreign policy people obstinately deny these complexities. Again, stupid.

The big one for the Biden administration is this: It is now perfectly legitimate to ask whether the U.S. is any longer a democracy — an unheard-of question a few decades ago. Maybe at some subliminal level Biden and his minders organized the Summit for Democracy precisely to dodge this problem.

(Thomas Hawk, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

And who can blame them, considering the only logical answer.

What happened and what didn’t last Thursday and Friday is an excellent punctuation mark at the end of Biden’s first year because it is so emblematic of this president’s most fundamental characteristic: We now have to count Biden an ineffectual bumbler in the same file as, say, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, or (regrettably, given his better qualities) Jimmy Carter.

It is Biden’s ill fortune to assume the presidency at precisely the point of inflection when the American empire enters a phase of steep, irreversible decline. Joe “America is back” Biden had two alternatives as he took office. He could pretend history had not merely stopped — it would reverse, and it was his job to restore the empire to the tarnished glory of the post–1945 decades. Or he could, as Jack Kennedy intended before the Deep State murdered him, get America out of the business of empire and advance it according to a new, more humane ethos.

The man from Scranton has chosen wrongly out of a deficit of courage. And now he emerges as the maestro of many messes.

Relations with China, relations with Russia, the Iran accord, Syria, the various covert ops south of the border: A year’s worth of foreign policy draws to a close in a directionless shambles. After all the talk of diplomacy first, the generals and the national security apparatus have never been more safely in charge. The Oval Office remains a prime source of the abominable violence we live amid.

On the domestic side, Biden has done nothing to draw the nation together to fight a common threat — no inspiring leadership, FDR–style, no focus. A second year with the Covid–19 virus finds us in the depths of cynicism: Corporations indulge in price-gouging on a grand scale, Big Pharma — Pfizer now urges a fourth injection, a second booster — reaping obscene profits while suffering and inequality rise right along with inflation.

In my read Biden is simply the wrong man for the job, setting aside his obvious mental decline. This is a pol who spent half a century wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill, where any kind of larger vision counts for little next to one’s ability to keep the logs rolling and the barrels filled with pork. An ability to mislead the public goes far toward success.

As long as Biden served among fellow dumbheads with the same lowly priorities, the one-eyed jack could pass as king — Biden was the seasoned foreign policy expert, the statesman. Forget it. The pose doesn’t work now that he has to understand the world and act sensibly in it instead of merely pretending to understand it and acting in it without great consequence. Unlike on Capitol Hill, there are serious, paying-attention people in Berlin, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and elsewhere.

Biden apparently dreamed of the presidency for decades. And now we must reflect on how perilous it often turns out to be when one’s dreams come true. Farce and embarrassment seem to be our fate for the next three years.

consortiumnews.com

U.S. President Joe Biden’s two-day “summit for democracy” was a farce even before it began this week. Now it has turned into a vile circus for Cold War hostility that greatly threatens world democracy, human rights and peace – the very antithesis of what the hubristic Americans claim.

On the second day of this video conference hosted by Biden, news emerged of the British High Court ruling in favor of the U.S. government that Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States to face trumped-up charges of espionage which could result in a death sentence. Assange is being persecuted for exposing massive U.S. war crimes, crimes against humanity, global espionage felonies and corruption. His case is a hideous warning that free speech and independent journalism are under ruthless attack by the U.S. authorities. In other words, the biggest enemy of the most basic of democratic rights is the United States government – and yet at the same time, we have this grotesque conference hosted by Biden declaring support for democracy.

Our own journal, Strategic Culture Foundation, is also coming under sustained attack from Washington. Several of our American contributors have been banned from writing for this journal under the threat of massive financial penalties. This is because the U.S. government makes the slanderous claim that SCF is directed by Russian state intelligence. See this recent interview by one of our former contributors Daniel Lazare who has denounced what he calls a move to censor free speech and critical thinking.

It, therefore, is truly absurd – and nauseating – for American leaders to pontificate on such rights. From the video conference hosted by Biden, one image said it all. Biden was seen addressing a blur of TV screens each displaying the face of leaders of nations invited by Washington to the “summit for democracy”. It resembled more a scene from a satirical movie. The self-appointed leader of the free world warned about the “backsliding of democracy” caused by “autocrats” (meaning China and Russia). Biden called for the protection of voting rights and free speech. This while his administration is seeking to incarcerate Julian Assange for the rest of his life because he dared to exercise his inalienable right of free speech. Assange should be honored by the world for his exposing of massive U.S. crimes and for his heroic contribution to truth. He revealed to the world the real and brute nature of Washington’s pursuit of global power. And for that, he is being viciously, mercilessly persecuted. It is outrageous that the leader of such a criminal government should be lecturing the world about the supposed virtues of democracy and human rights. It is deeply disturbing that such an insult to morals and intelligence seems to be even tolerated as if normal. Biden or any other U.S. leader should be scorned, not indulged.

The list of participants invited to Biden’s circus is shot through with inconsistencies and double standards. Even the normally dutiful U.S. media were obliged to note the incongruities and lack of principle in the virtual gathering of 110 countries. Some of those attending were classified as less democratic than some of those excluded noted the U.S.-based Freedom House.

It is blatant that the convocation by Biden was aimed at self-serving geopolitical power-play. The territory of Taiwan was invited as a representative of democracy while China was excluded. Under U.S. law, the One China policy deems Beijing as having sovereignty over Taiwan. So, the pointed invitation of Taipei over Beijing is an astounding provocation to China by the U.S.

Ukraine was invited to attend while Russia was also excluded. Since the U.S.-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 against an elected government, Ukraine has become a byword for corruption and the killing of journalists. The farcical invite by Biden is another geopolitical provocation that will embolden the Kiev regime to escalate further its hostilities towards Russia.

What Biden’s jamboree is all about is a flagrant attempt to divide the world into a Cold War demarcation. Russia and China have rebuked the initiative for harming international cooperation and increasing conflict.

There is not a scintilla of substance in what the Biden administration is attempting. The meaning and purpose of the “summit for democracy” is the opposite. It is about creating tensions, conflict, undermining democracy and fomenting war.

But it really shows the absolutely dangerous hubris of Washington. It somehow is deluded in thinking that it is uniquely endowed to host a conference on democracy when it fact it has no shame about being a ringmaster for conflict and war.

The United States’ history of genocide against native Americans, its decades of illegal foreign wars of aggression and destruction of nations, its relentless subversion of foreign governments – all of this and more are glaring proof that Washington is the center of global criminality. In order to manipulate the world under its hegemony, we have the risible attempt to corral nations into enemy camps of supposed democracy and autocracy.

Ultimately, however, this charade is doomed to fail. The objective reality is of a changing world, whereby U.S. capitalist, hyper-militarized power is failing amid the emergence of a multipolar international order. That fundamental historic development cannot be countered by futile machinations.

Of immense importance, too, the spectacle of hypocrisy seen this week also fatally undermines the authority of the U.S. governing system in the eyes of its own people. Biden offering blandishments about democracy comes across as crass Marie-Antoinette stuff when so many American citizens are dying from a pandemic that their government won’t spend money on to properly eradicate; when so many citizens are struggling with poverty and trying to feed their families; when Congress passes an annual military budget of $770 billion; and when millions of Americans are being barred from voting by new racist election laws. Biden’s summit for democracy is disgusting in its fraudulence, not just towards the wider world but towards his own nation. This is not just about Joe Biden and the Democrats. The Republican Party is even more unhinged from the realities of U.S. citizens and the world. The entire political class in the United States is bankrupt: morally, politically and economically.

This vile circus of Cold War theatrics that Biden oversaw this week is really a Swansong of failed American “democracy”.

By Scott RITTER

Some campaign promises, it turns out, should not be kept. In a major foreign policy address delivered on July 11, 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden declared that, if elected,

“I will ensure that democracy is once more the watchword of U.S. foreign policy — not to launch some moral crusade, but because it is in our enlightened self-interest. We must restore our ability to rally the Free World — so we can once more make our stand upon new fields of action and together face new challenges.”

To this end, Biden promised that “We will organize and host in the United States, during the first year of my administration, a global Summit for Democracy to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the Free World.” This summit, Biden noted, would build off “the successful model we instituted during the Obama-Biden administration with the Nuclear Security Summit,” adding that those who attend this Summit for Democracy “must come prepared with concrete commitments to take on corruption, counter authoritarianism, and advance human rights in their own nations.”

On Thursday, Joe Biden will make good on this promise, convening a two-day virtual “Summit for Democracy”

“which will bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”

Many progressive voices otherwise sympathetic to Biden’s candidacy thought the idea of a Summit for Democracy was a bad idea.

David Adler and Stephen Wertheim, for example, went so far as to write an OpEd for The Guardian in December 2020 criticizing the summit as “at once too blunt and too thin an instrument,” noting that

“although the summit might serve as a useful forum for coordinating policy on such areas as financial oversight and election security, it is liable to drive U.S. foreign policy even further down a failed course that divides the world into hostile camps, prioritizing confrontation over cooperation.”

On this point, Adler and Werthheim have proved to be prescient. In March, Biden took the unusual step of publishing an Interim National Security Strategic Guidance “to convey my vision for how America will engage with the world.”

This document was intended to be a policy placeholder while Biden’s national security and foreign policy team finished the bureaucratic processes associated with promulgating a new, coordinated National Security Strategy to replace the one published by former President Donald Trump back in 2018.

Tool of Exceptionalism

New Orelans Mardis Gras float in the Krewe of King Arthur. (PxHere, CC0)

Biden latched on to “democracy” as a tool of American exceptionalism, the promotion of which would serve to rally like-minded nations into the American camp to oppose the forces of autocracy. The rejuvenation of the United States under Biden’s leadership, the interim strategy guidance stated,

“begins with the revitalization of our most fundamental advantage: our democracy. I believe we are in the midst of an historic and fundamental debate about the future direction of our world. There are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward. And there are those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting all the challenges of our changing world.”

Democracy, Biden claimed, “holds the key to freedom, prosperity, peace, and dignity. We must now demonstrate — with a clarity that dispels any doubt — that democracy can still deliver for our people and for people around the world. We must prove that our model isn’t a relic of history; it’s the single best way to realize the promise of our future. And, if we work together with our democratic partners, with strength and confidence, we will meet every challenge and outpace every challenger.”

Stirring words, for sure, which, to an untrained ear, might very well inspire one to actually believe such lofty goals and objectives were both genuine and achievable. Sadly, on both counts, Biden and his Summit for Democracy fail. The reasons for this are many, but for the sake of brevity, will be encapsulated in the “golden rules” which should never be broken if a project like the Summit for Democracy is going to be undertaken.

Golden Rule No. 1: Pick a model of success that actually succeeded

The first Nuclear Security Summit on April 13, 2010. (Korean Culture and Information Service, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Biden and his team of advisers have modeled the Summit for Democracy on President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), the first of which was convened in 2010, and the last in 2016.

Like the Summit for Democracy, the NSS was an exclusive event, limited to 53 nations. Critics have pointed out that, regardless of the limited advances made regarding the issues surrounding nuclear security, when it came to the larger (and far more important) issue of nuclear non-proliferation, the exclusivity of the invitation process politicized what was otherwise a technical discussion, breaking the world down into “haves” and “have nots” when it comes to matters pertaining to peaceful nuclear activity.

This exclusivity proved to be the undoing of the NSS, with the narrow focus of the topic, combined with the limited invitation list, serving to kill the momentum generated during the first summit in just four years’ time.

The lack of a true multi-lateral composition resulted in the NSS failing to be able to extend its reach beyond 2016, the year of the last summit. Despite the limited gains made during the four summits, the fact remains that the world was a far more dangerous place in terms of nuclear proliferation in 2016 than it was in 2011, underscoring the reality that exclusive, ideologically aligned summits are not conducive to achieving broad-based global change.

Given the scope and scale of Biden’s ambitions for democracy, perhaps a different organizational model should have been embraced. But that could only happen if Biden were truly interested in change. The fact is, Biden is seeking to replicate the atmosphere of optimism and hope that defined the Obama administration in its first years. The mirror imaging of the NSS model by the Summit for Democracy only underscores the importance of process over substance in the Biden administration. Perception, not reality, is the name of the game.

Golden Rule No.2: Be consistent about what’s being promoted. 

In his July 2020 address on foreign policy, then-candidate Biden highlighted what he termed one of the great successes of the Obama administration when it came to promoting democracy abroad.

“Take, for example, the nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. As vice president, I secured commitments from the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to take on the corruption, violence, and endemic poverty in their countries that are driving people to leave their homes. Then I worked with a Republican Congress to approve a $750 million aid package to help support those reforms. And guess what — it worked.”

It worked so well that neither El Salvador, Guatemala nor Honduras are being invited to the Summit for Democracy.

U.S. President Joe Biden, left, with  adviser Juan S. Gonzalez, at right. (Twitter)

However, Gozalez explained, “we don’t think that El Salvador is — is perhaps either ready or will contribute productively to the conversation that we’re going to have.” Gonzalez then proceeded to provide a laundry list of reasons, including El Salvador’s “refusing to take action on corruption,” to justify its exclusion.

The same argument was made regarding Guatemala. “[W]e are very concerned about widespread corruption in Guatemala and one where judicial institutions are facilitating or even protecting it,” Gonzalez said. Likewise on Honduras, which Gonzales recognized “as a democracy and a longstanding partner,” before declaring that “we had some serious concerns about matters that have been unaddressed on corruption.”

In short, the nations that Biden singled out as representing foreign policy success under the Obama-Biden administration are now being excluded from the very forum in which such successes should be highlighted.

The problem, however, is that the Obama-Biden policies failed to achieve the results Biden claimed had been accomplished. And the price these three Latin American countries are paying is to be excluded from a summit which ostensibly promotes the very democratic values the U.S. is trying to facilitate in these nations.

One thing is for certain — by denying El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras a seat at the table of democracy, Biden will only further entrench the very forces he is seeking to address by holding the summit in the first place.

And, as a corollary to this rule, don’t invite C.I.A.-sponsored opposition figures whose most recent contribution to governance is a series of failed coup attempts. By extending an invitation to Juan Guido to attend the Summit for Democracy, Joe Biden is making a mockery of the very principles he claims to be promoting.

Golden Rule No. 3: When selling democracy, get your own house in order first

Storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (TapTheForwardAssist/Wikimedia Commons)

“[D]emocracies across the globe, including our own, are increasingly under siege. Free societies have been challenged from within by corruption, inequality, polarization, populism, and illiberal threats to the rule of law.”

Biden declared that under his leadership, the United States would “lead by the power of our example,” adding that this would require

“hard work at home — to fortify the founding pillars of our democracy, to truly address systemic racism and to live up to our promise as a nation of immigrants. Our success will be a beacon to other democracies, whose freedom is intertwined with our own security, prosperity, and way of life.”

Rare, however, is the successful salesman who seeks to peddle a product still under development. This task is made even more difficult if the product being pitched has undergone recent catastrophic failure which has yet to be repaired. American democracy is broken, and it remains to be seen as to whether it can be fixed. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, cannot be viewed as a one-off anomaly, but rather as a symptom of a larger disease of partisan divide that has caused many Americans to lose faith in the very institutions which serve as the foundation of what passes for democracy today.

By convening the Summit for Democracy, Biden is engaging in a very public theatrical event, a show which has him seated at the head of the table, like King Arthur, inviting lesser democratic partners to join him so that he can begin the process of confronting the forces of autocracy which have taken root in the world today.

A king, however, should be believable when he opines on issues, especially those that define his kingdom and the nature of his rule. Biden is not believable when it comes to matters pertaining to democracy.

The American model of democratic rule is no longer worthy of emulation, and America has long lost the ability to export this failed model from the tip of a bayonet. Simply convening a gathering, and placing yourself at its head, does not in and of itself imbue one with legitimacy or authority. In the immortal words of Tywin Lannister, “Any man who must say, ‘I am the king,’ is no true king.”

Joe Biden is no true king, especially when it comes to the issue of democracy.

consortiumnews.com

Inviting some while not inviting others to your party is usually a ploy one associates with petulant, insecure teenagers. It’s my party, so there! U.S. President Joe Biden turned 79 last week – near enough an octogenarian – and in the same week announced the invitation list for a so-called “democracy summit” to be held on December 9-10.

China and Russia aren’t on the list. Neither are a lot of other countries many of whom happen to be on U.S. blacklists for sanctions. They include Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela, among others.

The Summit for Democracy will see 110 participants attend an online teleconference hosted by President Biden. Delegates include heads of state, government leaders, diplomats and non-governmental organizations. The agenda, as outlined by the U.S. State Department, revolves around three main points: countering authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and upholding human rights.

The forum is shaping up to be a giant, rambling talking fest that will produce heaps of useless verbiage. If a legion of nations couldn’t come up with anything coherent and binding regarding climate change after two weeks of in-person meetings at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, it’s even more remote that two days of global teleconferencing in Washington will deliver anything of significance.

But in any case, that’s beside the real unspoken purpose of Biden’s “democracy confab”. The two-day proceedings are of little consequence, even for the American organizers. Because the real aim of the event is to exclude China and Russia and polarize international relations into Cold War camps: one of the camps is designated “democracies” under supposedly noble U.S. leadership; the other camp is for the “authoritarians” who are purportedly nefarious. It’s the cliched American dualist portrayal of the world as “good versus evil”.

Ever since Joe Biden’s inauguration as 46th president, he has been endeavoring to bestow his administration with a historic mission of “standing up for democracy” against “authoritarianism”. This is what he means by the clarion call of “America is Back!”. Biden is trying to foist an anachronistic dichotomy on the world whereby geopolitical rivals China and Russia can be cast as malign. This is another way of renewing the Cold War of dividing nations into making a choice between having the United States as a patron or choosing to side with Washington’s designated enemies.

This polarization of international relations which ultimately leads to tensions, confrontation and war is an essential configuration for how U.S. global power operates. As an imperial power, Washington must possess total domination in order to satisfy its economic imperatives. A vital element of this dominance is maintaining the privilege of the American dollar as the primary currency for world trade.

The emergence of a multipolar world is anathema to Washington’s dictate for unipolar hegemony (or what it cynically calls “rules-based order”). The ascendant reality of China as an alternative economic power and the shift in the global economy towards Eurasian integration is unbearable for the U.S. zero-sum view of its imperial demands.

In polarizing international relations, Washington can exert control over “allies and partners” (in reality, vassals and lackeys) by dictating the economic policy of nations – the euphemistically named “Washington Consensus” – that is designed so as to always benefit U.S. capital. Even supposedly stronger Western states like those of the European Union are effectively under Washington’s economic tutelage.

Another vital strategic objective is to militarize relations so that the United States can justify its gargantuan military budgets – $750 billion every year – in order to prop up the military-industrial complex that drives its otherwise defunct capitalist economy. This is while poverty and social decay across the U.S. are burgeoning to record levels.

China and Russia’s ambassadors to the United States lambasted the “democracy summit”. In a joint media article, Qin Gang and Anatoly Antonov condemned the arrogant presumption by Washington to define “who is a democratic country” and who is not.

The envoys went on: “An evident product of its Cold-War mentality, this will stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new dividing lines. This trend contradicts the development of the modern world. It is impossible to prevent the shaping of a global polycentric architecture but could strain the objective process. China and Russia firmly reject this move.”

Among the “not invited” nations are Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf Arab states. Of course, inviting absolute Arab monarchies to such an event would make Biden’s rallying of “democracies” look farcical. So a few of Washington’s allies had to be sacrificed for the bigger aim of trying to isolate China and Russia.

Nevertheless, the subjective selection of participants looks decidedly arbitrary and lacks any principle. The invitation of Taiwan and Ukraine look especially self-serving and betray the provocative intent of the entire summit to exclude China and Russia.

Taiwan, under United Nations convention and indeed under the U.S. One China Policy is internationally recognized as a province of China over which the government in Beijing has sovereignty. The Biden administration’s invitation to Taiwan to the Summit for Democracy is a crass incitement towards China. One that is inflaming already fraught tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

As for Ukraine, this country has been doggedly trying to provoke a war against Russia ever since the U.S. and NATO-backed a coup d’état in Kiev in 2014, bringing to power a Russophobic, neo-Nazi regime. The recent tensions and fears of all-out war in Ukraine stem from Kiev’s systematic violations of the 2015 Minsk peace accords and relentless goading of Russia with hysterical claims that Moscow is threatening to invade. American and NATO weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have emboldened its belligerence. U.S. propaganda has also boosted the baseless narrative of an imminent Russian invasion.

The United States and many of its capitalist Western allies have tenuous claims to being “democracies”. Elections every four or five years give individuals a piece of paper to put an X beside a name. But all the names on offer are virtually vetted by Big Business. When are voters ever given the chance to choose something better than capitalism? They are locked in an oppressive system of extreme wealth inequality and exploitation with a nicety of periodic voting to give an illusion of choice. As the old saying goes: if voting really changed anything the powers-that-be would have abolished it already.

China and Russia are systems that aim to enhance the overall development of societies. They have parliaments and lawmakers that are answerable for results. Who is to say their systems are not functioning for democracy – if by democracy we mean the empowerment of lives through social development?

What the world needs is for all nations to engage in genuine dialogue and commitment to mutual cooperation and peace.

There is no actual gain or intention of gain from what Biden is proposing. He’s just finding a petulant teen spirit to snub China and Russia – in a way that is greatly undermining and endangering world democracy.

The consequence of many decades of terrible ideas has now begun to impose its full weight upon the unipolar ship of state which has found itself careening towards a self-induced maelstrom. The captains managing this ship would have been able to easily foresee this tragic plunge long ago, had they not chosen to get drunk on hegemony amidst the cultish age of consumerism and hedonistic myopia that transformed our society 50 years ago. These empty shells of statesmen who have arisen to prominence within the post-truth age have proven themselves so detached from any semblance of humility or self-awareness that President Joe Biden has found no embarrassment in championing a World Democracy Summit this December 9-10th.

Besides the fact that this ‘democracy summit’ has undemocratically chosen to not invite nearly half of the nations of earth, including China and Russia, the USA is still somehow projecting the image that it is the leader of the free and democratic rules-based international order. The fact is that no nation has done more work to undermine democracies, spread war and murder over the past 70 years than the USA- and only a very shallow zombie, living in a self-congratulatory echo chamber, would miss that fact.

Sadly, as recent developments surrounding the lemminglike race for shutting down fossil fuels (amidst a dire energy crisis threatening millions of lives), and pushing military confrontation with Russia and China, the west is in no shortage of shallow zombies living in self-congratulatory echo chambers.

75 Years Bombing for Democratic Values

As it currently stands, the legacy of wanton murder and chaos caused by American military action has resulted in 201 induced armed conflicts (out of a total 248 on record) since the start of the Cold War. This represents a staggering 81% of all military conflicts recorded since WWII with 90% of the deaths occurring among innocent civilians!

1945 is a fair starting point as it was the end of the last war that could be justified in a rational manner (even though no good argument can be made that Wall Street or London bankers had to fund fascism before and during the war itself, but that’s a tale for another location).

After WW2, the USA completely lost any claim to a moral high ground, as Franklin Roosevelt’s beautiful vision for global development in cooperation with Russia and China was sabotaged by deep state snakes waiting in the wings for the first chance to take control of the ship of state.

This fascist machine within the USA which FDR fought relentlessly against since 1932 was called out by former Vice President Henry Wallace who stated in 1946: “fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”

At this tragic moment, Wallace was fired from the cabinet of Harry S. Truman, and a new Anglo-American recolonization of the world began under the pretext of ‘stopping godless communism’. Nuclear bombs which Roosevelt would never have permitted be used- especially on a defeated nation as Japan was – were quickly dropped by a racist little man who wasn’t even trusted enough to be briefed of their existence while vice-president. Not only did Truman not know of the Manhattan project, but he didn’t have the morality or mental fortitude to understand what FDR planned for the post-war age, and soon led a purge of all patriots from the OSS which was disbanded in September 1945, and reconsolidated a new clandestine warfare agency called in the CIA in 1947.

Under this new age of Cold War bipolarism, the dark arts of hybrid warfare, CIA/MI6-coordinated assassinations and coups were honed. Prominent nations targeted early on by this new devil’s pact included Greece (1947), Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Laos (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), Congo (1961, 1965), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976) (to name but a few).

The Korean War promptly led to the deaths of over 3 million civilians and even more refugees with the nation’s infrastructure in total disarray. Later, the Vietnam war resulted in the deaths of at least two million civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, 300 thousand South Vietnamese soldiers, and 58 thousand American troops[1].

It is difficult to estimate the loss of lives, direct and indirect by America’s interventions between 1945-present. In the latter category, one may include the revival of fascist networks in Europe via Operation Gladio, in Latin America via Operation Condor, and the creation of radical Islamic terror outfits under Brzezinski’s Operation Cyclone.

The assassinations conducted on nationalist statesmen seeking to defend their people from evil was not reserved for poor countries but also included leading moral figures within western governments. Among this grouping are found UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, Industrialist Enrico Mattei, President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy. The latter would certainly have been elected president in 1968 had an assassin’s bullet not shot him in the back of the neck at close range.

Lest we forget that imperial warfare is not isolated to bomb dropping, coup running, or color revolutions, John Perkins demonstrated in his Confessions of an Economic Hitman (2004), that the worst form of warfare has always been economic in nature. It has long been understood that more damage can be done by the stroke of an economist’s pen than a thousand paramilitary groups.

After this scorched earth doctrine wrecked havoc across generations, a resistance has finally emerged powerful enough to begin to challenge this empire of chaos, as we have seen with Russia’s subversion of Syrian regime change operations. Not only do we see resistance, but also the creation of a viable new economic order needed to provide real development to the world’s nations. Where the rules-based-order offered humanitarian bombs and democratic color revolutions to the world, the leadership of the multipolar order is offering peaceful cooperation, and large scale infrastructure.

China and Russia Step In

For the first time in decades, infrastructure projects tied to the BRI are arising within Southwest Asia. Railroads connecting Iraq to Iran (with the Shalamcheh-Basra rail) are being built, the CPEC corridor has transformed millions of lives in Pakistan, and have opened up new branchpoints that can easily extend development into Afghanistan and beyond. Through Russian and Chinese diplomacy, Syria is being re-admitted into the Arab League, and discussions are underway to extend a Southern BRI connection through Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey as part of a broader reconstruction program.

Even a new alternative financial economic architecture has been carefully built up over the past 7 years outside of the IMF/World Bank sphere of influence. This alternative system is de-dollarizing at a fast pace, and emitting long term, low interest loans without usurious conditionalities for genuine development.

While the Anglo-American deep state was busy obsessing over steering a color revolution to oust a democratically elected president within the USA itself between 2016-2020, Russia and China were busy launching a grand strategy of diplomatic brilliance across the global south. By 2020, over 135 nations had signed memoranda of understanding to join the New Silk Road, with 17 Arab, 17 Ibero-American, and 50 African nations jumping on board the life raft.

Their formula used by Russia and China is simple although a modern liberal couldn’t understand it: 1) Provide unwavering support for sovereignty of each participating nation, 2) Promote absolute non-interventionism militarily into another state, and 3) Encourage long term economic planning in order to harmonize all interests into a community of shared interest.

If the American population were more aware of their own history, they would quickly see that this outlook is entirely compatible with a tradition which the west once embodied in saner times.

Real progressive democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy died defending this non-zero sum paradigm of win-win cooperation globally.

These figures understood, as automatons dominant among the enlightened rules based techno-crowd today cannot conceive, that the only viable foundation upon which democratic ideals can be nurtured is when each participating state is respected as a sovereign nation. Upon being respected as a sovereign nation, each member can be trusted to act according to its true self-interest. Upon acting upon its true self-interest, the uplifting of living standards and universal needs for peace, security, freedom from want, and goals for economic betterment can be advanced. When these ideals are advanced, faith in the goodness of humanity can blossom on solid foundations and cooperation across cultural, ethnic, national and religious divides can unite the members of each nation into a family. This was the meaning of President John Quincy Adams’ foreign policy outlook when he envisioned a “community of principle”.

To the degree that techno-feudal wind-up dolls continue to promote “democracy” while demanding that the world remain firmly under the heel of a unipolar hegemon, then no “democracy summit” will be worth anything.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

Note
(1) Estimates published by the Vietnamese government in 1995