One of the most impressive things about U.S. elections always appears to be the way in which the 96% of humanity outside of the United States consents to doing nothing at all for the better part of a year, so that U.S. media outlets can focus fulltime on the election. Of course, it could be that this, like much else in U.S. elections, is a bit of an illusion.
The highlights of the recent debate would seem to be, from the discussion that has followed:
- an aging fascist buffoon falsely claiming that a group of people he’s demonizing wants to eat your pets — the wrong kind of animals, you should be serving the livestock industry that is helping render the Earth uninhabitable — and
- the same racist nitwit fumbling around about having “concepts of a plan” for healthcare — but please pay no attention to the healthcare solution long since found by every other wealthy nation on the planet and shunned by both major political cartels in Washington.
And yet, the most significant bit of the debate — as viewed by future visitors to Earth able to investigate what humanity did to itself — will surely turn out to be either the tiny section on the climate during which the same generalissimo offered nothing and his opponent bragged about having increased fossil fuel production, or the tiny section about Ukraine, during which the same mentally challenged Mussolini blurted out some obvious truths (albeit coated in typical sociopathic whining about wanting other nations to fund the public service of mass slaughter) and the Democratic candidate took her turn to promote insane delusions.
Even more significant is how the corporate media has reported on those seconds of foreign policy “debate,” and what the U.S. government has seized the opportunity to do under cover of election news silence and the annual militarized hoo-hah of 9-11 bloodlust glorification.
ABC “News” demanded that Trump swear his support for Ukrainian “victory.” ABC did not define “victory,” or explain how it might be possible in the real world or how many lives might be lost in continuing to senselessly pursue it, or address the growing risk that nuclear apocalypse will actually be achieved, or justify the past years of endless prediction of imminent “victory.” To the delight of many Democrats, Trump refused repeatedly to take the oath of victory-belief. Media outlets that listed some of Trump’s lies and fantasies included in their lists his refusal to take the victory oath. Here’s Huffington Post:
Sensible observers with zero interest in increasing the birthrate of the whitest and least intelligent people they can find, reducing corporate taxes to zero, or coating the planet with gaudy hotels have noted for years that the war in Ukraine can end through negotiation or through nuclear Armageddon. No plausible third ending has been conceived. (I like to link to one or more denunciations (by me) of Russian outrages when I say that, because Russiagate fantasies never die.)
Trump blurted out that negotiations are needed, that lives are being wasted, and that nuclear war is being risked. I’d love to quote a sane and respectable person saying those things on a U.S. television network, but U.S. television networks have not allowed many such voices — indeed, as far as I know, any such voice at all.
Meanwhile, Victoria Nuland, who at the time was U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, has gone ahead and said openly on video that the U.S. and UK blocked a peace agreement very soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Her justification is that the agreement would have denied Ukraine the right to certain kinds of weapons without denying Russia the same. Perhaps a half a million people have died so far as a result of blocking that agreement and refusing to negotiate a different one.
No doubt — as Madeleine Albright would tell us — it has been worth it. But what is the “it”? Surely it is not “freedom” or “liberty” or “values” — at least not for all those killed, never mind those injured, traumatized, made homeless, made motherless, and made fatherless. Of course “it” could be weapons profits, and NATO growth, but who — outside of the most rabid partisan election fanatics — is interested in those things? (I mean fanatics for both sides. Trump bragged more about weapons sales than any other president and badgered NATO nations into more war spending increases than Biden has — although blocking his supposed Dark Lord’s pipeline without blowing it up was perhaps a strategic blunder from a MICIMATT perspective, even if bringing it up left Kamala Harris speechless.)
More dangerous even than Nuland’s analysis that it’s now safe to just admit to having blocked negotiations — or NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s conclusion a year ago that it had become safe to admit that insistence on NATO expansion had led to the war — is what the people conducting the war have been up to while we’ve been sharing pet-eating memes. The Guardian reported on Wednesday:
“The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave his strongest hint yet that the White House is about to lift its restrictions on Ukraine using long-range weapons supplied by the west on key military targets inside Russia, with a decision understood to have already been made in private. Speaking in Kyiv alongside the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, Blinken said the US had ‘from day one’ been willing to adapt its policy as the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine changed. ‘We will continue to do this,’ he emphasised. Blinken said he and Lammy would report back to their ‘bosses’ – Joe Biden and Keir Starmer – after their talks on Wednesday with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.”
Whoever is sailing this Titanic in the absence of Biden’s full faculties is under the influence of the war machine and subject to little if any public accountability. We are likely, in the absence of a nonviolent public uprising by the tranquilized U.S. public at the height of the panem et circenses season, to see a significant escalation of the U.S.-Russian war — or not to see it (Norman Solomon says they’ve made war invisible) which may be even more dangerous still.