I get accused of being a Russian agent or Putin fan but I just want my country back from the fucking neocons. I really have no feelings about Russia except that they are a country we need to get along with because a nuclear exchange between us will end life on earth. Duck and cover won’t cut it.

My real concern is with America. I understand what is at stake with the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. I know the corporate media is lying when they endlessly repeat the phrase “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression”. I know that the American war party is responsible for pushing Russia to the decision that it made last February. That it is the war party that expanded NATO despite the promises, that arms Ukraine, that encourages the fanatics driving that country, that blocks all routes to a peaceful settlement, that encourages Kiev to squander the lives of its people.

The proxy conflict is just the latest in a series of disastrous foreign misadventures, brought to you by the bipartisan war party. I can’t remember when we weren’t at war. Can you?

What can we do? Voting doesn’t make much difference if both parties are complicit. The executive branch, since the Cold War, has amassed enormous power through endless war. The judiciary has proven to be in thrall to the national security state, as is the corporate media, who never saw a war they couldn’t enthusiastically support. The whole thing is predicated on fear, in scaring the hell out of the American public with endless villains.

Since the United States is now approaching a $1 trillion “war” budget for 2023, more than half  will likely go to private firms. The top five contractors alone — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman — will split between $150 billion and $200 billion in Pentagon contracts. Meanwhile, they’ll pay their CEOs, on average, more than $20 million a year and engage in billions of dollars in stock buybacks designed to boost their share prices. The arms merchants and their congressional sock-puppets justify the enormous expenditure by telling the public that the spending is making Americans “safe”. 

Except it isn’t making us safer, just poorer and bereft of any sort of moral credibility, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. An America of war all the time everywhere has brought us tent cities and full jails, open borders, disappeared manufacturing, poverty, opiates, misery and corruption. Instead of social programs and infrastructure, there’s austerity and war. An America with $100 billion to pour down the Ukrainian rathole but none to spend at home. A deep malaise that defines American society–the rage, despair and widespread feelings of betrayal and loss are overwhelming. The American empire is to blame, even if few can articulate it.

I can only see one way that the power of this internal enemy can be broken – complete and utter defeat. Defeat that cannot be ignored, cannot be explained away, defeat too big and too obvious for the obedient mass media to bury. And this is why I want Russia to succeed in the proxy war against the US and NATO. It’s because I see this as the opportunity for the humiliating defeat that will shatter the power of the internal enemy. As I stated last week–“the end of the American empire will require a disaster so profound that there’s no escaping accountability for the neocons and their fellow travelers among the elite political and media class.”

Unfortunately, the disaster may happen without any American noticing or acknowledging. I’m afraid that our society is no longer secular. We now live in a world of dogma, where believeing what you should believe, takes precedence over believing what is.

Update: Uber neocon, Michael McFaul has a new screed–“There are no innocent Russians”–where he exhorts Russian citizens to rise up against Putin and overthrow the Russian war party.

Talk about projection.

Caitlin Johnstone has the appropriate reply. “If the logic that “there are no innocent Russians” because the Russian people have a moral obligation to overthrow their warmongering government were evenly applied, it would also apply to Americans. Even more so, really, since their government is vastly more warlike than Moscow.

Putin would have to work very, very hard to catch up to the staggering body count of the US empire just in the 21st century. If Russians have a moral obligation to overthrow their government, then so do Americans. They have an obligation to topple the US empire, tear down the military-industrial complex, get rid of the false two-party system whose “two” parties support every war the empire architects call for, and create a peaceful country.”