United States Greatest Nation Ever?
Updated 2024-02-26
2024-02-14 Patrick Lawrence: Crisis at the NYT It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable. The Israelis took this risk and they have lost.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, as American media do not, that the Israel Defense Forces covertly sponsor a social media channel disseminating this degenerate material in the cause of maintaining maximum hatred. It is a psychologically diseased nation that boasts as it inflicts this suffering on The Other that obsesses it. The world is invited — the ultimate in perversity, this — to partake of Israel’s sickness and it said, in a Hague courtroom two weeks ago: “No.” Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now.
The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart — its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities — and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself. When the history of America’s decline as a hegemonic power is written, the Gaza crisis is certain to figure as a significant marker in the nation’s descent into a morass of immorality that has already contributed to a collapse of its credibility. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/14/patrick-lawrence-crisis-at-the-nyt/
Most important in bursting the bubble of U.S. leadership in international affairs is its tragic, morally suicidal complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Biden administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to enable Israel to murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children. It has provided—and dramatically increased—economic subsidies. It has rush-shipped tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition to Israel, even bypassing Congress to do so. It has provided military cover in the form of two aircraft carrier battle groups to prevent other nations from intervening to stop the slaughter. It has exercised its veto power at the U.N. Security Council to prevent a cease-fire, even for humanitarian reasons. The U.S. is all in on the massacre of tens of thousands of defenseless Palestinian civilians.
As a result of the U.S.’ help, Israel is able to bomb, with impunity, working hospitals, refugee camps, schools, churches, mosques, relief agencies, anything where civilians shelter to try to escape the apocalyptic destruction. And it is doing this, knowing that civilians are the main casualties, thus making it not just “killing” innocent, defenseless women and children, but murdering them. And this is still just the beginning of the depraved degeneracy.
The World Food Program says that as many as 750,000 civilians are now being intentionally starved. This, by a supposedly civilized nation. And, with no hospitals, no medicines, no water, and no sewerage, it is only a matter of time before epidemic diseases emerge and spread and kill hundreds of thousands. It is undisguised mass murder for the undeniable purpose of ethnic cleansing, which has always been Israel’s agenda, since even before it was founded. It is genocide, pure and simple, and all in public view of the world’s 8 billion people.
In Gaza, the U.S. returns to its roots, albeit vicariously. It, too, was founded in genocide, in its case, of the 50+ million native Americans who once populated the North American continent. It too, used vastly disproportionate force, the mechanized tools of an industrial-age civilization systematically exterminating a stone-age one. It, too, bolstered its commitment to ethnic cleansing with its self-flattering myths of racial superiority and its carefully cultivated conceits of cultural supremacy. The difference is that then, all the world was not watching the daily depravity. And it had not formed its present-day revulsion and international prohibitions against such state-sponsored barbarism. Now it is, and has. The damage to the U.S.’ reputation is palpable, undeniable, stunning, and irreversible.
The U.S. has defiled itself, humiliated itself, as no other nation could possibly do. It has destroyed goodwill that has taken centuries to acquire and that will never be recovered. If Ukraine exemplifies yet another iconic U.S. military failure, and BRICS the changing of the guard in the economic realm, the sadistic savagery in Gaza repudiates the moral right of the U.S. to lead… anything. No nation will ever again be intimidated by its hypocritical tut-tutting about human rights or its sanctimonious finger wagging about the responsibility to protect. It is, more than anything else, the world’s leading purveyor of death and all the nations of the world can see it.
The combination of these three events signal the 2023 bursting of the bubble of U.S. global leadership. The year will be remembered as the pivot point, the turning away from the post-Cold War unipolar era, and the ushering in of the post-unipolar, post-Western-centric multipolar world. Five hundred years of Western domination of the world order are ending. There will be no going back. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/2023-us-leadership-bubble-burst
2023-12-26 US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.
In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.
The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.
Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world. To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corruption-of-us-foreign-policy
2023-11-24 U.S. Marine Makes Undeniable Case For Hamas! Former United States Marine Kenneth O’Keefe has become an outspoken critic of Israeli policy toward Palestine, announcing that if he were Palestinian he would likely fight back against the occupation by any means necessary. In a clip dating from more than 10 years ago O’Keefe even compares Hamas to the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss efforts by certain non-profit groups to label O’Keefe an anti-semite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuRZ2FcRaU
2023-11-19 Myth Of “Western Civilization” Destroyed In 2 Minutes By U.N. Palestinian Representative United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese recently addressed the General Assembly and lit into the United States for making any claim to being a force for peace in the world. The United States is a warmongering nations, she said, with a foreign policy wholly based on the demands of the powerful military industrial complex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx3NbXFkM1k
2023-11-02 The U.S. Is NOT “The Greatest Country In The World” & Here’s Why. Often appearing on lists of the greatest scenes in television history, Jeff Daniels’ famous monologue from the show Newsroom helps lay out all the reasons why the United States is not “number one.” Except when it comes to incarceration and belief in religious nonsense, his character says. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzdSySFNNoc&t=6s
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