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Issue Number 36 - April 3, 2003
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"The initial data available so far reveals the dirtiness of U.S.-British warmongers, the fakeness of their claims about a clean war, as well as their indifference to the lives of innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilians." The indictment comes, not from Baghdad or Kuala Lumpur, but from the Foreign Minister of Switzerland. Micheline Calmy Rey, of the ruling Socialist Democratic Party, explained that her country has an obligation to document war crimes as "a founder and a sponsor of the Geneva Convention."
The entire globe is recoiling from the United States, a planetary phenomenon that will characterize the historical period we have now entered - if humanity survives it. In declaring war against international order, the Pirates at the helm of the Hyper-Power have profoundly frightened every economic and social sector of every nation on the globe. In self-defense, the world will be forced to reorganize itself, to create new mechanisms of trade and security in place of the institutions that the Bush men are deliberately savaging. The Americans will be left out of these arrangements.
The realization dawns on the assaulted consciousness of humanity that the would-be rulers and their society are worse than monstrously destructive - they are delusional, a danger to civilized endeavor, untrustworthy in any agreement, contemptuous of law and reason. A nation and people to be avoided, circumvented, conspired against for safety and survival's sake.
These are the first days of the inevitable and soon to become dramatic decline of the United States. In what will be viewed as a supreme irony of history, the dream of a glorious and bloody leap to global omnipotence will collapse in incompetence and self-mutilation - not this year or the next, and not in time to save millions from death, disease, impoverishment and national humiliation. But it will happen, because the nations and peoples of the world will see no choice available to themselves but to make it happen.
It need not have been so. With the role of protector against an extinct Soviet Union long redundant, the United States' favored position in the world is based on the size of its economy and the unique role of the dollar as the sole denominator of oil prices - an artificial support. Over time, the growing strength of the European euro currency would have provided alternatives to banks and national treasuries that sought to diversify their holdings. The dollar's value would have shrunken, gradually, but without great drama.
America's share of fossil fuel consumption could have been brought under control in collaboration with developed and developing nations, to guard against undue harm to the economies of all while alternative energy sources were brought on line - to the profit of innovative capital in the most developed nations such as the United States.
But this was not to be. The Pirate class personified by Bush, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle has no stake in the domestic economy of the United States or the stabilizing institutions of the world. They war against order, to transform the American military machine into a pirate armada to amass wealth through plunder. They are not really capitalists in the "normal" sense, at all. They "invest" in elections to seize control of state mechanisms to facilitate domestic crimes with impunity and terrorize the world militarily. And they award themselves contracts for that, too.
The Pirates operate within and are the products of a society made delusional through centuries of racist plunder. The most afflicted products of this society cannot recognize facts at variance with the racist imperatives of Manifest Destiny. They cannot negotiate because they are effectively blind to the humanity of others. Objectively incompetent at analysis of non-whites and only imagining the characteristics of foreign whites, they launch wars against "enemies" whom they cannot properly assess, with a cavalier cruelty that the civilized world reserves for animals. They have no sense of guilt because in their worldview they are the embodiment of good. Their wealth and power appear to confirm their self-assessment.
When frustrated by actual facts and peoples they escalate with fury and bewilderment, like an armed sleepwalker awakening in a crowd. They do great damage and feel harmed by their victims. But they cannot win in any protracted struggle, because they truly do not understand their surroundings or the people they have made antagonists - or even the Swiss, who are said to love order and prosperity most of all.
A wired world is taking note of every pathological tick in the twisted American face. Even now, a myriad of plans are evolving to sidestep the dangerous, delusional United States as mankind goes about its collective business. A kind of international redlining will increasingly make itself felt, but not seen. The Bush men believe they are willing into existence a New American Century, while in reality they are creating an America-phobic planet in which the U.S. has earned an invisible but powerfully consequential non-favored nation status. Having invented the concept of globalism, the United States will be consigned to pariah status - and shrink, until it learns to live by human norms and scales.
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