One of the great tricks of the neoconservatives was to reshape opposition to radical causes into support for their own radical projects. In the early days, this allowed normal people to strongly oppose limits on corporate power, in the name of fighting the communist threat from the Soviets. Alternatively, working class people could support the military industrial complex as their patriotic duty. Their own interests and genuine opposition to the Left was always secondary.
After the Cold War, this game rapidly evolved so that so-called conservatives supported a massive expansion of government, as well as a massive expansion of foreign policy entanglements, all in the name of freedom. Most conservative people assumed the end of the Cold War meant America could go back to being a normal country again, but those feelings were quickly channeled into new causes. The old tricksters were up to their old tricks, turning virtues into vices.
This is why conservatism never conserved anything. In the Reagan years, the conservatives were too busy fighting the Soviets to roll back the cultural revolution or clean up the welfare state. In the Bush years they were too busy spreading freedom and smart bombs to address domestic concerns. Despite promising to promote conservative causes, conservatives instead found some war to fight. Meanwhile, the bad guys got to run riot in the culture.
You can see the same game emerging with the war against Russia. The deception here is another version of the big lie. This time the villain is Putin, who for no reason at all, attacked Ukraine. All that opposition to perverts in sundresses and bigots spewing antiwhite propaganda in the classroom is being channeled into opposing Putin in order to defend our democracy. Normal people are supposed to be mad at Putin rather than the sorry state of their own country and its leaders.
You see how this works in this Victor Davis Hanson post. The goal of the post is to divert opposition to the regime’s foreign policy into a Republican brand of the same policies toward Russia. You see, the reason that dude in a dress is chasing your daughter around the classroom is Obama was soft on Russia. Biden is following the same policies, which is why things are so bad. He uses some form the word “appeasement” nine times, because, you know.
Of course, the column is also an attempt to whitewash the neoconservative involvement in the current crisis. You see, it is not the people who started this war with Russia who are to blame for the fallout. No, it is some guy off stage who is turned into the Emmanuel Goldstein of this show. He is the one who set the wheels in motion and all the people currently running foreign policy, all members of the same Trotsky cult, coincidentally enough, are just victims like you.
The truth is this war has its roots much further back than Obama. If you want to point to an incident as a starting place, it would be American involvement in the Balkan war during the Clinton years. American support for Kosovo against Serbia was the start of a new conflict with Russia. At the time, it was viewed in Moscow as a deliberate offense to the Russians. In the years that followed, this affair has become a warning for the Russians about what Washington plans for them.
There are other capers that could be a starting point. Washington supporting Georgia against South Ossetia in the Bush years is a good example. The neocons wanted to add Georgia to NATO. The Russians made clear that they saw this as a provocation, as well as another broken promise. Washington had promised Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand to the Russian border. In other words, the neocons have been at this for a long time.
Of course, one does not have to go back that far to see the grimy fingerprints of the Trotskyites in the current crisis. Victoria Nuland, who is running Russia policy for Biden, was the person running Ukraine policy for Obama. She was right there on the ground when Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. She is pals with Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the Ukrainian oligarch who backed Zelensky. The point is this is another neocon war that runs against American interests.
It also needs to be pointed out that Hanson supported all of the neocon misadventures going back to the Clinton years. He wanted Clinton to take an even tougher stance in the Balkan conflict. You will note that the neocons used the same language against Clinton as they are using now against Biden. He was not tough enough against this new Hitler from the hinterlands. Hanson, of course, supported the Bush wars. He also supported the Georgia – South Ossetia caper.
The point of Hanson’s post is to make sure no one turns over any of these rocks with regards to the neocons and Russia policy. Instead, the game is to channel general opposition to the Biden administration into an even more deranged hatred of Russia and Vladimir Putin. All your troubles will go away conservatives, if you just hate the Russians more and vote harder this November. It is a clever trick that works on a gullible but trusting population.
This is why foreign policy must become a litmus test. There are no American interests in the Ukraine, South Ossetia or Tajikistan. Not only does meddling in these areas invite trouble, but it also diverts attention from important matters. Building superhighways in Afghanistan did not shorten a single commute in America. “Standing with Ukraine” does not stop the flood of invaders over the southern border. What these foreign adventures do is divert attention from America’s real problems.
Given that all of these foreign escapades over the last thirty years trace back to the same Trotsky cult, the real litmus test is neoconservatism. Back before most people were born, they hollowed out conservatism and have used to as a Trojan horse to trick decent people into supporting that which is against their interests. A genuine conservative policy with regards to Russia would oppose Biden for meddling in the affairs of Russia, not demand more meddling.
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The Trotskyites have a few simple tricks to keep neo-con “leaders” like Lindsey Graham pouring endless streams of printed dollars into their schemes.
– Ukraine is now the largest money-laundering scheme in history. Who knows where the money and equipment we send ends up?
– Along with the payouts comes convenient blackmail opportunities. Also wouldn’t surprise me if the same people happen to have all of Epstein’s lost files.
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My hunch is we’ll be finding out where all the military equipment ended up on a regular basis for the next ten years. In some cases, might be the last thing you find out.
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Why should I hate Putin? All the hate, oppression and lawfare directed at me comes from inside my own country.
What is the meme going around now? Putin never called me a racist homophobic misogynist while doing everything to limit my voice, freedom and my parental rights.
Oh, I’m quite clear on who my enemy is.
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When you click the link for Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Victoria Nuland’s pal, make sure you smash the early life section. It really is every single time.
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VD Hanson is a golem.
If he hadn’t jammed his tongue as far as he could up our enemy’s azz and flattered them with comparisons to Athens, no one would know who he is.
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After all the foreign misadventures over the past 30 years – really the past 75, you’d think people would wake up that not a single one had a damn thing to do with our best interests. The government has been living on the fading patriotic fumes from WW2 for decades. Meanwhile, the cultural rot has reached the attic and the whole mess is close to tumbling down.. DC is a cancerous tumor threatening the entire world.
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It’s really hard for normal Americans to wrap their heads around the thought that we’re now the bad guys. In the cartoonish view that the Global American Regime pushes, the villains of the world are guys like Putin and Saddam, Assad, Khadafy, et al, not the good ol’ USA. (USA! USA! USA!)
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> Russia instead became a formable promoter of the Iranian, Hezbollah, the Assad regime, and Hamas axis, an obstacle to Israeli responses to cross-border terrorism, and a deterrent to any Western notion of preemptively destroying Tehran’s nuclear potential.
I like how he assumes all of these groups are so clearly bad that he doesn’t even try to justify it. While they’re not exactly pure as summer roses, in the grand geo-political realm, they’re pretty tame in comparison and benign to our core interests. For another nation, a greatest ally one might call them, it’s a little different though.
I wonder if someone like VDH ever sit back and look at the bigger picture, or just takes regime moral consensus at face value while just shifting the blame to his domestic political enemy to take potshots.
Thank you, Mr Z. Hanson is the absolute worst commentator in existence right now; he has managed the trick of tarting up his basic stupidity with bloviating, sham-Churchillian pros, which for a lot of moronic “conservatives” implies deep profundity. (I guess they are also impressed that he at least in theory can conjugate Greek verbs. (Let’s remember how he orgasmically celebrated “farm boys” from the Midwest for their pillage of “Southern aristocrats” in Georgia and South Carolina, and his hero-worship of the psychopath William T Sherman, whose greatest victories were against women and children. If you’d really like to hammer your brain with stupidity, read his book “Saviour Generals” which also licks the boots of the noisome David Petraeus.
Sorry, rant over. I just despise Hanson with every fiber of my being. A complete and utter fraud.
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In Sherman’s defense, he was the only one that warned early in the game that a) it would not be a short war and b) the economic destruction of the southern heartland was inevitable endgame. Nobody listened. The South’s key tactical mistake was replacing Johnston with Bell Hood. The latter was brave, but a moron.
A guy like Hanson used to have a place that was appropriate for him and his type, and that’s as a university Classics professor. He could teach young people the importance and relevance of our ancestors and forefathers.
Alas, the modern university no longer cares about the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, etc, unless they can find something gay about them. So instead of a nice, comfortable teaching position and a wood-paneled office with impressive bookshelves, he spends his time fluffing up mediocrities who care nothing about the past.
It’s sad.
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What gives me a serious case of the skeeves is the utter flippancy with which these morons are directly poking a nuclear power. Lived through much of the Cold War and studied post WWII defense policy under serious “realpolitik” academics. Direct confrontation was consciously avoided. Now we’ve got Dementia Joe flying to Poland and publicly stating that Putin needs to be removed. But then again at least the foreign policy “experts” of the postwar period had often seen war’s handiwork up close and had some appreciation of the stakes in the game. And they still fucked up. The current crop a) doesn’t seem very bright and b) appear to have spent most of their careers grifting and sniffing each other’s farts in the DC bubble. Nuland is an excellent example.
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Nuland’s physical transformation over the years is directly correlated with the state of her soul. She’s the type of person who would fail in a casting call for a serious movie’s villain, as she looks too cartoonishly evil for the part. Physiognomy is real.
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I become more convinced over time that that’s the whole point of all of this. In fact, if the Ruskies finally decide to launch the missiles, it’s not hard for me to picture Abidin’ – or whoever’s pulling his strings -kicking their feet up and saying, “Mission accomplished.”
But hey, at least we don’t have to worry about Trump’s mean Tweets anymore, right?
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Walter Russell Meade competes with VDH for neocon shill of the year.
I’ll give VDH a little slack. A lot of dissidents today had normiecon pov three decades ago.
The neocons are also not supernatural devils. They’re grifters that realized or stumbled onto a path of using America’s nature, it history, to advance their own interests.
The real problems are that America was founded on the liberal-enlightenment ideology that people could be whatever they want to be. And our formative experience was exponential growth by conquering a continent scantily populated by neo lithic tribes.
The combination made hubris the core American value. American and Americans could do anything and were destined to rule the world.
It was that element of American culture, and the frustration that arose from its conflict with reality that the neo-cons exploited.
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I have fully confessed to having misjudged the neocons in the Bush years. I did not think they were serious about the whole spreading democracy thing. That was two decades ago. Hanson is still selling this crap.
“Normal people are supposed to be mad at Putin rather than the sorry state of their own country and its leaders.
…
“This is why foreign policy must become a litmus test. There are no American interests in the Ukraine, South Ossetia or Tajikistan. Not only does meddling in these areas invite trouble, but it also diverts attention from important matters. Building superhighways in Afghanistan did not shorten a single commute in America. “Standing with Ukraine” does not stop the flood of invaders over the southern border. What these foreign adventures do is divert attention from America’s real problems.”
Couldn’t agree with you more. I know you’re directing your ire towards that pompous dullard Hanson, but keep in mind he’s nothing more than a bought-and-paid-for butt-boy of the empire. The problem is that the USA is configured as a war state. Many if not most of USA’s remaining industries are related to the military. The military lobby is influential. As a consequence the USA needs any excuse for military conflict — or is happy to fabricate a casus belli.
Some people argue that the US war state goes back to Truman’s quadrupling of the defence budget in 1948. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps it goes back a bit further to WW2, when USA’s giant companies all contributed to the war effort. I’m not enough of a historian to pronounce judgement on this.
Even when USA’s interests are involved — though I can’t think of the last time when they were — the USA prefers to a hammer or a cudgel rather than diplomacy and negotiation. Contrast the USA with Russia, which has consistently been seeking negotiated solutions and has reluctantly been following Clausewitz’s dictum that war is diplomacy by other means. The USA is a rogue state.
Your comment about the sorry state of the USA resonates with me. I’ve been reading Larry Romanoff’s essays on the USA as a failed state at Unz. I can find little to disagree with. While the USA’s elite has been squandering precious resources in futile and purposeless military adventures, the rest of the world has stolen a march on it. We all know Japan, China, and Europe have high-speed rail. But now so does Morocco in North Africa. Who is first world and who is third world?
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Here’s some not-very-surprising news: Tulsi Gabbard just announced she’s leaving the Democratic Party. She says that the party is controlled by “an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness” who “stoke anti-White racism” and “protect criminals.” She’s also urging other Dems to leave as well.
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