ISRAEL'S ROLE IN THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

 

                                                    

                                                                

      I am fortunate enough to live in a place where the local paper still prides itself on being a public forum. Every three months, I'm allowed 600 words to say whatever I think is most important for readers to understand. 

    This is my most recent submission. It is my second guest column on the nature of the US Empire. Others will follow.

If you wonder why Israel attacked Iran now, with an overextended army tied down in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, congratulations on refusing to be a passive consumer of what passes for American reporting on foreign affairs.

Bombing Iran was not about fictitious weapons of mass destruction any more than was the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In a 2012 UN speech, Netanyahu insisted that Iran was already on the verge of having a nuclear weapon. Cheney made a similar claim in 2007 that was debunked by the Intelligence Community. This saved the US from a disastrous military confrontation with Iran that would be much worse if attempted today.

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard stated there is still no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Under pressure from the Israeli lobby and powerful neocons like Israel-first campaign donor Miriam Adelson, President Trump dismissed her assessment and attacked anyway, placing 40,000 American service members at risk of Iranian retaliation.

As many predicted, the attack failed to eliminate the “threat” despite initial claims of success. Now, pressure is mounting for deeper US military involvement in Israel’s latest war of choice. Israel knows that without such help, it cannot complete its objective of eliminating the last obstacle to regional dominance, a plan 40 years in the making.

In 1982, Israel publicly debated a strategy to fragment any neighboring country that might oppose its expansion, rendering it too weak to resist Israeli aggression. The “Oded Yinon plan” has been refined over the years but still forms the basis for current US plans for Israel to dominate the region. That is why the US has enabled it to flout international law with impunity since the Nakba in 1948, as the US itself has done in the region.

Since 9/11, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Iran have been targeted by the US and Israel. Former NATO commander Wesley Clark has publicly stated that within two weeks of 9/11, he learned of plans to undermine all seven countries. Obviously, these plans had been drawn up earlier. Since then, five of the seven have effectively been partitioned, as envisioned by Yinon. Iraq and Libya were not failures. They accomplished their actual objectives.

The purpose of destabilizing these countries is to control this fossil fuel-rich region by militarily dominating the area through Israel. The ultimate prize in this game of Risk is US control of the entire Eurasian land mass, long regarded as the key to global domination. While Netanyahu and other political and military leaders are directly responsible for their genocidal actions and war crimes throughout the region, the US shares the blame.

Like all empires, the American one will fall. The Wall Street denizens whose profits determine “American interests” have hollowed out the real economy in creating an economic system dependent on endless war. An alternative system is being created by Russia, China and others who are not going to continue to tolerate the economic and military threats of an increasingly belligerent US Empire.

The fact that the US has cut off access to critical weapons needed to defend Ukraine so that it can provide them to Israel reveals its weakness. Meanwhile, China has declared that it cannot accept allowing Russia to lose in Ukraine. It knows that if it does, the empire will turn its attention to it. American military and political officials have publicly stated that the US will go to war with China as soon as 2030.

If President Trump really wants to leave a legacy as a peace President, let him start by standing up to Israel and its lobby.

THE CHINA SYNDROME

While most Americans are just waking up to the fact that they no longer live in a democracy, citizens of other nations with little or no tradition of democracy are demonstrating the power of non-violent resistance to authoritarian rule. In the face of much more danger than US citizens would risk for simply taking to the street in protest against the fascism of their government, hundreds of thousands of determined patriots from North Africa to Iran to China are demanding the right to freedom and justice.

In the United States, resistance is just beginning and remains disorganized and fractious. While over one hundred thousand demonstrated in Wisconsin over the weekend, the government of Michigan has declared open war on the worker. Although support is coming in from around the country and around the world, no clear national strategy for victory has emerged. Grass roots organizing is a necessary but not a sufficient condition in the struggle against fascism. For a revolution to succeed, there must be a political strategy to achieve the goals of the movement.

Perhaps it is the longstanding illusion that the American system of checks and balances would ensure that we would never have to fear our own government that makes the average American blind to the fact that corporate control over government is by definition fascism. People who have never known real freedom do not take it for granted. As a government becomes more dependent on lies to sustain a veneer of legitimacy, those who have never been under the illusion that they are free find it increasingly easier to convince their fellow citizens that they must take their fate into their own hands.

China is a special case because the internet has been much more tightly controlled there than in any other nation. Organizing has been much more person to person and is undertaken at great risk due to the history of the Chinese Communist Party of violent repression against freedom fighters. The United States has become complicit in these crimes against the Chinese people. The international corporate terrorists who control the government have an insatiable appetite for cheap labor to produce the dangerous and shoddy products that are all the working American can afford to by, at Walmart prices.

For those still under the illusion that the Republican Party is responsible for all of the suffering of the middle class in the United States, it is educational to ask where the President and Democrats in Congress have been during the assault on American labor. Candidate Obama promised to put on his walking shoes and march with workers if their right to collective bargaining was challenged. Now that he is not running, he has yet to catch up to within shouting range of the angry protesters who demand justice from a Party whose national leadership has largely abandoned them.

China is just another example of plutocracy, crony capitalism dressed up as a democratic movement of the People. There is no longer any illusion that the CCP is serious about stopping corruption when they stay in power by giving special privileges to Party members. As the Chinese people become more aware that the promises of wealth that a quasi-capitalist system will bring are lies, the bribery and repression grow ever worse. 

The response of the US Congress has been to cut funding for Voice of America in China, leaving China to pay for its own propaganda on the virtues of the “Chinese model” so popular with authoritarian corporatists  in the western world who see any plutocratic regime as a welcome ally in their war on democracy. At least one Republican senator had the integrity to protest this blatant collusion with Chinese-style fascism. The VOA is a bipartisan propaganda machine designed to influence the thinking of Peoples of the world toward the fascist vision of the international corporate terrorists who are the Puppetmasters of the Us government.

In a rigidly controlled society such as China where any dissension is treated with violent reprisal, the only liberty possible is the freedom of thought. The Falun Gong are waging nonviolent asymmetrical warfare against the CCP as Soldiers For Peace .are doing throughout the world. Outnumbered by billions of Chinese suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome, their only weapon is the truth. They are risking their lives to convince their fellow citizens that freedom is more important than life itself. This is a conviction once shared by most Americans, who remembered the sacrifices of those who fought for the freedom they have now come to take for granted. While these rights may be God-given, they can be taken away by men of evil intent if they are not jealously guarded.

The Falun Gong numbers an estimated 100 million Chinese practitioners. Only ten years after Tiananmen, they peacefully petitioned the government for redress of their grievances against the corruption of local officials. With the memory of the slaughter of thousands of the still fresh in their minds, ten thousand protesters lined up to present their petitions to the office designated to receive them. They were within walking distance of CCP headquarters, from which word came that their demands would be met, after which they peacefully dispersed.

Of course the assurances were false. The response to this courageous demonstration of the will of the People was a program of eradication of practitioners of Falun Gong.  It is doubtful that the demonstrators expected anything else, given the recent history of violent reprisal against dissent.  The purpose is obvious only to those who understand the reason that patriots have always been willing to give their lives in defense of freedom: Life is not worth living if you choose to submit to slavery.

Tens of thousands of Falun Gong have died to make the point that in the most repressive society, the spark of freedom stays alive when men and women remember that they always have a choice to accept slavery or live as free people, regardless of consequences. If their sacrifices seem futile, consider whether the Jasmine Revolution would have occurred without their example, or whether 89 million Chinese would have officially renounced Party membership had the Falun Gong not shown to them that a People united can live free, if they have the courage to act according to their beliefs.

Americans need to see that the present military buildup of China is a reflection of the failed ideology on which the repressive system of Chinese communism is based. No democratic nation has ever declared war on another. If the communist government of China had lived up to the democratic ideals of Sun Yat-Sen, it would not have to defend itself from its own people or from western imperialists. In 1911, Sun Yat-Sen became the first and only democratically elected president of China. Popular with the People, his government and democracy itself was brought down by the greed of the warlords of the early 20^th century.

The selfishness of these local powerbrokers kept China divided and weak, making the nation ripe for exploitation by the West. Many sold out to the international corporate terrorists of the day only to find that their trivial powers were no match for the Japanese Imperial Army at the dawn of the rise of modern fascism. It was this invasion from without that gave birth to the unity party of Chiang Kai-shek, which worked to mount resistance to Japanese Imperialism. 

The exultation of the Chinese people after the Japanese were expelled quickly evaporated as Chiang Kai-shek demonstrated the weakness of most men given the power to rule over others. His government became as corrupt as that which brought down the Emperor in 1911 and placed Sun Yat-sen in his short-lived position as the President of a democratic China.

In the wake of Chiang Kai-shek’s betrayal of his people, it took little time for well-organized communists to challenge his autocratic rule and drive him and his army to the island of Formosa. The civil war wasted millions of lives, as did the Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao less than two decade later. Mao had been given a cult-like status by a People blinded by the illusion of democracy. It took the deaths of untold numbers of Mao’s political opponents to awaken the survivors to the fact that they had been deceived again. By then, it was too late to effectively fight the autocratic rule that resulted.

Fearing the power of communist promises of real democracy that seemed to inevitably lead to authoritarian rule, Western powers chose the corrupt autocracy of Chiang Kai-shek over the corrupt plutocracy of the CCP. The uneasy balance of power in Asia is maintained as everywhere by the international corporate terrorists who arm the Taiwanese and vow to defend it from aggression by mainland China.

With the rise of worldwide neofascism and the democratic reaction to it, the CCP is tightening the grip of its power over the people of China while simultaneously preparing to defend itself from attack by fascist forces.  While the corporatists in the West have been worrying about the growing economic power of the Chinese dragon that they have created, China has begun a military buildup that now threatens the western Empire. Far from seeing this as a threat, the Puppetmasters of the international military-industrial complex are salivating at the prospect of gorging themselves on the public trough, slopped by the taxpayers of the United States.

In realizing the failure of centralized control of agriculture and manufacture, the CCP has gradually abandoned any pretense of being a democratic communist state. In buying into the capitalist system, they have wasted the lives of millions who fought for freedom for their nation. The dependence of the CCP  on international corporate terrorists of the western Empire has rendered it fascist in that as in western nations, there is a reciprocal dependence between corporate powers and the government. China provides Americans a glimpse of what life in the United States would be if they surrendered to their fascist leaders. Fascists inevitably strip the People of their liberty in exchange for a false sense of security in a world that their greed has driven mad.

This then is the final war on fascism, whose command center is in Washington, DC. Only if Americans wake up to the peril to democracy will they, the Chinese or the other Peoples of the world who are dying to live free ever know true democracy. Union organizers in the United States must muster the manpower to put American workers out on the street demanding an end to corporate rule by abolishing corporate personhood through a movement to pass  a Constitutional amendment. 

Workers of the world must unite in this effort to educate the Peoples of the US and the world that it is not world socialism to be feared.  It is the threat of world fascism that we must recognize and confront together if the Peoples of the world are to collectively shape the New World Order that must come if human civilization is to survive this global civil war.

The purpose of introducing an amendment to make it illegal for international corporate terrorists to buy members of Congress and the White House is to make support for it a campaign issue in every subsequent Congressional election. This would mean that there will be collateral damage to those corporatist members of Congress who fail this litmus test. 

If this effort to challenge corporate control of the American government destroys the two party system, then that is the price partisan supporters of the corporate political duopoly will have to pay to end fascism in the United States. Only We the People can force the Meat Puppets in Congress and the White House to bow to the will of an America once more united in the cause of liberty and justice for all.

If you like this essay, you may enjoy BROKEN CHINA: THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF THE HIVE MIND, from the online book of essays Stop the Madness: The Diary of a Soldier For Peace in the War to Take Back America that is linked to this website.