09-01-2008, 08:57 AM
<b>Astonishing US hypocrisy</b>
Premen Addy (Pioneer)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->When guns blaze, and swords are drawn and ploughshares left to rust in the meadows, media barons, always on cue, take up their cudgels. It is the 21st century's primary trans-Atlantic predator proclaiming its corporatist lineage to Mussolini and Goebbels. The obscenity of Iraq's destruction and colossal human loss is transformed into a luminous triumph of the democratic will; US-armed Islamist jihadis once counted a blessing in the struggle to reduce and traduce Russia and, to a lesser degree, India; after 9/11 they became a curse.
Sceptics are advised to read a recent Financial Times report on the current Kashmir unrest from sunny California. Amy Louise Kazmin, whose naked eye is unable to detect any transgression in the Valley's Muslim leadership. The evil, she claims with a turn of Pecksniffian rectitude, lies with the BJP-driven Hindu 'rioters' of Jammu -- the travails of the displaced Hindu Pandit community are cast into limbo. Small wonder that Tom Bairstow, a New Statesman hand in the magazine's long gone better days, dismissed his country's media as "the Fourth-rate Estate."
The US Democratic Party's obfuscated coronation of Mr Barack Obama as its candidate in November's presidential election was played out to tunes of primordial glory; in contrast the equally rousing call of the Russian Parliament that the breakaway Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia be recognised as sovereign states is derided as xenophobia.
Muslim Kosovo was detached from Orthodox Christian Serbia on the ground of self-determination and declared independent by American and EU decree, with cavalier disregard for Serbian sensitivities and over the vigorous objections of fellow Orthodox friend, Russia. But the elixir of Kosovo becomes hemlock when applied to areas where Western realpolitik affirms territorial integrity as a paramount principle. At such moments one is reminded of the stately Tory MP Edward du Cann striding down the corridors of the House of Commons, when a fellow MP stopped him to ask the time: "What time would you like it to be, old boy," he drawled, casting a languid look at his gold pocket watch.
The anti-Russian vitriol over Georgia from America's good and great, products of motley national security think-tanks singing from a common hymn-sheet, says much for the jaundiced eyes of the beholder, there being nothing quite like the malignity of disappointed humanity.
A spluttering Robert Hunter, a former US envoy to Nato, likened Russia to a "Saudi Arabia with trees". Remember the dire warning of the witches to Macbeth if "Great Birnam Wood to High Dunsinane hill/ Shall come...". These apparently are matters of small moment in Washington, DC. Time magazine published a philippic against Moscow from Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, notable for its staple Polish American incoherence. Its lubricious diatribes were unencumbered by the slightest recognition of America's numerous inequities in its own backyard and beyond in ages past and in the evolving present.
Truth is that the end of the Cold War was perceived in Washington, DC as a heaven sent opportunity to construct a genuine global empire complete with 100 military bases spread over every continent. American journalist and commentator Thomas Fleming wrote the following passage way back in March 1999: "Now that the Soviet Empire belongs to history, and for the foreseeable future Germany is in no position to go back to rattling sabres, the United States is top dog -- unchallenged in its might, but irresponsible in its leadership and uncontrolled appetite for hegemony. Some American conservatives are already calling for an American 'imperium', which they have tried, unsuccessfully, to distinguish from an empire (Americans don't study Latin.) Whatever we call it, Anerican adventurism is the greatest force for evil in the world today."
US security, say its most vociferous advocates, is blessed with moral weight, those beyond the pale are condemned, like sinners, to the eternal damnation of insecurity and its fears and tensions. Of America's attempts at pacification it might be said as it was of Rome's: "They make a desert, they call it peace."
The Times columnist, Michael Binyon, cut the cackle. "The cartoon images have shown Russia as an angry bear, stretching out a claw to maul Georgia. Russia is certainly angry, and like a beast provoked, has bared its teeth. But it is the wrong stereotype. What the world has seen last week is a brilliant and brutal display of Russia's national game, chess... For years there was rising resentment within Russia (that a weakened) Russia's views no longer mattered."
They do now. The country's economy is booming, its coffers are bulging. Its wealth is in Russian hands, not in the hands of grasping foreign predators. Its energy resources are firmly Russian. Gas and oil flow through Russian pipelines to Western customers. You pay for what you get. "Checkmate Gazprom" was the title of Derek Brower's informative and expert analysis in Prospect magazine. The battle has been truly joined. For all the inebriating, overblown rhetoric, Nato, notwithstanding its hi-tech war machine, is an organisation with feet of clay. It fights in Iraq and Afghanistan with conspicuous lack of success. Anglo-American brave hearts calling for a holy crusade against Russia beware.
It is a message that comes across loud and clear from the truest American conservative thinker, the famous Patrick Buchanan, no less. Mr Buchanan is scornful of his country's neocon lobby. He dismisses its members as a cabal of influential but pretentious buccaneers who violate the verities of philosophical conservatism, according to which all change should be incremental, even as it keeps faith with its traditional cultural and historical foundations.
Nations and peoples have their special characteristics moulded by time; their histories and affinities are as deserving of American respect as America is deserving of theirs. It is no business of American rulers to alter the world in America's image. The American economy is is in a parlous state. Its ills are being exported to the economies of its European allies; it is a nation in serious over-stretch but blinded by hubris.
The Pat Buchanan column began thus: "Mikhail Saakashvali's decision to to use the opening of the Olympic to cover Georgia's invasion of... South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamel Abdul Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships." In the light of US bombing of Serbia and Israel's assault on Lebanon, "Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?" he asks. Say it again Pat.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Premen Addy (Pioneer)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->When guns blaze, and swords are drawn and ploughshares left to rust in the meadows, media barons, always on cue, take up their cudgels. It is the 21st century's primary trans-Atlantic predator proclaiming its corporatist lineage to Mussolini and Goebbels. The obscenity of Iraq's destruction and colossal human loss is transformed into a luminous triumph of the democratic will; US-armed Islamist jihadis once counted a blessing in the struggle to reduce and traduce Russia and, to a lesser degree, India; after 9/11 they became a curse.
Sceptics are advised to read a recent Financial Times report on the current Kashmir unrest from sunny California. Amy Louise Kazmin, whose naked eye is unable to detect any transgression in the Valley's Muslim leadership. The evil, she claims with a turn of Pecksniffian rectitude, lies with the BJP-driven Hindu 'rioters' of Jammu -- the travails of the displaced Hindu Pandit community are cast into limbo. Small wonder that Tom Bairstow, a New Statesman hand in the magazine's long gone better days, dismissed his country's media as "the Fourth-rate Estate."
The US Democratic Party's obfuscated coronation of Mr Barack Obama as its candidate in November's presidential election was played out to tunes of primordial glory; in contrast the equally rousing call of the Russian Parliament that the breakaway Georgian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia be recognised as sovereign states is derided as xenophobia.
Muslim Kosovo was detached from Orthodox Christian Serbia on the ground of self-determination and declared independent by American and EU decree, with cavalier disregard for Serbian sensitivities and over the vigorous objections of fellow Orthodox friend, Russia. But the elixir of Kosovo becomes hemlock when applied to areas where Western realpolitik affirms territorial integrity as a paramount principle. At such moments one is reminded of the stately Tory MP Edward du Cann striding down the corridors of the House of Commons, when a fellow MP stopped him to ask the time: "What time would you like it to be, old boy," he drawled, casting a languid look at his gold pocket watch.
The anti-Russian vitriol over Georgia from America's good and great, products of motley national security think-tanks singing from a common hymn-sheet, says much for the jaundiced eyes of the beholder, there being nothing quite like the malignity of disappointed humanity.
A spluttering Robert Hunter, a former US envoy to Nato, likened Russia to a "Saudi Arabia with trees". Remember the dire warning of the witches to Macbeth if "Great Birnam Wood to High Dunsinane hill/ Shall come...". These apparently are matters of small moment in Washington, DC. Time magazine published a philippic against Moscow from Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, notable for its staple Polish American incoherence. Its lubricious diatribes were unencumbered by the slightest recognition of America's numerous inequities in its own backyard and beyond in ages past and in the evolving present.
Truth is that the end of the Cold War was perceived in Washington, DC as a heaven sent opportunity to construct a genuine global empire complete with 100 military bases spread over every continent. American journalist and commentator Thomas Fleming wrote the following passage way back in March 1999: "Now that the Soviet Empire belongs to history, and for the foreseeable future Germany is in no position to go back to rattling sabres, the United States is top dog -- unchallenged in its might, but irresponsible in its leadership and uncontrolled appetite for hegemony. Some American conservatives are already calling for an American 'imperium', which they have tried, unsuccessfully, to distinguish from an empire (Americans don't study Latin.) Whatever we call it, Anerican adventurism is the greatest force for evil in the world today."
US security, say its most vociferous advocates, is blessed with moral weight, those beyond the pale are condemned, like sinners, to the eternal damnation of insecurity and its fears and tensions. Of America's attempts at pacification it might be said as it was of Rome's: "They make a desert, they call it peace."
The Times columnist, Michael Binyon, cut the cackle. "The cartoon images have shown Russia as an angry bear, stretching out a claw to maul Georgia. Russia is certainly angry, and like a beast provoked, has bared its teeth. But it is the wrong stereotype. What the world has seen last week is a brilliant and brutal display of Russia's national game, chess... For years there was rising resentment within Russia (that a weakened) Russia's views no longer mattered."
They do now. The country's economy is booming, its coffers are bulging. Its wealth is in Russian hands, not in the hands of grasping foreign predators. Its energy resources are firmly Russian. Gas and oil flow through Russian pipelines to Western customers. You pay for what you get. "Checkmate Gazprom" was the title of Derek Brower's informative and expert analysis in Prospect magazine. The battle has been truly joined. For all the inebriating, overblown rhetoric, Nato, notwithstanding its hi-tech war machine, is an organisation with feet of clay. It fights in Iraq and Afghanistan with conspicuous lack of success. Anglo-American brave hearts calling for a holy crusade against Russia beware.
It is a message that comes across loud and clear from the truest American conservative thinker, the famous Patrick Buchanan, no less. Mr Buchanan is scornful of his country's neocon lobby. He dismisses its members as a cabal of influential but pretentious buccaneers who violate the verities of philosophical conservatism, according to which all change should be incremental, even as it keeps faith with its traditional cultural and historical foundations.
Nations and peoples have their special characteristics moulded by time; their histories and affinities are as deserving of American respect as America is deserving of theirs. It is no business of American rulers to alter the world in America's image. The American economy is is in a parlous state. Its ills are being exported to the economies of its European allies; it is a nation in serious over-stretch but blinded by hubris.
The Pat Buchanan column began thus: "Mikhail Saakashvali's decision to to use the opening of the Olympic to cover Georgia's invasion of... South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamel Abdul Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships." In the light of US bombing of Serbia and Israel's assault on Lebanon, "Is not Western hypocrisy astonishing?" he asks. Say it again Pat.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->