Unbecoming American: One Strike, Two Strikes, and You’re out

One strike, two strikes and they are out…

Meanwhile there are even respectable, Establishment scholars who appear to have overcome their indoctrination or institutional discipline to express views on the current campaign in the eternal war of the Anglo-American Empire although at variance—if not deviance—from the positions they have been known to hold in the past or those that continue to prevail among the ruling class, its prelates, acolytes and fanatical hordes.

Tucker Carlson has continued to sail full speed ahead in the same manner with which he confronted the Establishment’s re-enactment of the Reichstag fire (1933) in 2021 and exhibited the strongest circumstantial evidence that the farce staged on 6 January was quite obviously anything but what the Establishment has insisted it was to this day. Then he exposed millions of traditionally ignorant US Americans to the intelligence and immanent sanity of the Russian federal president, Vladimir Putin. Just last week he released an extensive interview with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Although Sachs is probably still invited to parties and other events of the New York and Washington season, this prior preacher of shock therapy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—of whose legal dissolution he was personally informed by US stooge Boris Yeltsin—has arrived, on his own it seems, at an independence he could scarcely have been accused of exhibiting for much of his career. That said, just because he has said things with which critical historically conscious people can even violently disagree does not mean that his basic intellectual integrity is fraudulent.

On the contrary, in the cult of individual personality that drives Western society there is also a compulsion to see every human as isomorphic with the verbal behaviour in which he or she engages. However since there is no immanent meaning in language—words—but only judged responses to verbal activity—it takes considerable energy and force to preserve dogmatic personalities of the kind with which we are routinely presented in mass media and wherever substantial power is exerted without corresponding challenge. What I mean is the judgement that anyone is inconsistent (as a liar or an idiot) relies on a more or less static and hence stereotypical or cliché-formed notion of the person whose behaviour is being judged. Hegel made this point more than two-hundred years ago in his journalistic essay “Who thinks abstractly?” (Wer denkt abstrakt?) It is not necessary to take vows of holy matrimony in order to have intimate and confidential relations—although as I child I did believe that children were mysteriously generated by the legal act.

The education of Jeffrey Sachs, although far from complete, induced him to repudiate his role in the destruction of the Soviet economy while sitting on a New York Times panel discussing China. He was heavily criticized for that as well as his unwillingness to categorically condemn the Chinese State—especially by Western standards. However the economist is still ready to believe that the UN Sustainability Goals are benevolent policies driven by the sincere pursuit of human welfare. It appears that he does not advertise his destructive role in post-Soviet Eurasia. In speaking to Tucker Carlson he retained the positive version of his political-economic engagement. However he recounted an element of his epiphany when the very policy recommendations deemed a success in Poland (for reasons that are too extensive to explain here) were categorically rejected when it came to restoring Russia to the Western political-economic fold. The refusal of his masters to approve recommendations he had successfully implemented in the CIA-infested Catholic republic east of the Oder was by his own admission a stage of his Kairos. Apparently oblivious to actual Polish politics he assumed—not unlike the worshippers of Ludwig Erhard in Germany—that wonders come from liberal economics in lieu of canonized saints or the deity itself. This failure does not invalidate the lesson he learned, namely that the masters’ were not about to let their servant treat the hereditary enemy of Anglo-American Empire (I find hegemony an insufferable euphemism) in any other manner than destructive. Perhaps it should be said here that the very intelligence which elevated Jeffrey Sachs to the professorship and fellowship of Harvard University at such an early age was complemented by the spiritual-intellectual dependency sought in the loyal cadre. Repeatedly during the interview Professor Sachs refers to himself as naive or perhaps naive. That naïveté is cultivated among the bright, once talent-spotters have recruited them for the Establishment. He called the “neo-cons” “true believers”—a term popularized by Erich Fromm—but seems unable to recognise that he too was a true believer, spoiled with rewards that confirmed his own merit but ultimately had little to do with his undeniable intellectual capacity.

Jeffrey Sachs, as a meanwhile marginalized if not banned regime critic, is important for two reasons. In the first place the credibility he enjoys because of his decades of devotion to the ruling cult lends some authority to the criticisms raised by those with little or no access to the apparatus of power. In the second place, Professor Sachs provides evidence of the permeability of a certain—albeit small—segment of the Establishment. His statements are evidence of the mendacity of his masters and ours. Although, unlike Tucker Carlson, Jeffrey Sachs is not willing to call his masters evil, he has at least reached the point of calling them insane. If we need proof that the evil 1% ought to be neutralized (to adopt a term favoured in those heights) there is at least testimony that the insanity requires us to act in our own defence.

This interview was not unlike the Putin interview in one respect. Both Vladimir Putin and Jeffrey Sachs live in the world of diplomacy, civilized behaviour even among antagonists. Although of very different rank and station, Putin and Sachs demonstrate that there are limits to what one may say in public. The conversation Tucker Carlson conducted permitted him to interpolate or extrapolate from the statements made by his interlocutor. Hence we cannot know how critical Professor Sachs really is or how much he really understands beyond the framework his precocious academic career constructed.

This is no where more evident than in the synthesis by which Professor Sachs asserts that none of the current crisis arose from spontaneous errors or miscalculations. On the contrary he argues very clearly that today’s brinkmanship derives at least from the policies (and culture) of Old Harrovian Henry Temple, 3d Viscount Palmerston and the Crimean War. The Old Etonian, David Cameron, who bowled Britain’s first innings against Russia until 2016 has continued that tradition in his assault as foreign secretary—recently on record as calling for direct assaults on Russia with British (and NATO) weaponry. In a discussion of his conclusions as chair of a committee appointed to investigate the origins of the so-called COVID-19 pandemic, Sachs traced the story back at least to 2008 and the ambiguity of US regime claims to research “biodefense”. He also asserted that the 1963 assassination of POTUS John F. Kennedy could no longer be explained credibly by the fantastic story recorded and certified by the late Chief Justice Earl Warren et al. Moreover he concurred with a view meanwhile widely held that the assassination was a coup d’etat at least organized by the US national security apparatus (e.g. CIA). In all these Candide-like remarks—with Pangloss implied—Jeffrey Sachs demonstrated that even the most well-rewarded prodigies can under certain circumstances be induced to question many if not all of the fundamental assumptions by which they were recruited.

Another admission—certainly rare among those of his rank and station—is that he actually values the lives of his family beyond the balance sheets and capital accounts with which political economy is obsessed. The idea that atomic war should be avoided because it kills the innocent (not necessarily the warriors) is foreign to any living Western politician or Establishment intellectual. As in the case of the settler-colonial regime in Palestine, the ideological standard is that mass killing of women and children “is worth it” (as the finally late Madeleine Albright proudly proclaimed for half a million dead Iraqi children). Sadism is an implicit prerequisite for high office and senior civil or military service. Corporations have departments dedicated to it. For Jeffrey Sachs the annihilation of his children and all the children like his was reason enough to oppose the insanity of the ruling oligarchy.

Nonetheless as thoroughly confessional and sincere as Professor Sachs was in his conversation with Tucker Carlson, there were numerous loose ends. Perhaps the loosest of those is the de-contextualization of George Kennan’s anti-Sovietism. While it is true that in later years Kennan criticized much of the Establishment policy toward the Soviet Union he never went so far as to violate the sanctity of Chatham House, so to speak. Candidly this true believer accurately asserted that without military force the US would not be able to retain control over some 60% of the world’s consumption with 4% of its population. He also predicted that the damage the West had done to the Soviet Union would require at least 20 years to repair. In other words those who had ultimately backed the Hitler Wehrmacht as a means of destroying the Soviet Union had succeeded in creating the living conditions claimed to be the fruits of socialism. When despite that devastation the Soviet Union recovered ahead of schedule, the war intensified.

By missing the essence of Kennan’s policy papers, Jeffrey Sachs fails to understand that the atomic weapons developed by the Manhattan Project— the largest single government research project at the time—were always intended for use against the Soviet Union, not against the German Reich or Japanese empire. Perhaps he never saw the de-classified Sandia oral history of US strategic policy. Yet Curtis LeMay was really no exception among the centurions. It was the Soviet Union that preserved what we in the West experienced to varying degrees as peace and prosperity, not the US. Even the story of the arms race taught in the West conceals this fact so as to blame the USSR for what was always unilateral, not mutually, assured destruction.

What was the fundamental change in 1989? Professor Sachs says it was the “neo-con” ascendency. However Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were already embedded in the Nixon administration. Richard Holbrooke and his slightly older roommate began their careers as Phoenix counter-insurgency managers in the Mekong Delta (VietnamI)—that is junior mass murderers for the CIA before the official “neo-con” tracts were published. The dramatis personae of American empire has been incestuously linked to Britannia’s (in fact the City of London) destiny ever since Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rothschild founded what would become the Royal Institute of International Affairs franchise and the Council on Foreign Relations. A century of continuous class war, for convenience launched in 1913 with such paragons of legislation as the Federal Reserve Act and the South African Native Lands Act, has been waged by the “banking” class, guided by its dogma of world population reduction. In 1989, the triumph of the 1.0% meant that the horrific labour (human) intensive industrialization process could finally be transcended. The merger of eugenics and ecology, exemplified in the Club of Rome, prepared the ideological foundation for elimination of 20-40% of the world’s population, instead of merely 20% of selected target populations (China, Soviet Union, Central America, African states). The United Nations organisation—mainly the plethora of “specialized agencies” and the Anglo-American dominated Security Council and Secretariat—provided deniability for genocide in Korea, Indochina, Indonesia and the Congo or Haiti and of course Palestine. What seems unmentionable is the global enclosures program being implemented behind the facade of UN Sustainable Development Goals. The WHO—originally founded as a shell organization for the Rockefeller petrochemical pharmaceuticals cartel—has openly taken the point for biochemical herd culling/ eradication. The pejoratively denoted “Woke” ideology has emerged very much like Huxley and Orwell described—under the pretext of a vacuous and hypocritical morality, human kind are to be replaced by NCEs, i.e. numerically controlled entities. The abolition of biological sex, both in microsocial and macrosocial senses, accompanies the total commodification of “identity”. It only takes a cogent sense of consistency to see that when there are no essentially human qualities, then there can be no human rights.

Fictive wealth can be indefinitely maintained by the minuscule tribe of monsters with the elimination of sufficient numbers of human beings (20-40% or more). Injecting genetically-engineered toxins into a billion people at a time is entirely consistent with pushing Russia into what could be politely called an atomic exchange.

To the extent Russia and China oppose this nihilism it is because, unlike the West, they have actually been on the receiving end of previous culling campaigns (millions murdered by Western warrior-terrorists). However even there one can hear the grunts of members in the “big club”. Resistance to evil and insanity is far from uniform, especially among those committed to AI and contract pharmaceuticals manufacture.

Nikki Haley is meanwhile standing in for that character played by Slim Pickens in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. As can be seen on the banks of the Hudson, Thames, Seine and Spree, between the River Jordan and the sea, the entire Western political class is compromised and or complicit in this accelerating democide.

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..