Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows.
David Stockman’s Contra Corner
Another Christmas and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality is the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac—along with its web of war-making capabilities, bases, alliances and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet. So positioned, it stands in stark mockery of John Qunicy Adam’s sage advice to his new nation 200-years ago:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The last bolded sentence pretty much sums up the foolish, destructive, unnecessary and fiscally calamitous Forever Wars hatched in Washington all the way back to 1950. Nearly without exception they were waged against alleged foreign monsters of the very kind which John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen not to pursue: Kim Il-Sung, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Salvador Allende, Ayatollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are but the most prominent among these targets of Washington’s relentless global-spanning search for “monsters to destroy”.
Yet without exception not one of these assorted authoritarians, dictators, tyrants, thugs and revolutionists, along with the nation’s they ruled, posed a direct threat to the American homeland. Not even Putin or Xi could actually dream of mounting the massive armada of land, air and sea-forces needed to transit the great ocean moats and lay waste to the security and liberty of 335 million Americans domiciled from “sea to shining sea”.
To the contrary, the claim always and everywhere has been that these foreign devils amount to incipient totalitarian monsters—the next Hitler or Stalin in the making. The presumption is that the likes of these two twentieth-century mutants are somehow embedded in the DNA of humankind. And unless resolutely and timely thwarted, each new tinpot tyrant who comes along will gobble up their neighbors in falling domino fashion until the economic and military might of their accumulated conquests threatens the security of the entire planet, including the fair lands in faraway North America.
Accordingly, the War Party claims that deterrence of incipient foreign monsters needs be accomplished through robust international arrangements for “collective security” and continuous preventive interventions, led by the peace-loving politicians and apparatchiks of Washington. The latter have finally learned the lessons of WWII and the Cold War, or so it goes, that eternal vigilance is imperative and that incipient monsters must be crushed in the cradle before they metastasize into the next Hitler or Stalin.
That’s always the syllogism whenever a new rascal, tyrant or local belligerent appears on the scene, and it always leads to hideously flawed claims of universal peril, as embodied in the current proxy war with Putin in Ukraine. That particular outbreak of mindless insanity has so far cost the lives of upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and the displacement of 10 million civilians across Europe. Nearly $200 billion in Western public money has been wasted to date. And now “Joe Biden” and the European Union want to donate another $100 billion to prolong this futile slaughter.
Yet a passing familiarity with the last few centuries of history makes it obvious that what is happening in Ukraine is not an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor by Russia but a civil and territorial war in what had been the shape-shifting “borderlands” (viz. “ukraine”) and vassals of Imperial Russia, and which became a defined state only upon the bloody edicts of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. So allowing this aberrant communist state of 1922-1991 to join its Soviet sire in the dustbin of history amounts to a no brainer.
And by all the evidence that is what had been inchoately wanting to materialize on the political ground in Ukraine after the iron fist of communist rule ended in 1991. As we have documented elsewhere, the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbass and southern rim along the Black Sea had voted 80-20 against the Ukrainian nationalist candidates, who in reciprocation had garnered 80-20 pluralities in the central and western regions including historic Galicia and remnants of Poland. Thus, this communist artifact of a broader 20th century history that needn’t have happened either (per below) could have been partitioned with dispatch ala Czechoslovakia and that would have been the end it. The dead, maimed and disabled in their tens of thousands need not have been victims, nor would the hideous waste of economic resources and military material in its hundreds of billions have ever transpired.
But it happened because the interested parties permanently bivouacked on the Potomac need an endless parade of “monsters to destroy” in order to justify the great enterprise of global hegemony and the opportunity for glory and globe-trotting importance that it confers upon Washington’s self-appointed proconsuls. And that’s to say nothing of the trillion dollars per year of fiscal largesse that it pumps into the insatiable maw of the military-industrial-security-foreign aid-think tank-NGO complex—an arrangement that coincidently has set the greater Washington metropolis aglow with prosperity.
In the current case of Ukraine, however, they have literally thrown rationality to the winds. Sleepy Joe himself in last week’s address to the nation trotted out the hoary canard that Putin means to resurrect the old Soviet Empire and that Poland, the Baltics and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin are next on his game plan of conquest, if he is not stopped well east of the Dnieper River. And, of course, Russian tanks in Poland would mean, under NATO Article 5, American troops being mustered into battle and the commencement of WWIII for all practical purposes.
Of course, this whole scenario is utter poppycock, hogwash, humbug and malarky all rolled into one malefic lie. There is not a shred of evidence that Putin has anything in mind other than the preventing the implantation of a NATO advance guard on his doorstep and cruise missiles within 30 minutes of Moscow. The whole Ukraine War saga, in fact, amounts to a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
In turn, the fact that official Washington does not even remotely see the irony is due to the fact that the War Machine on the banks of the Potomac has so thoroughly polluted the intellectual waters and ethers alike with the incipient Hitler/Stalin canard that it has just robotically slotted “Putin” into the latest incarnation of this hoary formula without even a tinge of embarrassment.
To be sure, Vlad Putin is no prince of men, and he does have his contemporary gulags to show for it. But he is way, way too smart and historically educated to wish to fall on his sword in Poland or anywhere else west of the Dnieper where Russians are distinctly unwelcome. Indeed, the very thought that this canard is a valid argument for the mayhem Washington is now conducting in Ukraine is a veritable affront to adult reasoning.
So let us turn to the predicate. How in the world did the notion that the planet is teeming with incipient monsters that can only be tamed by the global presence and continuous vigilance of a Washington-led and -kitted planetary gendarme ever take such deep roots and persevere for so long?
Alas, the answer lies in the truth that much of the 20th Century was an unforced error—a giant mistake that reaches back to Woodrow Wilson’s utter folly in bringing America into World War I, thereby ignominiously extinguishing the wisdom of John Quincy Adams in the mud and blood of northern France.
Wilson’s unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of homeland security, which is the only valid basis for foreign policy in a peaceful Republic. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.
Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was none of the above. Instead, what he really sought was a big seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.
But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.
Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it: Intervention positioned Wilson to play—
“The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.
America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World. John Quincy Adam’s wisdom got shit-canned in one fell swoop.
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 