Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Cold War

Here's a comment from a blog called "The Unz Review" about the situation in Ukraine and the Crimea. Seems to me it sums up the sorry situation pretty well, especially the fourth sentence.
Fran Macadam says:
It is appalling to think that a Cold War we were told was fought against communism threatens to come back fully aggressive and metastasized like a returned cancer. But it turns out the disease was partly misdiagnosed the first time, mistaking side effects for the underlying disease. It wasn’t just about fighting communism after all, or only making the world safe for democracy. Somewhere along the way, it morphed into making the world safe for a certain set of transnational oligarchs, and has now become a struggle for one clique’s set over another’s. Cabals of donorists aren’t interested in democracy, here at home or abroad, except to buy it up. The policies we get stuck with the losses for, as the American public, are the ones they have their politician employees carry out for their own financial interests, not ours. When will we be sick of this enough, to say, Enough! as our incomes drop, our opportunities disappear and our jobs are offshored? When elites enrich themselves with threats of ever greater aggression? Do they prefer to corner us into a hot war, because they see the potential for profit is beyond any previous limit, as mad as they have become with greed? The President and his ill-advisors seem incapable of realizing the consequences of their intemperate domination gambits – John Kerry, having forgotten the early lessons of his long ago return from Viet Nam, tweeted from Kiev that he’s reminded there is nowhere in the world so remote that it isn’t essential to U.S. economic and security interests – and values. Just what would those lost values be? Which of his own moral decorations has he tossed over the White House fence at this late date?

3 comments:

Jim Wetzel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jim Wetzel said...

An excellent summary, indeed.

It's nothing to do with "ideology;" forms of government don't signify; it's a class matter. I never thought I'd sound so much like a Marxist, but ... there it is, plain to see. Oligarchs of various flavors, of different nominal nationalities: they have their own critical interests in common amongst themselves, and essentially nothing in common with such as you or me. And we're programmed to love some of them and hate others, just as though there were important differences among them. It's like watching an NBA game played between two groups of multi-millionaires. Because they have different uniform colors, we're supposed to love one and hate the other. Tragically, we cooperate.

(Sorry about the earlier deletion; just fixing a misspelling.)

Mimi said...

Absolutely, Jim, yet it's so sadly easy, it seems, to have people see enemies all around. Those who think realize that ordinary people are much more alike than their odious "leaders."

FRIDAY

I was down 1.2 at home and down 1.7 at T.O.P.S. to 126.6 and 127.3, respectively. The meeting was partly one of our therapy sessions and par...