THE EMPIRE’S LAST GASP – ANGLO-AMERICAN JOURNALISM CHOKES ON ITS OWN DIGITAL MODEL
By John Helmer, Moscow
For empires to rule, their agents must hang on to their monopoly of force, fraud and subversion, inside the home country as well as in its far flung dominions. Subversion means persuading people to believe what is true and good, when that’s false and bad for them. Propaganda, in short.
It was a close run thing in Russia during the time of Boris Yeltsin and the Clinton family. But nowadays on the Ukraine front and the Syria front, Russian force is prevailing. On all the other US war fronts Washington’s agents are losing; that includes small islands like Cyprus and big ones like the Philippines.
The British voted for Brexit; the French for François Fillon and Marine LePen; and the Americans for Donald Trump because the fraud enriching their ruling elites became too pervasive, too obvious for the subversion of public opinion to explain it away or cover it up.
The US and European sanctions against Russia have been a colossal miscalculation because they give Russians a rationale for the misery that has come, not only with rouble devaluation and the loss of oil and gas export income, but also from the inequality inflicted by the oligarch system which replaced the communist one. In cutting the Russian oligarchs and state banks off from the international capital they regularly stole and converted into offshore assets, the sanctions have forced self-sufficiency on a reluctant Kremlin, and neutralized, for the time being, the most powerful Russian lobby in favour of Americanization and — what amounted to the same thing, globalization. What’s left of the fraud and conversion lobby in Moscow – Anatoly Chubais, Alexei Kudrin, Alexei Ulyukaev – is now under one form of house arrest or another.
Whereas the first assault on Russia by western journalists, a quarter of a century ago, was the sign of the collapse of Russian resistance, this time it’s the reverse – the signs of US and Anglo-European collapse, and Russian revival. We’re going to have to live a long time to figure out which side turns out to be civilized, which barbarian. Uncertainty like this used to be called the Dark Ages. (more…)