Tag: Empire

Cracks in Washington’s empire

Washington’s EU vassals might be finding their backbone. Britain, Germany, France, and Italy are reported to have defied Washington’s orders and applied to join the Chinese-led Asian Investment Bank. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Luxembourg might also join.

Washington uses its development banks such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, along with the IMF, in order to exercise financial and political hegemony. These banks are crucial elements of American economic and political imperialism.

The Chinese-led bank will, of course, be much more effective. The Chinese will use the bank to actually help countries and thereby make friends and grow trust, whereas Washington uses its banks for domination by force.

This new bank, together with the BRICS Bank, will provide countries with escape routes from Washington’s domination.

The Evil Empire is beginning to crack. It will crack more as the Russian-Chinese alliance unfolds its potentials and when European capitals understand that hegemonic Washington has put their existence at risk in order to try to prevent Russia’s rise. The crazed American and British neocon nazis, and their dupes among the populations, comprise the greatest human threat that the world has ever known. The sooner the Evil Empire collapses, the safer the world will be.

Here is the report.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

Dining with POTUS

Order one with mustard, and cross your fingers

The golden age of political poisoning has largely come and gone. POTUS, however, still eats the way a ruler of an Empire did.

We know Saddam Hussein, for one, had people on the payroll to sample his dinner. His son Uday apparently incurred his wrath by having a favorite food taster killed.

Figureheads seem to have let their guard down a bit. Royals in the UK and imperials in Japan have reportedly been eating taster-free for some time now. But others a finger on the reins of world power consider the possibility that he or she might get poisoned.

Which is why, though there may not be anyone who puts down “presidential food taster” under “occupation” on his 1040, there are definitely mechanisms in place to ensure that the U.S. president doesn’t eat anything dangerous. How these mechanisms work in practice, however . . . well, the White House, as one might imagine, plays the topic exceedingly close to the vest, and writers’ requests for details (even mine) tend to go unheeded. So we’ve been left to piece things together as best we can from the occasional news account or memoir.

What seems clear is that when the president eats somewhere other than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., tasters — in the form of Secret Service agents or military personnel — are likely to be involved. According to a Washington Post article from July 1990, George H.W. Bush ate out at Washington restaurants a lot by presidential standards, about once a month, and when he did he brought along his own condiments, bottled water, and a taster. On at least one occasion the taster was seen to personally wash all of George and Barbara’s tableware before use and subsequently monitor its whereabouts, sample the food, supervise its service, and uncork and taste the first couple’s wine.

Reports from early in Bill Clinton’s first term suggest inconsistent taster use: a March ’93 Post account of an impromptu dinner with the Gores at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, has a trio of Secret Service agents scrutinizing the preparation of Clinton’s food but not actually trying any. But an “official” food taster (described as a “veteran of three presidencies”) turns up in a local paper’s feature on a Clinton get-together with Silicon Valley types in Los Gatos, California, a month earlier. And lest you think tasters are deployed only when the president ventures off government turf, a detachment of navy culinary specialists did the tasting (per the New York Times) at a congressional lunch held at the Capitol during George W. Bush’s inaugural festivities in 2001. One presumes security has gotten tighter since (a) the 9/11 attacks and (b) the descent of W’s approval ratings to depths previously plumbed only by hostage-crisis Jimmy Carter and athlete’s foot.

The presidential food safety team’s responsibilities go well beyond packing up a squeeze bottle of Horsey Sauce if the POTUS indicates that he’s thinking Arby’s. In his 2005 book Standing Next to History, former Secret Service agent Joseph Petro — who spent 23 years in the suit and shades — writes, “In principle nothing edible gets near the President unless we know where it comes from and who has handled it.” When the president digs in at a state banquet, Petro informs us, he’s eating basically the same stuff as everyone else in the room, but his helping has been prepared specially by White House stewards, who suit up to match the other servers at the event and carry his plate out themselves. For events in foreign countries, it’s the same thing but more so. Petro writes: “Stewards find out what’s being served at the banquet and bring the ingredients with them from the United States.”

OK, but try this one. The president (Reagan) is at a baseball game (opening day 1984, Baltimore), and his handlers decide they need a photo op of him eating a hot dog. You’re the Secret Service guy. What do you do? According to Petro’s account, you do the only thing you can: you pick a vendor at random, order one with mustard, and cross your fingers.

Vladimir Putin brings his own salt, pepper, bottled water and napkin along with him, it is rumoured. Just to be on the safe side when dealing with the Empire.

Mandela’s Empire

by Albert Brenner

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. – Jean Baudrillard

Bearing an analogy derived from Jorge Luis Borges` On Exactitude in Science, Baudrillard endeavoured to colloquialize his conceptualisation of (Sophist) simulacra into the language of the layman.

In this specific analogy, he explained how a great empire was created whilst, simultaneously, a map was created to (cartographically) plot the former/original creation. As this real-world empire grew in size and might, so did its symbolic representaion, the map. Until it, the map, eventually assumed the exact same dimensions of the original.

Then this empire crumbled into dust…as do all empires. And all that was left of this once magnificent empire, was the map…minutely depicting its original splendour, on paper.

And this is exactly what the so-called New South Africa is all about. It is not real. It is a simulacrum. A virtual MSM and popular-culture representation…of a map, an abstract symbol, outlining an empire most magnificent in splendour…that never was!

21st-Century (moral) South Africa is simply an aggregate of (Western) narratives – linguistic symbols signifying an all-conflated signified that never was. In short; Nelson Mandela, the proverbial `Emperor without Clothes`.

Mandela, like his Noble Savage Empire (the Rainbow Nation), is not real. He is simply the feel-good projection of the Oediphusian `anger, forlornness and despair` (Sartre) postmodern Westerners have been experiencing ever since they slew their, ertswhile, Father (the Christian God) on the altar of Science.

Be that as it may; Mandela, the Wits-educated Xhosa goat-herder from Qunu, has wittingly (and hubristically) taken on the mantle of Emperor…..of a map-empire that was not even of his making.

Let us be frank here; Mandela basically sat in a locked room for 27 years whilst, occasionally, hitting stones into smaller stones. Apart from that, he only wrote one original text called How to be a good Communist.

Nothing more, nothing less.

That said; what exactly – in (the) physical reality – in/of South Africa still, remotely, inversely represents the map called Mandelatopia accurately?

Endemic corruption, nepotism, cronyism, rape, murder and mayhem is what the real is in South Africa. Not the map…not Mandelatopia!

Yet he has attained god-like status among the feeble-minded. How come? Well, being the integer of the (Western) narratives of de-colonialization, capitalism (neo-liberalism, now) versus communism and postmodern body/identity politics, Mandela just had to sit back (as he did in jail), bide his time – in order to let the precession of simulacra solidify – and await the outcome of these, aforementioned, great (moral) struggles of the West.

And that he did. Pax Americana won. The Berlin Wall fell. And seeing that the winner writes morality, the god-Man (conveniently) forgot about `how to be a good communist`…and assumed the Emperor`s neo-liberal clothes…and got rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace for all those stones he so painstakingly turned into smaller stones.

And now here we stand…in the real South Africa. It is a bloody mess. A typical post-colonial African failed-state in the making. And we only have the map, of an empire that never was and never will be.

But yet we persist, desperately holding onto the promise of paradise. As if this map is our only Salvation. For this map has become the (new) Bible. A holy script presaging and , retrospectively , validating, the new Messiah – a secular-humanist God, the Noble Savage goat-herder that will lead us to La La Land.The Alpha and the Omega.

And this will be our ultimate undoing, for forsaking the Future to placate the Present will only unleash that which had no place in History, in the first place…for “

…it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.“ (Jean Baudrillard)

South Africa’s decadence is an advanced form of British decadence

Dancing at the Gupta wedding at Sun City

‘The principal of Healdtown was Dr. Arthur Wellington, a stout and stuffy Englishman who boasted of his connection to the Duke of Wellington. At the outset of assemblies, Dr. Wellington would walk onstage and say, in his deep bass voice, “I am the descendant of the great Duke of Wellington, aristocrat, statesman, and general, who crushed the Frenchman Napoleon at Waterloo and thereby saved civilization for Europe — and for you, the natives.” At this, we would all enthusiastically applaud, each of us profoundly grateful that a descendant of the great Duke of Wellington would take the trouble to educate natives such as ourselves. The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were “black Englishmen,” as we were sometimes derisively called. We were taught — and believed — that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen.’ – Nelson Mandela, Long road to freedom, p. 37

Black-consciousness activist Andile Mngxitama writes in The roots of anti-Indian racism about the nouveau-riche vulgarity of the Guptas and why blacks resent Indians:

“The vulgarity of the showmanship at the Gupta wedding shows a desperate attempt to flee from blackness. The same madness is seen throughout post-colonial Africa, in the form of conspicuous consumption, and we would do well to remember that this is true for South Africa as well. The ministerial handbook is a bible for entering the white world. Why do we think Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma want houses with bunkers? Why would Juju so prize his R250 000 watch? These are all comical schemes to run away from blackness.”

However, it is too late to try and wean blacks from so-called “conspicuous consumption” and the abuse of public money to buy cars, houses, clothes and other status symbols. It is like trying to talk a drug addict out of his habit when he is already in an advanced stage of dependency.

Both blacks and Indians in South Africa have as their model the English, who are the most vulgar nation in Europe. The English pray to money and ostentation like others pray to God, tradition or nationality. Britain only became civilised in the nineteenth century and therefore lacks any real culture or tradition, unlike the French, the Italians, the Austrians/Germans or the Spanish.

In their quest to become “English gentlemen” and British celebrities, South African blacks are going to bankrupt the country. Having the right house, the right car, watch, jewellery, etc., is what counts. Mngxitama is right when he says: “…they are merely running away from blackness and mimicking whites, like all blacks do”. V.S. Naipaul wrote a novel called The mimic men, the title of which characterises the behaviour of the ruling class of a newly independent Caribbean country. However, South Africa’s nouveau riche class of blacks and Indians are not mimicking whites in general, they are mimicking Britain, possibly the last of Europe’s class societies.

In a way, I think the ANC is doing Afrikaners a favour by impoverishing us through affirmative action and BEE. I see it with my children. They accept that they are never going to be rich, being the wrong colour and speaking a marginalised, oppressed language. Therefore what is important to them is getting more than 80% for mathematics or writing an Afrikaans essay that would simply blow their teachers away.

We will go back to living simple lives like our grandparents did, keeping a few chickens and fruit trees, but with the difference that we will use technology to harness energy and invent new ways of survival. While billionaire blacks run Eskom and burn coal, we will turn to the sun and solar energy. The other day I heard over the radio that there are now light bulbs that only use 1W of electricity. Amazing! Soon we will have no need of this “English” civilisation which is but the final stage of decadence and decline before it collapses, exhausted, like a beached whale.

The greatest civilisation that Europeans built, was the Roman one. It was founded upon stoicism, asceticism, wearing a simple toga and a wooden armband, to show that you were proud to be poor. Poor but intelligent, cultivated and patriotic. When Rome became decadent under Nero and others, it declined and ultimately came crashing down.

Contemporary Britain is extremely decadent, but South Africa is even more decadent. It has surpassed its colonial centre in its plebeian excess, its sexual, dipsomaniac, money- and drug-crazed, orgiastic consumption.

If only we had had any educated authors, they could have written brilliant novels about the last days of Empire, the Trimalchian splendour of the Guptas. They invaded our country with Anglo-Indian arrogance, as if the Raj had suddenly risen from the dead, Lazarus-like, in Sun City.