RAINER SHEA—As part of its attempts to manage the situation, the imperial state is fueling left-wing pro-imperialist ideology, with its culturally based hostility towards countries like Iran and Russia. The imperialist media and its allies within the left are smearing principled anti-imperialists as “rightists,” seeking to divide the pro-Palestine movement over social issues. This psyop’s larger goal is to proliferate Neoconservativism under a leftist cover, letting the empire target countries for regime change on the basis that they’re “reactionary” and “fascist.” If any organization or state doesn’t conform to American leftism’s cultural sensibilities, it needs to be eliminated; that’s the mindset of this ideology.
-
-
BRUCE LERRO—In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.
-
RAINER SHEA—This damage won’t be enough to defeat China, nor the empire’s other next big opponent Iran; the coming war maneuvers will certainly backfire on the imperialists, like how it backfired when they picked a fight with Russia. The danger is in how many lives the hegemon may take during its collapse. There’s no doubt that the anti-imperialist united front will be able to subdue the hegemon, but in their desperate attempts to survive, the aggressors hope to bring a catastrophe larger than World War II. They’re already in place to take hundreds of thousands of more lives in Palestine, though Hamas has ensured that the plan for settling Gaza won’t be fulfilled.
-
EDITOR—Garland and Laith discuss the actual outcome of the latest Israeli strike on Iran, concluding that the air assault, comprising at least 100 warplanes and probably 200 missiles, and the full-on assistance of the US military, did little damage to Iran’s AD and strategic and economic infrastructure, and could have demonstrated instead Israel’s (and America’s) emerging severe limitations when confronting a peer power. Of course, Iran is now a member of BRICS, and also enjoys a mutual defence alliance with Russia and a de facto one with China, neither of which wants to see a destructive regional war in the Gulf, nor a major military setback by Iran nor the development of a successful regime change op by NATO.
-
ROGER BOYD—In 2002 Blinken married Evan Ryan, who also served in the Clinton administration as well as in the electoral campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden. After that, she served in the Obama administration and was a senior advisor for the Biden-Harris transition team. She also helped launch and lead Democratic news website Axios before it was acquired by Cox Enterprises in 2022. She has also worked with the Clinton Global Initiative and like her husband is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. Two peas in a pod.
