Umberto Eco: Memories of Fascism and related (seductive) abominations

The New York Review of Books

(Originally June 22, 1995)

UR-FASCISM*

By Umberto Eco
Fascism in Italy was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

Fascist Blackshirts giving a Dagger Salute to visiting German dignitaries. May 13, 1938

II spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

Il Duce among Blackshirts.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

But who are They?

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric (and opportunism). He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm- in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

D’Annunzio

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

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Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages – in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur- Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur- Fascist hero tends to play with weapons – doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

Freedom and liberation are an unending task. Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte Le teste degli impiccati Nell’acqua della fonte La bava degli impiccati.

Sul lastrico del mercato Le unghie dei fucilati Sull’erba secca del prato I denti dei fucilati.

Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.

Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti E sulla terra faremo libertà
Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà.

(On the bridge’s parapet The heads of the hanged In the flowing rivulet
The spittle of the hanged.

On the cobbles in the market-places
The fingernails of those lined up and shot On the dry grass in the open spaces
The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.

Biting the air, biting the stones Our flesh is no longer human Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are no longer human.

But we have read into the eyes of the dead And shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the fists of the dead Lies the justice to be served.)

– poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli ***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Umberto_Eco_04 Umberto Eco, OMRI (Italian: [umˈbɛrto ˈɛko]; born 5 January 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist,philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction,biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1856

* This essay incorporates Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

Financial Times’ attack on Piketty under fire

By Nick Beams, Political Contributor, wsws.org

Chris Giles: Arranging a late-day coverup of capitalism's numerous vices.

Apologist Chris Giles: Arranging a late-hour coverup of capitalism’s numerous vices.

The campaign by the Financial Times against economist Thomas Piketty and his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century appears to be unravelling less than a week after its launch last Friday.

In an article posted on May 28, the Financial Times’ economics editor, Chris Giles, the author of the attacks, sets out to address what he calls “a few misunderstandings” and some “very legitimate questions” that have been raised since the publication of the newspaper’s anti-Piketty articles.

The overwhelming response has been support for Piketty’s central thesis that income and wealth inequality is on the rise in both Europe and the United States, coupled with criticism of the Times and its motivations for the attack.

As Giles himself notes: “Many people online have suggested that the articles were a premeditated attack on Prof. Piketty, with suggestions that the FT’s motives were in making a splash or pursuing a political agenda.”

While acknowledging that the FT “likes making a splash,” Giles claims that his “true motivation” was much more mundane, namely that he was concerned by what he saw as discrepancies in Piketty’s data and his use of it.

This assertion that there was no wider agenda does not square with the record.

Giles’ criticisms concerned one chapter, some 40 pages long, dealing with the inequality of capital ownership, in a book of 577 pages.

On the basis of some apparent mistakes in the transcription of data onto spreadsheets (a problem that is clearly not confined to Piketty, as Giles had to acknowledge mistakes in his own work) and Piketty’s failure to use a statistical series the Times favoured, the newspaper denounced the entire book and its key findings.

The headline of the initial article was “Thomas Piketty’s exhaustive inequality data turn out to be flawed,” while an editorial was entitled “Big questions hang over Piketty’s work.”

There is no mistaking the intent of such an approach: it was aimed at calling the entire analysis into question. According to the FT, its criticisms were “sufficiently serious to undermine” Piketty’s claim that the “share of wealth owned by the richest in society has been rising.”

As a number of critics of the FT have pointed out, when Giles used an alternative series based on other sources of data for France and Sweden, the results turned out to be almost identical to Piketty’s.

The main difference was in the figures for Britain. According to Giles, Piketty cited a figure showing that the top 10 percent of the British population held 71 percent of the wealth, whereas the latest survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) put the figure at only 44 percent.

Piketty will no doubt provide details of his approach. But there are compelling reasons for seeking data sources other than those provided by the ONS. The series was started only in 2006 when the previous Inland Revenue figures for United Kingdom wealth were abandoned because they were regarded as unreliable. And it appears that the ONS itself has considerable doubts over the new series. Newsweek reports that the ONS told it that its data series was still in an “experimental” stage. “In other words,” Newsweek continued, “these figures, according to the office doing the survey, are not yet ready for prime time.”

Researchers in the field of economic inequality have sided with Piketty’s findings against the attacks of the Financial Times.

A typical response was set out in a letter to the newspaper by David R. Cameron from the Department of Political Science at Yale University. He wrote that while there were “flaws in the data,” noting the considerable difficulties in comparing the extent of inequality across time and across countries, Piketty’s conclusions stood up.

“[Y]our reporters are wrong to say there is little evidence to support Prof. Piketty’s thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few and that the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. And they are most certainly wrong in claiming that the US data are too inconsistent to draw a single long series and that none of the sources supports the view that the wealth share of the top 1 percent in the US has increased in the past few decades,” he wrote.

In its initial response to the FT’s attack, the World Socialist Web Site noted that while Piketty made it abundantly clear that he was not an opponent of capitalism, “the material he has gathered and presented in coherent form has clearly made the FT, and those for whom the newspaper speaks, very nervous.”

Even as that assessment was being issued, it was confirmed by remarks made at a London conference held Tuesday evening by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney.

Lagarde told the conference that progress in building a safer financial system was being held back because of “fierce industry pushback” against the introduction of new regulations.

Carney went much further, warning that the entire capitalist system is at risk. Unbridled faith in financial markets, corruption and rising inequality had damaged the “social fabric,” he said. Inequality was “demonstratively” growing and risked undermining what he called the “basic social contract” based on fairness.

“We simply cannot take the capitalist system, which produces such plenty and so many solutions, for granted,” he declared. “Prosperity requires not just investment in economic capital, but investment in social capitalism.”

Unchecked market fundamentalism, he warned, could “devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.”

In its editorial on Piketty, the Financial Times asserted that if there were problems in the accumulation of extraordinary wealth derived from “monopoly profits,” then “enlightened governments” should step in and “remove barriers to entry so that unfair rents disappear.”

In other words, let the “magic of the market” and competition do their work in lessening inequality.

The fundamental flaw in this analysis was exposed by Marx more than 160 years ago. As he explained, the very aim and logic of competition is not more competition, let alone fairness, but the creation of monopoly as “one capitalist kills many.”

The present economic situation, in which a few dozen major banks and transnational corporations monopolise and dominate the world economy, providing ever greater wealth to the ruling corporate and financial elites and their hangers-on, is precisely the outcome of the “free market” and competition.

The FT’s attack on Piketty is an attempt to deal with social inequality and its explosive political consequences by denying it.

Carney has decided to follow a different course in an attempt to head off deepening opposition and hostility to the capitalist system.

He is calling on the very financial interests that have plundered the wealth of society for their own benefit to undergo a miraculous transformation and become more socially responsible, in order to prevent political and social upheaval. Both efforts are doomed to failure as social reality brings an intensification of the class struggle.

Ukraine military helicopter shot down as battles flare in the east

ukraine-Mi-24-helicopter.shotDown

By Patrick Martin, Senior Political Analyst, wsws.org

Rebel fighters in the city of Slavyansk shot down a Ukrainian military helicopter Thursday, killing 14 soldiers, including an army general, according to press reports from eastern Ukraine that were confirmed by government officials in Kiev.

Acting president Oleksandr Turchynov told parliament that a shoulder-launched air defense missile was used to shoot down the Mi-8 helicopter. It was ferrying troops into the outskirts of Slavyansk, a stronghold for pro-Russian separatists opposed to the fascist-backed government in Kiev.

The general killed was identified as Maj. Gen. Vladimir Kulchytsky, a former officer in the Soviet military who was in charge of combat training for Ukraine’s National Guard. The National Guard has become the vehicle for the mobilization of fascist and ultra-nationalist gunmen against the population of Ukraine, drawing new recruits from the Right Sector and the Svoboda (Freedom) party, two groups that hark back to the pro-Hitler Ukrainian nationalists of the World War II era.

Six of the dead were members of the National Guard, while the other eight were from a special forces unit of the Interior Ministry—all evidently picked for their willingness to go into combat against their own people.

Turchynov described those who shot down the helicopter as “terrorists” and “criminals,” the terms used by the Kiev regime to describe all its political opponents in eastern and southern Ukraine. He claimed that air strikes and artillery strikes had destroyed the insurgent unit responsible for shooting down the aircraft.

Addressing the parliament, Turchynov threatened sweeping military vengeance against those who resisted Kiev’s dictates. “Our armed forces, our security forces will complete their job against terrorism,” he said. “And all the criminals who are now funded by the Russian Federation will be destroyed or sit in the dock.”

Press reports spoke of heavy fighting around Slavyansk, including artillery bombardments of residential neighborhoods in the city—a true act of terrorism, perpetrated by the government forces. There were no confirmed reports of casualties on either side, behind the death toll from the helicopter shoot-down.

The Associated Press quoted one resident, Olga Mikailova, who said she was leaving the city for her family’s safety. “They are shooting at us from grenade launchers. We hear explosions. The windows of our house are shaking,” she said. “I have four children. It is terrifying being here, because I am afraid for their lives.” USA Today cited comments from Olga Oliker, an analyst at Rand Corp. familiar with the capabilities of the Ukrainian army. She said that it lacked the ability to gather intelligence, conduct precision strikes and avoid civilian casualties, concluding with the remarkably open admission, “They are fighting a domestic population.”

The Russian broadcast NTV reported popular opposition to the intensified warfare in the east, expressed in the actions of parents of conscripts who went to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry base in the Luhansk region to take their sons home.

In Donetsk, the capital of the eastern region, funerals were taking place for many of those killed in fighting near Sergei Prokofiev airport just outside the city. After separatist fighters seized control of the airport, the Ukrainian regime called in airstrikes, incinerating as many as 50 people, including both local residents and volunteers who had crossed the border from Russia, a few miles away.

Billionaire chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko, who won the gunpoint election held Sunday in the government-controlled portions of Ukraine, hailed the bloodbath in Donetsk, declaring the fight to reestablish Kiev’s control over the eastern region “has finally really begun.”

Poroshenko’s comments were echoed by US President Obama in his commencement speech at the US Military Academy Wednesday, where he announced that he had spoken to the incoming Ukrainian president and condemned what he called “armed militias in ski masks”—not the fascist thugs who spearheaded the overthrow of Yanukovych, but the people of eastern Ukraine opposed to the ultra-right regime in Kiev.

The US-backed regime has now set June 7 for Poroshenko’s inauguration, although there will be no significant change in either the policy or the personnel in control in Kiev. Poroshenko said he would keep Arseniy Yatsenyuk as premier, while delaying any parliamentary election until the end of the year.

The Party of Regions, the organization previously headed by the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, has a plurality in the current parliament, although many of its legislators have stayed away from Kiev for fear of violence by Right Sector and Svoboda thugs.

In an interview Wednesday with Germany’s Bild newspaper, Poroshenko said that he would ask the US government for military supplies and training. It is not clear where this training would take place, raising the possibility of stationing US “advisers” on Ukrainian soil.

Poroshenko issued a statement Thursday saying he would sign an economic agreement with the European Union as soon as he takes office next week. Yanukovych’s balking at such an agreement—which includes drastic austerity measures that will devastate the Ukrainian economy and drive up unemployment—was the occasion for the US-backed drive to remove him from office.

“The signing and enactment of the agreement … is part of Ukraine’s modernization plan,” Poroshenko said, adding that he hoped to “implement the reforms package within a very short period of time.”

He also said that he would hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July. Russia has effectively halted all support to the separatist forces in the east and recognized Poroshenko’s election. As the fighting in the east flared, Putin travelled to Central Asia Thursday, signing an economic agreement to establish a “Eurasian Union” with Kazakhstan and Belarus.

America, an Irresistible Force, Confronts China, an Immovable Object

By Michael Payne

Photo credit: U.S., China and the world by worldnewscurator.com

A tale of two countries: some years ago China and the U.S. were traveling down the same road, with America in the lead, when they came to a fork in the road. The U.S., saw the sign marked “military dominance”, and rushed down the left branch. China, after studying both options, traveled down the right branch marked “Economic supremacy.”

This tale accurately describes how China and America are rapidly heading in totally opposite directions, with two different objectives and two distinctly different strategies. China is using its resources to become the world’s #1 economic power while those of the U.S. remain largely concentrated on remaining the world’s military superpower.

What we have here is a growing confrontation between these two world powers and their opposite philosophies in critically important regions of the world, specifically, Eurasia and Central and South Asia. Now while this would appear to be a struggle for supremacy between China and the U.S. recent events are making it very clear that far more is involved.

There is another player in this geopolitical chess game. Russia has now joined with China, thus forming a very powerful alliance to resist the U.S.’s intentions in this resource rich region of the world. Either one of these countries would present the U.S. with a formidable challenge to achieving its objectives but, together, they could be considered an immovable obstacle.

If we think more deeply about what is going on and how this situation has reached this tenuous point, the reasons become quite clear. For some time now the U.S. has been attempting, with its NATO partners, to encircle Russia with its military power. And more recently it has also decided to follow that same strategy relative to China when President Obama initiated his Asian Pivot to begin the process of encircling China with military power. Good luck with that.

Just recently, reacting to the mounting influence of the U.S. in Ukraine affairs, Russia’s President Putin, without causing any military confrontation, greatly strengthened his country’s alliance with Crimea and, thereby, assured Russia’s continuing control over its strategic naval base at Sebastopol, as well as its access to the Black Sea and beyond. While this clever chess move was being made the U.S. and NATO could only stand by and watch.

So while the U.S. pursues its objective of encircling China and Russia with military power those two adversaries are reacting to these moves with their own counter-strategy, that is, encircling the U.S. interests across Eurasia and Central Asia with their growing economic power. They have no intention of challenging America with military power because they are not about to ignite a world war but they are doing it with the force of their economic power that they strongly believe is a far better strategy.

What we have here could be accurately described as: America, the irresistible force confronts China and Russia, two immovable objects. Now let’s take a look at how these two distinctly opposite geopolitical strategies are working and the probability of success for each.

Everything the U.S. does in these increasingly important regions of the world revolves around military power; from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the southern Asian region, to the alliance with NATO countries to the West and those in between. China, on the other hand, is concentrating on positive and constructive development projects in various countries, making friends, not enemies.

China is following a concrete plan to build, construct, and expand its economic presence all over the world and especially in these regions; some might refer to what they doing as building an economic empire. As a recent article in the Asian Times article states, “It’s building not one, but myriad Silk Roads, far-reaching webs of hi-speed railways, highways, pipelines, ports, and fiber-optic networks across huge parts of Eurasia. These include a Southeast Asian road, a Central Asian road, an Indian Ocean ‘maritime highway’ and even a high-speed rail line through Iran and Turkey reaching all the way to Germany.”

For those who are not familiar with the term Silk Road here’s a definition from thefreedictionary.com: “An ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean Sea extending some 6,440 km (4,000 mi) and linking China with the Roman Empire. Marco Polo followed the route on his journey to Cathay.”

What China is doing, its relentless march to world economic supremacy, is reminiscent of a quote from an old horror movie when the really scary main character makes this statement, “Step by step, inch by inch.” That’s China, low key but relentless in advancing its economic agenda. Meanwhile the U.S. government goes around the world acting like a bull in a china shop, from one military confrontation to another, seemingly obsessed with spreading its military presence.

Here’s an article that indicates that China is now in the process of implementing its 12^th Five Year Plan. Talk about planning ahead, China seems to be following a technique that has been commonly used in the corporate world called Management by Objectives, which is self-explanatory. Does America have a Five Year Plan? Well, based on this government’s reactive rather than proactive way of doing things, I would venture to say that such planning is non-existent.

Trying to encircle China and Russia with military power is most certainly a totally misguided plan and strategy which might be called biting off far more than you can chew. Or it might be like trying to wrestle a crocodile and an alligator at the same time. When in American history have we seen a foreign policy that is, by its very actions, not only helping to creating a close alliance between two adversaries but seems to be greatly strengthening it at every turn?

Russia and China are using their economic powers and growing mutual cooperation to convince numerous countries to side with them, enticing them with Russia’s massive energy resources and China’s developmental prowess; making these countries dependent upon them and, thereby, cementing relationships; and with every one of these steps they take they are diluting America’s influence in the region.

As the U.S. increases its efforts to try to intimidate China and Russia the alliance between them becomes stronger and stronger. Here’s a linkto an article which reports on a monumental agreement by which Russia will be supplying China with natural gas worth $400 billion over 30 years. This is but one of many such trade agreements to follow between China, Russia and the other members of the BRICS group which also includes India, Brazil and South Africa, all of which are intended to be conducted with currencies other than the U.S. dollar.

China is, unquestionably, on the rise; it has a clear vision for the future and it wisely uses its resources to strengthen its interests all over the world. America is caught up in a state of stagnation with a dying manufacturing sector, and a hollow, lifeless economy. The U.S. government no longer has a vision for the future; it cannot see the handwriting on the wall that says, “Stop”, you’re going the wrong way, reverse direction before it’s too late.

So what is the lesson to be learned in this confrontation between great powers? It’s simply this. In the short term military hubris may dominate but, in the longer term, economic supremacy will prevail.

—M.P.

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US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

by Eric Zuesse

In America, money talks… and democracy dies under its crushing weight. (Photo: Shutterstock)

[dropcap]A [/dropcap]study, to appear in the Fall 2014 issue of the academic journal Perspectives on Politics, finds that the U.S. is no democracy, but instead an oligarchy, meaning profoundly corrupt, so that the answer to the study’s opening question, “Who governs? Who really rules?” in this country, is:

To put it short: The United States is no democracy, but actually an oligarchy.

The authors of this historically important study are Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, and their article is titled “Testing Theories of American Politics.” The authors clarify that the data available are probably under-representing the actual extent of control of the U.S. by the super-rich:

Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans – though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases – is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.

Nonetheless, this is the first-ever scientific study of the question of whether the U.S. is a democracy. “Until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions [that U.S. policymaking operates as a democracy, versus as an oligarchy, versus as some mixture of the two] against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.” That’s an enormous number of policy-issues studied.

What the authors are able to find, despite the deficiencies of the data, is important: the first-ever scientific analysis of whether the U.S. is a democracy, or is instead an oligarchy, or some combination of the two. The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, [a plutocracy in more precise terms] no democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation’s “news” media). The U.S., in other words, is basically similar to Russia [France, Britain, Italy] or most other dubious “electoral” “democratic” countries.* We weren’t formerly, but we clearly are now. Today, after this exhaustive analysis of the data, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” That’s it, in a nutshell.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

* Nations in which the so-called capitalist democracy model operates, and the economy and the political system and media are virtually completely controlled by the top 1% or less of the population.

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