CHRIS HEDGES—Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as “gaffes.” He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told British students: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
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TIM BEAL—The central role of the United States in international affairs must be unearthed and analyzed. Nothing much of consequence happens in the world without U.S. involvement. At the same time, that involvement is hidden, and the U.S. empire’s role obscured or distorted by its huge and largely successful propaganda apparatus. The ongoing Ukraine crisis is a salient example. The root cause is NATO expansion driven by the U.S. as an instrument of its strategy to disempower Russia. The other major players—Russia, Ukraine and the European countries—are subsidiary, and, whether wisely or not, reacting to U.S. grand policy. Needless to say, this is not the way it is portrayed by the United States.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Empire apologists get upset when you talk about the fact that this war was provoked because a large amount of empire apologia in 2022 is built around pretending that provocation just isn’t a thing. By some trick of Orwellian doublethink, this concept we’ve all lived our entire lives knowing about and understanding is now suddenly a freakish and ridiculous invention of the Kremlin.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The Western press alleges that Russia invaded Ukraine because of Putin, and that his motive was Russian imperialism, a desire to expand Russia’s territory. In fact, Finland and Sweden responded immediately to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by seeking membership in NATO, out of fear that “we might be next” to be invaded. However, expansion of Russia was not involved in Putin’s motivation regarding Ukraine, but the fact that Ukraine has the border that is the nearest of any bordering nation to Moscow, being only 353 miles away from Moscow, which would be around five minutes of missile-flying distance away from possibly nuking Russia’s command-center, was very much on his mind.
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ERIC ZUESSE—The latest (2021) YouGov global poll of the “Worlds’s Most Admired” individuals shows Barack Obama as being #1, and as being way ahead of #2, who is his wife, Michelle. There is no question that he has been a huge success. But his biggest success was his conquest of Ukraine, in 2014. Because that conquest ended up ultimately producing, on 24 February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in order to block the U.S. regime’s plan to place America’s nuclear missiles only five minutes of missile-flying time away from being able to obliterate Moscow. Obama’s terrific success [all high war crimes], in grabbing Ukraine, produced ultimately Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this February.
