By Caitlin Johnstone
February 13, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz criticized the
Biden administration’s dangerous escalations against
Russia on the House floor on Monday, not because he
thinks needlessly ramping up cold war brinkmanship
with a nuclear-armed nation is an insane thing to
do, nor because he believes the US government should
cease trying to dominate the world by constantly
working to subvert and undermine any nation who
disobeys its commands, but because he wants US
aggressions to be focused more on China.
“While the Biden administration, the media, and
many in congress beat the drums of war for Ukraine,
there is a far more significant threat to our nation
accelerating rapidly close to home,”
Gaetz said. “Argentina, a critical nation and
economy in the Americas, has just lashed itself to
the Chinese Communist Party, by signing on to the
One Belt One Road Initiative. The cost to China was
$23.7 billion — a mere fraction of a rounding error
when compared to the trillions of dollars our
country has spent trying to build democracies out of
sand and blood in the Middle East.”
“China buying influence and infrastructure in
Argentina to collaborate on space and nuclear energy
is a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and far
more significant to American security than our
latest NATO flirtation in the plains of Eastern
Europe,” Gaetz continued. “China is a rising power.
Russia is a declining power. Let us sharpen our
focus so that we do not join them in that eventual
fate.”
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For those who don’t know, the “Monroe
Doctrine” refers to a decree put forward by
President James Monroe in 1823 asserting that Latin
America is off limits to European colonialist and
imperialist agendas, effectively claiming the entire
Western Hemisphere as US property. It essentially
told Europe, “Everything south of the Mexican border
is our Africa. It’s ours to dominate in the same way
you guys dominate the Global South in the Eastern
Hemisphere. Those are your brown people over there,
these are our brown people over here.”
That this insanely imperialist and white
supremacist doctrine is still being cited by
high-profile politicians to this day says so much
about what the US government is and how it operates
on the world stage. This is especially true given
that Biden himself just articulated the same idea in
so many words last month when he
declared that “Everything south of the Mexican
border is America’s front yard.”
So on one hand Gaetz is opposing warmongering
against Russia and condemning the trillions spent on
US wars in the Middle East, which by itself would
normally be a good thing. But the fact that he only
opposes doing that because he wants to focus
imperialist aggressions on another part of the world
to preserve US unipolar planetary domination
completely nullifies any good which could come from
his opposition to aggressions somewhere else.
This is a very common phenomenon on the right end
of the US political spectrum; you’ll hear a
politician or pundit saying what appear to be sane
things against the agendas of DC warmongers, but if
you pay attention to their overall commentary it’s
clear that they’re not opposing the use of
mass-scale imperialist aggression to preserve
planetary domination, they’re just quibbling about
the specifics of how it should be done.
Tucker Carlson has been
making this argument for years, claiming that
the US should make peace with Russia and scale back
interventionism in the Middle East not because peace
is good but because it needs to focus its
aggressions on countering China. He inserts this
argument into many of his criticisms of US foreign
policy on a regular basis; he
did it just the other day, criticizing the Biden
administration’s insane actions in Ukraine and then
adding “Screaming about Russia, even as we ignore
China, is now a bipartisan effort.”
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp summarized this dynamic
well in response to
a recent Reason article making the same “Make
peace with Russia to focus on taking down China”
argument,
tweeting “Unfortunately, a lot of the opposition
to war with Russia is rooted in this idea that the
US needs the resources to eventually fight China. We
need more people to view war for Taiwan as dangerous
and foolish as war for Ukraine.”
Do you see how this works? Do you see how wanting
to refocus US firepower on a specific target is not
actually better than keeping that firepower diffuse?
The difference between “Let’s have peace” and “Let’s
have peace with Russia and stop making wars in the
Middle East so that we can focus on bringing down
China” is the difference between “Stop massacring
civilians” and “Stop massacring these civilians
because you’ll need your ammunition to massacre
those other civilians over there.”
And it’s especially stupid because
it’s the exact same agenda. One
imperial faction believes it’s best to preserve US
hegemony by focusing on bringing down the nations
which support and collaborate with China, while the
other imperial faction wants to go after China
itself more directly. They both support using the US
war machine to keep the planet enslaved to
Washington and the government agency insiders and
oligarchs who run it, they just manufacture this
debate about the specifics of how that ought to
happen.
This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when
he said,
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient
is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable
opinion, but allow very lively debate within that
spectrum — even encourage the more critical and
dissident views. That gives people the sense that
there’s free thinking going on, while all the time
the presuppositions of the system are being
reinforced by the limits put on the range of the
debate.”
That strictly limited spectrum of debate is known
as
the Overton window, and imperial narrative
managers work very hard to keep shoving that window
further and further in the favor of the oligarchic
empire they serve. In order to prevent us from
arguing about whether
there should be a globe-spanning capitalist unipolar
empire in the first place, they keep us arguing
about how that empire’s
interests should best be advanced.
The longer the drivers of empire can keep us
debating the details of how we should serve them,
the longer they can keep us from turning toward them
and asking why we should even have them around at
all.
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