So Trump, the US president, jealous at Putin’s imperialism, starts his own adventure in his own ‘back yard’ (as the press call it) in South America, as US armed forces kidnap president Maduro of socialist Venezuela, strangely meeting little resistance, according to reports. After this, we again find the US president threatening to take over Greenland, possibly even forcibly. This now has a new significance for other western leaders. They were generally quiet or supportive on Trump’s illegal action in Venezuela, but the Greenland threat got them worked up a bit more. Greenland, belonging to Denmark, a Nato member. Nato, a military alliance, has a pledge to defend any member against external threats, but now the threat is the biggest member of Nato, its de facto ruler. What would they say now?
Well, at least a few
half-hearted comments about Greenland meant they did not have to remark all
that much about Venezuela. But now of course Putin in Ukraine is not so morally
different to Trump in South America. Clearly the liberal western press was
having an awkward moment finding its ethical high ground. Still, the bottom
line, the standard frame, was to support the US, the leader of the Free World.
They look for excuses for the leader of the Free World to be so obviously
outright authoritarian and imperialist.
Putin in fact has more
and better excuses for imperialism in Ukraine, given what happened in WWII and
the millions of Russians who were killed by the German Nazis, the invasions of
Russia usually being via Ukraine with assistance from some Ukrainians. So, we
see that what interests the bourgeois classes and its western media is not
really some special democratically based morality, but the interests of its bourgeois
class owned corporations who are helped to global success by the force of the
US military. In a sense what this means is a return to the capitalist normality
of imperial competition, which was only interrupted a little bit by the post world
war consensus that such wars should never happen again.
And so, what does this
mean? It means we are heading towards another world war; this is always where
imperialism ends up, as we should know by now. However, knowing this and doing
something real about it are two different things. Our politicians act as if they
are living on a different astral plane, their morality and arguments are from
an earlier time, outdated as soon as they utter their well-worn phrases, and
otherwise quite bizarre, they do not face up to what is happening. But they
cannot, not because they do not have this knowledge, but because they are
embedded in a system where they depend on the corporations and the military who
are pushers of imperialist conquest. They are not in fact our elected
representatives, even though of course they act out this role, they are really
members of the media state apparatus of the bourgeois class, their job is to
perform for this class, to play the role of democratic freedom, a kind of covering
up of imperialism with a sugar coating.