by Caitlin Johnstone

Foreign conflicts in the 2020s are always like:

USA: Let’s militarily encircle this large nation 

Large Nation: Hey stop 

USA: Let’s heavily arm proxy forces right on their border 

Large Nation: We’re drawing a red line 

USA: Let’s cross the red line immediately 

Large Nation: *acts* 

USA: OMG COMPLETELY UNPROVOKED AGGRESSION

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Of course, Greta Thunberg met with Zelensky. Of course she did. That was the only box left to check off in the most PR-intensive proxy war of all time. They got Bono. They got Mark Hamill and Sean Penn. They got appearances at the WEF, the New York Stock Exchange and the Grammys. They just needed Greta.

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As with 2016 and 2020, by far the largest US election interference in 2024 will come not from Russia or China but from American oligarchs and Empire managers. This is treated as fine and normal, because American oligarchs and Empire managers are the nation’s real government. US election interference is an inside job.

We’ve been seeing this illustrated with RFK Jr’s censorship by Google-owned Youtube:

We also saw it illustrated recently when Obama’s acting CIA director just casually admitted to using his intelligence connections to orchestrate a blatant psy-op to manipulate the 2020 election using false information, and literally nothing happened. It was just accepted as fine and normal. 

It’s only illegitimate election interference if unauthorized foreign powers do it or if ordinary Americans do it; when US oligarchs and Empire managers do it it’s just the normal thing that’s supposed to happen.

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A 2014 study found that Americans have no idea how bad income inequality in their country really is; participants believed things are vastly more equal than they are. This is because western media never report on the class warfare that is being waged against the working class [and the middle class —Eds]. The media are owned and controlled by extremely wealthy people who have a vested interest in keeping everyone from looking at class warfare, and the most influential media employees share this interest because their empire apologia has made them rich as well. That’s why they keep everyone focused on culture wars, irrelevant partisan spats, and other vapid nonsense.

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The US Empire is like the mind of a highly dysfunctional person. There might be parts of it that sometimes say “I shouldn’t be like this, I should change,” but the way it’s wired points it toward destructive behavior. There are significant parts of the empire who are acutely aware that things like military overextension and ramping up aggressions against China run directly against its own interests, but because the forces which pilot the empire’s actions are pointed in that direction, it’s happening anyway. The empire keeps waging destruction the way an addict keeps using.

The reason you seldom see people change despite their stated intent to do so is because your behavior doesn’t change just because you know it should, it changes when you fix the underlying forces within yourself which drive that behavior. It’s the same with the US Empire. The US Empire is inseparable from the forces of neoliberal capitalism, war profiteering and unipolarism with which its true leadership has intertwined itself, so while the odd Empire manager may say “end the wars” it never happens, because everything in it is oriented toward war.