Brooding, duplicitous, wicked and able, media-ready/
Heartless and labeled super U.S. citizen, super achiever/
Mega ultra power dosing, relax, defense, defense, defense, defense"
R.E.M., 'Ignoreland'
In 1979, at the close of a decade of conflict between far-right political parties like the National Front and the British anti-fascist movement, Stuart Hall astutely observed that “Fascism and economic recession seem to render transparent those connections which most of the time are opaque, hidden and displaced.” Forty-three years later, the United States finds itself positioned precariously close to both. The resurgence of ultra-right-wing nationalism and the decay of an economic system unwilling to reconcile record profits with record wealth inequality are but two examples of catastrophes too profound to ignore—and too interconnected to be coincidence. Indeed, the greatest tragedy of living through an age of openly neo-Nazi militia groups, a laughably ineffective health care system, and the very real risk of open nuclear war, is that no one seems to want to admit who is responsible.
As Hall points out, the connections are now visible. The neo-conservatives, “right-wing revivalist” Reaganites who supposedly were at their apex during the W. Bush presidency, were widely thought to have been ultimately banished by the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. However, the events of early 2022 have proven that, not only have they not gone anywhere, but their neoliberal allies have given them a seemingly-unshakable grip on power. These two factions purport to be mortal enemies in public, clashing over issues like abortion or LGBTQ rights, when both sides embrace deregulated market capitalism and thrive on an interventionist foreign policy that forever positions the United States as a "beacon of freedom," despite the fact that US-Americans lack basic services every other country in the Global North takes for granted.
Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature."It should go without saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was both illegal (inasmuch as laws that are neither acknowledged nor particularly respected by any superpower can truly have any validity) and abominable. Likewise, the number of innocent Ukrainians and Russians lost in the civil war sparked by the 2014 Maidan revolution has reached the level of “human rights atrocity” we usually associate with conflicts like those in Yemen, Palestine, Somalia, or Libya. However, the mainstream depiction of the conflict—“plucky freedom fighters led by the charismatic Volodymyr Zelenskyy versus the evil, imperialistic Russians and their Fearless Leader/avatar, Vladimir Putin”—suppresses any critical analysis of exactly things reached this point, a sinister tactic that would be amusingly shallow if it didn’t simultaneously put us closer to nuclear war.
Max Brooks, World War Z
Indeed, any suggestion that the conflict in Ukraine might not be such a neat, good-vs.-evil conflict gets either suppressed outright or accused of supporting Putin.
Even a cursory google search reveals some disturbing connections in Ukraine. A key figure in this conflict is Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and likely someone very few people in the United States have heard of.
Nuland (herself the granddaughter of a Ukrainian immigrant) cut her teeth in the Clinton Administration before resurfacing in 2003 as a deputy foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, with whom she played a crucial role in the Iraq War. She later became US Ambassador to NATO, where her primary job was to drum up support in Europe for the war in Afghanistan. She served under Obama in various positions, most crucially as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. It was in this capacity that Nuland came closest to any fame, during the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, in which a taped phone call between her and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt leaked, that featured the two discussing how the the Ukrainian government would be restructured.
Nuland would step away from government work during the Trump Administration, instead serving as CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a public policy think thank specifically concerned with US geopolitical military interests, only to return during the Biden Administration, when should would accidentally admit to Congress that the whole “Ukrainian bio-weapons labs” rumor was not, in fact, Russian propaganda, but very much real.
Most curiously—and most damning—Nuland’s husband is Robert Kagan, co-founder of the neoconservative think tanks the Project for the New American Century and the Foreign Policy Initiative.
Hammered by a pandemic-exacerbated economic downturn, the connections are vividly clear to anyone paying attention. It isn’t coincidence that the same figure who was an advisor on the Iraq War, who worked in the U.S. State Department during its regime change efforts in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, and who told Congress that there was “no doubt in [her] mind” Russia will use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, also happens to be the wife of one of the most prominent neoconservatives in the country. Nor is it coincidence that Nuland was the point person for the US State Department during a time in which the Ukrainian government was restructured from one amenable to working with Russia to one spurning Russia in favor of NATO. Furthermore, tragic and devastating though it may be, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was neither coincidental nor was it unforeseeable.
People got problems that they can’t work out/The fact that someone like Nuland has had a succession of high-ranking positions in both Democrat and Republican governments should be the dead giveaway that neoliberals and neoconservatives have taken advantage of the ever-rightward shift of the Overton Window in US politics.
so their sense cracks/
I read the paper and I watch the news/
it don’t give me the blues, it just gives me the blacks.
Fishbone, “Subliminal Fascism
Decades of Third Way, “middle-ground” concessions from people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have exploited the language, iconography, and identity politics of US progressivism to Astro-turf their tacit—and, sometimes, overt—approval of neoconservative policies. From NAFTA to TARP, from Libya and Syria to Ukraine and, possibly, Iran, it’s obvious that, when Democrats talk about “bipartisanship,” the fetishized “middle ground” to which they refer is the Democratic Party itself. Any voices of dissent from the Left are shot down; through a quirk of neoliberal logic, leftists are simultaneously irrational extremists whose policy goals are too radical for mainstream America and a vital bloc whose vote can turn the tide of an election. There is no better example of the neoliberal/neoconservative alliance than US Presidential elections. Ralph Nader and the Green Party are supposedly responsible for Al Gore's loss in 2000, instead of the millions of registered Democrats who voted for George W. Bush. Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016 wasn't due to her record unpopularity or identical policy positions to neocon war hawks like Ted Cruz but, rather, to a nebulous Russian conspiracy that a two-year investigation failed to prove even existed.
Perhaps saddest is that, whether it be due pandemic-induced fatigue, media-saturation cynicism or just plain laziness, most people in this country seem content to not know any of this. In an era defined by our access to—or saturation with—information, it’s incongruous at best (and terrifying at worst) that people have become increasingly defined solely by the scope of their informational lens. Our ability to transmit, receive, and process information has advanced light-years from the welcome cacophony of 56k modems to the Star Trek tech in our purses and pockets, yet even with the sum totality of human knowledge literally at our fingertips, we seem incapable of seeing how narrow our vision has become—or, for that matter, the consequences of our myopia. Democrats and Republicans alike focus elections on performative Culture War topics, neolibs and neocons deliberately limiting what passes for "debate" to a handful of issues whose solutions always seem to involve gradual, market-based change (if any change at all). Perhaps that is why the connections are so clear, that so many of the details of who is creating the system that could very easily kill every human on the planet are as transparent and unobstructed as they are: the architects of that system know they've already won, and people would rather die a fiery death than see a world without it.
Citations
Stuart Hall (1970) "The Great Moving-Right Show." Marxism Today, January 1979
Stuart Hall (2005) New Labour's Double-shuffle, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 27:4, 319-335, DOI: 10.1080/10714410500338907
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