Sunday, January 14, 2018

Ajamu Baraka — The Responsibility to Protect the World... from the United States

One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments.
This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.”
This violent, lawless Pan-European colonial/capitalist project continues today under the hegemony of the U.S. empire. This then begs the questions of who really needs the protection and who protects the peoples of the world from the United States and its allies?
The only logical, principled and strategic response to this question is citizens of the empire must reject their imperial privileges and join in opposing ruling elites exploiting labor and plundering the Earth. To do that, however, requires breaking with the intoxicating allure of cross-class, bi-partisan “white identity politics.”... 
This is the result of attempting to combine idealism and realism. Idealism becomes a weapon of realism that serves the narrow interests of an elite class that is overwhelming white and committed to maintaining and extending white dominance.
Neocons like William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl were the driving forces in pushing for the war in Iraq. They understood if they wanted to sell war, “Americans” needed to believe the conflict was about values, not interests. The neocons dusted off and put a new face on that old rationalization for colonialism—the white man’s burden.
Interventions were to bring democracy and freedom to those people who were struggling to be just like their more advanced models in the white West. Liberal interventionists further developed those ideas into “humanitarian interventionism” and the “responsibility to protect.”
The fact that the United States and Europe can wrap themselves in the flag of morality, practice savior politics and get away with it is a testament to the enduring psychopathology of white supremacist ideology.
Of course, the liberal interventionists were just as influential and active, and it was Bill Clinton that led the liberal intervention in the former Yugoslavia, and Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton led the liberal intervention in Libya.

Moreover, the US has been actively advancing its realistic agenda focused on global hegemony on idealist grounds of human rights, R2P, and spending freedom and democracy across the world, in Latin America, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa.
The result? International Gallup and Pew research polls have consistently shown the peoples of the world consider the United States the greatest threat to world peace on the planet.…
Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated the obvious: he United States was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He also said the public allowing this violence would lead to a kind of national spiritual death that would continue to make the U.S. state a danger to the world.
That spiritual death has not quite happened completely. Yet accepting the “inevitability” of violence and the necessity for waging war is now more deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of individuals in the United States than it was 50 years ago when King warned of the deep malady of U.S. society....
Ajamu Baraka issues an eloquent plea for a resurgence of the American anti-war movement.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The Responsibility to Protect the World... from the United States
Ajamu Baraka | national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace, 2016 Green Party vice presidential candidate, an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine

Here is an example of realist American strategic thinking that illustrates this.

Its more wishful thing that is far from reality but promises to spread conflict in another region, which is in the sphere of influence of both Russia and China. What could go wrong?

Asia Times
American power needs a Eurasian reset to combat Islamism
William Holland

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