Joaquin Flores
America's deep state and oligarchy have landed upon a type of civilizational about-face, where the legitimating social ideology is increasingly being made into the legitimating ideology of the military.
In the wake of the most blatantly corrupt election process in living American history, Biden's pro-terrorism policy in the Middle-East leaves the military's rank-and-file and American society more strained than during the Obama era.
This is dangerously being carried out in combination with the new initiative of ideologically purging the military of so-called white supremacists, by which they mean pro-constitution conservatives. As Vanity Fair covered just two weeks after Biden's inauguration:
"Lloyd Austin ordered a stand down across all branches of the armed forces to have a"deeper conversation"about the problem. But actually solving it will likely require more direct action."
After four years of relative peace in the Middle-East region under Trump, the U.S.-DS (U.S. Deep State) support for war and terrorism is back on the agenda, thanks to the handing of the election result to Biden. This region has been a long-time favorite theatre of war for neocons and neoliberals alike.
The real problem is that the lack of public support for military imperialism mirrors the public's aversion to the new cultural revolution underway in the U.S.
We are forced to return our focus to the Syria theatre, for it is here that we are seeing the ugliest and most contemptible return to Obama-era policies, where ISIS terrorism and YPG separatist terrorism were both supported.
But rather than reverse a truly Anti-American and misanthropic policy, the American oligarchy has cynically decided to simply change the ideology of the military so as to redefine the rationale for America's disastrous adventurism without reversing the policy of adventurism itself. This also happens to be a reflection of a deeply problematic problem inside the U.S. as well: rather than confront the role of the financial institutions and the billionaire oligarchs running the U.S., there has been a decision to 'punch downward' and lay the blame for America's problems at the feet of the American people themselves. 'Racism', we are told, is not an institutional phenomenon shaping public and corporate policy. which historically benefited the oligarchy's divide-and-conquer motifs, but rather an 'attitude problem' at the level of the average private individual.
YPG Terrorism and ISIS - Obama is back with Biden
Obama once opined that he'd love to serve a third term in a Cyrano de Bergerac way, giving directives to some mind-control asset, we assume, through what he described as 'an earpiece'.
It appears he's gotten his way.
In the middle of February, the Daily Sabah notes that "coinciding with a new U.S. administration taking office in Washington, attacks of the YPG terrorist organization in northern Syria have visibly increased, further undermining the country's chances for peace and the Syrian people's hopes for stability".
Under Biden's apparent directives, the Sabah notes that on the 16th of February, a car bomb killed more than 20 people in several attacks.
The calculated evil of this policy is clear-cut. As the Sabah states, Biden has brought former Obama-era U.S. envoy to the Syria coalition, Brett McGurk, back from retirement.
But what often goes unnoticed is what McGurk's real talent is. His job is to make it look like the U.S. is using the YPG to fight ISIS, when in fact the game went very differently. As the U.S. was also backing ISIS, and as Syria is a sovereign state, Obama's strategy operating in Syria was an insidious game.
ISIS would take land from Syrian people after fighting Syrian forces, claiming it as part of the Islamic Caliphate. U.S. air forces would defend the ISIS occupation from Syrian counter-attacks, under the auspices of defending YPG supply lines and forces. Then the U.S. would have the YPG come in and 'fight' (in the professional wrestling sense) ISIS for it, thereby making it 'Kurdish'. This was called the 'Anti-ISIS Coalition', but the real goal was to divide the Syrian state and create a failed state of perpetual war and conflict, through which resources could be smuggled out and regional development could be thrown into limbo. If you can't grow your own economy, you can at least use the military to set others back.
Supporting terrorism is not just evil, it doesn't even serve a state in purely Machiavellian terms. Not so in an environment of information and awareness at all-time highs. We've entered into a major civilization crisis in the West, where salesmen and book-talkers are able to confuse the traditional meanings of what 'public support' used to mean.
Things have changed significantly in the past five years. Americans have been largely red-pilled on the above described madness, and many Americans are perfectly cognizant of the fact that Obama and McCain worked to build both the ISIS and YPG terrorist organizations. By the way, this mayhem in turn largely caused the refugee crisis in Europe.
What that means is that business as usual can't go on. That these games continue in the face of public awareness is undermining American institutions and the public's support for the entire mythos.
The Biden Team's Pump-and-Dump Politics
The new Biden regime is based on the idea that doing pump-and-dump politics is the winning solution. These are fine 'games' in the stock-market, where costs can be externalized and margins can recover. This is the opposite of fine in the world of national security and legitimacy, where things are hard-earned, easily lost, and costs cannot be externalized.
What do we mean? It's one thing to hold stock-holders meeting and show inflated numbers, skewed statistics, and flawed studies. The belief that these represent something real (though they don't) can be enough to inflate the value of the stock. Those in-the-know would make a small fortune, before reality and the law of gravity kicked in.
But America's corrupt deep state political hacks and grifters have decided that this pump-and-dump method is also fine for politics. This is dangerous in its hyper-realism. It will have broad and far-reaching effects in terms of national security, social cohesion and stability, and participation and support from the broad masses. The military under Obama was considered broken, as the Brooking's Institute noted in at least one of a number of pieces:
"In April 2015, USA Today reported a disconcerting, if somewhat incongruous, finding about the Army's morale. Despite a six-year, $287 million effort to make troops more optimistic and resilient, an Army survey found that 52 percent of soldiers scored badly on questions that measured optimism, while 48 percent reported having little satisfaction or commitment to their job.
This study is only the latest of several such studies. A 2011 Center for Army Leadership study found that only 26 percent of active soldiers thought that the Army was headed in the right direction, while the Military Times in 2014 published a study ominously titled"America's Military: A Force Adrift."
Playing the types of games that Biden and the deep-state played to get themselves into power, 'by hook or by crook', as the saying goes, was a short-sighted and foolish gambit from which the fabric of American society may never fully recover, unless the military does something soon, and publicly so. Have they started to already?
When the election was handed to Biden, the military - it is widely believed - was apparently not present to play 'Hail to the Chief' at the inauguration, and a 21-Gun salute was not given. If true, these were strange, if not striking signals from the military that they view the Biden administration as something bordering on a usurpation of power, and a warning to any pretender to the role of Commander-in-Chief that a return to the 'forever wars' status quo would not be accepted.
At the same time, we have seen a parallel move to ideologically cleanse the U.S. military of patriots, and make more profound changes in new officer changing. A new form of indoctrination is afoot, where the founding fathers must be ritualistically introduced first as being 'flawed people', before the actual reference to those leaders' relevant ideas can then be discussed.
And yet the Pentagon itself has continually pushed back against Biden's proposed appointments. While mainstream news media openly reported this phenomenon in January, blaming Trump, this has in fact carried on. Defense News, at the close of February noted that:
"[Across the entire Biden administration, 58 individuals have been nominated for the roughly 1,250 Senate-confirmed spots ... So far, only 10 nominees across the government are confirmed - two of whom were confirmed on Tuesday Feb 23] - which lags significantly behind the previous four administrations, something Schulman attributes to the unique circumstances facing the start of the administration."
Lessons Learned
The military is a microcosm of society itself. A society that believes in itself, has a military that believes in society's mission. A people with high morale, has a military with high morale. A society that is openly corrupt and lacks legitimacy, has a military that is openly corrupt and lacks legitimacy. That military begins to operate more and more like a large mercenary outfit, and a dysfunctional class-system within it between reluctant potato peelers and misanthropic paid killer specialists. That type of military can work to an extent so long as the conflicts do not require a full mobilization of society, and do not strain the military itself. Those may be low to medium intensity conflicts with only several hundred actually involved in live-fire operations.
Every society has a legitimating ideology. There has to be some degree of tangible reality that connects the legitimating ideology to the actual facts on the ground. One of the reasons the USSR collapsed is that the ideology of socialism became increasingly and publicly at odds with the very real and actual role that Communist Party chiefs had as privately interested oligarchs who were in it for themselves and themselves alone. When that reality sank in, the society collapsed. It only required a few extra bribes and nudges from its great geopolitical rival, the U.S., to pull the final thread out for the whole sweater to come undone.
A similar situation is happening today in the U.S., and its rival China may indeed have its own fingers similarly on that thread. The rise of Biden and the games and tricks played by corrupt state legislators and a fake-news legacy media complex to force that result on the American people, could very well be the final straw.
While some minority of Biden voters might be fooled by the ongoing events, the rest of the world's leaders and their military chiefs are not. They can see clearly a division between the military and its civilian government. They can see that America's volunteer army is in a period of prolonged collapse. Who would volunteer for more pointless forever wars, in countries no one's heard of, that have no national security aim, and hoisted upon the military and the people by an illegitimate Biden administration?
America's deep state and oligarchy have landed upon a type of civilizational about-face, where the legitimating social ideology which fuelled the Chicago Doctrine, Human Rights Imperialism, and Responsibility to Protect, is increasingly being made into the legitimating ideology of the military itself.
This has required coordination between the public education system, social media and celebrity public service announcements, the university system, and officer training academies for the military.
While any number of these newly introduced ideas, in the abstract, may have some foundation in truth from a critical perspective, it is doubtful that this cultural revolution in society and the military will find a real foothold.
For America's ruling oligarchy, they are fine with introducing new ideas in the military which are critical of America's history, so long as the truly destructive reality of the robber baron industrialists and financiers - yesterday and today - are left out of the equation. This truth, if left untouched and unchallenged, will create precisely that rift between ideology and reality which has historically rendered all such social experiments a failure.