Pick a Cold War, Any Cold War: The Limits of Isolationism Under Yellow Peril

 It's an old plot and the bastards of Babylon have been at it for ages. From Halford Mackinder to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from the British Crown to their Yankee progeny right here in Pax Americana, the Atlantic powers known collectively as the West have been motivated by a single waking nightmare since white power ran on black coal, the fever dream of the dreaded Eurasian Century. The simple fact that the backwards landlocked Huns of the World Island that is Europe, Africa and Asia hold the keys to 60% of the world's land mass and an even larger share of its natural resources has kept western imperialists up at night for centuries and motivated every great bloodbath in the era of modern warfare.

It's why London and Washington engineered two world wars with hasty borders and crippling sanctions. It's why these same mandarins initiated the first cold war with an invasion of the barely formed Soviet Union in order to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution in its cradle. It's why they reignited that quixotic crusade with an atom bomb long after the Japanese had surrendered, and Stalin had begrudgingly agreed to keep his hands to himself. It's why we provoked the rise of the Iron Curtain with the neo-colonialist contraption known as NATO and rearmed the fascists with Operation Gladio to keep it valid. It's why we lured the Kremlin deep into the Hindu Kush by inventing modern-day jihadism with the Mujahedin and its why NATO just kept on expanding even after that geopolitical boobytrap finished off the communist threat that alliance was supposedly designed to contain. It's also why we continue to stoke the flames of a third world war by funding the current autocratic duel over Ukraine.

Every bottomless forever war, every convoluted conspiracy against world peace, every bomb that has ever been dropped beneath the contrived banner of liberal democracy and the American way has all been part of a plot to divorce Berlin from Beijing and prevent a common-sense economic union between East Asia and Central Europe that would permanently damn the empires of the Atlantic Ocean to global irrelevancy. This is the dirty little secret of American power. The despots who run this titanic battleship we call a country have never given two flying fucks about fascism, communism or Islamic Fundamentalism. It has all been one great big shapeshifting shadow puppet show projected over the graves of a craven plot for pure naked global power.

This isn't to say that those graves haven't long been populated by twisted ghouls that are more than deserving of condemnation from any sane observer with a functioning conscience. Stalin, Mao, Putin and Xi are all repugnant rapists in their own right but there is a reason that those monsters have become household names while others like Pinochet, Suharto, Duvalier and Salman have received the full blessing of those that combat them. The only monsters that Washington is willing to blow up the world to contain are the ones that threaten to replace it on the world stage. 

The latest cold war is no exception. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a savagely venal crime against humanity and it's one that America actively encouraged. We have set Ukraine like a gigantic mousetrap over the last decade with this tragic fate in mind. We overthrew a corrupt but neutral democracy with a phony revolution in 2014 before packing their security forces with the most insanely Russophobic ultra-nationalists that money could buy. 

We encouraged the violent repression of Ukraine's Russian speaking population while running round the clock war games with American battleships and bombers capable of carrying nuclear payloads right off the shores and borders of an increasingly paranoid Russian behemoth. Then we turned up the heat by predicting their imminent invasion even while our own Ukrainian quislings begged us to cool it down. All so we could provoke a thin skinned capitalist Übermensch with daddy issues into obliterating his neighbors while we ran the footage of his savagery on a loop to discourage the blue bloods of Central Europe from investing in a future we didn't micromanage for western hegemony.

It worked, except it didn't. Putin more than lived up to the role we wrote for him as the ultimate boogeyman to end all boogeymen, but half of the American homeland still isn't willing to leverage the farm in order to dig him a bottomless grave in Bakhmut and it isn't the half some might expect. Since Putin began his special military rampage in Ukraine polls have shown a steady decline in Republicans willing to encourage its continuation with a steady diet of Stinger missiles,

Pew has the number of Republicans opposed to fueling this thing indefinitely at 40% and rising. Gallup has it even higher at nearly 50%. These are the blood and butter conservatives that America has long relied on to mindlessly support even our most batshit interventions long after their futility has become almost comically obvious. Democrats have always been the quickest nitwits to start a war but it's the Republicans who stick around for Old Glory and apple pie to finish the fucking thing long after it has become too heinous for the coastal elites to virtue signal over the carnage. So, what the fuck is going on here? Are we finally witnessing the second coming of the isolationist right in MAGA country? 

I wish, but as an often less than willing occupant of America's rustbelt outback, I can tell you from personal experience that it's actually a lot more personal than that. Once again, Hillary Clinton has shit this bed, this time by tarring the deplorables in flyover country as Russian dupes in 2016. All because they would rather vote for a reality television rapist then one of the two dynasties that sold their children into servitude to opioids and Walmart by hollowing out their futures with crooked trade deals. 

Regardless of where you land on Russia's supposed involvement in the 2016 election, the notion that backwoods farm folk are too fucking stupid to realize that even a goon like Trump is a lesser evil to a Bush or a Clinton without the assistance of Kremlin manipulation is beyond fucking offensive. The blowback from this campaign to blame the humiliating spectacle of a Trump presidency on anyone but the people who made it inevitable is that now middle America has finally become increasingly immune to Russophobia and right-wing shills like Tucker Carlson are chasing that money even if they have to sing "Give Peace a Chance" to earn it.

So, what's an empire to do? Pack it up and sue for peace? Never. Instead, the bipartisan war machine is tearing a page form the playbook that hoodwinked the original America First movement into throwing its weight behind total war. When all else fails, just try good old-fashioned American racism and stir twice. Republicans and Democrats alike weren't willing to return to the trenches of Europe in the wake of the Great Depression to kill a bunch of white people. But once FDR turned the war effort into a fight to keep filthy yellow hands off of Lady Liberty's creamy white bosom, all it took was goading the Japanese into bombing an American colony in the Pacific to get every farmer's daughter to willingly chuck her own sons straight into the wheat thresher.

Just turn on Fox News and you'll realize that things haven't changed a bit. Peace peddling peckerwoods like Carlson flipped the switch from isolationism to imperialism at the speed of a scatter bomb the moment an errant Chinese weather balloon passed over an American farm. That smug asshole went from blowing Glenn Greenwald to screeching for the blood of every first-born Chinese son faster than you can say 'Lindberg lovingly licks Lemonheads.' Now, it's Chinese fever around the clock. They're scuttling across the border. They're slipping fentanyl into your favorite soft drinks. They're training bats to peddle pandemics and critical race theory door-to-door. Biden and his gray-care handlers are already on the bandwagon too, sniping at UFOs with F-22s and fessing up to the dangers of gain of function research while they sail battleships through the Strait of Taiwan and dare Xi Jinping not to flinch.

And just like that, the Cold War is back in tetanus country like crystal meth. My neighbors have gone from sensibly questioning the efficacy of poking a nuked-up basket case with a NATO stick to calling for a ground invasion of Peking if those commie cunts are two weeks late with the next fucking X-Box. One step forward and a great leap backwards into the frying pan of 1950s-style xenophobic hysteria.

So, pick a cold war, any cold war! China or Russia, Ukraine or Taiwan, either way the Atlantic Empire achieves its real goal of isolating the bustling markets of Beijing from the sophisticated banks of Europe and stalling the Eurasian Century for another 15 minutes. The only problem with this conspiracy is that middle America isn't the only landlocked rust heap growing weary of constant war and it's a little bit harder to sell Sinophobia to Polish farmers when they're starving just three hours from a highspeed rail system that can sling them prosperity straight from the Orient. All while the fat cats of NATO tell them to take another one for the team.

I'm not the Bolshevik Barbie that I used to be. One century is as sick as the last one as long as rich men with small dicks and big bombs still run the show. But I also can't ignore the fact that a Second American Century is only possible with a nuclear bomb or that a Eurasian Century would put my trailer park smack dab in the middle of the next empire's blind spot. Call me a communist, but I'll take those daylight vampires in the Politburo over the double-speaking Doctor Strangeloves on Fox News any day of the week. I just wish that I could convince my neighbors to hate the bomb more than "the other" it drops on and learn to eat their grits with chopsticks.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon

* Home Again Garden Grove by the Mountain Goats

* Shark Smile by Big Thief

* China Girl by Iggy Pop

* Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry

* Holidays in the Sun by the Sex Pistols

* Faith Healer by Julien Baker

* My Girl by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Counting Backwards by Throwing Muses

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski