The height of arrogance is when you think you adjust reality to suit your whims, which pretty much describes Washington. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:
U.S. leaders seek to suggest that America still has the power to alter ‘reality’ to fit to its own exceptionalist myth, Alastair Crooke writes.
President Putin in 2007 (at Munich) challenged the West: ‘We didn’t. You did; You continuously attack Russia; but we shall not bend’. The audience sniggered. Now, speaking at (a virtual) Davos this last month, after an absence of twelve years from that forum, President Putin held up a mirror to the key ‘influencers’ of the West: ‘See what you have become in the interim; Look at yourself, and be worried’.
This was not so much a be-gloved slap, prefacing duel-by-weapons-of-choice, but an earnest caution. At its’ bottom is a warning that the socio-economic dynamics set into motion by the western zero-interest, debt-led model have not just thrown swaths of society under the economic bus, but rather, that the internal socio-economic catastrophe is being widely vented at external ‘others’. That is, projected psychically abroad, in a lust to fight imaginary demons.
Italy in the 1400s had experienced psychological stresses somewhat similar to todays’ – the upending old ‘myths’, old cultural ties and sources of social cohesion, triggered by the gathering storm of Reformation and Scientific Enlightenment. The new leaders insisted to put old values and the ethos of ‘continuity’ to the auto da fé bonfires of sceptical rationalism’s shiny, new culture. There was then, no China to blame, but the witch and Satan hysteria of that era – a mass collective hysteria – led to some ten thousand Europeans being ‘cancelled’: they were burned alive for clinging to ancient ways (judged to be denials of ‘Truth’). Ultimately the Inquisition was instantiated to condemn and punish heresy.
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