Can the West put aside its missionary impulse to live and let live with the rest of the world? From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.su:
To attempt to use secular rationality as the predominant analytic tool by which to comprehend geo-political events may be to commit an error.
On a visit to Oxford a few weeks ago, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative, (Walter Münchau writes), made an interesting remark: “Diplomacy is the art of managing double standards”. Münchau illustrated its inherent hypocrisy by contrasting the enthusiasm with which EU leaders supported the ICC’s decision to seek an arrest warrant against Putin last year, and “yet not to accept it – when it hits a member of your team” (i.e. Netanyahu).
The most egregious example of such double ‘thinking’ concerns its correlate – the western ‘management’ of created realities. A double standard – a ‘narrative’ of us ‘winning’ – is crafted, and then set against a narrative of ‘them failing’.
A resort to the manufacture of narratives of winning (instead of actually doing the winning) may seem rather clever, but the uncertainty it causes can have unforeseen potentially disastrous consequences. For instance, President Macron’s deliberately obfuscated threats to send NATO forces to serve in Ukraine – which only contributed to Russia preparing for a wider war against all NATO, accelerating its offensive operations.
Instead of deterring – as likely intended by Macron – it brought about a more determined adversary, with Putin warning that Russia would kill any NATO ‘invaders’. It was not so clever, after all…
Take as a more substantive example President Putin’s response to a press query during his visit to Uzbekistan: ‘These representatives of NATO countries, especially in Europe, … firstly provoked us in the Donbas; led us by the nose for eight years, deliberately deceived us into supposing they [the West] wanted going to resolve things peacefully – notwithstanding their seemingly contrarian attempt to force the situation ‘towards peace’ – through armed means.
Doesn’t it say that on the back of the dollar?
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
Top down rule in the caste triangle.
The weedy rabble at the bottom of the pyramid is us.
But like Morpheus said, they will fight tooth and nail for their enslavement.
George Herbert Walker Bush
(h/t-Omega)