Source – globalresearch.ca
– Decoding the US Empire of Chaos, The Global Reversal of the Social Evolution of Humanity – By Prof. John McMurtry and Biljana Đorović:
The interview (transcript below) from questions with Prof. John McMurtry was conducted for the 15th Anniversary of “Geopolitika” a journal of geopolitical and cultural analysis in Belgrade which was broadcast on Radio Belgrade by the weekly show “Silen” on February 12 from questions posed by Biljana Đorović.
The depth of the abyss into which the world is falling is ever clearer to people, but not the cause or the way out. Could you give us some kind of structure to explain what is at the heart of this empire of chaos that is reigning across the world?
In a nutshell, social evolution itself has been reversed by a US-led war on social and ecological life organisation driven by one corrupt master value – to free transnational corporations and their shareholders from social responsibility to multiply private fortunes without limit. It is a counter-revolution against the long development of democratic government and the welfare state that once crossed across the divisions of the Cold War.
The ultimate driver of the disorder can be explained in one underlying principle. The sole and absolute organising principle of the world’s reproduction and growth is turning private money into maximally more money for private money controllers. The ‘empire of chaos’ is the result.
The more this transnational financial capitalism is deregulated and subsidized , the more it multiplies itself through organic, social and ecological life hosts, the more predatorily destructive it becomes at all levels. This is ultimately a cancer system at the macro level, and it has quickly spread through the world. It was effectively with the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution against the social state with a US $500-billion tax-cut to the rich deliberately bankrupting the base of social programs, simultaneously pervasive media worship of the ‘free market’ and hatred of socialism, behind-the-scenes presidential permission of mass media monopolies proclaiming this mindless propaganda line, the systematic smashing of organised labour and sites of progressive intellectual discourses, ghoulish leashing of death squads in Latin Central America to reverse socialist forces while spending the opposing superpower USSR into bankruptcy on the arms race, and – finally but perhaps most importantly – preparation and passing of the world’s first major binding treaty absolutizing transnational corporate rights over all past or future democratic policies or legislation reducing foreign profit opportunities.
This sets the historical parameters of the current empire of chaos by reversing the post-1945 social evolution towards life security for all by the master principle of commodity and money-demand maximization across cultures and permanent war against any alternative.
How could this possibly be proclaimed, as it always has been, a victory for global freedom morality and justice?
The key is always in the US-designated Enemy whose destruction is equated to the victory of Good over Evil. There is no positive substance of the Good but destruction of the designated Enemy. There is in fact no common life interest of US civilization. There is the Enemy that must be defeated on the collective level, the sole collectivity. The money that must be made to survive is the only obligatory individual value, with self-maximization the logic of success.
The global turning point to ‘Communism’ as the Enemy came in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. This was triumphally proclaimed the victory of US freedom, the death of marxism and socialism, and the end of history itself.
In fact, the USSR fell by being hollowed out by the arms race and the Cold War, a deliberate US strategy, and from fighting the first jihadi terrorist uprising financed by the US in quasi-socialist Afghanistan. It was on Russia’s border, and the way to “bleed Russia to death” when it intervened to assist the secular social order with new equality for women. Yugoslavia at this same time was an iconically successful socialist society across ethnic divisions. But its US-led financial destruction was planned by secret presidential directive in 1981, and led to a chaos of ethnic wars and hatred ending in the 1999 bombing of Belgrade by NATO – – which was also during the US-British sanction bombing of Iraq, and more society-destroying bombings to come across the Middle East. Now the new designated Enemy was Saddam once the USSR fell.
One can see here that always a great Enemy is declared. It was long Communism which covered any alternative secular order with any socially owned economic base, the real danger being that it outperforms capitalist societies in serving the life needs of its people. But no sooner had this threat been apparently eliminated in even the Third World with death squads, international slanders and financial sabotage usually doing the trick than a new great Enemy called Saddam was declared just as the USSR was falling next door and unable to intervene.
Another new war, worse than the Cold War went into motion. As always there was constructed pretext, but this time without any USSR to limit it, the US (and Britain) bombed the long-evolved socialist infrastructure of Iraq into ruins and perpetrated an eco-genocidal invasion from 1991 to 2003 that was, as always, justified by the Enemy it attacked – although the enemy Saddam was long on the CIA payroll, just as Osama Laden, the next great Enemy to appear, was financed and armed by the US in Afghanistan to begin the new greatest enemy of all replacing Communism.
This Enemy is Islamic Terror which still morphs on into ISIS suddenly appearing in June 2014 to keep the ball rolling into Syria bombing by NATO, a reprise of the complete society destruction of Libya by US-led NATO bombing in 2011. The end of the Cold War gave rise not to peace, but wars of aggression by the US whenever it could take the people along with false cover stories. The constant throughout is a great Enemy, the cornerstone of US ideology, with constructed pretext or false flag event always justifying war against the now perpetually changing Enemy – in fact, sitting duck with no air defenses to stop imperial bombing and expansion of the transnational money-cancer system.
Do you think there is a fundamental difference between the US-led empire during the Cold War and after it? The years of the US-Soviet conflict seem almost pastoral compared to now.
1991 was supposed to bring about the great Peace Dividend with no US enemy to justify the always rising military spending to stop the “communist plot for world rule”. Now we know better who was aiming for world rule, as always projecting onto the designated Enemy the US’s own objective. The carpet bombings of helpless societies by US-led forces since 1991 are, like Vietnam, eco-genocidal in nature, only now one after another. They force-metastasize the exponential private financial growth of Wall Street and company, but transnational corporate treaty and social-state stripping is the ultimate inner logic of the US-led spreading chaos.
Before 1991, the US and allies had developed social life support systems and a welfare state to compete with state socialism. No longer. Since the fall of the USSR, whole peoples and their life conditions are destroyed and looted across continents from Yugoslavia to the Ukraine, from Iraq to Libya to Syria to who knows where next. Propelling every degenerate trend from behind has been the carcinomic financialization of real economies into multiplying private money sequences devouring life and life support systems as ‘global market freedom and prosperity’. This is the borderless transnational globalization of the private money-power system that has changed all the rules.
Dividing societies into civil war or helpless bankruptcy or both is the new and unnamed master pattern, destroying whatever collective economic and social success has been achieved everywhere, clearing s the way for foreign control of once sovereign resources, markets and peoples. Greece is a current example of these external money sequences cored in transnational banks hollowing out an evolved Western society to recoup foreign bank revenues after the Wall-Street-engineered bank collapse of 2008 – stripping ever more peoples to pay for big banks’ ponzi schemes even if the society’s unemployment goes over 30%, the public sector is dismantled and looted at fire-sale prices, and the majority’s lives and life conditions are turned towards the living hell formerly reserved for the Third World death-squad dictatorships.
This systemic money-sequenced destruction of evolved societies, their public resources and life support systems is now plundering all societies including the US and Britain. It is inconceivable that what is now normalized as “necessary market reforms” today could have been even proposed by these countries from 1950 to 1991. But things have also changed at the oppositional level. Latin America has largely evolved out of the US-led oligarchies of fascist tyranny.
Why is this underlying pattern – essentially a global multi-front war against humanity – not recognised in even academic discourses?
This is a very complex matter in all the levels of systemic degeneration and attack. The inherited methods and categories of understanding are incapable of comprehension so long as they are divided into siloes, mechanistically organised into atomic agents and aggregates, and increasingly funded for proprietary corporate research for profit.
The academy led by its own multiplying corporate managements has been largely converted into a servo-mechanism to the financial cancer system, a long war, with a new underclass of casualized worker- profs doing most of the teaching with no time for research. System diagnosis is prohibited at every step by this context. Marxist analysis itself is bound to categories unable to grasp the system’s disorder where more means and conditions of life are now destroyed than produced.
So-called ‘economics’ is most of all a set-point of the self-referential stupefaction. It is based on a life-blind liquid mechanics of the nineteenth century disguised by algebraic notations whose referents are idealized money coordinates in dyadic and exponential repetitions. The reigning models are structured a-priori not to see any of the real-life failures and depredations of the runaway disorder. Policy-setting ‘economics’ is without any framework to factor in the life needs of people, societies and environments at all. Academically trained critics name the problem as ‘neo-liberalism’, but this is a vacuously equivocal slogan. – – The classical liberals John Stuart Mill and John Dewey were both mild socialists and advocated a reasoned social progress of humanity’s permanent life interests, which this transnational private money-sequence system rules out in principle.
RIELPOLITIK 