THE WEST, ALL ALONE IN ITS LITTLE BUBBLE!

TRANSLATED FROM ENTREFILETS, 31/07/12

At the risk of seeming somewhat naive, we have to confess that here at entrefilets, we never cease to be amazed by the extent of the disinformation diffused by the Western Bloc on the subject of the Syrian and Iranian crises. And also, in more general terms, by the persistence of its astonishing need to put a virtuous gloss on even its most obvious machinations, and even its most outrageous acts of barbarism. It is a phenomenon which fascinates us because it signifies a total rupture with the reality that the rest of the world shares.

From Latin America to Asia, also taking in Africa and the Indies, there is a virtually unanimous rejection of this Atlantic claptrap, which bears witness to a vertiginous change in paradigm - the lies of the West no longer deceive anyone but the West itself. Its human-rights-narrative has fizzled out.

In fact, we are the very last ones, the only ones, who still believe in it.
Whether it’s a matter of Iraq or Afghanistan, or Libya, or Syria – and maybe Iran soon – the phony casus belli advanced by the West to justify their lucrative little attacks are now seen for what they really are.

LIBYA BEFORE AND AFTER

 Waiting for their dismal fate

It’s worth taking a moment or two to really take stock of this idea, to really grasp the potentially devastating consequences it entails. Nobody, absolutely nobody in the rest of the world, believes any longer in the virtuous rhetoric of the West, or in the justness of its causes. The moral authority on which the Atlantic Bloc claims all its actions are founded has quite simply evaporated - other than in the heads of Westerners.  It may seem entirely obvious to say so, but when you think about it, it is quite simply extraordinary and, one could even say, revolutionary.

What this signifies today on the international scene is that everyone more or less contents themselves with listening politely to the leading lights of the Western bloc, purely and simply out of respect for their extraordinarily deadly strength, but this in the manner one would listen to a king who has gone mad, that is whilst plotting for his eventual deposition whilst, even more wisely, praying that the dismal fate reserved for them by divine providence comes at the earliest possible opportunity.

And how could it be otherwise? Because everywhere else in the rest of the world, one has memories and a sense of history.

 

The great burden of virtue

In 1991, the Western Bloc and some client states attacked Iraq after having tricked Saddam Hussein. However, the dictator was left in place to allow the ‘legalized’ pillage of the country’s resources. During the ensuing embargo, a million Iraqis were killed by the UN’s paper bombs, half of them children, a price which according to the then US Secretary of State Madelaine Albright was a price worth paying.
And indeed, above and beyond the strategic benefit that wresting control of this territory  from the still smoking ruins of the ex-USSR represented, the operation indeed proved to have been the most lucrative of the end of this century for the arms dealers (notably thanks to the sales realized in the Gulf countries) and Western petrol interests.

Next there was the attack and invasion of Afghanistan, on the flawed pretext of a riposte to the September 11 attacks. The anticipated benefit was once again related to resources, and to the need to retake ground abandoned by the Soviets in Central Asia. Ten years of war, tens of thousands of deaths, maybe hundreds, who knows, and an entire country devastated, with the likelihood of a return to power for the Talibans.
Then it was the fairytale of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the monstrous death blow afflicted on this country, with a million additional deaths. But at least during this whole occupation, American tankers were able to anchor off the coast of Iraq, filling up for free after having disconnected the meters of the refineries.

 

And then came the turn of Libya, with its tens of thousands of deaths and the resultant devastation, ruin and tribal wars. But there also came of course the astronomical re-construction projects, and a new totally submissive government, indebted for a thousand years, if the county even manages to escape being torn apart in the way Somalia was. Victory!

Illich to the rescue

In his time, Ivan Illich developed a concept which could serve as a useful basis for reflection on order to explain this extraordinary inversion of values promoted by the West. It is the concept of counter-productivity which states that when they reach a certain critical threshold in their monopoly of the situation, the great institutions of our modern industrial societies produce a situation where, in the vast majority of cases, the opposite effect is achieved. The health system produces more sick people; the education system increases the ignorance, more communication increases isolation, more emphasis on security only increases insecurity, etc. (a concept, moreover, which the increasingly disastrous socio-economic situation of the Western populations seems to validate). The West has perhaps indeed reached this critical threshold, in this monopoly situation, of hyper-power in which it finds itself. And from this point on, its light of the past can, today, no longer produce anything more than darkness.

If this is the case, it is a lot easier to understand this astonishing need to put a virtuous gloss on even its most obvious machinations, and even its most outrageous acts of barbarism - it even becomes vital. For otherwise, how would it be possible to live with all this blood on our hands, how would we eat and be merry amidst all this pain, how would we prosper in the shadow of all these ruins?
It would be better indeed for the West to carry on saving and helping the Syrians, the Iranians, Africa, and the world. All alone, in its little bubble.

At least, until divine Providence manifests itself.