Christopher King warns the United States’ allies that the path of Washington “is of ethical and material ruin”, and argues that the European Union must recover its values and its true path, including closer integration with Russia, with which it has common interest and culture.
There’s a good question: “What does the USA contribute to the world?” Let’s leave aside the US delusion that it brings democracy and freedom to a benighted world.
Americans like doing one thing and they do it a lot: they like creating dead foreigners and travel all over the world to do it. Their solution to a problem is to shoot someone. Take a simple case: the recent Somali pirating of the Maersk Alabama. Now, I don’t like pirates any more than anyone else and this practice has to be stopped, but it was unnecessary to shoot the three men holding the captain. As one of their relatives said: "They were trying to save their own lives...The only thing they could bargain with was the captain, but the Americans would not accept." President Obama approved this killing and it can be read as an indicator of his basic morality. And intelligence. In future, pirates might as well kill the whole crew and go down fighting. Until now, these incidents have been conducted with considerable restraint. He’s made the whole situation more difficult for everyone. There are cheap peaceful solutions possible for the Somalia problem as there are for Afghanistan and were for Iraq, but Americans consider them unattractive since they do not give America direct control.
To make killing foreigners easier, Americans are very good at devising ingenious means of doing it, such as smart bombs, beam weapons and drones with which operators in Nevada can safely bomb wedding parties in Iraq or Afghanistan. One can only think that if all this money, energy and Yankee ingenuity were put into renewable energy and infrastructure improvement at home with genuine grass-roots economic aid abroad, the world would be a much better place and Americans would be much better loved. America is certainly the most powerful country in the world but what does that mean? It means only that America has the ability to kill more foreigners than anyone else. It’s by no means evident that this makes it the world’s legitimate policeman, implanter of democracy and freedom or any other of its myths. Nor is America the world economic leader, having ignored sound economics and squandered its wealth on an extravagant life-style and its military-industrial complex. Its debts and fraud are now being paid for largely by the rest of the world.
Like the Soviet Union, which was based on a Jewish-European conception of a workers’ paradise (Marx of course was Jewish), the United States is an aberration based on a Jewish Old Testament/European conception of righteousness through freedom – freedom to do anything. Particularly killing and torturing foreigners. America has no respect for human life. The figures prove it. The USA is not the world’s policeman. It is the world’s assassin, torturer and thief. President Obama and the Americans are who they are. They will not change their aggressive behaviour while NATO, the European Union and particularly the United Kingdom follow them and reinforce their beliefs. In following the United States into Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Europe has deviated from its philosophy of peace born from two devastating European wars. The roots of the European Union lie in the effort initiated by France and Germany to avoid future warfare. Europe has forgotten this. Political and military detachment from the USA is essential if Europe is to return to the path of peaceful European cultural development.
Europe is still the seat of Western social philosophy in the highly successful European Union as well as natural philosophy (science) with, for example, the CERN large hadron collider in Switzerland and the ITER tokamak in France. It should be mentioned that “tokamak” is the Russian name for this device of their invention. Russia is part of Europe in this context if only for Dimitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, a great achievement in natural philosophy. As a measure of American philosophical error, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to date, USD 850 billion, represents 140 large hadron colliders at USD 6 billion each or 30 ITER tokamaks at USD 28 billion each. These wars will be remembered not only for the American and European ethical failure in invading and killing Middle Eastern foreigners for their polluting oil, but also for the opportunity cost (i.e. forgone alternative) of developing clean fusion energy.
The USA’s Yankee tinkerer’s weapons are a despicable abuse of the science that commenced in Sumer and Babylon, now Iraq. Its military barbarians tread the same land walked by men 5,000-6,000 years ago whose systems of counting time and measuring angles they employ to kill its present inhabitants and dig military bases into the sites of the civilizations that developed them. America’s clever weapons are an abuse of the Arab mathematics and European science that were developed over millennia from a philosophy of advancing knowledge.
President Obama and our British politicians now want to forget the half-million Iraqi children who died from sanctions that Madeleine Albright said “were worth it” and the million Iraqis dead since the invasion. Of course, politicians who are responsible will take that view. Parents and wives of American and European troops who have died in these wars might comfort themselves that their loved ones’ deaths were in defence of their countries. It would not be so bad if it were true – but it is a lie.
Politicians rely on the fact that dead people can’t express an opinion. I’ll do it for them. Not one of the dead American or European soldiers would have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan if he had known he would die there. They really believed that they would live and they believed the lies. The politicians’ goals were not truly worth it to them. Every one of the half-million children killed by sanctions would have chosen to live a full life rather than become a victim of American politicians’ plans. Every dead Iraqi would have preferred to live under Saddam Hussein rather than die from American invasion. It’s only “worth it” to American politicians who think no further than their own elections and those Europeans who follow them for short-term gains or from stupidity.
After 100 days it’s clear that, despite his geographical agility, Barack Obama is going nowhere new. He’s George Bush by another name, which means that America is no good to anyone except those who take its bribes – and even they don’t recognize their own best interests. The path of the United States is of ethical and material ruin. The European Union needs to recover its values and its true path, in the first instance by detaching from the United States, politically and militarily. Closer integration with Russia, which has common interest and culture with Europe, lies along this path from which the USA is seeking to deflect us. It is the path of security and safety.
Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK.
