Let’s Join Our Hands to Speed Up the Demise of the US-led Imperialist World

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 25 Nov 2024

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

Tomasz Makowski, Shutterstock

I can’t possibly tell my 15-year-old that their future will be more peaceful, and the law and the established global governance institutions will offer them protection, let alone Palestinian or Myanmar or Sudanese teenagers who don’t know whether they will live or get blown up before their next meal.

20 Nov 2024 – Whatever their names, imperialisms are, in the final analysis, bad for the people at home as well as the world at large. The North Americans are about to find this out.

Donald Trump Jr. the 46-years old son of the US President-elect Donald Trump, tweeted “The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives. Gotta lock in those $Trillions. Life be damned!!! Imbeciles!”

The M57A1 Army Tactical Missile System missile (ATACMS) is fired over the cab of an M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launcher.

(U.S. Army photo) Wikipedia Commons

He was referring specifically to the Biden White House’s 11th hour desperate move to greenlight Ukraine to use NATO-provided Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) ballistic missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia.

If a lifelong and openly anti-Western imperialist such as myself feels compelled to turn to a Trump’s words it is because I find unbearable and deeply troubling the level of militaristic American imperialism from the lame-duck President Joe Senile Biden (and his neo-conservative minders), best known for his genocide facilitation, to borrow the words of Omer Bartov, the renowned Brown University historian of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s war machine who served in Gaza as Israel Defence Force Company commander for 4 years in the 1970’s

We need a historical consciousness, rooted in the knowledge of the past, to comprehend the unfolding follies of today’s “world leaders”. For events and policies of today rhyme with the world’s past, albeit under radically different circumstances and with different specificities.

It is worth mentioning a particular social media meme which is attributed, falsely or accurately, to the famed German philosopher Hegel: “we learn from history that we don’t learn from history.”

So, when the other night my 15-years-old daughter told her mother and me that she was interested to read philosophy and politics, besides natural sciences, for her college entrance A-level, I pulled out Peter Singer’s thin introductory text on Hegel. Both she and her mother rolled their eyes, implying that my reaction was over-the-top.

Well, my 15-years’ old and her peers are growing up with Instagram and TikTok where they bear witness vicariously to the 24/7 live-streamed genocide in Gaza including complete destruction of all schools, universities, hospitals and other life’s essential services. They are aware of the bloody war in Ukraine, nuclear-sabre-rattling and the frequent references to the World War III, all with the direct involvement of, and with the arms \supplied by, the bi-partisan imperialists in Washington, their little British poodle and the all-party leaders of former Nazi Germany.

Instilling a critical historical consciousness through serious literature is one effective vaccine for the youth of today, I thought to myself as an educator.

To understand the second coming of Fascism with American characteristics since Charles Lindbergh’s America First of the 1930’s (Charles Lindbergh’s unapologetic bigotry: How he became the face of the America First Committee | Salon.com ) , one needs to know the historical processes and events which brought our world where it is today.

In the post-USSR world since the early 1990’s, the leader of the Imperialist western bloc is the United States, to belabour the obvious.

While barking incessantly, the “rule-based world order” “respect for human rights” and accountability for “rogue regimes”, it is the United States, more than any other political actors, that have, for all intents and purposes, destroyed any popular confidence in international law, civilized norms and post-World War II global governance institutions including the United Nations and its judicial organs such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

To be sure, diplomats and chattering classes will – and do – keep on talking about the need to reform the UN and restore faith in the rule of international law. But hundreds of millions of humans – in refugee camps, the now uninhabitable Gaza, the world’s war zones, as well as in anti-war and anti-genocide rallies and protests in many capitals worldwide – know that the law is not universally applied or enforceable, when it comes to today’s Nuremberg-worthy imperialists of the West, however heinous their crimes against humanity have been.

I can’t possibly tell my 15-year-old that their future will be more peaceful, and the law and the established global governance institutions will offer them protection, let alone Palestinian or Myanmar or Sudanese teenagers who don’t know whether they will live or get blown up before their next meal.

As for us living in the United Kingdom that has dutifully been in every single US military adventure since the end of the World War II, Britain playing a sidekick to their former colony of the USA is both pathetic and deeply troublesome.

Just today (19 November) the US-based Scheer Post re-published an investigative report by Gray Zone’s Kit Klarenberg with the disturbing title “Leaks Expose Secret British Military Cell Plotting to “Keep Ukraine Fighting.” The subject matter of the report – conceived just days after Russian troops entered Ukraine in February 2022 – is about the Project Alchemy “founded on the personal orders of Britain’s Lt. General Charlie Stickland CB OBE, in charge of “planning, executing and integrating UK-led joint multinational overseas military operations”, which aims at “defeat(ing) Putin in Ukraine and set the conditions for reshaping of an open international order of the future”.

Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan – March 5 2022: People with signs at a march in Shibuya, Tokyo protesting the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Photo: Hiroshi Mori, Shutterstock

According to the investigative journalist Klarenberg, the need to “keep Ukraine fighting” was the main theme and intent of the 26-February minutes of the inaugural meeting attended by “an assortment of leading academics, authors, strategists, planners, pollsters, comms, data scientists and tech” who were on hand to develop “a grand strategy options paper”.

But wait! We have been here before.

This is where historical consciousness becomes indispensable

Anyone who is remotely familiar with the world affairs surrounding the seismic changes in Tsarist Russia around the turn of the 20th century would most certainly know that the West, with the then two leading imperialist actors, namely France and Britain, were initially fighting their proxy war against a new European power, Kaiser’s Germany, weaponizing the financially bankrupt Tsarist regime of Russia as its spearhead. In her well-researched book “Lenin on the Train” (published in 2016 to critical acclaim), Catherine Merridale captured “an extraordinary journey from harmless exile in Zurich, across a Germany falling to pieces from the war’s deprivations, and northwards to the edge of Lapland to his eventual ecstatic reception by the revolutionary crowds at Petrograd’s Finland Station.” Merridale insinuated that the British agents were directly involved in the killing of Rasputin while London and Paris were financing the Tsar who in turn used the foreign money to silence or buy any opposition voices in the Russian Duma or Parliament. The sole purpose of the Anglo-French plotting in St Petersburg, the pre-revolutionary capital, was to keep Russia stay in the war with Germany as long as possible.

The young Russian Jewish men and poor peasants who were subject to forced conscription into the Tsar’s army bore the brunt of these endless wars while Anglo-French strategists connived to secure commercial and strategic gains from the protracted European war distant from their national borders. (As a young Belarusian Jew, Noam Chomsky’s father immigrated to the United States to “escape Tsarist conscription”, as mentioned in one of his public talks by the great American critic of US imperialism.)

Fast-forward to 2024

Ukraine has been made the proxy spearhead for the new West led by Washington where neo-Conservatives, from both democratic and republic parties, have reigned supreme since the days of the 2nd invasion – and the regime change in Iraq – which eventually destroyed Iraq as a society. The avowed goal of the West is to create a post-Putin Russian Federation, with an eye on Russia’s cheap wheat and gas, a regime in Moscow that will be pliant and subservient to Western energy and commodity interests.

But unlike the turn of the 20th century, Britain no longer ruled the waves. Great Britain no longer matters, except as Washington’s poodle. From Tony Blair to Boris Johnson, London in effect takes orders from Washington, which maintains a dozen military bases across the British Isles. Sir Keir Starmer, the newly elected Labour Prime Minister, doesn’t really have much wiggle room, when it comes to the American Design over NATO and its European member, which are effectively vassal states when it comes to their defence policies.

In the 1910’s, the Tsar’s Anglo-French backers apparently lost their gamble spectacularly. Lenin and Bolshevik not only ousted and decimated the Tsar Nicholas II and his entire lineage but also established an entirely new economic and political system in place of the 400-years old corrupt feudal system.

Today’s British plotters running “Project Alchemy” must, one can imagine, be pained to find out that things in their proxy theatre of Ukraine have not been going according to their grand strategy options. Vladimir Putin just presided over widely applauded and admired BRICS Summit in the Russian City of Kazan with a 30-page declaration of the fast-approaching death of the US-led unipolar world.

I suspect there is a direct connection between the Project Alchemy’s spectacular failure to discredit and make small their arch-target Vladimir Putin in the eyes of the world and the last ditch efforts by Biden’s eventual nod to Ukraine to use NATO-supplied ballistic missiles to strike targets inside Russia, a move that the lackeys in London and Paris have replicated, to no surprise to anyone. Ukraine has reportedly launched missile attacks into Russia.

With the United States taking its gloves off, and openly opting for the bloody war – possibly nuclear – with Russia, I urge fellow activists and citizens of the world to resist the sole really existing imperialism, namely the American imperialism, and adopt the long view of history of liberation struggles.

On their part, the good Americans need to start deprograming their Pavlovian national self-perception – that the US is a force for good, despite all available mountains of evidence to the contrary. Imperialism is bad for both the home crowd and the world at large.

We must all join hands together to end this round of imperialist rule from Washington.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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