PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Empire’s Last Stand

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This was reposted in The Scrum.

From the article:

In the early months of 1947, President Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, made up their minds to prop up Greece’s openly fascist monarchy against a popular revolt they had cast as a Soviet threat.

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Truman and Acheson knew the Greek intervention would be a hard sell: Congress was in no mood to spend that kind of money, and the war-weary public harbored hope for FDR’s vision of a postwar order built on the principle of peaceful coexistence.

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“Mr. President,” Vandenberg said during White House deliberations, “the only way you are ever going to get this is to make a speech and scare hell out of the American people.”

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Truman made his since-famous “scare hell” speech. The Greeks got their $400 million (a remarkable proportion of which was embezzled by government ministers), and the American public was kept scared for the next 40–odd years — the Cold War years.

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Some scholars argue it began as early as the Yalta Conference in early 1945, when Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt told Joseph Stalin there would be no Allied support for the reconstruction of the Soviet Union, which had sacrificed 20 million to 27 million lives to defeat the Germans — a victory that left the Soviet economy in ruins. (bold added, because it's inexcusable how many people forget or ignore this)

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My date is March 12, 1947, when Truman delivered his address to a joint session of Congress. And it is remarkable how faithfully the intervention in Greece, the first of Washington’s major Cold War undertakings, has been reproduced during all the decades since. A year later the U.S. (with Britain’s assist) corrupted Italy’s first postwar general elections. Then came the coup in Iran, then the coup in Guatemala, and so on without interruption until our time.

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Last Wednesday President Joe Biden announced a new trilateral security agreement with Britain and Australia. Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, respectively the British and Australian prime ministers, joined him electronically from London and Canberra. Biden couldn’t remember Morrison’s name — “that fella down under” is as far as he got — but let us not allow the shocking incompetence of the man driving our bus to distract us from the gravity of the moment.

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Last Wednesday was a three-sided declaration that Cold War II is now our new, flesh-and-blood, steel-and-bombs, propaganda-and-paranoia reality.

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The Ides of September: Remember the date. Sept. 15, 2021, is our March 12, 1947. Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic is in 2021 what Stalin’s Soviet Union was three-quarters of a century ago. Truman and Acheson changed the world when they drafted the full-of-lies “scare hell” speech — greatly for the worse, of course. Biden, Johnson and Morrison just did the same. It would be hard to overstate the dangers and burdens Cold War II is going to inflict upon us — we Americans, we the rest of the human population.

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Remember this, too, and bear witness. It is the U.S. that has assiduously sought to kindle Cold War II, just as it, and not the Soviet Union, was responsible for starting Cold War I. I mention this because the origins of the first Cold War have been hopelessly blurred in the histories. We can watch this time. It is occurring before our eyes.

More at the link.

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More from the article (bold added):

The submarines and carrier groups, the extravagantly equipped bases, the bombers and the endless joint exercises associated with Cold War II will come at a heavy cost at home. Our schools will continue to fall apart along with our roads, bridges and transportation networks. There will be no proper health care system. Corporate exploitation will worsen and the liberals among us will insist all will be well tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Propaganda will all but smother us. All this is already evident. But the fight for relief just got tougher.

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Those able to recall Cold War I will understand that there is also a great psychological cost to waging these imperial campaigns. This saddens me as much as anything else. Cold War II, like the first, is likely to warp American minds in the same way. It will render an inability to see the world as it is, it will narrow the intellectual range, everything will be Manichean once again. It will render Americans lonely strangers among others.

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These are not lethal consequences in the way a war with China, which just got a lot more real, would be lethal. But Cold War II will kill our spirits, or nearly, until enough people are prepared to shake off the torpor, stand up, and say, “No more.”

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In this connection I venture a prediction. When enough people begin to resist the madness and we begin to get somewhere, Cold War II will turn out to be the American empire’s last stand.