William Shirer remarks on Hitler’s campaign to rush to Moscow and deal a death blow to the Soviet Union in the early stages of Barbarossa.The easy victories of june came to be replaced by increasingly strenuous gains as fall and winter approached.At the gates of Moscow, within sight of the towers of the Kremlin,Hitler’s armies were stopped cold by Marshal Zhukov, armies Hitler had not even suspected of existing let alone armed and equipped to battle in the extreme cold.
That debacle changed not merely the facts on the ground but dealt a psychological blow to the Germans.Until then, his armies marched into all countries uninterrupted and unchallenged and struck terror among people because of the Blitzkrieg tactics employed by the Panzers.Moscow dramatically changed the equation.From that point on, the people of Europe lost their fear of the German Wehrmacht and it was the Wehrmacht that was on the run.
I bring this up to show what has transpired over the last five decades to the American mythology of a benign colossus dispensing wisdom to the world’s peoples about Democracy and Freedom and being entirely certain about the correctness of its ways.To begin with, that mythology was just that, a mythology created and maintained by the numerous propagandists and shills that spring up from our universities and think tanks at the smell of money like a Starbucks epidemic in our barren suburbia.The mythology was designed to camouflage a covert agenda of people like Kennan who wanted American Hegemony with Smiles to permit our corporations to enter the economies of compliant countries and turn them into extensions of the U.S. economy with little or no say on the part of the local populations. That was achieved by encouraging local elites to seize power without consent of the people and hock their economic future to U.S. banks at near usurious rates.That model turned prosperous economies like Brazil, Chile and Argentina into basket cases.When met with resistance, the US agencies went after troublemakers like Allende.
I believe that the Latin American debacle has exposed the soft underbelly of American capitalism to an extent nothing else has in recent years. Gone are the days when a U.S. President can induce “Regime Change” in any Latin country with a wink and a nod.Everyone associated with U.S. corporate power is now suspect in Latin eyes and there is no prospect of anyone tainted by American association ever coming to power.
As these realities sink in,US corporations, profligate to the max, are increasingly finding it difficult to sustain their ravenous appetites for profits even within our domestic markets, starting with the steel, auto and the auto parts businesses.The exodus of industries to India and China is gathering steam, laying waste to our heartland and creating economic desperation among our people who have been fed myths about how our corporations would take care of them if they just keep their noses to the grindstone and not rock the boat.As our corporate masters become desperate for profits, our political elite, taking their cues from the same corporate elites, launch their desperate wars, in Vietnam, Iraq and God knows where else.
The world has always known that the benign face created by our shills was just that, a face to make our greed and enormous appetites for other people’s resources palatable.When Rumsfeld launched his “shock and awe” terror strike on Baghdad, he was convinced that it would be a cakewalk like Hitler did before him.Events since then have not merely disproven his hubristic verdict but killed once and for all the invincibility of the American forces.A rag tag band of Iraqis armed with the crudest improvised devices have fought a far superior force to a standstill and promise to drive the invaders out.
Through it all, like Hitler’s minions in Berlin, we have a Press and a supine Congress engaging in sideshows,not leveling with people and hastening the day when US imperialism, in Mao’s words would indeed become a paper tiger.In an ironic sense that would indeed be a blessing for us and the world.
