Tortilla con Sal, September 24th 2013

In the UN system, the countries of North America, Europe and their Pacific allies are known informally as the Western (European and Others) Group. Outside those countries, the history of their serial crimes against humanity in order to get what they want is not forgotten. The Syrian crisis shows that Western countries' predatory aggression continues as their ruling elites struggle to brake their decline relative to China, Russia and those countries' important regional allies like Iran or Venezuela.

The political, media and intellectual representatives of the Western Group typically operate on the assumption – at once cynical, sinister and crass - of their own societies' moral superiority. They consistently omit that the social and economic advantages they enjoy derive from centuries of genocidal colonial pillage. After World War Two, in response to the moral challenge of socialism, the imperialist colonial system adapted so as to operate on the basis of implacable neocolonial economic domination and persistent military aggression.

That military aggression was waged either directly, as in Vietnam, or through State proxies like Israel and South Africa, or else through non-State proxies like the Contra in Nicaragua or Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Beyond the self-evident suffering and loss caused by persistent Western military aggression, the human cost of that neocolonial system was systematically and brutally externalized onto the West's former colonial possessions.. The Western countries' current relative stability and prosperity have been paid for by the effective enslavement, immiseration, oppression and genocidal murder of the rest of the world's peoples.

At once commonplace and exotic, this paradox haunts almost all Western political and economic analysis by its omission. From Mozart-loving genocidal Nazis to their Whitman-quoting US counterparts in Korea and Vietnam, to the Cartesian French mass murderers and torturers from Indochina to Madagascar to Algeria, or to Kipling and Elgar inspired British sadists in Africa, Asia and Ireland, or from high-minded Spanish chemical warfare in the Rif to devout police death squads in Euskal Herria, the list is long and damning. Decade after decade, Western high culture has always gone hand in hand with savage genocidal barbarism, as it continues to do.

Inverting that reality, Western corporate elites, their politicians and their media have used fear of their historic victims to intimidate their own peoples. The attacks of September 2001 coincided with a US recession prefiguring the collapse of 2008. This period saw the Western corporate elites impose the costs of their crisis-ridden social and economic system directly on their countries' fearful populations. In that oppressive atmosphere, they have institutionalized anti-democratic, transnational centralized economic planning to defend their corporate interests.

The suave, self-serving barbarian Western elites are using against their own peoples the neocolonial measures they have so long inflicted on the rest of the world. The increasing application of the military dimension of those measures is only a question of time. Even so, Western intellectual production across the political spectrum continues to assume Western moral superiority.

Apologists point to the recent vote in the UK parliament and legislative foreplay in the US Congress on whether to go to war against Syria as proof of vibrant Western democracy. In fact, the UK vote depended entirely on what Labour Party leader Ed Miliband and his team decided. For various reasons, it happened to suit the elite interests Miliband and his colleagues represent not to attack Syria. They preferred to win a political advantage by damaging David Cameron's in any case thoroughly phony authority.

Likewise, the suggestion that corporate funded US Congress members responded to popular opinion rather than the elite interests that fund them is ridiculous. The vote on Obamacare, stripping funding even from President Obama's woefully inadequate health care plan, confirmed that the machinations around a vote on Syria represent vicious elite infighting intended to damage President Obama politically. Wherever one looks in the Western countries, majority popular well being is subordinated to elite corporate economic interests under Margaret Thatcher's slogan of the low, dishonest 1980s, “There is no alternative”.

In that context, it is easy to find seductive liberal and progressive economic advocacy, for example, that if only market capitalism were adequately regulated things would eventually come right for the Western economies. A common argument goes that the system would stabilize if only governments applied some mixture of more equitable wealth redistribution, increased public sector investment and debt relief. But very little liberal and progressive comment recognizes the wider significance of the global context on their domestic affairs

The era of Western global dominance is accelerating into a transition unlike previous imperial transitions, like those of Britain and France. This transition will be different because those countries' elites were still able to count on their US partners' economic and military power to maintain control of global natural resources and areas of strategic importance. In this further transition, now well under way, the Western elites will have to reach accommodations with global counterparts who certainly need strong Western Group country economies, but not at any price.

The majority world has no obligation to support Western living standards that do not correspond to the value of goods and services produced by North America and Europe relative to the rest of the world. Western decline has been readily observable since the US economic bust of 2000, the mystery-shrouded attacks on the US of 2001 followed by the invasion of Afghanistan and, in 2003, the war on Iraq. Since then NATO militarism has grown in inverse proportion to Western Group countries' relative economic decline.

NATO countries' terrorist wars against Ivory Coast and Libya in 2011 were geo-strategic campaigns derived directly from the Western economic crisis. Western leaders also expected Syria's legitimate government to fall in 2011, but their ultimate targets, Iran and Russia, China too, acted decisively in self-defence. The processes driving these events are self-evident to any concerned observer outside the Western countries' narcissistic media bubble.

In the Western Group countries, permissible views on those processes have shifted so far to the right that mainstream liberal and progressive comment has become truly demented. Most Western intellectual production espouses self-evidently false beliefs, avoiding the obvious and embracing the irrational. This is clear in almost all Western analysis both of the continuing economic crisis and of foreign affairs.

In the economic sphere the outstanding feature of the crisis since the two Bear Sterns hedge funds went belly up in the summer of 2007 has been the increasingly blatant intimate liaison between Central Banks and multinational corporate financial institutions. The clearest example of this has been the relationship between the US Federal Reserve and its Primary Dealer network. Leading members of that network became insolvent through 2008 and should have been put into receivership.

Instead they have been rescued by means of a series of measures that not only protect the corporate elite but sustain a corrupt, unaccountable centrally planned international financial system. Apologists for that system will point to the various Congressional oversight committees in the United States or the occasionally effective regulatory regimes in Europe. Mainstream commentators indeed acknowledge that the crisis lingers on in large part because Central Banks and regulators stick to the Too Big To Fail consensus.

But the reason those institutions remain too important to be forced into receivership is because they are essential partners, enforcers and enablers of the Western elites' control of the global financial system. The corollary of this fact is that the destructive role of Western countries' corporate financial sector in their domestic economies is treated as a necessary evil. Effective domestic regulation of indispensable players in the global financial system is impossible because the Western elites depend on that system to maintain their global financial domination.

Major players in the Federal Reserve's Primary Dealer network pay heavy fines as a cost of doing business. They do so repeatedly in persistent scandals over, for example, bond market and interbank lending rates, multi-billion money laundering, bilking clients with junk derivatives and other fraudulent misrepresentation of all kinds. Despite this endless corporate recidivism, even very distinguished mainsteam dissidents, themselves often former regulators, suggest that a return to adequate regulation will help get things back on track.

But it is a demented false belief to argue that the current system can be made to work as it did in some supposedly corruption-free past. The corrupt Western financial system will only reform when it starts to reflect the real value of the goods and services its economies produce and something like their true relationship to the goods and services produced by the rest of the world. The canards of innovation, of inflated asset values being called growth, of falls in economic participation rates treated as an increase in employment, all are common in mainstream commentary as too is the omission of the centralized planning role of Central Banks and their corporate partners.

That systematic dementia over the Western Group's economic crisis is naturally complemented by systematic false beliefs in foreign policy. So Western political leaders and their media partners consistently rubbish the achievements of Venezuela and Cuba. They accuse Venezuela's government of destabilizing the region. The reverse is true.

Venezuela has stabilized the whole of Central America and the Caribbean through its Petrocaribe and ALBA initiatives, promoting both energy sovereignty and food security. In terms of its own economic needs, Cuba has made hugely disproportionate contributions to the region in both health care and in education. Similarly, Western media and politicians hysterically attack Iran, supporting assassination campaigns of Iranian scientists and cyber-aggression against Iranian industrial targets.

But it is Israel that is the rogue nuclear and chemical weapons power in the region, not Iran. Likewise the Western Group countries demonize what they term Palestinian aggression – in fact, legitimate self defence - for not accepting Israel's genocidal colonization of Palestinian territory. The Western Group countries defend that history of genocide, casting Israel, the region's historic aggressor, as a victim.

Syria is a microcosm of all these factors. It is one of the last remaining countries not locked into the Western financial system. Its government's ideology is socialist. Its energy policy favours Russia and China. Until NATO's proxy terrorist war, its secular society had the most diverse religious and cultural tolerance. Syria has been a factor of stability in the region, helping defend Lebanon against Israeli aggression and providing unstinting support to the brutalized people of Palestine. For all those reasons, it poses a challenge to the elite interests of the Western Group countries.

So, just as they did in Ivory Coast and Libya, the Western governments which had promoted terrorist subversion in Syria for decades, instigated a terrorist war which their demented psy-warfare media described as a democratic revolution. The Saudi Arabian and Qatari-funded mercenaries are described as idealistic rebels. Now, after two and a half years, despite billions of dollars in funding, armaments and training the NATO terrorists are effectively beaten. So on August 21st, the US, French and British governments either encouraged, or at the very least allowed, a provocation using chemical weapons, murdering dozens of children to create a pretext for a direct attack on the Syrian government forces.

This is a moderate level of evil for the demented Western Group high cultural barbarians. The cynicism of the Western liberal media is no more than the rest of the world has long come to expect and despise. The moral hypocrisy of war criminals guilty of the supreme war crime of unprovoked aggression, like Barack Obama, David Cameron and François Hollande and their colleagues, is no greater than over Palestine or the Congo. In brief, everything is normal, but only, as Comandante Hugo Chavez said, “for now”.