In a send-off interview with The New York Times, Biden’s secretary of state renders a sober-sounding account of the world as the retiring regime now leaves it that is so shockingly far from reality as to be frightening.
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Readers write from time to time thanking me for keeping up with The New York Times so they don’t have to do so themselves. I understand the thought, and they are most welcome in all cases. But we have now the case of the Times’ lengthy interview with Antony Blinken, published in the Sunday Magazine dated Jan. 5.
Yes, I have read it. And this time I propose others do the same. This is one of those occasions when it is important to know what Americans are supposed to think — or, better put, the extent to which Americans are not supposed to think.
It is sendoff time for the outgoing regime. You can imagine without my help what kind of piffle this is engendering, if you have not already noticed.
USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, Susan Page, threw President Joe Biden a seven-inning game’s worth of softballs this week, producing a Q & A all about “legacy” and “inflection points,” the glories of American hegemony (“Who leads the world if we don’t?”) and how Joe could have defeated Donald Trump last November but was, after all, “talking about passing the baton” even when everything we read indicated he had no intention of doing so.
Here is one of my faves from Susan Page. Consider as your read this all that is going on in the world Joe Biden will shortly leave behind:
“PAGE: And as you know, I represent the Wilmington News Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network. And so on behalf of my colleagues here, I want to ask you. Your presidential library, Delaware or Scranton?
BIDEN: It won’t be in Scranton. Hopefully Delaware, but a real big push to-
PAGE: Or I meant Syracuse, actually. I knew it wasn’t going to be in Scranton. Delaware or Syracuse is really my question….”
Journalism with American characteristics, no other way to name it. Not a single question about the Gaza crisis, genocide, Ukraine, China. Not even a mention of Russia. And what in hell, now that I think of it, will fill the shelves in a Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Presidential Library? This is really my question.
O.K., USA Today is a comic book — “McPaper,” we used to call it — and it is folly to expect anything more than fatuous pitter-patter out of Joe Biden (or anyone interviewing him) at this late stage in the proceedings. But the Times is not a comic book, its day-to-day unseriousness notwithstanding, and Blinken purports to gravitas and authority. Herein lies the problem. In his lengthy exchange with Lulu García–Navarro, Biden’s secretary of state renders a sober-sounding account of the world as the retiring regime now leaves it that is so shockingly far from reality as to be frightening.
“Today as I sit with you, I think we hand over an America in a much, much stronger position, having changed much for the better our position around the world,” Blinken asserts at the outset of this interview. “Most Americans,” he adds a short time later, “want to make sure that we stay out of wars, that we avoid conflict, which is exactly what we’ve done.”
Go ahead, let your jaw drop. Blinken’s 50 minutes with the Times are an assault on reason, on truth. And as such they are an incitement to ignorance, precisely the condition that lands this nation in the incalculable trouble Blinken proposes we pretend is not there.
One of Those ‘Hollow Men’
It is not, or not only, the extent of Blinken’s incompetence, which even this carefully staged presentation cannot obscure. We knew he was not up to the job Biden gave him from his first months on the seventh floor at State. It is his, Blinken’s, moral vacancy that must disturb us most. He is one of those hollow men T.S. Eliot described in his famous poem of this name. This is a man who professes “values” — “our values,” as he puts it — but has none, who stands for nothing other than the rank opportunity uniquely available with access to power. I have never heretofore thought of Antony Blinken as at heart a nihilist. But on his way out the door, this seems the most truthful way to understand him.
This is the man who swiftly made an utter mess of U.S.–China relations when, two months after taking office, his first encounters with senior Chinese officials blew up in his face during talks in an Anchorage hotel conference room. Sino–American ties have been one or another degree of hostile ever since.
[See: PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Blundering Biden Team]
This is the man who, a year later, led the way as Biden provoked Russia’s self-protecting intervention in Ukraine. He, Blinken, has ever since refused negotiations. This is the man who, a year after that, began his continuing defense of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It has been Blinken and Nod in action in each case.
This is the man who — a couple of notable moments here — celebrated World Press Freedom Day in London in May 2021, while Julian Assange was in a maximum-security prison a few miles away. “Freedom of expression and access to factual and accurate information provided by independent media are foundational to prosperous and secure democratic societies,” Blinken had the nerve to declare, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as he did so.
This is the man who perjured himself last May, when, under oath, he told Congress the State Department had found no evidence that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. (I take this occasion to praise Brett Murphy once again for breaking this story in ProPublica.)
Now we can settle in and listen to Blinken converse with his interlocutor from the Times.
Blinken on relations with China:
“We were really on the decline when it came to dealing with China diplomatically and economically. We’ve reversed that…. And I know it’s succeeding because every time I meet with my Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, he inevitably spends 30 or 40 minutes, 60 minutes complaining about everything we’ve done to align other countries to build this convergence in dealing with things that we don’t like that China is pursuing. So to me, that is the proof point that we’re much better off through diplomacy.”
This account of the regress of the U.S.–China relationship on Blinken’s watch is beyond bent. First, there is no record of Wang Yi, China’s distinguished foreign minister, ever complaining to Blinken or any other U.S. official about Washington’s alliances in East Asia. China’s complaints have primarily (but not only) to do with the Biden regime’s incessant assertion of American hegemony in the Pacific, its provocative conduct on the Taiwan and South China Sea questions, and its efforts to subvert an economy with which the U.S. can no longer compete.
Second, not even Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, with which Washington has indeed strengthened military ties, are now “aligned” against China. They, along with all other East Asians, can read maps, believe it or not. And the whole of the Pacific region will favor balanced ties with the U.S. and China as long as you and I are alive. Drawing East Asians together in some kind of Sinophobic “convergence” is a long dream from which the Washington policy cliques simply cannot awaken.
Finally and most obviously, if antagonizing another major power is a measure of diplomatic success, the nation such a diplomat purports to represent is in the kind of trouble to which I alluded earlier.
Footnote: It has been a sad spectacle these past three years as a parade of Biden regime officials, Blinken chief among them, has marched to Beijing and failed one by one to repair the damage done in Anchorage. In their dealings with Blinken, Wang and Xi Jinping, China’s president, have treated Biden’s top diplomat as if he were a junior high school student who flunked geography.
Blinken on Russia and Ukraine:
“So first, if you look at the trajectory of the conflict, because we saw it coming, we were able to make sure that not only were we prepared and allies and partners were prepared, but that Ukraine was prepared. We made sure that well before the Russian aggression happened, starting in September and then again December, we quietly got a lot of weapons to Ukraine to make sure that they had in hand what they needed to defend themselves, things like Stingers, Javelins that were instrumental in preventing Russia from taking Kyiv, from rolling over the country, erasing it from the map, and indeed pushing the Russians back….
In terms of diplomacy: We’ve exerted extraordinary diplomacy in bringing and keeping together more than 50 countries, not only in Europe, but well beyond, in support of Ukraine and in defense of these principles that Russia also attacked back in February of that year. I worked very hard in the lead up to the war, including meetings with my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva a couple of months before the war, trying to find a way to see if we could prevent it, trying to test the proposition whether this was really about Russia’s concerns for its security, concerns somehow about Ukraine and the threat that it posed, or NATO and the threat that it posed, or whether this was about what it in fact it is about, which is Putin’s imperial ambitions and the desire to recreate a greater Russia, to subsume Ukraine back into Russia. But we had to test that proposition. And we were intensely engaged diplomatically with Russia. Since then, had there been any opportunity to engage diplomatically in a way that could end the war on just and durable terms, we would have been the first to seize them.”
Where to begin? Give me a sec to catch my breath.
Blinken and his colleagues anticipated Russia’s invasion before it started in February 2022 because the Biden regime provoked it to the point Moscow had no other choice. Washington spent the autumn of 2021 arming Kiev, just as Blinken recounts, but Blinken makes no mention of the two draft treaties the Kremlin sent Westward that December — one to Washington, one to NATO in Brussels — as the proposed basis for negotiating a durable new security settlement between Russia and the Atlantic alliance. This was dismissed out of hand as a “non-starter,” the British-ism the Biden regime favored at the time. Blinken skips over this opportunity to develop productive diplomatic channels like a mosquito across a pond.
His idea of diplomacy, indeed, was limited to gathering one of those coalitions of the willing (or coerced) the American imperium has long favored, in this case to back the proxy war to come. There was not then and has not been since any serious effort to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine. Blinken seems actually to believe (or he pretends to believe) that there was never any question of Moscow’s legitimate security concerns: It was all about the Kremlin’s plan to “erase” Ukraine in the cause of the Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions. Somehow this proposition was tested and proved out, and I would love to know how.
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I am reminded once again of that moment, a few months into the war, when Blinken pulled aside Sergei Lavrov for a private exchange after formal talks at the Kremlin. As I wrote subsequently, when he asked Moscow’s long-serving foreign minister if it was true Russia wanted to reconstruct the Czarist empire, Lavrov stared, turned, and left the room — no reply, no handshake, no farewell, just an abrupt exit. How could a diplomat of Lavrov’s caliber possibly entertain such a question? We are left with two alternatives, readers. Either Tony Blinken is extremely dim-witted to misinterpret Russia’s position this badly, or Tony Blinken is a very formidable liar.
My conclusion: He is both.
Footnote: Blinken has not spoken to Lavrov since that pitiful occasion in mid–2022 — or to any other senior Russian official so far as we know. And the Biden regime has on two occasions, most famously in Istanbul a month after the Russian invasion began, actively scuttled talks between Kiev and Moscow that could have ended the war.
We come to Blinken on Israel, Gaza and the Palestinians.
Blinken spent a great deal of his time with García–Navarro explaining his views of the Gaza crisis. And for the most part he stayed with the tedious boilerplate with which we are already familiar. The Biden regime supports Israel’s right to defend itself. He has dedicated himself to making sure the Palestinians of Gaza “had what they needed to get by.” The impediments to a ceasefire and a return of hostages are all on Hamas, not the Netanyahu regime.
Has Israel committed war crimes? Do we witness a genocide? Have the Israelis blocked food aid? You can’t expect straight answers out of Blinken on these kinds of questions, and García–Navarro got none. What she got was Blinken’s approval of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, couched in the cotton-wool language to which Blinken always resorts when he wants to turn night into day, failure into success. Yes, he allowed, the Netanyahu regime could have made some minor adjustments at the margin and the slaughter would have looked better. But there is no erasing Blinken’s ratification of Israeli terrorism, his judgment that it has been a success — or García–Navarro’s failure to call him on this, a topic to which I will shortly return.
There is one remark Blinken made in this sendoff Q & A that has stayed with me ever since I watched the video of it and then read the transcript. It concerns the Gaza crisis, but it expands in the mind like one of those sponges that grow large when wetted. “When it comes to making sure that Oct. 7 can’t happen again,” Blinken said, “I think we’re in a good place.”
I can hardly fathom the implications of this extravagantly thoughtless assertion. There is no understanding of the human spirit in it. It takes no account of the enduring aspirations of the Palestinians people, I mean to say, and so displays the shallowest understanding of the events of Oct. 7, 2023. It presumes, above all, that the totalized violence of uncontrolled power is some kind of net-positive and can prevail in some lasting way, and that there is no need to trouble about what is just, or what it ethical, or what is irreducibly decent, or a commonly shared morality, or, at the horizon, the human cause as against (in this case) the Zionist cause.
This sentence takes us straight to Antony Blinken’s nihilism. As he leaves office he mounts not only an assault on reason, as I argued above, or our faculties of discernment, but altogether an assault on meaning. The working assumption is that he or she who controls the microphones and megaphones is free to say whatever it is of use to say. It does not require any relationship to reality, only to expedience. This is what I mean by nihilism.
“I don’t do politics,” Blinken flippantly tells García–Navarro early in their time together. “I do policy.” García–Navarro lets this go, as she does so much else. It is prima facie ridiculous, a hiding place in which García–Navarro allows Blinken to take shelter. Policy is politics: They are inseparable, no exceptions. In this case, Blinken cannot possibly expect the world beyond America’s shores to take seriously his assessment of the world as the Biden White House leaves it. This interview is all politics all the time: It is strictly for domestic consumption, intended not only to salvage a reputation — one beyond salvaging in my view — but to continue the grinding business of manufacturing consent.
A few words in this connection about García–Navarro’s management of this interview. Let me take you to J–school for a moment.
The proper way to conduct an interview of this kind is to assess one’s subject — honest, artful dodger, habitual liar, etc. — then determine what one is after, the universe of the exchange, then write out one’s questions. And then one must remain wholly, unreservedly open to abandoning the plan in accordance with the interview subject’s replies. These must be challenged at every turn when a challenge is required. One may never get to most of the written questions, but a willingness to deviate from one’s list is essential. Otherwise, what looks like journalism is reduced to mere presentation.
Above all else, before one even sits down, one must be clear in one’s mind: I will address my subject as an equal, not a supplicant in the presence of some kind of superior authority. Interviews with powerful people do not work otherwise.
García–Navarro did not do this. Watch the video of her time with Blinken. As is easily detected, she reads from a script and remains resolutely faithful to it regardless of what Blinken says. She purports to be otherwise, but she is a supplicant. She pretends to challenge Blinken on this or that question, but it is all faux, pose. None of Blinken’s lies, misrepresentations, and plain disinformation come in for serious scrutiny. It is merely on-to-the-next-question.
This is not journalism. It is spectacle, a theatrical reenactment of journalism — another case of journalism with American characteristics. It is not the creation of meaning, either: It is the destruction of meaning. I have already noted my term for this.
I mentioned Eliot’s poem earlier, The Hollow Men, published in 1925. “We are the hollow men,” it begins. And then:
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar…
A hundred years on, a century after Eliot contemplated the nihilism abroad amid the wreckage of World War I, this seems to me a remarkably cogent description of Antony Blinken and all the Antony Blinkens who have populated the Biden regime these past four years. Empty, cold of heart, dry of voice, a head stuffed with straw: How could my mind not go to Eliot’s lines as I watched Blinken exit the stage?
The saving grace of García–Navarro’s encounter with Tony Blinken, and a little to my surprise, lies in the comment thread appended to the published piece. There are 943 comments at this writing. And there are some voices of approval, certainly. “What if there was no Blinken to provide pushback against the demands made to Netanyahu by the likes of Ben–Gvir and Smotrich?” asks someone who goes by Lrrr. “There was only ever a choice between bad and worse outcomes.”
But my goodness are the critics many. Here are a few straight off the top of the thread:
Jorden, California:
“Blinken has tarnished the office of Secretary of State. Silly is not the word, not even irresponsible but diabolical. Just bad on so many levels…. The Biden administration will mark the sudden decline of American hegemony …. U.S. foreign policy needs a much needed injection of realist logic now.”
Jorden got 103 “Recommends,” whatever these are.
From “Independents,” USA:
“Anthony Blinken did a shabby job, especially, especially the middle east nonsense.”
Seventy-seven “Recommends” for “Independents.”
From “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Wisconsin:
“For readers who want to further marvel at the creature that is Tony Blinken, watch his performance of “Rockin’ in the Free World” from last winter in Ukraine. It is truly cinematic in its irony as he facilitates U.S.–backed genocide. Could not write it better. That’s when I realized how much I viscerally hate this guy, how pathological his lack of self-awareness is[.]”
Another 77 “Recommends” here. And from David in Florida:
Yes, it’s called being delusional or incompetent or utterly negligent! Good job Blinkin! You and Biden undermined the final support of the Democratic Party. Sure you and your overlords will be fine with I’ll[sic] gotten gains. The rest of us won’t.
Sixty “Recommends” for David in Florida.
And so it goes. More readers of The New York Times than I had imagined know what it is they are reading, I have to say.
One of these, “AKA” from Nashville, offered this and got 58 “Recommends” for it:
“I wonder if Blinken reads the comments section and readers picks to understand what the public thinks of his work and legacy.”
I wish I could say I wonder with you, AKA, but I don’t. Antony Blinken is utterly indifferent to “what the public thinks” by his own profession. He doesn’t do politics, you see.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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“When it comes to making sure that Oct. 7 can’t happen again,” Blinken said, “I think we’re in a good place.” Does the MOAB comfort Sec. of Genocide?
comment from Jerusalem Post:
As a US Army aviation veteran, the biggest bomb in US and Israeli inventory is a GBU-43/B, also known as a MOAB, (mother of all bombs) this bomb can be dropped by C-130 aircraft
Guess what? Israel has SEVEN C-130J Super Hercules, Israel used C-130’s to rescue the hostages at Entebbe, and this aircraft can lift any bomb in US and Israeli inventory.
Israel doesn’t need to buy, borrow or lease an aircraft it already has.
Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules
FULFILLING DONALD TRUMP’S campaign promise to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, the Pentagon dropped the “mother of all bombs”
— one of its largest non-nuclear munitions — for the first time on Thursday, in Afghanistan. The 21,600 pound weapon was developed over a decade ago, but was never used due to concerns of possible massive civilian casualties. Intercept 4/13/2017
Great article. Being a flawed human being I hate Blinken almost as much as I hate Biden. No administration has done so much damage while talking such utter bullshit. Come to think of it, I hate Victoria Nuland as much as Blinken. I pray Blinken, Nuland and Nod never darken the world again.
The best trick Blinky pulled off is how for every lie he told he got Matt Miller’s nose to grow longer.
To see that “santa’s reindeer” Blinken in comparison with people like Sergei Lavrov or Wang Yi or Indian FM Jaishankar lets us know the abysmal level the USA has sunk to in relations with other countries.
It is such an enormous embarrassment! And yet the media just keeps pretending everything is normal. It is both horrifying and fascinating to watch an empire die, and I am very grateful that I am OLD.
Antony Blinken is a recent example of the banality of evil
An American official is “shockingly far from reality.” I am Shocked!
Let us consider America and reality.
– Americans believe they live in a democracy.
– Americans believe they live in a land of the free.
– Americans believe that if they work hard in America they can be a ‘success’ just like the mega-donors.
– Americans believe that the world is not currently at war.
That’s a short list, but lets examine a few of those points.
– American presidents now consistently while in office have ‘approval ratings’ of around 40%. This is now bi-partisan.
– Between elections, approximately 70% of Americans say the nation is heading in the wrong direction.
– The last time the American people were able to make a noticeable change in America’s direction was the election of 1932 when the people replaced Hoovernomics with The New Deal. Interestingly, there was never an election with a noticeable shift back, and yet America’s economic policies are now completely in line with Hoovernomics.
– Is this what Democracy looks like?
– America has the world’s largest population of prisoners.
– America has another large population of those under some form of government supervised “release” from its large prison system.
– American police regularly rule with brutality, threats and intimidation.
– Is this what Freedom looks like?
– In America, the rich always get richer.
– In America, the poor always get poorer
– In America, the only profit and benefit from a citizens work and labor goes to the rich.
– In America, if you study hard and work hard, you find that America gives your job to a H-1b visa immigrant. The type of immigrants that the oligarchs love to welcome to America. The ones that keep your pay low and oligarch profits high. The ones who support the system of making the rich even richer.
– Is that what opportunity looks like?
– There are bombs and missiles exploding around the world. Casualties number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Many of those bombs and missiles have “Made in the USA” stamped on them. America pumps hundreds of billions of dollars into extreme regimes that are fighting these wars. Meanwhile, America can’t afford to fully fund its own fire departments.
– Is this what Peace looks like?
America, the Empire of Lies.
So, yes, I am completely shocked, shocked I say, to find that an American is “Shockingly far from reality”
Shock and Amazement comes from meeting an American who is even vaguely aware of reality.
I love your last sentence, it is truly brilliant. And your entire comment is excellent!
That Tony Blinken has the same job as Russia’s S. Lavrov, China’s Wang Yi, and India’s S. Jaishankar tells us a lot about our world. These three others are serious men, masters of their craft, with decades of experience in foreign policy before they became foreign ministers. Crucially, these men are steeped utterly in their craft and would have been very influential members of each nation’s foreign ministry no matter who the national leader was.
Our Tony? While he also has a long list of foreign policy roles to his resume, most of these are advisory roles to political leads, working for senators, vice presidents, and presidents … it is so much more personal and political and so much less institutional than the other three.
Thus, the comment that he doesn’t do politics, he does policy is such a funny one: Blinken hasn’t done anything but pure politics for a long long time.
May Blinken be forgotten in the blink of an eye!
Who? There, I’ve forgotten him already.
“Our values…” “We’re much better off…” Um, yeah, Antony, about that “we.” Reminds me of a joke that circulated in the ’60s.
|[For you outside the U.S. or too young to remember, this is in reference to a former radio program becoming popular on TV in the 1950s. The main character is a masked good guy former Texas ranger. His faithful companion is Native. Good and bad guys are clearly delineated.]|
The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by what appear to be hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger says: “We have to fight them, Tonto!” To which Tonto replies: “What’s this ‘WE,’ white man?!”
It has become common place there are too many officials in high office who should not be there. Politics is a catch basin for the good, the bad, and the mentally unfit. There has to be psychological screening for people going into high office and there are psychologists already suggesting this necessity.
Why can’t we see the likes of Jeffrey Sachs, Michael Hudson, Lawrence Wilkerson, or Colonel Douglas Macgregor et al in government.
We are in a age where bad leadership becomes sociocide.
“When it comes to making sure that Oct. 7 can’t happen again,” Blinken said, “I think we’re in a good place.” …
When I read this, it took me back to the awful and terrorizing memories of GWB when he talked about 9/11 men starting his disastrous preemptive wars based on lies .
Making sure the oppressed and down-trodden can never, ever rise up to challenge their masters.
That is not a lie. That is the firm belief of the American elites. That is the firm belief of what they teach at places like Georgetown U. This is what America has been built upon, what America firmly believes in, ever since Haymarket Square, as reinforced by Kent State.
However, this is not the American Dream. The big lie is when the elites tell you what to dream.
Marvellous dissection of a vile character
Patrick Lawrence on excellent form, as usual. He is correct about Blinken in all aspects here. How the likes of a Blinken come into powerful positions remains a mystery to my rational brain. But, of course, the system is corrupt and the most slavish power-hungry second-rate thinkers manage to insert themselves. It was made a lot easier for Blinken due to the fact that Joe Biden has dementia and cannot find his own ass with both hands.
Ah, the latest Democrat deception. Blame it all on old Joe. He was in charge. Never mind that the old man could not decide which exit to use from an empty stage. Never mind that the old man frequently decided to shake hands with imaginary people. Blame it all on Joe Biden. Its all his fault. Old Joe was The Decider. See, the next D candidate will fix everything. We promise!
What has been of course very, very obvious is that from Dubya to the Obomber to Trump to Old Biden and back to Old Trump is that the elections only select figure-heads. None of these people are really in charge of anything.
The main difference in this now thankfully almost past administration is that the Mega-Donors who run things appeared to be giving orders directly to SOS Blinken and SOD Austin (and SOT Yellen) while bypassing the figurehead.
It need not be a mystery to your rational brain. Blinken is straight out of the Jewish mob — his stepfather was Robert Maxwell’s lawyer — and the Jewish mob is fully supportive of Israel. Israel runs the US government, Blinken had “good” qualifications, so he was put into office to fulfill his duties as an overseer of genocide and a traitor to the US. Only when the American people get sick of being ruled by treasonous warlords will we see a change. (I’m reading The Power Elite and I love that Mills refers to the military as warlords, about time — the 1950s! — that someone called them what they are.)
When Blinken says the US has “stayed out of wars,” he means there are not US soldiers being killed abroad. This minimizes domestic opposition – probably the only “useful” lesson the US rulers (mostly) learned from the Vietnam debacle.
And from Germany from approximately 1935-1942.
Chancellor Hitler kept the German people isolated from war during this time. The wars were not “secret”. Herr Goebbels trumpeted the might victories as the Chancellor occupied the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and fought in Spain before moving on to Poland and France. But, there was no draft, there were no shortages, no rationing. In fact, just the opposite, as the armies conquered the fields of Poland and the vineyards of France, the goods flowed back to the happy German people to enjoy. The hardships were in the past, from the Depression and the Wiemar democracy, but the new Reich was successful and happy.
It achieved the combination of “war” to both foreign and domestic advantage, while making sure the people did not suffer hardships from wars. Up until 1943 at least. After the victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad, the news from the fronts turned bad, and the German economy had to be completely committed to war and the military in an effort to stop the reverses.
BTW, America now appears to be at the point of needing to fully militarize its economy to deal with the string of reverses around the world. Up till now they’ve tried to produce at least enough butter to keep the people happy with the giant gun budgets. But now, leaders across ‘The West’ are telling people that its time to tighten their belts and sacrifice for the good of the Reich because of the patriotic needs of the war.
I think we were destined to end up with leadership like Blinken. This country was founded on genocide and slavery. A fact that is still ignored and or justified by the ruling aristocracy and its puppets in Washington. The only way to continue to attempt to carry the colonial project forward is to hire zombies like Blinken who is vacuous enough to believe his own bullshit. And of course the propaganda arm of said aristocracy continues to attempt an air of normalcy as the absurdity is thick enough to cut with a knife. Their problem is, hardly anyone else believes a word of it anymore.
Bingo!
Frigging lying hypocrite! How can you live with yourself.
Sociopaths and psychopaths have no trouble living with themselves because they are empty shells of facsimile human beings. Every once in a while I’m fortunate enough to run into an online discussion about whether people are actually human when they lack empathy, decency, ethics, etc. I believe it takes a lot of work to become human in an anti-human society, to reject our society’s junk values, and it’s work that very few people want to engage in.
Thank you Patrick Lawrence for your outstanding writings…..who is listening….hope and pray that some are….I for one in California am so grateful to you, but who among my friends will be open to reading your piece? “Hope springs eternal” Shelley. May your works be blest.
I am listening. I find Patrick to be astute and correct. I share his articles as widely as I can.