Eric Zuesse

The disenchanted Reagan Administration official and much-honored economist and political scientist, Paul Craig Roberts, headlined on April 27th, "Washington Plans to Nuke Russia and China” and stated an impressive case that this radical conclusion is realistic, no mere alarmism. Roberts even said in it that "Russia and China cannot simply sit there and await America’s preemptive nuclear strike,” which is an extremely bold and even courageous thing to assert in a country that the rest of the world labels as being overwhelmingly “the greatest threat to peace in the world today” (and this U.S.-government-sponsored global poll was taken only once, in 2013, and because of its finding was never repeated, nor was it mentioned in the government-controlled media).

Dr. Roberts employed his trademark unflinchingly unambiguous style to state that, “The US military/security complex has clearly prevailed over Trump’s intention to normalize relations between the US and Russia, and anti-Russian venom continues to pour out of NATO and Washington’s European vassal states. The majority of the American people seem to have accepted the propaganda that Russia is the number one threat to the United States. With propaganda controlling the explanation, Washington’s aggressive actions are explained as defense against a threat and not as a policy that will end life on earth.”

But how can this possibly be true, given that a war between the U.S. and Russia would ultimately release 15,000 nuclear warheads before the ‘winner’ would even be able to contemplate what he had ‘won’, and the ‘winner’ would almost certainly die from radiation sickness within, at most, a decade, if not from starvation or illnesses or injuries produced by the nuclear-destroyed planet, occurring within even less time than that? We’ll get to that question; he has an answer to it.

Roberts focused mainly upon summarizing today’s news and recent historical events, rather than on hypothesizing an explanation for them, but he did note that, “The neoconservative claim of American exceptionalism is the identical claim made for Germans by Hitler,” and he blamed “the insanity that is Washington” and basically argued that yesterday’s Nazis are today’s Americans: America is today’s champion of invasions. Hitler was arrogant and reckless; so is today’s U.S. regime. The facts support Roberts’s view that the analogy holds.

Whereas Hitler ceaselessly repeated his countrymen's “Deutschland über alles” (meaning that Germany was the world’s most important country), Obama repeated his countrymen’s calling America “the one indispensable nation," such as on 28 May 2014, when he told graduating cadets at West Point Military Academy:

From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations. America continues to attract striving immigrants. The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe. And when a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. (Applause.) So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.
But the world is changing with accelerating speed. This presents opportunity, but also new dangers. We know all too well, after 9/11, just how technology and globalization has put power once reserved for states in the hands of individuals, raising the capacity of terrorists to do harm. Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.

Not only does the U.S. aristocracy, which recent U.S. Presidents have actually been representing (no longer the public), view this country to be the only nation that’s “indispensable” (and all others thus as being “dispensable”), but America's soldiers, whom the American public fund through paying taxes, are being instructed by this agent for the U.S. aristocracy, to view themselves as being agents, themselves, for the global dominance of U.S. international corporations, over those headquartered in any economic upstart countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — the BRICS nations, which Obama was thereby casting as being not only an economic threat, but the enemy nations that these cadets are bound by their future career as U.S. military leaders to subdue or else to conquer.

What America’s aristocrats, the individuals who control the U.S.-headquartered international corporations, are more concerned about than anything else, is dominating the world. This motivation is consistent with the empirical findings in Social Psychology and Personality Psychology, that the richer a person is, the more psychopathic he/she tends to be. If you’re a billionaire, then getting tax-write-offs and university buildings named after you for ‘philanthropy’ will be fine, but your real obsession will be to win, to dominate everything — by hook or by crook, and no matter what, but this is for real, it is none of the mythology. It’s no different in today’s America than it was in Nazi Germany.

Roberts’s reference to “Washington’s European vassal states” is too narrow, however, because Japan, Australia, and many other nations outside of Europe, are likewise run by aristocracies that are vassals of the U.S. aristocracy. It’s an international gangland operation, and the local aristocracy has adjudged that its best chances for being with the winner will be for their country to buy U.S. weaponry and otherwise to be allied with the U.S. gang. But worldwide, there are fewer than 3,000 billionaires; so, any of them whose main concern isn’t merely to be, or to be with, ‘the winner’, could probably organize any other such dissenters to resist the present escalating trend toward nuclear annihilation — unless there are no such dissenters among them, such as currently seems to be the case. Any of them who controls a major news-medium could have an impact, if such a person is not first declared to have died from ‘an unfortunate accident’.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.