The Hollow Empire 
The System Against Syria . . . & Russia

2,046 words

In the wake of the Boston bombing, there was some hope among the dwindling number of true believing conservatives that the long awaited Grand Alliance Against Jihad would finally come to fruition.

The news that Russian intelligence had warned the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and subsequent raids on Muslim “extremists” within Russia prompted a flurry of activity on conservative websites. The emerging motif within the American Right is that Vladimir Putin may be a sinister tyrant and anti-American (and a Communist from the KGB!), but he’s at least a serious and competent national leader who recognizes the threat of Islamic terrorism. The reaction at the grassroots forum FreeRepublic to the news that Secretary of State John Kerry was kept waiting in Moscow was laughter, rather than patriotic fury. As President Putin patiently lectures Barack Obama to the delight of conservative chatterers, at least some of the hoi polloi of the American Right are dreaming about the Red Army and the 101st Airborne joining forces to romp through Grozny.

Keep dreaming.

The result of the Boston bombing will not be a Russian-American rapprochement. Instead, it will lead to an acceleration of The System’s efforts to encircle Russia, especially by increasing aid to “rebels” opposed to Russian ally and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

More importantly, it is the foreign policy experts of Conservatism Inc. that are leading the way. Senator John McCain, taking a break from his work pushing a nation-breaking amnesty as part of the “Gang of Eight,” is calling for “game-changing” aid to the rebels in Syria. Senator Lindsey Graham is going further, calling for ground troops to secure supposed chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, among the conservative press, the talking heads are sensing an opportunity to attack President Barack Obama for being “weak.” Charles Krauthammer repeatedly mocks Obama’s impotence in the face of Syria crossing his “red line” by using weapons of mass destruction. National Review has called for military aid to the rebels, but don’t worry, only the “secular,” non-militant ones. And of course, the Weekly Standard moans that Obama has failed to “topple an Iranian ally,” but rejoices that our “strategic ally” Israel has begun bombing the country. If Conservatism Inc. has a core message, it’s that President Obama is not “strong” enough.

What makes it almost funny is that it’s Bashar al-Assad who explicitly laid out what is likely to happen. Assad warned that the West paid heavily for supporting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and it is now supporting it in Syria. The cost will come in the “heart of Europe and the United States.” This is precisely what happened in Boston, when years of extensive American support for Muslim rebels in Chechnya evidently did nothing to endear Chechnyan immigrants to the American way of life, any more than tens of thousands of dollars in welfare.

The truth is that whatever one says about Bashar al-Assad, the opposition at this point in time is precisely who he said it was at the beginning – Muslim extremists allied with Al Qaeda, openly hostile to the West. Furthermore, Assad’s stubborn hold on power is fueled by his stalwart defense of minority communities within Syria, especially Christians. Finally, while the best the United States can say is that it has “varying degrees of confidence” that Assad used chemical weapons, the United Nations is hearing testimony that it was the rebels who used sarin gas on civilians. Not surprisingly, it’s also the rebels who have heroically taken UN peacekeepers hostage, to the utter indifference of those who usually care about such things.

American hawks, led by the supposedly anti-jihadist conservatives, seem blithely unconcerned about all of this. Of course, we just saw this movie in Libya. The glorious Libyan revolution led to the outright murder of an American ambassador and other American officials. Only Congressional Republicans seem to care, and are widely mocked by the media for doing so. Muammar al-Gaddafi of course, was a largely secular dictator who had openly declared his allegiance with the United States during the War on Terrorism. This didn’t stop America from helping his enemies butcher him and anally rape his corpse with a knife. Today, Islamic radicals are far more powerful in Libya than they were before Gaddafi’s fall. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the “French” Jew who helped lead the effort to overthrow the government, is today banned from the country because he is a Jew.

It’s not about terrorism, or democracy, or even Israel. American foreign policy is already post-American, designed to break down any centers that show signs of independence from the international financial system of Wall Street and London. It is no coincidence that Gaddafi suddenly fell from favor when he began to move away from trading oil in dollars. Syria also represents a territory that still has a degree of real independence from the global banking system. It is for that reason it must be broken. Geopolitically, Russia is the final target, as its large energy reserves and nationally conscious ruling class prevent it from being simply absorbed into the system of financial control that rules the West.

But what do American neoconservatives, the true believers of Empire, think about all this? On the surface, Barack Obama has actually strengthened the “jihad,” presiding over the fall of largely secular governments in states like Egypt, welcoming the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and actively continuing American military aid. Sure enough, accusations that Obama is naive at best and malevolent at worst are a largely consistent feature of the American Right’s take on his foreign policy. However, this paranoia about a Muslim Brotherhood caliphate supposedly uniting the Middle East misses the reality that these states are actually far weaker, and less independent, than they were previously.

A leader like Assad or Saddam Hussein is able to use his personality and ideology to make his regime the focus of loyalty among the population. In Egypt, while the Muslim Brotherhood has achieved political power, it has having a hard time consolidating its rule. While Iran represents a unity of political, religious, and economic sovereignty under an ideologically oriented and permanent regime, Egypt is still up for grabs. Under the “open society,” the controlled media, civil society groups under the control of George Soros or the U.S. State Department, and an army of international activists are free to manipulate the system from the top down. Even if there are short term gains for so called “radical” Islam, the growth of sharia law in Egypt does not threaten the power of international finance, any more than the growth of sharia law in neighborhoods of Copenhagen or Denmark. What does threaten international finance is a nationally (or worse, ethnically) conscious people, united under nationally conscious leadership that is willing and able to wield state power.

On a global scale, Russia is leading this resistance. Putin’s decision to ban the “pro-democracy” groups and foreign activists responsible for the “color coded” revolutions in Eastern Europe marked his transition to an anti-American “bad guy” in the eyes of the media. Whatever his (many) failings, Putin insists on his idea of “sovereign democracy” and the survival of Russia as a self-conscious entity. This is echoed in Assad’s pronouncement that he has no alternative but victory, as if he loses, “Syria is finished” in the same way that Iraq today is simply a geographic expression. Talk of Islamization, terrorism, or who is “pro-Western” or “anti-Western” conceals the real agenda. In the world of the future, peoples are to have no collective existence, aside from a token form allowed to non-whites who are incapable of maintaining any real independence.

While it’s comforting to believe that the American Empire is on its last legs, there’s little to suggest that the geopolitical position of the United States is actually growing weaker. Serbia has long since fallen, stripped of Kosovo, and voted into the anti-European Union after an international propaganda campaign. Iraq has fallen. Syria is on the brink. Despite the drones patrolling entire regions of the world, the American military is actually remarkably restrained considering the country’s actual potential. The country’s current military expenditures of about 4.5 percent of GDP is well below the 45 year average. If pressed, the United States could easily expand its military.

Patriotic American conservatives are the essential bulwark to this system. They fight the wars, as the combat arms and Special Forces are still overwhelmingly white. They provide the intellectual justification for interventions around the world. They salute the flag and promote the idea of the military as an honorable profession. Nonetheless, what is driving American foreign policy is something beyond imperialism, capitalism, or even the frenzy for white dispossession. We are moving towards an end game that is openly discussed and openly defended. That end game is precisely what was defined in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, the “Open Society,” rule by finance and media, worldwide, forever.

Such an agenda has nothing to do with any recognizable form of American patriotism, but this does not stop American conservatives from seeking to marshal what is left of the traditional American nation for one final democratic crusade. As Mitt Romney maintained, Russia is our “number one geopolitical foe.” Perhaps the most important reason that American conservatives must never be allowed to regain power is that they truly believe their own propaganda when it comes to foreign policy. After all, the only things the American conservative movement has to show for its unlimited control of the American government in the early 21st century are upper class tax cuts, and the Iraq War.

Where does leave the North American New Right? The system is anti-White, but it is more than that. As Noam Chomsky said,

Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous. Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist — just because its anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic — there’s no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangable cogs who will purchase all the junk that’s produced — that’s their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevent, and usually a nuisance. (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky [New York: The New Press, 2002], pp. 88–89)

The critical divide between the System and those forces against it is the question of sovereignty. The System seems to break apart any collective identity or defense by peoples against the global power structure of finance and media. America is the iron fist that facilitates this transition, enabled by the useful idiots of the American Right. Israel, as the nationalist state of the “Chosen” is the one permitted exception, but even their ethnostate may be caught in the larger pattern and break down in the long term. In the end, Muslim or Christian, white or black, you will be assimilated.

Russia is not some lost ideal for the North American New Right, Putin is not some nationalist paragon, and Russian exports like the Fourth Political Theory are not some glorious path to victory for us. Nonetheless, the only geopolitical imperative that matters today is the ability of states to secure an independent existence from this system. Without this potential, even talking about ethnostates and White Republics misses the point. For that reason, states as diverse as Chávez’s Venezuela, Iran, and above all Syria deserve our attention. Breaking patriotic American conservatives away from their minders at Conservatism Inc. is a critical strategic objective. The Boston bombing is an opening.

Syria is not just fighting against Al Qaeda and hypocritical Zionism in defense of Christian minorities. It’s fighting in defense of the idea that peoples – any peoples at all – have the right to exist. White American conservatives have to decide if they would rather be the vanguard of the Hollow Empire – or a people in their own right.