I know it's Grayzone which has been cringe recently but this is Parenti's son and it's a very good read so.
Very interesting article. Especially from Christian Parenti. Quite a thought-provoking retrospective on the bull in the China shop that the Trump presidency was.
I do want to note my favorite bit from the article is
Trump treated powerful allies as poorly as he treated subcontractors during his real estate days. Recall the G-7 summit of 2018: Trump arrived late, left early, and refused to sign a joint communiqué reaffirming the G-7’s commitment to a “rules based international order.” When then-German Prime Minister Angela Merkel pressured him to sign, Trump took two Starburst candies from his pocket, tossed them across the conference table and sneered, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.”
Trump took two Starburst candies from his pocket, tossed them across the conference table and sneered, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.
:michael-laugh:
Two things:
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He just had Starbursts ready to go in his pocket
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I bet you the ones he gave weren't even any of the good flavors. They were 2 lemon ones for sure, while he kept the reds and oranges for himself
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Literally Maduro, thought. He even has a tiktok.
Some guy told him on a twitch stream or whatever: "Maduro, i left Venezuela a few years ago". Maduro's response: "So? Just come back"
Maduro pulls out and tosses an empanada that was tucked in his jacket.
then-German Prime Minister Angela Merkel
Merkel wasn't prime minister, she was chancellor.
The FBI and the CIA have illegally intervened in domestic politics, historically by targeting left-wing social movements. We know they infiltrated Trump’s 2016 campaign, then worked to paint him as a Russian puppet throughout his presidency. Are we to believe that the intelligence agencies would not and could not have intervened to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump? Or that they would not have attempted to entrap, then hound and severely punish the MAGA that that rioted for several hours at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021? Such a proposition strikes me as ridiculous. Yet, many of my left-wing friends refuse to explore the mounting evidence suggesting that such agencies moved against Trump and his base because they cannot see why the intelligence agencies might have pressing reasons to do so.
But look abroad. Trump threatened the entire system of US global hegemony. He threatened it for different reasons and in different ways than might grassroots, socialist, anti-imperialists, but he threatened US empire nonetheless.
He is positing here that Jan 6th was anti-Trump entrapment concocted by the fbi/cia. And given all the weird things we were talking about at the time, I think it's an interesting suggestion. Much of the rest of the article is a mountain of evidence to support the hypothesis that the feds would have a motive to do such a thing.
Egging on maga to do an intentionally bad colour revolution failure as a means of defeating a political threat? CIA doing the revolution psyops they do abroad but intentionally badly within their own country? I can see it.
You could probably say the same about the 2020 George Floyd events. I actually think about that a lot, why was Floyd the straw that broke the camel's back? Police have and continue to murder black people with virtual impunity. What was so significant about Floyd's murder? The conditions caused by COVID lockdowns created a unique situation for sure, but we saw stuff in 2020 that the US hadn't seen since the late 60s, when, apologies to George Floyd, multiple important black leaders were assassinated. I think it's definitely possible that the protests were escalated by the security state in an effort to damage Trump. Trump, being the absolute moron that he is, played right into their hands by escalating right back, but the spooks probably anticipated that. It is depressing to think about how powerful the US security state is. I suppose if there is one silver lining it's that something so globe spanning and insidious has to be a very complex system, and complex systems can be easier to disrupt.
In Portland if there was escalation, it was by the PPB, they were coordinating with SPD to fuck people up from day 1. You don't need the feds for that shit. Cops are dumb enough to do it on their own.
DHS was in Portland egging them on. There are tweets from Chad Wolf in Portland saying how they were going to restore law and order by any means necessary. I know you all hate the PPB, and I'm sure it is well-deserved, but DHS was in Portland ready to murder people and, from what I remember, it was Wheeler and the PPB pushing back against armed DHS agents coming in. I'm sure part of that was a pissing contest between agencies, but it was DHS that was really trying to escalate against the protestors.
Yeah, shit escalated after DHS came in, but it was not them those first few nights.
Besides, PPB has been ramping up since like 2016, beating up Sierra Club types un-provoked.
Covid was thr first time in a long while people could feel the material changes to their lives. It's hard to remember but it felt like anything was possible. We could just all agree to do things differently and do them. It was intoxicating. That is part of why they had to restore normalcy as soon as possible. So we didn't realize it is all just made up.
The 2020 BLM movement was almost certainly infested with feds at the national level. All the actual leaders of the OG BLM movement were assassinated after the 2014 Ferguson protests. When the Minneapolis protests started, it wasn't the local orgs that had actually organized the initial police protests that were chosen for TV and interviewed, it was members of a national organization that had nothing to do with those protests. The same thing went for the online discourse, the #BLM stuff felt extremely astroturfed at first until it caught on with the mainstream. Hard to tell with online stuff though, as it is usually incredibly reductive.
That is very interesting, honestly it makes you wonder, to what extent the national security state has to keep a lid on everything all at once, my only guess they arent nearly as competent as we would think, it really seems like the situation is just managed chaos in terms of the George flyod situation. Their are really hard questions to askon, how much longer this thing can work as it is right now trying to contain manage ukraine, but also over throw southamerican goverments, while managing a future upcoming, Taiwan China situation, I belive we are gonna see the limits of the national security state honestly. No king rules forever and no security state can forever repress its internal contradictions forever in a declining hegemonic position.
I've been on about this for a while, honestly. Basically the entire Proud Boys leadership were FBI informants.
It's win/win for thr cia. If the based Maga Chad's actually did anything on 1/6 it could only have ment more policing. Either due to new fascism or to protect order. The worse the cops do and the more chaos they cause the more their budgets increase. They have no incentive to be anything other than monsters
What's really weird about it is that I could believe it was something organic they could have latched onto, or was even whole-cloth made up by them, but in the end all the MAGA people are incoherent that there's almost nothing you could do to make them change their views because it's alternately an evil government plot/based patriots fighting the gov't when it suits them.
Trump is not against war, he literally tried to start two with Iran and Syria
This isn't hard
There's some truth to the article though. Trump's moves did hurt the American empire, even as he tried to double down on some imperial aspects. His brash "fuck you, pay me" ideas of diplomacy have the appearance of being pro-empire, but undermine the subtle systems that actually keep the world under American hegemony. Definitely not "anti-war" though.
I’ve heard parenti’s daughter in law really continued the Parenti legacy moreso than his son, and this article does reinforce that (full disclosure I didn’t read the article).
It doesn’t matter if a ruling class person has lumpen elements that make them funny, there is no version of “the US” that’s good or at all preferable to the complete dissolution of the US, and weird thought-exercises are never going to change that
I don’t understand the desire to build bridges with white supremacists, its completely unnecessary and in fact counterproductive
I don’t understand the desire to build bridges with white supremacists, its completely unnecessary and in fact counterproductive
I think it's fair enough to say that Trump was a threat to the security state. One, as matter of discourse he actually ran on scaling back war commitments, even if he was actually lying. Second, he let the mask fall off as he demanded tributes from allies and reduced the US presence in syria into the 'oil protection units'. And lastly, because he's a dumbass:
Unimpressed, Trump called his generals “dopes and babies” and “losers” who “don’t know how to win anymore.” As his anger rose, he demanded to know why the United States was not receiving free oil as tribute for the US military presence in the Middle East. “We spent $7 trillion; they’re ripping us off,” Trump bellowed. “Where is the fucking oil?”
There are points in the article that can almost be ready like Trump is a principled isolationist handicapped by media and the blob. But that's if you're a Trump worshipper already (which, this being the grayzone, yeah). All in all I think there is some truth in saying that Trump is too green a politician to properly convey the Republican desire to ally Russia, decommit form the Mid-east and attack China. Which means that he' s always stepping on a blobber's toes without proposing anything to focus them.
I’ve heard parenti’s daughter in law really continued the Parenti legacy moreso than his son, and this article does reinforce that
Didn’t she write an anti-vax article for the Grayzone?
I will just as a blanket recommendation throw out Yannick Giovanni Marshall
As much garbage as i'd expect from the brownzone.
Worse yet in the eyes of the national security state, Trump went after US operations in Germany and South Korea, threatening highly strategic lynchpins in the global system of US military power.
He moved those US troops in Germany to Poland, increasing pressure on Russia. He also never "threatened strategic lynchpins", the bases in Ramstein and Landstuhl are still fully operational, whether we're talking the logistics hubs for campaigns in the Greater Middle East, the relais stations for drone warfare or the biggest US military hospital in Europe.
He also made great strides towards normalizing relations with North Korea and producing a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula
... which then never happened.
In Libya, he declined to escalate and worked with Russia towards a peace settlement.
Last i checke,d Lybia is still a wartorn hellhole with slave markets and concentration camps, just as the EU wants it to be as part of their border protection efforts.
In Venezuela, he first allowed John Bolton and the CIA to attempt a color revolution-style coup fronted by pretty-boy Juan Guaidó. But when that effort faced resistance Trump grew bored
Oh wow, he grew bored. Venezuela is still being strangled by the US sanctions regime, tho.
But his attacks on American empire were not ideologically coherent. He hated NATO but he loved Israel. He increased pressure in Cuba, but did the opposite with North Korea. He increased the military budget even as he attempted to withdraw troops all over the planet. His reasoning, when given, was crassly transactional.
No shit, Sherlock. Almost as if "America First" isn't about how aggressively the US bullies the rest of the world, but how much it shows its ass in relation to its allies. It's the same as under Bush, and just as under Bush, the dick waving and flexing isn't enough to make America's allies even consider viable alternatives to living under US hegemony. They just make it less strenuous for the USA to keep up that hegemony, and as soon as there's a democrat multilateralist back in charge, all the NATO allies are happy and cheerful about the renewed trust in transatlanticism.
Also "loved Israel" is a massive understatement for the biggest zionist in the white house EVER.
Does this go on like this? I stopped reading after he admitted that Trump was shit on Iran, withdrew from the INF treaty with Russia etc. etc.
The entire case this is building seems to be either "well Russiagate!" or "look, he was really incompetent about his imperialism", both of which are liberal talking points that people on here regularly dunk on. Sorry, not gonna bother with this anymore.
The entire case this is building seems to be either “well Russiagate!” or “look, he was really incompetent about his imperialism”, both of which are liberal talking points that people on here regularly dunk on. Sorry, not gonna bother with this anymore.
No the case it builds of Trump being very bad for the american imperial project, either by literally acting in opposition to it at times or by being incompetent (both are true) is to argue that the CIA did Jan 6th as a means of damaging a threat to empire (Trump).
idk why Trump and the hogs would need CIA help to make themselves look bad with their lil beerhall putsch with selfie booths.
It’s a bummer Trump is a rightwing monster because if he just did fuck-all domestically in office then his foreign policy was actually decent.Unfortunately he wants to murder trans people and anyone who isn’t white. So that sucks.
Edit: i was horribly wrong about this. As always, death to amerika.
you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to US foreign policy
Trump's foreign policy involved a genocide against Yemen and a re-implementation of the Cuban embargo. Foreign deaths by drone strike increased too. He also assassinated an Iranian general on Iraqi soil and very nearly started a war with Iran over it.
his foreign policy was actually decent
Verbally maybe somewhat, but it was the same as ever otherwise. Increased murder of people in other countries.
He also ramped up sanctions in Iran and Cuba and doubled down on support of Israel's settlements. Dronings increased under him. He just did a slightly different imperialism, albeit one that undermined support with important US client states. He still did warfare, just under different pretexts.
I agree with all of that. Which is why we need a competent president to manage our empire :biden-harbinger:
Eh I wouldnt go there, he didn't start any wars, didn't stop any either, and ramped up drone strikes A LOT since Obama. I honestly think Biden's better. He might be giving weapons to Ukraine but he got the US out of Afghanistan, ended America's "combat mission" in Iraq, and reduced drone strike attacks
I'd disagree. They are equally shit in completely different ways. Neither has done nor did anything to get rid of AFRICOM, which is where the bulk of actual U.S. military actions are these days. Biden has ramped up rhetoric and focus on both China and Russia, which are lose-lose military situations for us even if we did bother to actually engage it. As such the nuclear clock has never been closer to midnight, which is dangerous as shit. However, Biden has also been talking about lessening sanctions on Venezuela, but also ramping up sanctions on Cuba. They're not going to bring back the Iran deal and NK is still going to continue to fester.
At best what Biden has done is remove us from completely failed military actions and refocused them in things that are actually escalating.
Yes and no. Biden was the guy in Ukraine for his vice presidency. He controlled the money pump. His election was definitely a signal that they'd get unlimited support. Likely there were diplomatic channels that put the message across.
Would the conflict have escalated under Trump 2020? Probably in some way. But Biden deliberately put his thumb on the scale.
People have been telling me this. More and more people say, they only reason we got any work done lately was out of spite for trump. It's really fantastic
