By Paul Edwards

May 10, 2023: Information Clearing House -- Empires stand or fall by violence and deception.  They have no other effective tools.  Deception is employed to gull, con, and enhance the natural stupidity of men.  Much of the time this is a sufficient method of control, but not by itself.  Behind the Grand Sham, the infection of subjects with poisonous falsehood, there must be the certainty of lethal brutality for rebels.  Imperial America has managed its tools to great effect for generations.

Until recently…  For decades, by honing its hegemonic chops abroad, it enjoyed great advantages at home.  It was possible, by lynching black men, crushing Indians, and exerting dominion over women and their bodies, to show the mailed fist in action to the public while feeding them an all-fat-and-sugar propaganda diet that made them morally sick and mentally impotent.  Its long, brazen, triumphant violence abroad was the anthem to which the gelded, lobotomized citizenry danced its feeble-minded reel.
 

Some time ago the wheels of The Empire’s military juggernaut began to come off.  It staggered in Korea, got a good country ass-kicking in Vietnam, blundered along on hi-tech and inferior cognition, beating up tiny, nondescript islands until it hit a slew of stunning, ridiculous humiliations that jammed sand in its gears and exposed it as the overhyped, overpriced, inefficient and ineffectual can or worms it really was.  Its history in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, is an obscene tale of the FUBAR reminiscent of the sorry disintegration of Rome, and its ludicrous pratfalls had a deleterious effect on the droning Fairy Tale of Exceptionalism.

Military embarrassments put a terrible strain on propaganda.  It was impossible to craft PR triumphs out of ludicrous shamings that were the military equivalent of being pantsed in public.  The Empire’s answer to this was to brazen it out and—believing Americans even more brainless than they were trained to be— they ceased to apply their own smell test to the absurdities they fed them.  This dilution of believability of what they put out to homeopathic levels had the disturbing effect of undermining their credibility.  The drastic loss of status they had suffered in their imperialist flops were not offset by propaganda gains; they were as shamed in their domestic bullshit as they were militarily by lean, mean Mujahedeen, fanatic Takfiris, and cutthroat Jihadis.
 

There are many classic examples of the gross imbecility of The Empire’s messaging but a few will suffice.   One act of surpassing idiocy was Biden’s first promising to destroy Nord Stream 2 and then swearing he hadn’t done it; then the baldfaced hypocrisy of throwing a grand fete for “Press Freedom” while imprisoning and abusing the most courageous journalist in western history; then, our nebbish Secretary of State’s marshaling 50 establishment whores to deny—as a “Russian plot", yes?—that Hunter’s laptop was a manual of graft and porn while preventing its examination.
 

The other night someone shot a bottle rocket at the Kremlin that was instantly characterized as an attempted hit on Putin, for which our geniuses at once denied responsibility.  It’s hard to say which is more contemptible: firing that puny squib or denying it.
 

The upshot of the disasters in both the military and PR pillars of The Empire, is that this giant engine of murder and repression now teeters on the brink of meltdown and system failure.  One might be excused for thinking this was a time for retrenchment and repair, but no.  The Empire’s stance—which violates the First Rule of Holes—is to double down on everything that created its massive, unparalleled face-plant over the last several decades. 

Most obviously perilous is the fact that after having had its clock thoroughly cleaned in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its hired killers run out of Syria, where flimflam, phony Obama swore “Assad has to go”, and having swooned into laughable impotence in failing to dominate Iran, it has decided to bait and harass the two most powerful nations on earth, and to provoke them into open war. 
 

It is funding and arming the pathetically depleted Ukronazis to be fed into the Donbass meat grinder solely as its proxy to infuriate Russia.  Evidently insouciant about the mortal danger of this offensive madness, it has directed its debased press to win the war on paper, which our supine ersatz journalists are doing.  

Meanwhile, with this tentative invitation to WWIII ongoing, The Empire has concluded to assault China, the source of most of what its people use and consume, in the most crudely insulting, inflammatory terms.  China has done its best to deflect the base puerilities of our clumsy buffoons and desk-jockey military hacks, but their patience—an Oriental virtue—is not infinite.  The Empire tampers with the One China policy, fifty years old, at great peril.
 

The Empire sees itself ready for two major wars at once and, well, if they go nuclear, what the hell.  They feel bullish because they have old ICBMs from Cold War days that may still work, bombers made of 14k gold that don’t function, missile systems that reliably fail, nuclear subs that make fine marine coffins, and huge aircraft carriers that are the military version of pinatas.  All this, to oppose an array of the most sophisticated hypersonic weapons ever devised, against which there is no defense. 

It is increasingly difficult to contend that the United States is a sane or viable nation.  With a Congress of vacuous hillbillies that  does nothing for The People and shovels billions in corporate welfare to the War Machine, a court system loaded with twisted sluts for Big Money, and two of the most disgraced, degraded, baldly incompetent sockpuppets for war and privilege ever to run for President, the prospect of total breakdown begins to seem preferable to continuity of this obscene Theater of the Absurd. 
 

Americans are displaying, in their zany style, awareness of this: some by suicide, some pushing a false Christianity of hate, and others by shooting people at random.  Despair is the new hope.