Edward Curtin (Behind the Curtain)
BRIAN BERLETIC
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Trump’s Contronymal “Peace” with Russia
“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
With all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of U.S.-Russia bilateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014. For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.
They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China sequentially, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.
Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics. Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.
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The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs, are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party. The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as chairman between 1970-1985.
“Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.
Donald Trump is a headline grabber who ultimately follows orders. He is not, as claimed, an outlier. Unusual he may be – bizarre in many ways – but he has his supporters within the dueling factions of the ruling elites. Nothing could clarify this more than the events of the past weeks, from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to his meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenski, his fellow entertainer, and his European entourage of jugglers and clowns. They didn’t act like people, and they didn’t act like actors.
“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”
Such is what I see when I read today’s press about Trump, the peacemaker. Having been around a few years, his actions strike no shock of the new in me, but rather bring to mind a walk down a city street where old ghosts meet to whisper a description I once read of most corporate mainstream journalists – “No ideas and the ability to express them.” Or to put it another way – only ideas they have been fed and the ability to regurgitate them. So Trump is either described as a traitor who has been manipulated by Putin or a man genuinely seeking the end of America’s efforts to surround and crush Russia.
Neither is true. We are captives in a contronymal game (a contronym being a word having contradictory meanings, such as “refrain”: to desist from doing something or to repeat).
Someone is playing someone. Who is playing whom and why I will leave as a question for readers’ research. See, for example, the work of another key think tank – the Rand Corporation’s 2019 study, “Extending Russia,” – that cooly sets out various options for the U.S. to use in undermining Russia as if it were suggesting possible menu items at a restaurant. Without a knowledge of history, Donald Trump appears to be a radical departure from past American presidents. That he opened a dialogue when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska seems significant. It is true that talking is better than walking away, but only when the intentions that underlie it are honorable, and in this case, I find that doubtful.
Let me use an analogy that may at first seem “by the way” and therefore not apt. I think it is. When it came to the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA and its media mouthpieces weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” to besmirch the names of those who questioned the Warren Commission Report. The corporate mainstream media (MSM) have echoed this ever since and thus the term came to be one applied to dissenters of all sorts, even those who believe the most outlandish things, such as Elvis didn’t die but was taken up by aliens where he now commands a spaceship called Suspicious Minds, named for one of his hit songs.
Conspiracists were those who had these insane thoughts that there were elements within the government, notably within the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, who would assassinate their own leaders and those devoted to peace. Over the years this term came to be mixed with that of “the deep state,” shadow government, rogue network, etc. The “official” position was that such conspiratorial thinking was undermining the official good government and was the work of lunatics; it assumed that the government didn’t conspire to commit crimes, only lone nuts did, and then crazier nuts tried to pin it on elements within the government such as the CIA. These people were said to be paranoid.
But over the decades scholars have clearly shown that many of the claims of the “conspiracy theorists” were correct despite the best efforts of MICIMATT to create fantastically absurd “conspiracy” stories that they have used to ridicule serious thinkers and researchers. This mode of attack was weakening and along popped Donald Trump “straight” out of the TV screen. A larger than life big mouth who appealed to voters who felt that they were being screwed by the elite elites, which they were and are (Trump, after all, is a super-rich New York City real estate tycoon that no one except the most astute propagandist would choose to run for the presidency). Trump promised he would get to the bottom of many of the “conspiracy theories” – such as the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the events of September 11, 2001, etc. – but he never will. He was going to expose the crooks, clean out the swamp, and make government as pellucid as a pristine mountain stream. Like all the charlatan presidents, he campaigned as a peacemaker and then waged war directly or through barely concealed proxies (war being the lifeblood of the U.S. economy) – Ukraine, Israel, Syrian “rebels” (i.e. terrorists), etc. The charade of his “peacemaking,” although weakening, still casts a spell over many people who fail to understand who formulates American foreign policy strategy.
If there is a so-called deep state responsible for the aforementioned assassinations, etc. and it controls U.S. presidents, then it controls Donald Trump. If Trump is truly trying to end the U.S. proxy war via Ukraine against Russia and establish good relations with its long-term arch-enemy, either the “deep state” has decided this is the best long-term strategy to try to maintain world dominance and it has tricks up its sleeve to attempt to do so, or else it will prevent Trump from carrying out his ostensible intent.
However, if there is no hidden “deep state,” just the official U.S. public state whose policies are largely determined in the dens of the aforementioned think tanks whose works are openly available, a government that does what it wants under various cover stories – two most significant ones being “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” – then Trump may be its most fantastic contronymal creation, the epitome in his person of what Orwell meant by Doublethink:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
It is important to remember how all the rhetoric surrounding the term “deep state” has been so craftily used and mixed with that of “conspiracy theory” that it is worth considering it part of a very sophisticated propaganda campaign to scramble minds.
Few would dispute the fact that there is a ruling class in the United States and that its interests are not those of ordinary Americans. This is so obvious I will elide further comments about it. Everyone knows how wealth controls the electoral system; that it has corrupted it beyond repair.
Logic suggests that if a “deep state” is posited opposed to the official “open” government, and if it can be eliminated by a “good” politician, then the good guys will be back in charge and a return to the status quo effected.
So we must ask the question: What is the opposite of a contronym?
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
2 comments
Foreign politics are determined by internal politics, which are provincial and ignorant of world politics. It is the reason for the total chaos we encounter today. How come that lucidity is not one of the strengths of (political) writings? Probably bad schooling, teaching kids technical knowledge but not how to think.
Sorry. Disagree. Foreign policies (at least in the West) are determined rigidly by myopic and largely delusional oligarchic class interests and proclivities. Study the dynamic between billionaire cliques (esp. in the US), and the think tanks they fund, and the policies that emerge from that accursed union. Policies which later the whore politicos and media sell to the largely benighted public.