In the agitated August of 1968, the myopic Soviet Union rolled its drab tank platoons into Czechoslovakia, crushing a spontaneous outbreak of free speech and self-determination known as the Prague Spring. Far away, perhaps cloistered in some poet’s atelier, W.H. Auden scripted his impressions from a distance:
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.— “August 1968”
Auden’s swift and masterful portrait of the autocratic state imagined the Soviet state as Czech citizens surely saw it, though not as inhabitants of the Kremlin saw the monolith whose gears they so crudely engineered. Today the Ogre has relocated, no longer a habitué of Moscow and its onion-shaped domes, but of Washington and its own drab neoclassical domes and pedestals. It peers out of its labyrinth not at the Moskva River but the Potomac.
Propaganda as Projection
Today, U.S. foreign policy is the Ogre, a narcissistic psychopath for whom the mainstream media (MSM) is the mirror it glances in every morning to confirm its noble visage. Normally, the image reflected back to the onlooker confirms its identity: a judicious paternal chaperon of the new world order, guided in most cases by noblesse oblige, in rare instances by humanitarian concern, a felt responsibility to protect, and–it goes…