{"id":272274,"date":"2016-10-11T05:54:42","date_gmt":"2016-10-11T05:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=272274"},"modified":"2016-10-18T15:17:24","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T15:17:24","slug":"trump-hillary-tragedy-great-american-tv-soap-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/trump-hillary-tragedy-great-american-tv-soap-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and Hillary: The Tragedy of the Great American TV Soap Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colin Todhunter<\/em><\/p>\n

(RINF<\/a>) – For many onlookers who reside outside the US, the run-up to that country\u2019s presidential election appears to be some kind of made-for-TV soap opera. Amid\u00a0evidence of rigging<\/a>, it seems Bernie Sanders was always destined not to win the Democratic Party nomination. It seemed a sure-fire bet that Clinton would.<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton,\u00a0a war monger<\/a>\u00a0who supported the attack on Libya and the murder of Muammar Gaddafi. Clinton who presses for more attacks on Syria and who sanctions the destabilisation of that sovereign state via the placement of US military personnel there along with the active backing of terror groups. Clinton, the candidate who is on record as stating she would go to war with Iran and whose dodgy emails and\u00a0Clinton Foundation dealings<\/a>\u00a0help demonstrate the corruption at the heart of US politics.<\/p>\n

And this doesn\u2019t even account for Trump, someone seemingly so lacking in knowledge of world affairs that much of the rest of the world can only say with more than a hint of trepidation, \u201cOnly in America!\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump was always destined to be little more than the fall guy to get Clinton elected. While Trump has his loyal followers, the assumption was that the floating voter would never support such a figure and that Clinton would be a relatively safer bet. As Ron Horn on his\u00a0Surviving Capitalism website argues<\/a>, Clinton was always the US deep state’s choice and she was always going to win \u2013 by hook or by crook.<\/p>\n

So what will the US voter give to the rest of the world by voting in a handmaiden of empire? What will we, the global public, have to thank the US voter for? A voter spoonfed and indoctrinated with a diet of CNN\/Fox fear-based propaganda about \u2018Russian aggression\u2019 and Islamic terror as well as the US\u2019s role in exporting \u2018freedom and democracy\u2019 to the smoking ruins it helped create in Syria, Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan?<\/p>\n

What we will get is what we already have: a trajectory towards a nuclear precipice and, along the way (maybe a very short way), a continuation of the steely grip of freedom around the necks of weaker states who refuse to bow to US hegemony.<\/p>\n

Aside from the unfolding situation in Syria, the US and its client states\u00a0are to all intents and purposes already at war with Russia. Washington initiated economic sanctions against Russia, has attacked its currency and has manipulated oil prices to try and devastate the Russian economy. It was behind the coup in Ukraine and is now escalating tensions by placing troops and missiles in Europe.<\/p>\n

The ultimate aim is to de-link\u00a0Europe\u2019s economy from\u00a0Russia and weaken Russia\u2019s energy dependent economy. The ultimate aim is to also ensure Europe remains subservient to\u00a0Washington, not least via the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and in the long term via US gas and Middle East oil (sold in dollars, thereby boosting the strength of the currency upon which US global hegemony rests).<\/p>\n

As with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and now Syria, or the much less publicised\u00a0death and plunder in the Democratic Republic of Congo which Washington and London fuels for its corporations<\/a>, US foreign policy leaves a trail of death and devastation in its wake.<\/p>\n

By the 1980s, Washington\u2019s wars, death squads and covert operations were responsible for\u00a0six million deaths<\/a>\u00a0in the \u2018developing\u2019 world. An updated figure suggests that figure is closer to\u00a0ten million<\/a>.\u00a0The US is effectively a\u00a0‘destroyer of nations<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n

The game plan is to destroy Russia as a functioning state or to permanently weaken it so it submits to US hegemony.\u00a0Washington\u00a0believes it can actually win a nuclear conflict with\u00a0Russia. It no longer regards nuclear weapons as a last resort but part of a\u00a0conventional theatre of war\u00a0<\/a>and is willing to use them for pre-emptive strikes.<\/p>\n

The situation in Syria is most worrying of all. Another theatre of conflict instigated by the US that now sees it and Russia facing each other directly, with\u00a0Moscow warning the US about the consequences of its aggression<\/a>: possible nuclear war.<\/p>\n

Washington presses ahead regardless. Russia and China\u00a0undermine dollar hegemony<\/a>\u00a0by trading oil and gas and goods in roubles and other currencies. And history shows that whenever a country threatens the dollar, the\u00a0US\u00a0does not idly stand by.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, most US voters believe the lies being fed to them: a Pavlov\u2019s dog public and media, which respond on cue to the moralistic bleating of politicians who rely on the public\u2019s ignorance to facilitate war and conflict.\u00a0A public\u00a0that is encouraged to regard what is happening in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Libya, etc, (that is if they are encouraged to think about such things at all) as a disconnected array of events in need of Western intervention based on bogus notions of \u2018humanitarianism\u2019 or a \u2018war on terror\u2019, rather than the planned machinations of empire.<\/p>\n

And what of Europe? Former US government official Paul Craig Roberts says a senior US government official told him in the 1970s, when referring to top European leaders, \u201cwe own them, they belong to us<\/a>.\u201d This has always been the US plan for Europe since 1945. And that ownership is clear to see as Europe\u2019s politicians\u00a0lie to their public<\/a>\u00a0by parroting official Pentagon nonsense about Russia and Syria and drag Europe into conflicts not of its choosing.<\/p>\n

Could it be that the US\u2019s first woman president will sleepwalk the world towards humanity\u2019s final war (if it doesn’t reach that point prior to her becoming president)?<\/p>\n

Could it be that the hawks in Washington would rather gamble on taking Russia (and China) out while risking all life on the planet?<\/p>\n

After all, why would they be any different from their predecessors who appeared to\u00a0place no value on the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary people who lived in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe<\/a>?\u00a0They were prepared to annihilate vast swaths of humanity with nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

That mindset persists among the modern-day guardians of empire who continue to display no regard for human life whatsoever. We can hope that the US public finally wake up to the situation. But what chance of that? A public fed a prime-time TV soap opera script based on personality politics revolving around Trump’s dodgy past or Clinton’s health or integrity, while remaining blissfully ignorant of the real possibility of nuclear war breaking out in Syria.<\/p>\n

We can of course hope that diplomacy and sanity prevails.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the more likely option at this moment is that, in Syria, Russia offers a sufficient enough deterrent to force the Pentagon and the White House to reconsider the course it is on.<\/p>\n

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer\u00a0https:\/\/twitter.com\/colin_todhunter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Todhunter (RINF) – For many onlookers who reside outside the US, the run-up to that country\u2019s presidential election appears to be some kind of made-for-TV soap opera. Amid\u00a0evidence of rigging, it seems Bernie Sanders was always destined not to win the Democratic Party nomination. It seemed a sure-fire bet that Clinton would. Hillary Clinton,\u00a0a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1214,"featured_media":272275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,461],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-272274","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-editorials"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}