If there is any doubt in your mind that War Fever has infected the same ‘minds/hearts’ that sold the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Here is the evidence.
Martin Wolff in the Financial Times under the title ‘Help Ukraine seize this chance’, with the subtitle of ‘A small price for the chance of securing a stable democracy on the continent’s eastern flank’. Needless to say Mr. Wolff’s polemic is larded with the cliches of the New Cold War i.e.Putin taking the lead as political monster in chief :
I can’t quote directly from the text but Mr. Wolff acquits himself as a trusted spokesman for Western Values i.e. perpetual war in search of an elusive peace. The argument Mr. Wolff makes is economically based, complemented by winning graphics, no surprise here, but the IMF bailout, and as usual, in the face of failed Neo-Liberalism the prescription is more Neo-Liberalism. (The key word here is always ‘reform.’) See Philip Mirowski’s book ‘Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste’ for a telling description of this phenomenon:
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
There is so much more to be said about Mr. Wolff’s unseemly war advocacy! Yet he arrives at his political destination with a certain aplomb: he manages to provide a rational economic gloss to his advocacy.
From The Economist, the F.T.’s sister publication, of the February 14, 2015 edition is the print magazine’s lead story, complete with a melodramatic, menacing picture of Putin as puppet master, on a black background, called ‘Putin’s war on the West’. The road to war is paved with cheap visual melodrama! But please don’t underestimate the power of sophisticated propaganda, that uses an hysteria mongering vocabulary allied to an appealing historically charged rhetoric. And also notice the sub-heading ‘What is to be done’ a reference/quotation from both Chernyshevsky and Lenin, a bit of Oxbridge flat footed irony?
Again , there is so much more to be said about this essay.
HE IS ridiculed for his mendacity and ostracised by his peers. He presides over a free-falling currency and a rapidly shrinking economy. International sanctions stop his kleptocratic friends from holidaying in their ill-gotten Mediterranean villas. Judged against the objectives Vladimir Putin purported to set on inheriting Russia’s presidency 15 years ago—prosperity, the rule of law, westward integration—regarding him as a success might seem bleakly comical.
But those are no longer his goals, if they ever really were. Look at the world from his perspective, and Mr Putin is winning. For all his enemies’ machinations, he remains the Kremlin’s undisputed master. He has a throttlehold on Ukraine, a grip this week’s brittle agreement in Minsk has not eased. Domesticating Ukraine through his routine tactics of threats and bribery was his first preference, but the invasion has had side benefits. It has demonstrated the costs of insubordination to Russians; and, since he thinks Ukraine’s government is merely a puppet of the West (the supposed will of its people being, to his ultracynical mind, merely a cover for Western intrigues), the conflict has usefully shown who is boss in Russia’s backyard. Best of all, it has sown discord among Mr Putin’s adversaries: among Europeans, and between them and America.
An editorial from February 12, 2015 edition of the Financial Times titled ‘Tactical pause in Putin’s assault on Ukraine’ which tells the whole propaganda story in miniature:
Political Skeptic
StephenKMackSD's Blog 