WILL THE WEST LEARN ITS LESSON THIS TIME?

Afghanistan is an enormous blow to western hard power. It has knocked western elites onto their heels and caused them to squeal in anguish. Already their false memes concerning democracy and human rights are being engaged to help mitigate the damage.

But the real destruction is to their power, prestige and influence in the region. They have all been delivered a punch to their communal solar plexus.

A return to full health looks a distant and remote prospect.

But will they learn their lesson this time? Is it even possible or permissible within the opaque, group-thought miasma of their institutions where only positive messages are allowed? The stiff upper lip of the British elite and the hyper-hubris of American exceptionalism create an atmosphere where negativity is denied and jingoism is all. They conceive themselves to be the world’s governors, the superior elite whose word should be law and all their crimes immune from prosecution. The western judges will NEVER find themselves guilty.

At the top of the political trees of both the U.S. and UK are those who feel themselves imbued with their holy god’s eternal light of infallibility. How can they conceive themselves to be fallible? Others are completely permeated by the kind of lingo and fable seen in the most banal and predictable of western movies where the good guys always win and the bad guys are suitably dealt with, usually via some form of violent death. The entire milieu of western elite insanity is completely permeated with such concepts, concepts that make owning up to a fuck up almost impossible.

Afghanistan will be put down to other factors that western elite screw-ups, overindulgence in false reports of progress and an overwhelming reliance on blowing things and people up. The innate violence of the western mind with all its arrogance, aggression and speedy use of brutality makes their talk of concern for human rights a stimulus for a serious bout of vomiting. How you can cause the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands, the destruction of many times more homes and the fracturing of an entire region of the world and then point at others as abusers of human rights is quite beyond me.

How can you re-evaluate your policies and activity if you consider you are perfectly motivated, perfectly informed and imbued with the infallible, god-given insight and all-embracing knowledge of what’s right and wrong… and you assert only you can judge yourselves? It’s impossible. The USA has refused to become subject to the rulings of the International Criminal Court and barely pays any attention to criticism from the UN except to condemn and veto it.

In this atmosphere of western arrogance and belief in its own exceptional superiority, what hope is there that western elites will learn their lesson this time? They have never learned any similar lessons of the past, such lessons that could have been learned from Vietnam for instance, or in the case of the British, from the Suez Crisis. What hope is there for a change of heart and direction now? The short answer is, of course, none.

The elites of the west have harnessed themselves firmly to the tool that has worked for them till now, the deceptive use of the buzz words and phrases ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ to give them the self-awarded “right” to break international law as they please by waging war of one kind or another on whoever they like. That they are guilty of the most egregious human rights abuses in human history, the genocide of North America’s native population, the enslavement of millions of Africans and in Britain’s case the exploitation of half the world by colonial domination is conveniently “forgotten” by them. They have created an image of purity and sanctity for themselves, a facade of semantic deceptions and phoney myths of supreme majesty, civilization and wisdom.

Self-analysis, confession of sins, any inclination or determination to do better, let alone admittance of any guilt and need of change will, as usual, simply be out of the question. A non-starter in each and every case whether things go to plan or not, a disaster, catastrophe or concatenation of tragedies and/or atrocities.

So… the answer to the question at the head of this piece, whether the West will learn its lesson this time, is quite obviously a resounding no.