RT's "America's New Regime Change Formula"

When the ol' cloak and dagger seems a little passe and morbid and the world has caught on that certain "revolutions" might not be as genuine as advertised, be a little more explicit.  At least that is what the United States has seemingly learned from the Cold War.  Now that communism has failed and democracy is in (as if they were mutually exclusive) supporting insurrection as long as you're up front about it seems to be politically speaking - kosher.  The old tricks utilized by clandestine operations in the foreign intelligence field are now being overlaid in a hip and seemingly innocuous bureaucracy funded by US taxpayers, but the results are the same as before violence, delegitimization, waste, and those pesky unconstitutional (or perhaps more aptly put for those neo-cons out there extraconstitutional) issues keep popping up.



To read the rest of Russia Today's article.

Lion Of Liberty Says...

"It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones." – Calvin Coolidge

VIDEO: The Ultimate Read Pill is Truly Inspirational

VIDEO: INSPIRATIONAL - This is the video which supplied the fuel for my interest in liberty, which woke me up to the systems which silently pervade our society and deliberately reduce our freedom of mind, body, and soul. Take the red pill and open your mind!

End of History for the Middle East?

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama wrote an article called "The End of History?" in which he claimed the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the ultimate victory of western liberalism over its fascist, socialist, and communist alternatives.  Moving forward, Fukuyama predicted the world would no longer suffer from large-scale confrontations between super power states where the threat of weapons of mass destruction, legions of warriors, and iron horses held the masses in the grip of terror.  

Fukuyama subscribed to a Hegelian Dialectic (a linear view of human political progress), which at its apex held liberalism as the lone victor in a world of peace and prosperity.  The proceeding years in this new ideological environment according to Fukuyama’s dialectic would witness an inevitable expansion of liberalism to those corners of the globe, which it had yet to take root.  The non-liberal world, those he deemed still "living in history", would experience those final acts (religious, nationalistic, ethnic, and feast-famine economic struggles) which had already been played out and resolved themselves in the liberal or "post-historical world" of the North Atlantic nations.  

Fukuyama saw the post-historical world's struggles "replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."  Few would doubt that his view in many ways resembles our current state of affairs.  Fukuyama also alluded to interplay between that world wrapping up its historical baggage and the post-historical world; on the character of that interplay he did not opine.  In a melancholic vein, however, he did predict and recognized even in 1989 that in the "caretaking [for] the museum of human history" there would be a "powerful nostalgia for the struggles of the past" so powerful in fact that after a period of "boredom" that nostalgia would "serve to get history started once again."

It is Fukyama’s final words, which seem to perfectly illustrate or at the very least give us a lens through which to understand our government’s proclivities and its obsession with policing and intervening in world affairs, moreover it enables us to understand why US citizens allow it to happen, after all we’re “making the world safe for democracy” and spreading freedom; it’s an intoxicating prospect!  There is a looming question however, is the US and Europe really spreading liberalism as it is traditionally understood, is anyone for that matter?

If the rise of the Tea Party movement signaled anything it was that there are serious disagreements over the nature and future of our own liberal institutions.  Everyday we are bombarded by headlines: US national debt reaches parity with GDP, claims of a $1.5 Quadrillion derivatives bubble (the financial baggage leftover from the 2000s “wild ride”) threatens life as we know it, Wall Street Institutions whom are “too big to fail” and whom felt they deserved taxpayer bailouts to protect their defunct operations run unscathed, unaccountable, and even more powerful than before, the devaluation of the dollar and the commensurate threat of hyperinflation due to the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policies (printing money out of thin air) are real and pervasive (ask the Middle East), the alarming growth of the military industrial complex and a commensurate bona fide police state threaten our freedom, and an unprecedented centralization of health care decisions which equates to a usurpation of 1/6 of the economy undermines our decisions over our own health.  The question ultimately comes to the fore – do we really have a viable ideology to spread around the world?

In Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Mauritius, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, we hope to see the liberal democratic domino effect we never saw in Communism, but it seems the wrong dominoes are falling.  After decades of handpicking dictators and sending in troops to secure freedom foreign policy hawks are dreading democracy once again.  The successful ousting of Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine ben Ali leads to what exactly?  This isn’t a calculated ideological uprising based on the violation of inalienable rights and liberties, it is merely because food prices are soaring, jobs are hard to find, and the future is bleak! 

This area of the world is very much in the throws of history, rife with ethnic division, religious intolerance, playboy leadership, and rampant tyranny (both private and public), only now budding with trappings of consumerism and a myriad of ideas regarding the future of their society as people connect to each other via cell phones, email, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, and Google. Liberalism plays no current role in the Middle East and never has.  If Egypt is the “trend setter” everyone claims it to be then the Middle East will remain right where it is in history stagnating among awkward opinions regarding gender segregation, stoning adulterers, cutting off thieves hands, and capital punishment for those whom convert out of Islam. 

It is highly dubious to believe billions of dollars in economic and military aid will soon deliver the Egyptians or anyone in the Middle East for that matter out of these bizarre notions of ideal society.  If the Protestant Reformation and the American Revolution taught us anything it is that real change requires a perfect storm, sometimes doesn’t come for generations, but most assuredly doesn’t come from foreign intervention.  

The region may not be at the end of history, however, did Egypt and Tunisia just experience a huge breath of freedom?  Are the rest of the Arab states flexing a primary muscle of liberty?  Yes and hopefully that will be enough to start brush fires in the minds of the Middle East.