Brendan  Clifford

The idea that the United States is a rogue State is being flirted with in England.  The reason for this is that President Trump is seen as breaking up the established order of the world put in place in 1945, and is thus endangering the West.

Where did this “West” come from in 1945?  It did not exist in 1944, or for many years before that.

The free states of Western Europe in 1944—the states that were not engaged, in one way and another, in the War to destroy Russia—were Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

Spain and Portugal were free fascist states, in the sense that they were independent fascist states.  They were not members of the European alliance that was trying to destroy Russia.

Spain deplored the British war on Germany as a European civil war, and refused to take any part in it.  When Britain lost that war and Germany established the New Order in Europe, Spain did not participate.  

When the New Order of Europe attacked Russia, Spain sent a token force to take part in it—just to show which side it was on—but it still maintained its neutrality as between Britain and Germany:  and for people escaping from the New Order it still represented freedom.

Freedom has no general meaning.  It has meaning only as freedom from, or for, this or that;  or freedom to do this on the condition that you do that.

The West is now lamenting the destruction by Trump of the supposed rules-based order which was freedom.  Every rule is a limitation of freedom, and order is a system of limitations.  

But that system of limitations might enable things to be done that could not be done without it.  And what is prevented by the system of rules might be experienced as freedom no less that what is made possible by it.

This is something that should be well understood in Ireland if it reflected with a degree of objectivity on how the two peoples who live in it experience things.  Protestants and Catholics are, on the whole, uneasy in the presence of the culture of the other and experience freedom in their own. 

 Sartre had the idea that Hell is other people.     Or Hell is the other religion.    

Or, since the Catholic religion—which was experienced as freedom by the overwhelming part of the nationalist population fifty years ago but now collapsed—Hell is religion.

The state of mind that fills the vacuum created by the collapse of Catholicism can only understand what nationalist Ireland was in those ancient times (within the living memory of many!) as a kind of tyranny imposed by a despotism that came from God-knows-where!  But what was actually experienced by the general population about that aspect of things in the 1950s was contentment.  The way Faith Of Our Fathers was sung at all-Ireland finals left no doubt about that.

Of course it would be nice if this or that rule could be bent a little on this particular occasion—which was often done without any challenge to the rule itself—but the order on the whole was considered fine.  There was certainly no desire to be free of it.  It had been well worth preserving against the English.  Celebration of it was the real national anthem:  “Faith Of Our Fathers”.

We celebrated our ‘debasement’ by a religious tyranny.  And we were so debased by that tyranny that we experienced it as freedom!  

How could it be that we experienced things so falsely?

We were indoctrinated by the tyranny?

But it was a very different Freedom that the English tried to indoctrinate us into!  Indoctrination by tyranny failed.  It was through our own will that we became what we were.

If we were so thoroughly indoctrinated against truth by ourselves that our natural feelings were over-ridden for centuries and we experienced the world falsely, then we are in a bad way, since knowledge begins with experience.  

And the tyrants who messed us up so thoroughly could only have been ourselves.

We have now shrugged off all of that and joined the Free World, the ‘West’.  We are no longer “the aliens of the West”—as the Young Irelanders put it.  We now get our feelings and experiences from outside ourselves.  But we seem to have joined the West at a moment when it has become uncertain about itself.

The West is not Europe:  that much is clear.  Historical Europe—a loose configuration of dynamic cultures—was undermined by the British 1914 War against it—Casement’s Crime Against Europe.  It was destroyed by Britain’s 1939 War against it.  

Britain’s European wars were “balance-of-power” wars, the purpose of which was to prevent an evolutionary development of Europe through the interaction of the major forces within it.  Europe had to be kept at war with itself so that Britain could conquer the world.  But Britain was so badly damaged in its wars on Germany that it had to concede primacy to its offspring, the United States.  

What has been clarified during the last few years is that the West is now the United States—and that both Britain and Europe are its dependencies.

The US has never been anything but capitalist, democratic and militarist.

It was founded as a new society of militant migrants from Britain and Europe—who cleared space for themselves by comprehensive genocide—in the culture of which they still revel.  Its social culture is extreme individualism.  In the economy it accepts the discipline of the market.  In the army it takes the form of rigorously regimented individualism—which gives it immense power.  In foreign affairs its guiding notion is Manifest Destiny—which means grabbing whatever is there to be grabbed.

The British—and the Europeans, who are the battered casualties of Britain’s two World Wars—like the illusion of International Law in a rules-based order of the world since 1945.  The US knows that that is make-believe.  The US, until recently, tried not to deprive them of the comfort of that illusion:  but now thinks they should be made to grow up and face realities.

When the US engages in a blatant breach of the ‘rules-based order’ by killing or kidnapping the leader of another state, the UK/EU leaders say they shed no tears because he was a bad man and leave it at that.

The US is now deciding whether Manifest Destiny obliges it to destroy Iran as a favour to Israel—while Israel is wondering whether Iran, in the course of being destroyed, could still inflict sufficient damage on Israel to put its future in question.

There is disagreement between the US and  EU/UK over Russia.  EU/UK want Russia to be destroyed by the European war in the Ukraine—which was its intent in provoking it.  The EU thinks it could remake itself into something viable by means of winning such a war.  At the same time it knows it could not undertake such a war without the US.  But the US has its mind on China.

China has become a major economic Power by means of a free capitalism within a framework tended by the Communist Party.  That is how it has defended itself from the destructive power of the West—a destructive power that has littered the world with casualties.

Britain has forgotten that it forced China into the world market by means of the Opium Wars—wars of one-sided slaughter by means of which Liberal Britain compelled China to open itself to the sale of British opium—which had been kept out by the State.  Opium was the point of leverage in the Wars that opened China to Western markets.

If course it is wrong for China to remember such things, as the West would rather that they were forgotten—and that is what counts as morality in the post-religious era.

But China does remember, and seems to know that its only actual means of defence against the West is by acquiring the power to destroy the West.

The post-religious West sanctifies all that it has done to the world by calling it Progress—as if progress was not just what it did, but was a transcendental force directed on the world by the Heaven which it has abolished.

The West has been continuously at war during the long period since it was defeated in the Chinese Civil War of 1947.  The Chinese Army has had little experience of warfare, except in skirmishes, since Korea.  It has built an apparently powerful Navy but it has no battle experience.  It has never been engaged in warfare around the world, as the Army of the West has been.  It is by comparison a mere home defence force.

If the West continues on the course upon which it set itself four or five centuries ago, it will be obliged to engage in a final contest with China.  And the home-bound Chinese Army can only hope to survive by means of nuclear weaponry.

When Russia tried to supply Cuba with effective (i.e., nuclear) means of defence sixty years ago, and Washington threatened nuclear war, the Chinese view was that  it should not have offered those weapons to Cuba—though it was no more than the US had done with states bordering on Russia—but that, once the threat of nuclear war was made against its Cuban ally, Russia should have responded in kind.

That is presumably what China will do if necessary.

And the odds are that the West, in the grip of its obsessive Judeo-Christian mentality—which survives the decay of belief—will bring about that necessity.