I

Living in the American-led Order, one is encouraged to imagine that there is a hardy group of thoughtful powers, clustered together in NATO, who are opposed by rogue entities abroad such as Russia, China, and Iran, not to mention the ragtag gang of proxies and clients that these villains have assembled to goad and threaten our heroes. The US-led countries—O happy few, a band of brothers!—do not want to have to arm themselves; it is purely in reaction to those terrifying and unreasoning outsiders that they have amassed their weapons, including a nuclear capacity sufficient to destroy the planetary ecosystem.

Let us zoom out and get a better view: what we see is a single System with multiple participants; collectively all of these states form the War Party, a set of belligerents intent on realising a Global War, though of course each actor within the War Party wants to be able to blame other parties, so that—assuming human life continues on the other side of their war—they will not be held accountable. When this time comes, Macdara asks, let it never be forgotten that all of these states acting in concert have brought us there. The despicable Liberals of US-aligned regimes assure us that NATO countries must escalate their armaments now in preparation for a war they definitely do not want, just as they must expand the alliance in order to prevent a war they definitely do not want. NATO has just celebrated 75 years of extraordinary success in routing money towards elites intent on grabbing as much cash as they can in the hopes, presumably, that money will offer them some protection from the destruction they will visit upon us all. It is tempting to reach for Freud and ascribe their actions to some unconscious Drive, but there is no need. They are fully conscious of their actions, after all: they knowingly pursue the pleasure of Catastrophe, which is coextensive with the pleasure of Capitalism.

II

On a recent trip to Ireland, it took no longer than a drive home from the airport for it to become clear that NATO’s poison is at work in the Irish Political System. Macdara was told by the family member who had collected him that the Russians keep interfering with us—a reference to a military exercise conducted 240 km off the coast, a little within the State’s Exclusive Economic Zone, exercises that the Russian Government subsequently moved further into the open ocean at the request of the Irish Government. It is evident that NATO shills in politics and the media have little difficulty in planting their messages in Irish minds softened by decades of Americanisation. 

The present writer’s intention is not, of course, to imply that the State currently committing a unjustifiable, pointless and destructive war against Ukraine is anything other than an imperialist belligerent. His point is that the glee with which Irish elites depict US-opposed parties as permanent enemies, as being uniquely capable of perpetrating violence, is mindless, venal and idiotic in its ultimately putting the people of the State at risk.

But the cartoon logic at play is irresistible: the Russians, being bad, must always and everywhere be malicious, mistaken, mendacious. It struck your correspondent as absurd that the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines would be perpetrated by the Russian State. Not impossible, but not a clearly rational move. The NATO line however was that it was—as an act of sabotage—naturally the deed of that arch saboteur, Putin. It does not need to make sense; you are not required to think critically about these things. If it is bad, it is him. Macdara also refuses to believe that Putin buying a few ads on social media represents the dire threat to American Democracy that we are meant to take it to be—but we must ascribe such extraordinary powers to the great baddie, it could never be that the American people would elect Trump without such interference…

Questioning the ideological function of all this, asking what the heroes are getting away with in having enlisted Putin as the baddie, is of course out of the question: the sceptic is, at best, naive, and at worst, a secret agent of the Enemy in Chief!