It's one of those ironies of history that the phrase "American Exceptionalism" was coined by Joe Stalin. Similarly the concept's cleverest disciples are the neoconservatives whose intellectual roots can be traced back to the Trotskyite Max Schachtman. For permanent revolution read the endless chaos of America's wars, oh and throw in a little Gramsci - the capturing of newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian for the war party. With the neocon approved Hillary Clinton - her granny was from Merthyr* - a shoo-in for the Presidency, a $2.5 billion war chest should see to that, the world can look forward to interesting times.
Meanwhile let's enjoy some real American Exceptionalism:
* The family had actually arrived in the US a few months before mam-gu's birth.
Having a bit of difficulty finding a picture of Idi Amin, her man in Kampala, meeting Betty Battenburg on one of his state visits to Engerland. Surely HM hasn't taken advantage of those new European data protection laws to get them flushed down the memory hole?
Anyway will have to make-do with this fine piece of 20th century poetry from the Mighty Sparrow.
One thing you're not going to hear very much about during the election campaign is foreign affairs. After all the main parties are broadly in agreement on membership of NATO and the EU and the necessity for British nuclear weapons. Even the SNP wants an independent Scotland to be part of NATO and while Trident is said to be a redline would that matter given Tory support for any Miliband government vote on renewal.
Of course foreign affairs do matter and it's not as if we are living in uninteresting times. The US seeks to destabilise Russia as a first step to destabilising China. A lesser understood imperative being perhaps to isolate Germany from the Eurasian landmass - see the neo-con George Friedman's recent press conference in Chicago. Meanwhile the UK takes the lead in dispatching troops to Mykolaiv, a strategic southern Ukrainian city with a large Russian speaking minority. Who knows how this will end? At best a frozen conflict, at worst a nuclear war?
Listen to the American journalist Robert Parry discussing the near total journalistic groupthink about Ukraine in the US:
In the UK things are even worse, with only one or two mainstream journalists not caught up in a black hat/white hat narrative, much of it based on downright lies and distortions.
How naive we are to think that this corruption of journalism doesn't affect us? Do we really think that the UK will go down before Nicola Sturgeon without putting up a dirty fight? Already we've had that weird story about a battalion of British soldiers being recruited to fight on the social media front. Politicians who can't be bought or intimidated will be smeared, incidents will occur, ballots will be mislaid, a public that thinks Putin is the new Hitler will swallow something similar about Salmond.
