Fear-mongering is longstanding US policy that accompanies its geopolitical agenda.
The late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter described how the US operates worldwide, saying its ultimatum to other countries is “(k)iss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.”
Domestic policy is much the same. US hegemony tolerates no opposition, demands subservience.
Pinter added that Washington “doesn’t give a damn about the UN, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.”
Both right wings of the US war party need enemies to advance their imperial agenda.
They don’t exist so they’re invented — fear-mongering a tactic used time and again to manipulate the public mind.
No matter how often most Americans were duped by earlier phony threats, they’re easy marks to be fooled again — why the late Gore Vidal described America an “the United States of amnesia.”
The last oral historian Studs Terkel corrected him, saying:
“Gore, it’s not the United States of amnesia. It’s the United States of alzheimer’s.”
Invented US enemies are falsely accused of all sorts of things they had nothing to do with.
Endless repetition by establishment media manipulates most people to believe almost anything, no matter how implausible.
Along with the Trump regime’s war of words on China, DJT declared a nonexistent national emergency threat to national security by executive order to protect the nation’s power grid from cyber-attacks by Russia, China, or other US adversaries.
Phony threats to the US power grid surfaced before. In 2009, the UK Telegraph falsely claimed “cyberspies from China and Russia have hacked into the US electricity grid (with) hidden software that could be used to disrupt power supplies,” citing unnamed officials.
Nothing of the sort occurred.
Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed Obama regime officials said “(t)he Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid.”
“So have the Russians,” implying they have attacking it in mind. No cyber or other attacks occurred.
In mid-2017, the Washington Post falsely claimed that “(h)ackers allied with the Russian government have devised a cyberweapon that has the potential to be the most disruptive yet against electric systems that Americans depend on for daily life, according to US researchers,” adding:
CrashOverride malware “could be deployed against US electric transmission and distribution systems with devastating effect.”
“Russian government hackers have shown their interest in targeting US energy and other utility systems.”
No evidence was cited in the above reports because none exists.
No national emergency to the US power grid existed earlier or now from any other nations.
Trump’s executive order, falsely suggesting otherwise, combines fear-mongering with a move to curb or ban imports from China, Russia, and other nations that compete with corporate America for key technological applications.
Trump’s EO calls for establishing a task force on energy infrastructure procurement policies to achieve this objective.
It lets the energy secretary and other US officials prohibit or limit purchases of power-related equipment from nations allegedly posing a potential threat to the US power grid.
The EO relates to equipment used in power plants, substations, and control rooms, including nuclear reactors, transformers, large generators and their backups.
In 2019, then-DNI Dan Coats falsely accused Russia, China, and other countries of threatening US infrastructure, including the nation’s power grid.
In April, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), together with the UK National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), warned that unidentified national and international “advanced persistent threat (APT) groups” are “exploit(ing)” COVID-19 outbreaks by cyber operations against their countries — again no evidence cited.
Trump’s EO called for creating a vendor “blacklist” to curb or prevent US power companies from buying equipment from unacceptable foreign sources.
Claims that they’re “increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities” in the United States bulk-power system with “potentially catastrophic effects” ignores nonexistent threats from China, Russia and other countries on the US target list for regime change.
In sharp contrast, the US poses an enormous threat to all nations it doesn’t control.
Wanting them transformed into client states is what wars by hot and other means are made of.
Ongoing endlessly in multiple theaters, new eruptions could happen against other nations at any time.
That’s what the scourge of imperialism is all about, threatening everyone everywhere.
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
