I’m not sure when this address was delivered by Thatcher, but I’m guessing it was at some point in the late stages of the Cold War. What’s notable to me is that lurking behind the words is simply another version of the imperial notion of the White Man’s Burden—the notion that We are inherently superior, a more fully human form of life, the carriers of a Manifest Destiny to rule the lower forms of human life. Thatcher clearly divides the world into two forms of human existence. We are rich because we are inherently superior—not because we colonized the world by force of arms. The Russians are poor because they are a lower form of human life. As such, it is up to them to submit to our rule and surrender their resources.
Am I exaggerating, reading too much into Thatcher’s words? In the light of previous history, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars onward, I don’t think so. Thatcher was heir to the imperial British ambition of the Anglo-Zionist empire. The history of the British imperial project, as Jeffery Sachs and many others have pointed out, revolved in great part around the idea of containing Russia, preventing Russia from expanding toward British controlled parts of the world—especially India.
The end of WW1 saw the rise of the Anglosphere, with the tentative entry of America into the Anglo-Zionist empire. The American progressives under Wilson had their own ideas about remaking the world order, but initially entered the British project of taking over Russia—a project that ended in disaster. Since the end of the Cold War that project has been revived, shifting once again from containment to active aggression aimed at subjugation and looting.
It’s easy enough to see in the current crisis a crisis of identity and of confidence in the Anglo-Zionist empire. The true believers, the Neocons, are convinced that the rise of Russian and Chinese untermenschen is a fluke, a blip on the screen of history that can’t possibly endure. Because. It’s Us and Them, and We deserve to rule—all we need to do is to pursue our proxy wars to their conclusion, because We can’t possibly lose. Because its Us. Then we loot the subjugated pretenders to sovereignty that have been put in their places.
I’d very much like to see someone running for office who could place all this in perspective for America going forward. I fear that waging war, beyond the inherent dehumanizing immorality of our wars of choice, will not get us out of the debt trap we’ve constructed for ourselves. We will default because there’s no way out of this maze. Putin sees an era of conflict ahead, possibly resulting from the flailing of collapsing empire. Who in American public life has a credible vision of a constructive future to offer?
So I offer this brief tweet and transcript in support of yesterday’s Russophobia And Its Consequences:
Arthur Morgan @ArthurM40330824
#Thatcher explained why #London, and now the #EU, hate #Russia - because Russia has all the resources and because Russians have refused to be colonized by the #West since the 1700s.
The most creative description of the desire to steal.
[Video of Margaret Thatcher]
4:02 PM · May 24, 2024
Transcript:
If you were to make a table of all the nations in proportion to the natural resources they have, the top one would almost certainly be Russia. She has everything. Oil, gas, diamonds, platinum, gold, silver, all the industrial metals, marvellous standing timber, a wonderfully rich soil. But countries are not rich in proportion to their natural resources. Countries are rich whose governments have policies which encourage the essential creativity, initiative and enterprise of man and recognize his desire to do better for his family.
One wonders. Did Thatcher really believe that the governments of the Anglo-Zionist empire really have those seemingly noble goals at heart? We know better, now. That’s part of the Populist Great Awakening, the populist understanding of MAGA—which may or may not be the Trumpian understanding—that We the People are considered to be subjects of the imperial project, to be subjugated for the good of the rulers.
Coming next, a discussion of a very stimulating interview of Doug Macgregor by Maike Hickson.
Apropos of the White Man’s Burden as the underlying ideology of the Anglo-American empire, I would suggest there’s more to Mark’s “Anglo-Zionist” hyphenation than merely a master-client relationship between Britain/America and Israel. Even before British evangelicals mutilated New Testament ecclesiology with bizarre misreadings of isolated Old Testament passages (i.e., “Christian Zionism”), 19th-century British elites were imagining England herself as the New Jerusalem. This notion was eventually popularized when William Blake’s poem “And did those feet in ancient time” was set to music in the early 20th to become one of Britain’s unofficial anthems, “Jerusalem” — a creepy hymn of national self-worship:
https://youtu.be/MKRHWT6xdEU?si=qMUXW0TgLMsGl2Qc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time#%22Dark_Satanic_Mills%22
The speech was given in the US in 1996, when western liberal democracies were taking a victory lap. It is an indictment of communism, and socialism, e.g.
"And who could have foreseen, at the beginning of this century, the rise of a new despotism in 1917, as Lenin seized power in Russia and imposed ruthlessly the most total tyranny the world has known.
...[When] this new despotism came in 1917, it had not arised from the people. Lenin seized power when Kerensky had won the first democratic election Russian ever held. He was not allowed then to continue to govern. Lenin seized power and imposed his terrible tyranny.
Unwittingly, the world at that time had entered into the greatest economic experiment it had ever known. One between the total state control of communism with no freedom for the individual and our way of life of free enterprise economy based on liberty and rule of law the true counterpart of democracy. The only system that gives everyone a say."
And so forth. She's very clear that the problem was the system imposed on Russian people, on the common man, by the Party.
Whether the communists were funded by opportunists hoping to destroy Russia and control her resources, I cannot say.