Weep for the West
By Alastair Crooke – Strategic Culture Foundation, 2023
We seem headed for a point of impact, with the prospect of collision in full view – and one as obvious as it was in 1911.
Michael Anton, a former U.S. Presidential National Security Adviser, gives us this analogy for the U.S.’ and Europe’s situation today:
“On Sept. 20, 1911, the RMS Olympic—sistership of the ill-fated Titanic—collided with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke, despite both vessels traveling at low speeds, in visual contact with one another – for 80 minutes. “It was,” writes maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham, “one of those incredible convergences, in full daylight on a calm sea within sight of land, where two normally operated vessels steamed blithely to a point of impact – as though mesmerized””.
We too seem headed for a similar point of impact, with the prospect of collision in full view – and one as obvious as it was on that day in 1911. Equally, our ruling class is not for changing course. It must want this percussion —or else perhaps they view an Armageddon of collision as ultimately destined to provide the path to the triumph of ‘righteousness’.
Certainly, the present moment is defined darkly as one of severe economic forebodings, co-existing with a mood of political impasse. It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people in the West that something has gone terribly wrong with the ‘Ukraine project’. Sunny predictions and projections of certain victory did not materialise, and instead, the West is facing the reality of the blood-drenched sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men to their fantasy of Osiris dismembered. The West does not know what to do. It ambles around, looking lost.
The whole mess is sometimes explained as a result of a miscalculation by the western élites. The situation, however, is far worse than that: The sheer dysfunctionality and the prevalence of institutional entropy is so obvious that there is little need to say more.
