I don't imagine that Hillary Clinton would deliberately start World War III. Rather, the situation is dangerously similar to the eve of the First World War, with major powers massively armed and suspicious of each other, when a minor incident set off catastrophe.
I call her Queen of Chaos because today, the result of war is chaos, not conquest. Look at the results in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. There are no real winners, only losers.
JB: So, your major beef with Hillary is on the foreign policy front. We'll get back to that in a bit. Does your critique extend to other policy issues closer to home as well? If so, what might they be?
DJ: I see foreign policy and domestic policy as interlocking. Basically, the US economy is radically distorted by the military-industrial complex, which influences both foreign and domestic policy. Financial capital, whose wish list is now determining policy all over the Western world and beyond, loves the military-industrial complex because Pentagon contracts ensure a comfortable profit on investment. And the military-industrial complex loves "threats" because they provide endless pretexts for developing more and more extravagant weapons systems. Hillary Clinton is notoriously the favorite of Wall Street because she supports these interests, including the wars and threats that justify them.
Hillary claims that no one can prove that she changes policies to please her Wall Street donors. In fact, her whole approach is identical to theirs: provide more space for financial investment by privatizing public services, education, prisons, health care, and so on. That is why Americans spend much more on health care than, say, the French, who live longer, because in the US system shareholders and corporate executives have to take their slice.
The Clintons have abandoned the working class, single mothers, the part of the population in greatest difficulty, in favor of what is called neo-liberalism, which simply means working for finance capital. They still pretend to be progressive by "identity politics", proclaiming that women and members of minorities should be able to "shatter the glass ceiling". This means forgetting about the majority in favor of a successful minority of minorities or of women.
Bernie Sanders advocates quite the opposite. His policies, such as single payer health insurance, would benefit the majority at the expense of financial speculators. Bernie's shortcoming, however, is that so far he fails to spell out the link between domestic and foreign policy. To finance his program it would be necessary to make drastic reductions in the military budget, which implies a less aggressive foreign policy. He rightly criticizes Hillary's ties with Wall Street without denouncing her ties to the war machine.
JB: How does a candidate who doesn't favor endless war or a budget tilted toward military needs and tightened belts everywhere else make headway against all the formidable powers arrayed to keep the status quo?
DJ: Incidentally, our current status quo is never really a status quo, because things are not staying the same but getting worse. By poor general education and mass media distractions, people are kept ignorant of how much worse things can become if the war policy continues, as Hillary clearly intends. There needs to be a movement to end this war policy that involves not only hundreds of thousands of citizen protesters but also individuals in key positions in society, notably military men and women, who say no to this suicidal trend. We need a sort of mass strike for peace. But alas we are very far from that level of consciousness and action. On the one hand, I don't believe this electoral campaign can possibly defeat those dominant powers, but on the other hand I can't help hoping because time is running out.
JB: I'm with you there. Let's go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that one of the reasons you wrote Queen of Chaos was seeing what happened in Libya, a place you had more than a passing acquaintance with. No one loved Gaddafi. But you're saying that it was largely Hillary who pushed for the "regime change." Please tell us more about that. Many would not see that as a bad thing, by the way.
DJ: You say, "No one loved Gaddafi." That cannot be exactly true, because in Libya, on July 22, 2011, in the middle of the NATO bombing campaign, a million Libyans demonstrated for Gaddafi and against NATO in Tripoli. The pictures are there to prove it, but it was not front page news in the West. No "dictator", busy with a foreign assault, could force a sixth of the entire population to go into the streets carrying banners and shouting slogans on his behalf. The demonstrators no doubt had not forgotten that Gaddafi had transformed a poor, sparsely populated desert into the country with the highest standard of living in Africa.
JB: I didn't know any of that, Diana. I actually was referring to most Americans.
DJ: So in Libya itself, some people loved Gaddafi and other people hated him. Who were those other people? Mostly Islamists in Eastern Libya, notably in Benghazi, who had always been opposed to Gaddafi mainly because of his efforts to modernize Islam and Libyan society.
Moreover, millions of Africans loved Gaddafi. He had sponsored African unity and development. He was preparing to use Libya's huge wealth to sponsor a single African currency that would free Francophone Africa from dependence on a French-backed currency, the CFA franc. Reason enough for French President Sarkozy not to love Gaddafi. Also reason for some of the Libyan elite to turn against him, because they would rather keep the profits for themselves, as in Qatar.
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