Every year has a zeitgeist. We remember 1957 for Sputnik, 1963 for the Kennedy assassination, 1975 for the American exit from Vietnam, 1989 for the end of the Soviet Union, 2001 for the 9/11 attack on New York and Washington, 2008 for the Wall Street meltdown, and 2016 for the election of Donald Trump. This year, 2022, brings into clear view three latent conflicts that unelected officials of the American deep-state have been engaged in for several decades: With Russia, with China, and with U.S. citizens. They operated in the background, lacking the critical mass to be salient, and obscured by competing narratives. Russia sought accommodation with the West, American business and political leaders believed trade would democratize China, and the schoolbook tripartite civics model defined domestic governance.
The brief Trump presidency interrupted the ongoing deep-state rush toward war with Russia. From a 2022 perspective, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative advanced by unelected national-security officials through their candidate was much more than merely a campaign ploy to divert attention from the Clintons' own actual Russia-collusion (§2. Monetization of U.S. Foreign Policy, 2008 - June 2010):
(the Uranium-one deal to give Russia control of one-fourth of the North American uranium resource in exchange for a donation to the Clinton Foundation). The clumsily contrived attempts to link Trump with Russia via fraudulent third-hand notes (the Steele dossier), courtesy of the alcoholic Brookings staffer Igor Danchenko) were part of a nonstop effort to drum up war fever among the American public. Astonishingly, it worked, as if some atavistic memory of Cold War fears were magically retrieved from the past and emptied, like a bucket of offal, into the vacuous public mind. Whereupon it was amplified by obedient media into deafening war cries drowning out all common-sense.
And (lest we forget) 2022 is the year that the Chinese Communist Party's real intentions toward the United States became manifest.
No longer was the Wall Street fantasists' fable of the democratizing effects of trade credible. CCP doctrine had for decades been aimed at conquest, at re-positioning the Middle Kingdom at the center of the world, with subservient satrapies paying tribute to Beijing. 'Winning without fighting', the CCP reaped the harvest of its systematic due diligence in subverting Wall Street, political elites, academia, media, and anyone who could either interfere or assist in its efforts. They understood very well that the Western democracies had several big inter-related comparative advantages vis-à-vis China, namely consensual government, free speech, social peace, and free enterprise responsive to market signals like consumer demand and negotiated prices. Keen observers and astute historians, CCP authorities and scholars recognized that this intricate system was the key to Western prosperity and superiority. They set out to destroy it. Not that their goal was simply to smash a fine watch, rather it was to diminish the appeal of freedom at home and around the world. All those human-rights lectures that Western leaders had ritualistically prefaced to their trade concessions had apparently hit home. Dismissive in public, CCP and Chinese Government officials and academics had the wit to see the advantages of human rights -- for others -- and not merely for propaganda purposes. They calculated that if these real and rhetorical advantages could be destroyed, not only would they not have to listen to human-rights lectures in diplomatic meetings anymore, they could also thereby cripple Western civilization and the prosperity it generated. How satisfying it must have been for the grandees of Beijing to watch Western officials from Milan to Minnesota, from Albany to Adelaide, confining citizens to their homes, canceling public gatherings except those promoting race-hatred, and conditioning jobs, transportation, and food on official whim. Just like Beijing! If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, observing this kowtowing must seem at least partial payback for the opium depredations inflicted on the Chinese by Jardine's.
A third latent trend made manifest in 2022 is the open hostility of officialdom toward the people whom they are supposed to serve. Contempt for the general public was a covert leitmotif throughout the Bush and Obama years, occasionally emerging in comments about 'deplorables', 'rednecks', 'gun-toting bible-thumpers', and the like. These could perhaps be interpreted as partisan posturing, poking at marginal people who didn't matter. Federal agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the FBI increasingly asserted their unaccountability to the people as a virtue. Yet the tax agency, when directed to attack political opponents known as the Tea Party, offered no such objection. Most taxpayers might think themselves safe from such harassment if they did not join the Tea Party. Similarly, mass surveillance had become a background phenomenon, not an obvious threat unless activated to target specific individuals. Even when the national-security apparatus was mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign staff in 2016, using falsified warrants approved by a secret court,
these excesses could be dismissed as over-eager efforts by a few rogue officials. The actions of these same unelected officials or their replacements entered another dimension as they were applied to remove an elected president. The Russia-collusion narrative continued unabated through the Mueller investigation and two impeachment efforts, culminating in several months of officially condoned looting, burning, and rioting, an imported plague, and a fatally flawed 'election' that reversed the will of the U.S. electorate with 100 million mail-in ballots, voting machine algorithms, delayed vote-counting, violence against poll-watchers and certifiers, and numerous other crooked schemes: §9c. Hijacking the Presidency, November 2020 - January 2021:
This marked a turning point pitting unelected officials seeking to retain illegitimate power against the citizenry. But widespread recognition that this had occurred was lost amid the forms of a deceptive appearance of transfer of authority -- accompanied by a 25,000-person army, the largest seen in Washington DC since the Civil War. An unelected regime, having no choice but to use coercion to maintain itself, is bound to alienate larger and larger numbers of people. The FBI has carried on the attacks on political opponents begun by the tax agency, including fingering parents in Virginia objecting to genital mutilation of their children as 'terrorists', provocations designed to entrap ordinary people, and swat-team arrests of people prominently questioning the 2020 'election'. In addition, the excess deaths and unhealthy consequences of the various forms of medical tyranny deployed in 2021 have made manifest the (unsurprising) hostility of an illegitimate regime toward ordinary people.
What became manifest in 2022 had been immanent for decades. Denizens of the U.S. deep-state had long dreamed of reducing Russia to subservient status. The 2014 Ukraine regime-change, a joint-venture of CIA, State Dept, and Soros operatives, was the first stage of that plan. Brushing aside the solemn promise of 'no eastward expansion', Ukraine was then made-over into a de facto NATO member. The election of Donald Trump interrupted the next stage, but the delay also enabled the training of Ukraine's army to NATO standards. Following Trump's removal, conspirators resumed active anti-Russia operations. An over-confident Putin, perhaps misled by his army's quick successes in Georgia and Kazakhstan, and by the United States' humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, commenced a hasty and inadequately prepared invasion of Ukraine. Some seven months later, Russia annexed Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaphorizhzhya, and Kherson, securing its previous annexation of Crimea with the strategic seaport of Sevastopol. This left Russia with a thousand-kilometer frontier to defend and the unexpected necessity of tripling the size of its invasion forces, incurring some unpopularity at home. Unidentified saboteurs, probably American, destroyed Russia's Nordstream pipelines, cutting off the prospect of any gas or revenue stream through them. In such ways a long-suppressed and yet entirely unnecessary conflict took shape in 2022.
In other ways the 21st-century version of the Great Game of rival Eurasian empires played itself out. China, long chafing under Anglo-American hegemony, acquired a measure of parity with them by cleverly exploiting their reverence for money and their desire for self-righteous esteem. The Chinese Communists brilliantly executed an audacious plan to capture the commanding heights of U.S. finance, politics, and culture. By the time it had become overt, in 2022, it no longer mattered. U.S. and international 'leaders' could be heard repeating the Communist Party line in myriad variations, from the vapid reset utterances of Klaus Schwab to the racial demagoguery taught in schools and bootcamps, and from inane anti-carbon campaigns (recently suspended) to the corporate finance social-credit system hewing to ever-changing environmental, social, and governance goals. The year saw America and Europe tying themselves in ever more constricting knots over these unproductive and pointless efforts.
The rise of the administrative state, and the consequent fall of individual sovereignty and freedom, were also foreshadowed for many years before this conflict became overt. Warnings were regularly made, heard, and discarded. Each incursion into freedom -- mass surveillance, censorship, arbitrary regulatory enforcement, and many other instances -- presaged the abandonment of pretense that is the hallmark of 2022. Officials don't bother pretending anymore that they are acting in what used to be called the public interest; or at most they summon the ghost of public service to apply a thin veneer of slime to their otherwise unconcealed corruption. Self-enrichment or self-aggrandizement, or both, is what their office is all about. Transparency at last!