U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in a speech he gave in 1983, dubbed the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire" and the "the focus of evil in the modern world". The Cold War, he said, was a battle between good and evil, making it clear that it was the US and the West that was good. Even then, Reagan’s black and white view contained a large amount of exaggeration, but also enough authenticity to give his claim the ring of truth.
The speech was given to an audience of evangelical Christians, to whom Reagan told the joke of an evangelical priest and a politician who arrived at Heaven’s gate together. St. Peter took them to see their quarters. The first was a small single room with a bed, a chair and a table. That was for the clergyman. The politician was worried about what might get and couldn’t believe it when St. Peter stopped in front of a beautiful mansion with lovely grounds and told him that these would be his quarters. Puzzled, the politician asked why he got a beautiful mansion while the holy man got only a single room. St. Peter replied that heaven was full of clergymen, but he was the first politician who ever made it.
When the laughter died away, Reagan went on to say something profound, that there were good people in government and public life, but they need to be reminded constantly of the ideas and principles on which the West was founded. That is, a commitment to freedom and personal liberty. Sadly the West’s Establishment, those running the United States, Europe and the white English-speaking world, is not only no longer committed to those ideals but also directly opposed to them. It is busy crafting policies that will end them, using state control, reduced national sovereignty, mass immigration and the fallacious man-made climate change’s net zero fraud as their main tools. And they are set on imposing this sinister vision on the whole world.
Like hell itself, the cult driving this has several circles. At the bottom are the useful fools, the student activists screaming ‘no borders or ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘black lives matter’ and the ridiculous retirees rattling on about stopping oil. But at the top there are a few very wealthy, powerful people. And just below them are the cult’s Himmlers, Goebbels, Gorings, Funks and Speers - people who do very well out of it.
And it is these groups, for the sake of convenience called the Woke Globalist Cult (WGC) and therefore the West generally that is the new Evil Empire and the main focus of evil in the modern world.
It is not the only source of evil of course, not by a long shot. There are evil cults everywhere. They are abundant in Africa, and Arabia, many in the Muslim world, control China, rule Russia. But none pose the threat to world peace, prosperity and individual liberty that the West does now.
And the West's trajectory is towards less freedom and more autocracy, ending in totalitarianism, as that is the only way the WGC can achieve its stated aims. China already has the degree of autocracy it wants and in Russia the trajectory was, pre-war at least, probably towards more freedom. Neither Russia nor China are interested in Net Zero, mass immigration, multiculturalism or abolishing the nation state, the drivers of the West’s move to serfdom.
The implausible claim that the West is still the bastion of freedom can be made only because of where we started, not where we are now. Neither Russia nor China has ever been a free democracy. But it is because that we in the West can claim to have been that allows the Cultists to pretend to be freedom lovers, constantly shouting about freedom and democracy while using all the means they have to subvert both. A new hate crime here, a ban on certain types of cars there, a bit of censorship spread around the internet in the name of protecting the vulnerable, and restrictions on movement everywhere, and so on. And as there is little or no choice other than WGC parties to vote for, our sham democracy is eroded.
Government always tends to autocracy, but it was ‘winning’ the Cold War that accelerated all this. When the Soviet Union collapsed the West was left as the sole hegemon, and it – really the US – started to act like one, assuming the right to interfere anywhere it liked. The rest of the West poodled along, doing as it was told, with Britain wagging its tail the most enthusiastically.
Another accelerator was the election of the leftist Clinton, followed by the fusion of the US establishment’s megalomania with the incipient woke globalist ideology. The New Evil Empire began to take shape, at home and abroad.
Russia and China each have only one military base abroad that is not contiguous with their own borders. The US has over 750 in 80 different countries, including Cuba, Iraq and Syria where they are not wanted. The US has bases close to both Russia’s and China’s borders, making both feel encircled and under threat.
The list of US interventions, military, political and economic is too long to go into in detail here, but as briefly as possible, since the early 1990s, America has intervened in Haiti to reinstate a pro-US president, bombed Serbia and put troops in Kosovo to instal a murderous pro-US government, the CIA was involved in a (failed) 1996 coup against Saddam Hussein. U.S has fired missiles at Iran, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Somalia has been attacked and bombed several times, often with large civilian casualties.
Then there was the invasion of Afghanistan with the stated aim of replacing the Afghan government with a pro-Western one. It was a miserable and expensive failure that lasted over 19 years and cost U.S taxpayers over $2 trillion.
The war was called Operation Enduring Freedom, though it was never explained whose freedom was to endure, an operational name also used to attack or intervene the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia (again), Tanzania, and Uganda, Trans Sahara, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tunisia. Few have done any good, and many much harm.
Regime change and political interference is a specialty. A 2016 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that the United States had intervened in 81 foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, the majority of them through covert (CIA) action. There have been more since despite them usually making things worse. A 2021 review found that US foreign interventions since World War II overwhelmingly failed to achieve their purported objectives.
One of the worst cases was invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 to depose President Saddam Hussein, accused of having links to al-Qaeda and possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), of which the US has plenty. No WMD were ever found, and even a US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence admitted that it had no evidence of links with al-Qaeda. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died, and Iraq has been violent failed state since. Oddly, no one was accused of, let alone tried for, war crimes.
The 2011 Arab Spring resulted in yet more intervention, uprisings, revolutions, and civil wars across the Arab world, including Libya, Syria, and Yemen. In 2011, the West launched an extensive bombardment in support of anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya, and Barack Obama authorised the CIA to carry out a clandestine effort to provide arms and support to the Libyan opposition. Libya is also now a violent failed state where thousands have died and has become a main conduit for migrants heading for Europe
The US has been interfering militarily in Syria since 2012 and has trained and armed nearly 10,000 Syrian rebels to fight President Assad. This cost the US taxpayer $1 billion a year until phased out by Donald Trump - who called Obama the ‘founder of ISIS’. More people have died in Syria every six months since then than have died in all Israels wars since 1948.
The US engineered the 2022 vote of no confidence in Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, as it was unhappy with his foreign policy and visit to Russia. Islamabad's ambassador to the U.S met the American Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, who said that if the no-confidence vote was successful, "all would be forgiven", otherwise "it will be tough going ahead" The next day the Pakistan Democratic Movement announced that they were bringing a no-confidence motion against Khan. The US gave Pakistan over $200 million that year, much of which is alleged to have disappeared.
But the most egregious act of the New Evil Empire is the war in Ukraine. It has been US policy to de-stabilise Russia since Putin replaced the West’s patsy Yeltsin. That policy is based on former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski s strategy of US domination of Russia and using Ukraine as a weapon to achieve that end.
Brzezinski was responsible for the Taliban. He initiated the covert funding and arms supplies to the mujahedeen fighting the pro-Russian Afghan government that later became the Taliban. Asked if he regretted this, he replied “Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” And that has been the CIA’s modus operandi ever since. The death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no consequence.
The US has broken every promise it made to Russia, from Reagan reneging on a deal made with Gorbachev to destroy all nuclear weapons, to Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in 1990. This was part of a cascade of assurances given by Western leaders in 1990 and 1991 not to expand NATO – all of them broken. By 2009 all former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe were NATO members, including three former Soviet states. And then West made plain its intention to bring both Ukraine and Georgia in.
Many Americans warned that such an expansion would lead to war. Russia had put up with US missiles being placed in Poland, Romania and Turkey, but had made it clear that it would not put up with a NATO move into Ukraine or Georgia. Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns, has been warning about the provocative effect of NATO expansion on Russia since 1995 when, as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he reported that “hostility to NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” And when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were brought into NATO, he wrote that this was “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” In June 1997, 50 prominent US foreign policy experts signed an open letter to Clinton, saying, “We believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO … is a policy error of historic proportions” that would “unsettle European stability.” In 2008, Burns, then the American ambassador to Moscow, wrote “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
But these warnings were ignored. The West believed its own rhetoric that that Russia was weak, falling apart and hopelessly divided and set about creating a war on Russia’s doorstep with the overt aim of weakening Russia and replacing Putin with somebody who would toe the woke globalist line and agree to Russia being taken over by US corporations like Cargill and Blackrock.
And, as planned by Brzezinski and the CIA-linked Rand Corporation the main weapon to be used against Russia was Ukraine. The US-led West trained and armed openly fascist militia to start a terror campaign against Russian-Ukrainians in the eat, on Russia’s border. This, predictably, escalated to the point where the Ukrainian army shelled and killed civilians, its own civilians. The CIA then fomented a coup against a pro-Russian Ukrainian president in 2014, openly boasting that it had installed its own man – who promptly inflamed the war on Russia’s border by further infringing the rights of Russian speakers. Joe Biden (and his son) were frequent visitors to Kiev. Provocation followed provocation, nuclear capable US war planes repeatedly flew right up to Russia’s air space, military exercises were held in the area, including naval exercises in the Black Sea.
Finally, Russia could take no more and invaded – but with the obvious intention of bring the West to the negotiating table to seek a fair settlement. But the West paid no heed and has done everything possible to make sure that the war is kept going. No diplomacy, no attempts to seek peace and in fact when Zelenski – elected on a ticket to seek peace with Russia, almost reached agreement with Russia, Boris Johnson was despatched to tell him that the West was ‘not ready for peace’. And then the West blew up the Nordstream pipeline to ensure that Germany did as it was told, and also to cement the US as the biggest supplier of gas.
War breeds brutality, and both sides have committed atrocities, though to listen to the West’s MSM only Russia has done so, and frequently repeats Ukrainian government claims as the whole truth, no matter how preposterous. Millions of Ukrainians have left. There are two million Ukrainian refugees in Russia alone. The Ukrainian economy is destroyed and it is bought and paid for by Western, mainly US money, billions of which have disappeared. Over half a million Ukrainian soldiers have died, as have thousands of civilians. The root cause of all this death and suffering is the New Evil Empire and its desire to destroy non-woke, non-globalist Russia.
And we, dear reader, are funding all this, even perpetuating it if you vote for one of the mainstream political parties.
(For definitions of terms like Woke and Globalism, see Definitions and Style Guide for Contributors.)