Carl Boggs - The Great Fear

Carl Boggs
Introduces his new book "The Great Fear"

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, people living in Western industrialized societies face what are presented as a number of mortal threats – above all climate change, but also debilitating global health crises, mounting economic calamity, food shortages, the worldwide scourge of terrorism. Such threats consume by far the most political and media attention. Often lost amidst the frightening scenarios is a bigger, more imminent threat to life on the planet: nuclear Doomsday. As the Ukraine proxy war between the United States and Russia rages through its second year, the world has surely never been closer to nuclear catastrophe, yet that horrifying prospect – focus of moral hysteria decades ago – commands strangely little attention today as the two leading nuclear powers fight each other on the European battlefield. That silence is especially deafening within American society.
 
The well-oiled Western propaganda apparatus, starting with the corporate media, in fact strives to downplay, even ignore, this unparalleled threat. The deeper obsession is geopolitical – that is, U.S./NATO expansion eastward with the goal of attacking and ultimately weakening the Russian Federation, on the path to regime-change in Moscow, hoping to gain access to the most abundant natural resources in the world. By far the greatest landmass on the planet, Russia is rich in such raw materials as oil, natural gas, timber, valuable metals and minerals, arable land, water. For roughly a century, going back to World War I and the Woodrow Wilson presidency, the U.S. has coveted Russia as supreme economic and geopolitical prize -- the first move, in fact, being Wilson’s invasion (with Allies) of Russia in 1918, hoping to overthrow the nascent Bolshevik regime. That failure did not quench the Western desire to one day turn Moscow into something of a vassal state.