In Search of His Lost World War

At one year old in 1944, Joe Biden was too young to be aware of D-Day in particular and World War II in general. At 81 years of age in 2024, Joe Biden  is so old and so out of it that he can't even keep  his own lies (what the New York Times calls "tall tales") straight any more.

Unlke the decline in his his actual cognitive functioning, however,  Biden's reptilian patriotic mindset shows no sign of faltering. In France last week to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion at Normandy that marked the beginning of the end of the war in Europe, Biden was in such a state of full-blown nostalgia that he expressed a yearning for a repeat. This time around, the designated Hitler is none other than Vladimir Putin.

Biden and his gerontocratic war cult long with a vengeance for the good old days of World War II, the "good" war, when people waved the flag and planted victory gardens  and hardly anybody protested in the streets. The Americans wrenched themselves right out of their isolationism, saving the entire globe from Hitler. They later absolved themselves from their own official anti-Semitism, for the shame of having closed the immigration door to Hitler's Jewish victims, by supporting the creation of the state of Israel. 

Most importantly, World War II made the USA a superpower and paved the way for the permanent military-industrial complex that D-Day architect Dwight Eisenhower warned us about at the end of his own presidency.

Biden, in denouncing Vladimir Putin as the reincarnation of Hitler via his invasion of Ukraine, conveniently glosses over the actual history of the second world war, and how even before its end, FDR and Churchill  and Stalin had already divvied up the spoils and carved up the planet in a new imperialist world order. Germany was cut in half, as was Korea. American troops  still occupy Okinawa. There are at least 800 American military bases operating throughout the world.

 When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the 90s, the United States assumed it would now own the whole world into perpetuity. vIt was, as as Francis Fukuyama arrogantly dubbed it, "the end of history."  But far from being inspired to cut back on the military industrial complex,  they created a new enemy in the form of "Islamic extremism."  It morphed conveniently into the permanent war on terror once former CIA asset Osama bin Laden and his Saudi financial backers attacked the World Trade Center. (Once Osama had outlived his usefulness in what amounted to one of several US proxy wars on Russia when it occupied Afghanistan) he did the expected blowback.

America's ownership of the world, and its status as sole remaining Superpower, is now coming to a close with the rise of China and the BRICs economy. This decline and fall of US power is only being hastened by its depraved financial and ideological support of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile,  Biden  topped off his sales pitch for World War III with a gala four-course state dinner in Paris. In a scene straight out of Proust's Belle Epoque, he gnawed  his way through chicken on "a base of artichoke hearts, slivers of carrots of various colors had been curled into the likeness of a rose. A cheese course led to a finale of chocolate, strawberries and raspberries, again shaped like a rose, enlivened by a coulis of “carnal thorns,” whatever that may be. In any event, it was very good."

The fawning Times culinary review gives off a distinct vibe of Nero fiddling while Rome burns... right down to each individual table bearing the name of a celebrity or a politician. I imagine that guests were fihgting over who got to sit at tables labeled "Nancy Pelosi" and "Antony Blinken."

War and genocide and starvation can rage all they want outside of the palace walls, but for the elite dignitaries running the show,  everything is literally coming up roses. Even as they wined and dined in a sickening display of  war nostalgia,, in grisly remembrance of slaughters past, slaughters present, and slaughters yet to come,, thousands of protesters were surrounding the White House, draping its entire perimeter with a red banner bearing the names of Palestinian victims of US-financed genocide.

Biden and his Cold Warrior clan, now variously known as Neocons, Liberal Interventionists and Nato Partners, simply were not counting on the masses of people being disgusted by their violent antics around the world. Biden's repulsive boasting that the war in Ukraine and the slaughter of Gazans being good for the economy as they protect weapons manufacturing jobs, has fallen flat on its face and rightly so. He is still counting on the military Keynesism that finally lifted the US out of the Great Depression during World War II to do the trick once again.

He is looking at what Marcel Proust called "the monstrous past" through rose colored glasses. Biden's own search for lost time replaces the horror of past wars with "a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled."

Of course he is running, or actually shambling, for re-election. And he is boasting of US-supplied missiles flyng iinto Russia.

This patriotic fervor in combination with senile dementia (and I include Donald Trump and his own twisted MAGA version of wpatriotism in that category) is particularly frightening.

This patriotic fervor is what keeps Biden on his feet even as he breaks off one of his "tall tales" of being arrested in a civil rights protest or graduating first in his law school class with a sudden blank, lost, slack-jawed stare. The mere sight of a flag-draped stage could be the miracle stimulant that snaps him right out of his senility for whole minutes at a time.

Meanwhile, even "progressives" like Bernie Sanders are urging people to re-elect Biden jthosust to avoid a second term of Trump.

He and other liberal apologists would be wise to heed the words of Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from the real Hitler.

"Those who choose the lesser evil, " she wrote, "forget very quickly that they chose evil."