I saw a fellow I know accidently knock over a cup of coffee at Starbucks this morning. Although he was clearly embarrassed, he might have been somewhat relieved when I explained that he could just blame in on Russia.

And that he wouldn’t need any evidence.

The ease with which Russia can be blamed for anything that goes wrong in the Empire or with Imperial warlords like Hillary, is troubling. And revealing.  We are much closer to a war of principals or proxies with Russia than the American people realize.

But Putin gets it. There was a plaintive tone to his remarks when he spoke to foreign journalists earlier this year about incremental NATO expansionism.

“[You] do not feel a sense of the impending danger – this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on.

“I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.”

The idea of the enemy is central to fomenting war. In A Terrible Love of War, James Hillman observes that “the invasion of Iraq began before the invasion of Iraq; it had already begun when the nation was named among the axis of evil.”

“It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces war upon us, but the imagination. Imagination is the driving force, especially when imagination has been preconditioned by the media, education, and religion, and fed with aggressive boosterism and pathetic pieties by the state’s need for enemies. The imagined phantom swells and clouds the horizon, we cannot see beyond enmity.  The archetypal idea gains a face.  Once the enemy is imagined, one is already in a state of war.  Once the enemy has been named, war has already been declared and the actual declaration becomes inconsequential, only legalistic.”

Now that the Empire’s enemy has been named, can the hot phase of the war be far behind?

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