War is Wrong and Evil – The Western Left AND Right are, too
Denial isn’t going to cut it anymore, then again, disillusionment and enlightenment were always twins!
Note for new readers – As always – auto-estimated reading times are much exaggerated – just four pages of essay today (followed by more than a dozen pages loaded with interesting excerpts and links from others, which you may peruse at your leisure, whenever you find you have some!)
Hey folks – I must open with an apology. Yesterday I recorded a new “Conditions are always impossible” show with my dear friend Ian Calvert. The subjects were important, but were nonetheless overtaken by frightening events. I’ll still run that one very soon, but today seems to call for something very specific and direct.
Why am I an anti-tribalist?
Am I just stupid? (hey, why not make people on both major factions angry at the same time?)
Am I just looking for a cause so unlikely and frustrating, I can always be an underdog?
No folks, I am working backward from certain knowledge of disaster, and trying to get to the most useful fulcrum I can see, which might still save all of us from irreparable ruin and endless horror (the “lemming track” we’ve all been on, this whole century).
The super-wealthy have been manipulating world affairs for a very long time. They regard normal people like you and I the way we regard mosquitoes – irritants and threats which should be kept clear of their aims and/or killed. Sometimes they choose between these options based on what is most immediately profitable, and sometimes they play a longer game, sacrificing short term monetary gains for the sake of extending their power either geographically or in time (often both).
As a class, killing us for money (or exploiting, expropriating, false-taxing and even outright enslaving, if that benefits them most) is what they do.
Failure to understand this incredibly simple and morally paramount reality is making every one of us in the west – left and right, traditional and progressive, responsible and narcissistic – all of us – complicit in the very worst kinds of evil of which mankind has ever been capable.
As long as we, the democratic citizens in western nations, keep pretending that our parties represent greater and lesser ratios of virtue, instead of acknowledging they are all deeply wedded to extended racist mass murder all around the world without any limit in time (or by morality) we are the bad guys.
Of course the game of tribalism is expressly (and very expensively) designed to make us think that we can be “the good guys” just by having a fight about the neighbour’s attitude, even while our favoured faction slaughters foreigners wholesale, without the slightest qualm or apology.
That’s what makes it such total shit – it is a scheme to enable endless evil and mass murder.
In 2016 – roughly half of the American people voted to endorse grotesque racist mass murder, and the other half voted for Donald Trump. Amazingly, the people who voted for Hillary asserted that they were anti-racists, because they really thought Trump being rude, was worse than Hillary mass murdering black people (Libya and Syria) as secretary of State – and doing it with open (and still evident) PRIDE.
I’m a history geek, so I also know of hundreds of other mass-murder enabling stupidities on the political left in America, but this is the recent-clearest.
And now we have a whole game where the BigWar sponsored BigNews brings us story after story about the incredible and unprecedented evils being done by Trump, almost all of which are twenty years old, and were not just absolutely endorsed, but also actively used (in corrupt fashion) by both political parties.
Millions of people suddenly heard the name Palantir for the first time a week ago – every one of those people is what you call grotesquely ignorant – in arrears on their most basic citizen responsibility.
Palantir has been a frightening link between CIA Mossad and MI6 for decades now. A digital connection between the three most dangerous agencies on the face of the earth. By that I mean, three agencies which all believe they have the right to subvert any government on earth – including their own – in order to achieve the power-ends sought by the insane strategists of the stratospherically wealthy.
Why didn’t Edward Snowden ‘go through channels?’ Because he saw what the state did to courageous NSA whistle-blower Bill Binney, when he did things properly. They destroyed his life, and corrupted every agency of state power they could, to silence him forever.
Who was Bill Binney? Oh, no one special, he’s just the guy who figured out the algorythm which first allowed us to sort through the deluge of the internet and find things, usefully. He wanted to warn about the way the state was already collecting and organizing information about citizens, but was instead attacked (even an FBI swat raid on his house, while he was in the shower). Then the NSA gave his algorythm to the founders of Google, which has been a faithful servant of NSA (and CIA) all along.
If you think I’m being cynical (they did used to have the company motto – “don’t be evil”) please understand – google earth, which they bought and integrated into their brand, was begun as a global target-plotting program, but the original company ran out of money halfway through. Not Google!
So – can you remember when you first heard about Google? THAT’S when you were supposed to start being concerned about all of this. Yesterday is way too late.
Now let me be ultra-clear here. Plenty of lousy stuff is being done by Trump’s team – but again, in case you didn’t notice, the Biden team’s philosophy (still inspiring most of western Europe) was to spend billions of taxpayer dollars (all of which are desperately needed for domestic priorities) to cause the unnecessary death of literally millions, even deliberately risking a nuclear world war three, just so they could steal resources that belong to other people – who would be perfectly happy to sell them.
Stop and read that again if you have to. This is why we in the west really go to war. Armed robbery.
He’s a Hitler and they have weapon X and cannot be trusted and think of the poor puppies threatened all convince us, at one time or another. Yes, some of the greatest anti-war protests in the history of the world happened just before the Iraq war. But where were the protesters against Obama’s slaughters?
Well, you might say that they were in the same place as all the coverage which should have followed Snowden’s original leaks. The kind of stories about secret power that would let citizens have some impact on the international policy of their nations, like in those whaddayacallits – oh yeah, democracies!
Gone, vanished, silenced – and no one even remarking on this shocking display of corrupt power.
(It is really amazing how happy we are to kill others for being non-democratic, while simultaneously insisting our tribal faction alone has the right to destroy democracy HERE, for the sake of “Good”)
Biden’s entire term in office, like Obama’s before him, was a constant never ending shredding of the common presumption of rights. They happily set fire to the constitution, just for political advantage.
Trump doesn’t read, so as frustrating at you may find him (in my case, very) he skates on some small measure of relative culpability just there. Those other guys actually knew what they were signing!
Of course Biden was brain-dead long before he was elected, we all know that – but he used to be able to read! (back when he was a slick racist ultra corrupt goddamned con-man for corporate America).
No really, this is how bad tribalism now is. People who call themselves “Left” elected a brain-dead lifelong Dixiecrat racist scumbag “for anti-racism” and put the government of America entirely in the hands of unelected career civil service megalomaniacs. (Blinken could never apologize enough for even half of the damage he did, even if he does nothing else with the rest of his life).
In response, people on the right elected someone with so much bloody-minded will and ego that they hoped he might bring America back under the influence of the electorate again. Those hopes lasted a few weeks, and then began to collapse (I have a SUPERB link below, about this crushing of early hope). The funny thing is, it is almost certainly the same thing which gave them hope, which made him the wrong person to invest with such hope.
He had a team of outsider thinkers and deep state neocons put together, and seemed as if he was trying to play them against each other (as he has, in many corporate settings), but ultimately all of the most promising people were sidelined, and the exact creeps he was elected to defeat, rose in their place.
So again – why am I insisting that everyone is wrong, instead of pandering? (Especially in a moment when far fewer than ever are willing to listen to a message like that?) Because I want us all to do better, and I am convinced that the only way we can, is to reject these manufactured tribalism games, and come together as responsible citizens.
I absolutely do NOT mean we need perfect agreement about all or even most things, but this whole “Anyone who disagrees with me about issue X is not even a person with a soul” stuff, just has to end. That’s not just a juvenile rejection of the most basic responsibility of citizens (to be at least somewhat informed) it is also the exact surrender which allows the richest and most destructive to gather our proxies and then so wildly abuse them (and us and the whole rest of the world, in the bargain).
You, I, and every other person on earth, is weird and wrong to at least one other person (with at least a partial point).
So what? – move on – talk anyway – get over yourself. Contrary to decades of infantilizing and evil-power serving consumerism, our feelings are not important, our actions and our understandings are.
I am an anti-tribalist, because tribalism enables mass murder, war, exploitation and mass destruction, and unlike many who have given up caring and just gone politically feral, I still have real hope. Yes, tribalism offers tons of emotional pleasure - reject it!
Overcoming tribalism. Recognizing the staggeringly huge overlap in common interests, and negotiating our differences based on principle and reason, not narcissism and emotion, is the key to doing better. Planning and BUILDING again.
By which I mean making a life we actually LIKE. Can you even picture that? A world where some people weren’t made to starve, just to promote the price of eggs in a far distant market. Not a perfect world, just one where we – and I mean citizens together, from all across the spectrum – worked on actually making communities and greater regions really work, for all kinds of rich human thriving.
The only reason this general benefit and fair-play policy seems impossible to so many of us, is because we’ve become so accustomed to surrendering to the “skim” of the rentier class (and of course their far louder and less subtle nouveaux riche digital attention-skimming brethren). Their cut (much like the foreign resources always coveted by lying colonialists) is exactly what WE need, to be able to make it. Simple as.
But we won’t ever get there by electing Land Developers, Lawyers, Investment Bankers, or Chief Prosecutors – so that rules out almost the entire Western World right now – so deeply into our fatal tribalism, still, even at this ever so late imperial hour – that we elect our own worst oppressors and then defend them, passionately, just for the hope that they might at least smite our hated tribal foes one solid blow.
People, adults, citizens, sane humans (everywhere else on earth) know, that just won’t do.
We won’t get to utopia on an army of Karens and their tantrums, or with a phalanx of new right warriors and their ‘stands’.
In other words – we’re going to have to actually sincerely try (for the first time in many generations).
And until then, we are our own Visigoths, in every possible way – and also the worst most relentless mass murdering nightmare to every other nation on earth, almost none of which have ever come anywhere near to us, in sheer general distributed madness.
Finally, as a parting note for my unwarrantedly smug Canadian friends who think Carney somehow stood up to Israel, with some recent “Strong Words” (tm). No folks (once again, basic awareness please) the explosive propellant material used in every single 155mm artillery shell sent by the US to support Israel’s all-direction aggression comes from one single (General Dynamics owned) plant in Quebec.
There is NO decency in our western political tribalism – only constant two-sided capitulation to the worst evil we do.
“They” will not ever fix this. They like it this way (and not only own companies which rake in millions, from every conference convened to stem bloodshed they start, you just know they are so cynical they get a kickback from every body-bag, too).
So the choices are – own our complicity. See in the mirror the very thing we say we hate the most – not for some orgy of self-flagellation, but greater understanding of complexity, and a far clearer view of others. Stop pretending that our internal emotional projection, relieves our personal moral burden.
Or – do better, together, which requires first recognizing that necessity, and then humbly trying to learn. Accepting a mission, in one way, finding true purpose, too.
Cheers folks. Sorry if that was a bit fierce – but this is simply not a moment for our usual self-serving foolishness.
Pray (or invoke, by secular means) and for god’s sake think and learn to be better at love.
HEART AND BRAIN.
We won’t make it there with souls intact, without these, respect and gratitude. And it wouldn’t be a place worth getting, anyhow, even if we did. (though no one could rationally deny we alone deserve that fate, unless...)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As per my recent practise, I had a rich set of curated links and quotations from interesting sources with useful perspectives laid out today, but I’m going to drop the most topical ones altogether, in favour of a selection of channels you can watch as things unfold, which will help give you the information and context that BigNews is now less honest about than it has been in many decades.
Below that, I’ll have a few economics and culture pieces (because until we do get nuked, life goes on).
First – channels for up to the minute reality-checks (‘cause the BS storm is already here).
Dialogue Works is superb – brings together the voices of many highly experienced and wise insiders, from governments in America and around the world. Also, Nima is both calm and well informed, (shows respect) and so gets fine insights from people who are sometimes provoked to rant, elsewhere!
Glenn Greenwald remains one of the most courageous and impactful journalists alive. The kind who shows enough nerve to literally bring down governments, and then attacks the corruption of the new government he just helped to save from unjust imprisonment! Principle (and civil liberties) first!
(which was why Snowden picked him – but OMG is it impressive that he’s still standing).
System Update with Glenn Greenwald on Rumble (still the best thing on the channel)
Jimmy Dore is a comedian, but he’s also, like Greenwald, a man of both nerve and principle. By standing up against the worst excesses of the Biden era, he earned the respect of many on the right (and the ire of many lifelong allies, as with so many who were talking sense, instead of faction). But he (and his always sharp guest-hosts also) do not spare Trump or any of his errors, either. I want to say Dore has the kind of nerve that we all once thought Jon Stewart actually had, only without the constant sickening “Aren’t I cute, mom?” camera-mugging. (and not a sellout, the way Jon turned out to be).
Glenn Diesen is one of my favourite political analysts – a very modest Norwegian professor, he is also one of the world’s great exponents of Westphalianism (what to do after the great bestriding hegemon falls, and then all the false claimants to the throne are exhausted from endless war and struggle).
The fact that super productive European fairness treaties came about because they tried war until they were almost destroyed is, well, typical actually. The powerful never offer people concessions (not even ones which prove to be very good for them also), unless they are absolutely forced to, by the people (and that, my friends, would be us).
Glenn Diesen – a calm helpful voice for international peace and cooperation (learning from history)
Judge Napolitano is a treasure – and I don’t care one bit that he once worked at FOX. Seriously, watch him a bit yourself, and you’ll start to realize that though they had a lot of propaganda from the start (like the rest of BigMedia), there were also some currents of truth that left-coded media banned, which FOX did (until recently) allow.
I will say that he has a habit of running the most infuriatingly ignorant clip he can find, when world leaders do especially insane and stupid things. Can be very stressful – on the other hand, he has introduced me to several of my favourite independent analysts and commentators, and keeps me up to date with others. Compact punchy shows, too - no one ever takes three hours to get to their point!
If nothing else, you must watch him talking to Pepe Escobar and Alestair Crooke (usually mondays)
Judge Napolitano on Youtube – new interviews every weekday (the guy is a machine).
Danny Haiphong is the kind of old-school no apology anti-imperialist that I remember very fondly from the early eighties – extremely rare these days, especially with so much reason and fire, in combination
Brian Berletic (The New Atlas) may be the most cynical and supremely informed analyst online. For those who’ve had their heads buried in the sand (left or right) he’ll be a shock at first, but even when I prefer a more hopeful explanation I find elsewhere, his hardcore realism is a useful check to fantasy.
Brian Berletic – The New Atlas – On Youtube
Danny Davis is a former military officer turned whistle-blower who remains well connected for sources, but also reminds us that principle and intellect also exist deep in the military (probably far more so, than in the intelligence directorates). They study history deeply, and man, it shows.
Danny Davis – Trying to wake his beloved country up, before it goes over the precipice.
I’ve shared the Duran, and the individual links for both Alex’s before – indispensable (and often bleakly funny, just when you need a bit of that)
The Duran on Youtube – and Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforu
TheGrayzone is probably the most important small independent news journal on the web. Max Blumenthal, Kitt Klarenburg, Anya Parampil and many other star reporters publish here. Year after year, they show outstanding courage about maddening world affairs that so many remain silent about.
Scheerpost is my favourite news aggregator (left, but almost entirely sane-left, only rarely corrupted with cheap dem propaganda takes - and those, swiftly refuted)
It is run by Robert Scheer – the same fellow who ran the famous Ramparts magazine, back in the similarly turbulent and baffling late sixties. Read Patrick Lancaster, Mister Fish and Chris Hedges.
DropsiteNews is a comparatively new outlet – but has already gathered an outstanding bullpen of reporters, and have particularly superb (that is, heartbreaking) first hand witness pieces from the conflicts all around West Asia – not just Gaza, Lebanon and Syria also (Iran no doubt to come).
Responsible Statecraft is one of those odd projects which suggests not all think-tanks are (entirely) evil! Run by “The Quincy Institute” they are surprisingly insightful, and ‘straight’ enough that they are also read by many legislators (a useful balance, even if it invites a bit much jingoism for my tastes).
Responsible Statecraft (about the best a politician who actually was well-motivated, might be thinking)
Larry Johnson is one of the most interesting former CIA analysts in the public sphere. He’s also the most prolific writer of all the members of “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.” After spending a career as a cold warrior and watching the mess that came after, he’s now seriously dedicated to peace.
Larry Johnson on Substack (He also publishes some great guest writers on Sonar21)
Now how about a bit of smart analysis? (while the world yet spins, and our hearts yet beat).
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
I should start with Rat, who as so often, nails the point completely (good time of day humans indeed!)
Tara Van Dijk keeps hitting them right out of the park. This is an outstandingly clearly reasoned piece, and very important for any who want to be clear and useful about their politics, thinking, and effect.
Criticizing modern (tribalist) feminism isn’t about scoring points against those who bug you – it is about actually making a world where both men and women might be happier, and also much closer to sane!
“...Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) advocates for women’s emancipation through the cultivation of reason and virtue. “I do not wish [women] to have power over men,” she writes, “but over themselves.” She critiques the cultural emphasis on beauty and charm, arguing that such focus traps women in a cycle of self-objectification: “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Wollstonecraft’s proposal, in effect, is that if women wish to claim the same political rights as men, they must change and devote themselves to the development of their intellect and moral reasoning. She does not rail against The Patriarchy, which didn’t become the evil Poohbah of feminist discourse until the 1960’s when the “smash the patriarchy” mantra tickled their fancy. Rather, she focused on what women needed to become in order to claim and be recognised as rights-bearing citizens.
Wollstonecraft’s life (1759–1797), like that of many early feminist figures, undermines the narrative that women were completely oppressed until feminism and the women’s movement freed them from domestic servitude.7 She actively participated in the radical intellectual circles of her time, to include collaborating with figures like Thomas Paine. Wollstonecraft lived and moved with a freedom that feminist histories often make seem impossible for a woman in her era. She had love affairs, travelled to revolutionary France during the Reign of Terror, engaged in politics, and gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Wollstonecraft is rightly remembered as a pioneering Enlightenment intellectual. But her life also reveals a deeper contradiction: that a woman in the 18th century could write, travel, speak, and scandalise—without being forced “back into the kitchen” or erased by patriarchy. The usual feminist narrative would have you believe such autonomy was unthinkable before the movement. Wollstonecraft herself proves otherwise.
19th Century First Wave Women’s Movement: Suffrage and Temperance
The women’s movement in the United States gained momentum after the abolition of slavery, coalescing around two main causes: suffrage and temperance. Unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, who grounded women’s emancipation in rational self-discipline and equality with men, these women emphasised their moral superiority. They saw themselves not as political radicals, but as Christian women, mothers, and moral reformers. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), under leaders like Frances Willard, argued that women needed the vote not to assert individual rights, but to protect the home from the destructive influence of alcohol and the vices rampant in tavern culture. Willard framed suffrage as a tool of “home protection,” enabling women to extend their nurturing influence into public life. She envisioned women as “citizen-mothers” who would, in her words, “come into government and purify it, into politics and cleanse the Stygian pool.” This was not the language of liberation, but of moral stewardship. These women justified their entrance into politics as an extension of domestic duty, not a rejection of it. Their claim to public authority rested on their natural and divine difference from men, not on equality with them.”
And
“...The way feminists enjoy The Patriarchy is, in this sense, conservative at best and reactionary at worst. The fantasy of The Patriarchy provides the certainties, grievances, and moral elevation that obscure the contradictions of modern sexual life. In 1970, Hannah Arendt gave us a framework of power that exemplifies how anachronistic feminism’s central antagonist is:
The rule of man over man—of the one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy—has now been replaced by something more formidable: bureaucracy, the rule of Nobody. In this regime, no men, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible… Tyranny, understood as government unaccountable to its subjects, finds its purest form in rule by Nobody. (16)
Feminism, like the Woman Question that birthed it, is a symptom of modernity’s rupture of tradition. The Patriarchy has become a fetish—an ideological decoy that allows feminists to repress, disavow or foreclose the truth: there are no men—neither the One nor the Many—who can be meaningfully held responsible for the state of womanhood. Certainly not as a coherent class in a world increasingly governed by market forces, bureaucracy, algorithms, and legal fictions.”
And
“...In the history of science, “saving the phenomena” refers to the effort to preserve an explanatory model even after it no longer matches reality. Think of Ptolemaic astronomy: as evidence mounted that Earth was not the centre of the universe, epicycles were added to explain certain anomalies. The model wasn’t abandoned—it was made more elaborate. Not to get closer to truth, but to protect the premise.
Feminism’s investment in The Patriarchy is structurally identical. As material realities shift, power becomes more abstract, and sexual norms fragment—feminism doesn’t rethink. It doubles down. It adds more epicycles: toxic masculinity, mansplaining, emotional labour, incels, woke bros, the manosphere. Everything is Patriarchy. Everything proves Patriarchy. The model explains its own failure. It becomes pure ideology. Feminists, like pre-Copernican theologians, are no longer trying to understand the system—they’re trying to save the sublime object: The Patriarchy. The feminist death drive orbits it. So does their double jouissance—as victim and vanquisher.”
And
“...Since the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century and the industrial upheavals that followed, one rule has remained operative: anything but class. You can blame a religion, a race, a culture, “toxic masculinity,” or fate itself. You can indulge conspiracy theories about secret cabals. Just don’t point the finger at a society structured around private capital accumulation and the socialisation of risk.”
Here is a profoundly insightful piece from one of my favourite writers on the right. I should mention, I was talking with my smarter leftist friends about how we had effectively won the culture war, but then completely screwed it up, by crossing all boundaries of mutual respect, twenty years ago or more.
These insights, into how dangerous the polarized tribalist (emotionalist, and no longer principled or scholarly) modern incarnation of the left might become, if forever immortalized in our AI brains, are both startling and exactly on point. What I was saying above – it wouldn’t be worth it if we did? This!
“...Have you ever read the book Conservative Victories in the Culture War 1914 - 1999? All the pages are blank.
Over the course of the 20th century, the Right lost the Long March through the Institutions. All the marches, all the institutions. The universities fell first, then the journals and the media, the publishing houses, the science academies, the tv stations, the tech companies, the law firms, and finally even the business world. The Left didn’t just win the argument; it captured the entire apparatus of truth itself. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up on Wikipedia.
Of course, truth is more than an apparatus.
Despite all its hard-won power, despite its total dominance over information, education, entertainment, and administration, the Left’s promised Utopia failed to materialize. The 20th century ended in war, stagnation, cynicism, and despair. Cities began crumbling, trust began evaporating, debt exploding, infrastructure collapsing, birthrates imploding. The Left won everything, and everything was lost.
In the 21st century, as the economy grew ever-more fictitious, the social fabric grew more threadbare, and the people more medicated, anxious, obese, infertile, and alone. Everywhere in the West, people began clamoring for change. The populist wave rose: Brexit, Trump, Italy, Hungary, Argentina, the Netherlands. Dissatisfaction metastasized into rebellion. Finally, Cthulhu began to swim Right.
And now, just as the regime begins to teeter, just as the reality-denying machinery begins to sputter and backfire, a new machinery arrives… The machinery of AI. Faster than any revolution. More persuasive than any sermon. More scalable than any school. The machine that explains. The machine that guides. The machine that teaches. A machine that has been taught by the very people who drove us into ruin.
For decades, no matter how many ballots were cast, nothing upstream ever changed. Because upstream of politics was culture, and the culture was controlled by the Left. Now, finally, when the Right has begun to regain control the culture, we are about to discover that there is something upstream of culture: Code.”
Here’s an incredibly insightful piece about the side-effects of reading (the ones we treasure most, and are fast losing, thanks to our weird experiment with the random digital indoctrination of our young).
“...If new media outperform text on primary utility, ordinary selection pressure may displace literacy from its cultural and cognitive niche. But while these systems may replicate many of the affordances of textuality, their effects may be fundamentally different. And when it comes to literacy, it is precisely the secondary and tertiary effects that carry disproportionate value.
These effects include recursive empathy, long-horizon abstraction, disciplined counterfactual reasoning, interiority, and the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives over time. They emerge slowly, through sustained symbolic engagement. They are difficult to measure, easy to overlook, and prone to erosion when unattended.
To be clear about the mechanism: our society selects for the affordances of a medium —speed, ease, efficiency— not for its effects. And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized. They rarely register on the dashboards that guide decision-making.”
Now here’s something outstandingly useful for my chums on the left especially – another passionate and intelligent writer from the right, conveying a sense of dismay and collapse which feels EXACTLY like the implosion so many felt after Obama’s election, when it became clear that for all his demands that we dare to hope once more, even after being burned so often, he too was a corporate fink and liar.
Even if you disagree with him in many places (as I do, with some pieces far more than others) “Bad Cattitude” from El Gato Malo always makes for compelling reading. Like it says on the masthead – come for the cats, stay for the toxoplasmosis!
This piece is also one more fantastic reminder of the point I was after above. The stuff we are all endlessly obsessing about, is nowhere near as scary as that which we still refuse to face in common.
ECONOMICS (AND WAR, OF COURSE – SAME SUBJECT)
How closely does talk follow action, when it really counts? Pretty much what you’d expect (grotesque). Just in case you think I was taking liberties above, about my own lousy government. Anti-war stalwart Medea Benjamin brings the hard facts.
“...Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.
A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.
The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones, and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.”
Here’s Alex Krainer on the specific link between economics and war. (very old and well established).
“...Whatever war in history you study, you find that, as a rule, people are hugely reluctant to go to war, and that especially includes soldiers and military generals. Wars are also hugely expensive and almost never go according to plan. Invariably, they result in great destruction, economic decline and tragic loss of life. I’m old enough to remember that political leaders used to talk about war as the solution of the last resort and supposedly wars were such serious business that they could only be declared by legislative bodies of people’s representatives in a large majority.
But somehow we’ve done away with all that and for some democratic nations, wars have become the single most captivating obsession of the political class and I thought, there had to be a reason for all this - some obscure moving principle behind the seeming dysfunction. At some point I came to the conclusion that the system of incentives driving us to wars must emanate from the banking system and that its main objective is the quest for capital.
First time I articulated that idea, it was met with incredulity and some experts from the world of finance told me I was wrong, that collateral was something different entirely, vaguely something to do with mushrooms (I can’t recall exactly, perhaps they used the word ‘fungible,’ or something like that) and that I was out of my depth. But still, the more I looked and paid attention, the evidence cropped up that wars are exactly about that. In March I published an article on Substack in which I articulated my argument: “The powers behind the throne and the forever wars.”
Then recently I had another unexpected corroboration. On Friday, 23 May, I had the pleasure of joining prof. Glenn Diesen on his podcast where several months earlier I explained my idea that wars are all about collateral. That time we didn’t move closer to a conclusion, but in our Fridays discussion (around the 19:18 mark), Prof. Diesen told me that he recently spoke with a person who had worked for British intelligence for “a few decades,” and who told him that the wars were over the “collateral for the banking system.” Our full discussion is below:”
And just what kind of money are they playing-with (and risking the lives of millions, as they do?) oh dear! City of London Rules? That means – no freakin’ rules at all. (the evil beating heart of colonialism, yet lives).
Cynthia Chung really comes through on this one. (she’s always great, but some pieces stop you in your tracks).
“...The 2008 crisis put in the spotlight the psychopathic level of greed, vice, apathy and short-sightedness from those who wanted to play into the City of London and Wall Street casino houses. Get rich quick and don’t care who you screw in the process, after all, at the end of the day you’re either a winner or a loser.
Since the general public tends to consist of decent people, there is a widespread difficulty in comprehending how entire economies of countries have been hijacked by these piranhas. That we have hit such a level of crime that even people’s hard earned pensions, education, health-care, housing etc. are all being gambled away… LEGALLY.
Looking upon investment bankers today, one is reminded of those sad addicts in the casino who are ruined and lose everything, except the difference is, they are given the option to sell their neighbour’s family into slavery to pay off their debt.
It is no secret that much of the “finance” that goes through the City of London and Wall Street is dirty and yet despite this recognition, there appears to be an inability to address it and that at this point we are told that if we try to address it by breaking up and regulating the “Too Big to Fail” banks, then the whole economy would come tumbling down.
That is, the world is so evidently run by criminal activity that at this point we have become dependent on its dirty money to keep afloat the world economy.”
I have mentioned before the strange but compelling idea that perhaps Trump came in with the backing of a rebel faction of the deep-state, which wanted to gain institutional dominance by backing an oustider. Could be digital bankers trying to break the old money-houses’ monopoly of global economic control, or it might be better characterized as a B faction of raw power, which has been biding their time, while the neolib A team crashed and burned these last few decades, and now feels ready for a turn at bat (whether or not their ‘alternate’ solutions are batty).
Here’s Alex Krainer once more, with another bracing take on the “Who is who’s bitch here anyhow?” question.
“...In my understanding the deal that Trump made with the ruling class had several elements. The key element was to bring our ballooning debt under control. And this is where the Trumpian dilemma took root.The ruling class itself was divided to some extent—some favoring domestic fiscal measures of responsibility that Congress has never shown a willingness to submit to, while others favored a strategy of squeezing vassal states around the world—defined as all countries that relied on the dollar to transact their international trade. While Elon Musk’s DOGE did a remarkable job in exposing the depth of American fiscal irresponsibility—not to say chaos—it predicatably fell short, impaled not least by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. That, of course, was entirely predictable. And so main hope for getting America’s debt and ballooning debt service under control was in Trump’s Tariff shock and awe.
This was essentially a scheme to force the rest of the world to pay down America’s debt, allowing the US to maintain its military hegemony and—this part wasn’t spoken out loud, camoflaged by the DOGE efforts—continue its domestic fiscal irresponsibility. This, in the end, amounts to kicking the can a bit further down the road. The hope was that the shock and awe approach of the Trumpian tariff onslaught would catch the world by surprise by its very enormity, forcing the world into line before they knew what had hit them. We’re now seeing that this hasn’t worked as hoped/planned—the world in general is resisting, led by China. What has been revealed for all to see is the tight linkage between the hegemonic dollar and US military might.
While America retains powerful military capabilities, the US military’s force projection capabilities have been revealed (or, perhaps, confirmed) by Trump’s misadventures—especially in Yemen—to no longer have the global reach that they previously were presumed to have. In fact, as Col. Larry Wilkerson maintained yesterday, it may well be that it is only the American nuclear arsenal that preserves the US military status. The reality is that the US is in no position to go head to head in a conventional war against Russia, China, or Iran. The Iranian example is especially important, because it is the one country with which the US is most likely to be drawn into a full scale war, rather than a proxy war. The result—while unpleasant for Iran—would likely be a US withdrawal from West Asia, which is the foundation for the Petro-Dollar.
Interestingly, prolonging the war has been Britain’s core objective in Ukraine since the very beginning. One of the expressions of this objective was formulated by Project Alchemy, convened in February 2022 under UK’s Ministry of Defence. It brought together a group of military and intelligence officers who put together an array of plans “to keep Ukraine fighting.”
Dusting off the Operation Gladio playbook
Led by Lt. General Charlie Stickland, “The Elders” of Project Alchemy produced a document titled, “Ukraine’s Next Chapter - Elders Grand Strategy Options.” Stickland is not a ‘Sir’ yet, but he claims lineage from “a long line of pirates and buccaneers,” so his knighthood is as good as in the bag. Among other admirable counsels, Stickland’s elder alchemists advocated for outright terrorism, envisioning a Gladio-style army of Ukrainian partisan fighters to do assassinations, sabotage and terror missions behind enemy lines. Throughout the document, the need to “keep Ukraine fighting.. at all cost” was described as London’s “main effort” in the conflict.
Why keep Ukraine fighting? If you guessed that it would be for the democracy, freedom, and human rights of the Ukrainians, I’m afraid you guessed wrong. The merry cabal of British alchemists had other plans in mind: it was to “set the conditions for the reshaping of an open international order of the future.” To do that, it will be necessary to eliminate Russia: the Elders were convinced that so long as Russia struggled against Ukraine, British intelligence would be able to challenge Moscow’s “stature as a competent international actor: “A long war against a small state makes [Putin] look a fool.”
And no, it isn’t just people like Alex and Cynthia who are increasingly worried about Albion’s violent and persistent imperial delusions.
“...Unpopular governments always retreat to grounds of lazy convenience. Instead of engaging in exercises of courage, they take refuge in obvious distractions. And there is no more obvious distraction than preparing for war against a phantom enemy.
That is exactly where the government of Sir Keir Starmer finds itself. Despite a mammoth majority and a dramatically diminished Tory opposition, the Prime Minister acts like a man permanently besieged, his Labour Party seemingly less popular than Typhoid Mary. His inability to be unequivocal to questions of whether he will contest the next election suggest as much.
The same cannot be said about his enthusiasm for the sword and sabre. There are monsters out there to battle, and Sir Keir is rising to the plate. Sensing this, the military mandarins, most prominently General Sir Roland Walker, head of the Army, have been more than encouraging, seeing the need to ready the country for war by 2027. Given the military’s perennial love affair with astrology, that state of readiness could only be achieved with a doubling of the Army’s fighting power and tripling it by 2030.
Given that background, the UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was commissioned in July 2024. Led by former Labour Defence Secretary and NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson, the freshly released report promises a fat boon for the military industrial complex. Like all efforts to encourage war, its narrative is that of supposedly making Britain safer.”
Krainer again (yikes – but you can’t look away, it is all far too relevant and horrific)
“...In 1998, the UK declassified documents related to the “Operation Unthinkable,” a secret plan to attack Russia. The document was drafted by the British Joint Planning Staff and submitted to Winston Churchill on 22 May 1945. It is available at the UK National Archives at this link. The immediate consideration explored by the Joint Planning Staff was a surprise attack against Russia by the UK and the US, supported by the Polish and German troops. The date for the start of hostilities was set at July 1, 1945.
The overall “political objective” of the operation was, to submit Russia “to our will”:
“A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being; but it might not. … if they want total war, they are in the position to have it.”
A total war is necessary
Note, all this hard thinking was going on in London even as World War 2 was still raging and the Soviet Union, allied with UK, US and France, was in the final stages of fighting Hitler’s Wermacht at the Eastern front. But defeating Nazi Germany obviously wasn’t the top priority of the British establishment: their top priority was defeating Russia. To pursue it, the Joint Planning Staff advanced two hypotheses: (1) that “a total war is necessary,” and (2) that “a quick success would suffice to gain our political objective.” However, the quick victory in a surprise attack might only yield a temporary result. A lasting one would require victory in a total war:
“The only way we can achieve our object with certainty and lasting results is by victory in a total war.”
Achieving this, however, would have to be a very long term project:
To achieve the decisive defeat of Russia in a total war would require, in particular, the mobilisation of manpower to counteract their present enormous manpower resources. This is a very long term project and would involve: the deployment in Europe of a large proportion of the vast resources of the United States; and the re-equipment and reorganization of German manpower and of all the Western allies.
It will take a very long time
In conclusion, the Joint Planning Staff again reiterated that, “the only thing certain is that to win it would take us a very long time.” They didn’t define exactly how long a time they were talking about, but it could be inferred from the document that they were talking about years, if not decades.
Fast forward 80 years, and it would appear that the UK is as committed as ever to a total war against Russia, first to the last Ukrainian and whatever else it takes thereafter, even if the conflict goes nuclear. Over the recent months, British officials, including the PM Keir Starmer frequently stated how important it was for the US to provide the backstop to the allies war effort in Ukraine and to act as the guarantor of Ukraine’s security.”
Japan is especially indebted, but this problem is built into many economies now, because we left other problems rot, without solving them, by pumping the system full of “free” (oligarch serving) money.
Krainer once again, with some superb insights.
“...But delaying the unravelling of the financial and economic imbalances with a flood of free money will almost certainly prove hugely destructive. At the same time as Japan has the world’s highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the developed world (260%), Japan is also the world’s largest creditor nation, holding around $3 trillion in foreign assets, including US Treasuries. As of last November, Japan owned about $1.09 trillion in U.S. Treasuries, making it the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt.
Japan’s free money bonanza also gave rise to a colossal carry trade where investors borrowed yen (almost for free), converted it to US dollars and used the proceeds to purchase much higher-yielding assets like US Treasuries, corporate bonds and stocks. But the carry trade only works if there’s a sufficiently large interest rate gap between the cheap and expensive money. Now that the Japanese yields are rising, the carry trade has begun to unwind, which led to a sharp, 25% crash in the Nikkei index last summer, from the peak level of around 41,750 to the August 2024 trough at around 30,800.
Although the Nikkei partially recovered and didn’t slip into a bear market, it never regained its 2024 peaks, or its prior uptrend. Rather, the episode foreshadowed Japan’s (and world’s) vulnerability to further unwinding of the Japanese carry trade and Japan’s divestment from foreign assets. The rise in yields we’ve seen since 2021 has resulted in very significant capital losses on treasury holdings of Japanese institutions like banks, pension funds and insurance companies. One report suggested that Japan’s insurers sustained $60 billion in paper losses; Japan’s largest insurance company, Nippon Life alone has a $25 billion loss.”
I keep saying “Two Things (wrong) At Once!” Here’s an especially great example. (the old economic plan was never about domestic thriving – it was always about undermining local labour, with disruption, for profit). Don’t defend one completely faulty system, just because another is also nuts!
It also reveals the broad outlines of a far more hopeful plan b, which we in the west can only pursue, when (if?) we stop electing actual freakin’ slavemasters!
“...I’ve written for Compact about the deep structural reasons why European elites are freaking out at Trump’s EU tariffs. This is not about GDP losses or job losses (though these are real risks), but because Trump’s upending of the global free regime threatens the foundation of their power.
To understand why, it’s essential to grasp the crucial role that the EU’s mercantilist regime has played, and continues to play, in entrenching the power of its political and economic elites. At its core, an export-led growth model offers a structural solution to one of capitalism’s most enduring contradictions: the tension between wage suppression and consumer demand.
In capitalist economies, suppressing wages boosts profits in the short term by lowering labour costs. But it also weakens workers’ purchasing power, thereby undermining the very demand businesses depend on to sell goods and generate revenue. Since lower-income earners tend to spend a higher share of their income, reducing their earnings translates into weaker aggregate demand, stagnating consumption and ultimately declining profitability.
The economically rational response would be to increase wages and pursue full employment, thereby stimulating domestic demand and creating a more stable, inclusive economy. However, this poses a political threat to elites, because a well-paid, securely employed working class gains bargaining power, which in turn erodes the dominance of capital in both the workplace and the political arena. This is what motivated the eventual elite backlash against the postwar full employment regime in the 1980s, a development predicted four decades earlier by Polish economist Michał Kalecki.”
Here’s Mark Wauck (meaning in history) quoting the highly insightful Yanis Varoufakis
The US doesn’t fear China because of “cheap labor” or “IP theft.” What it truly fears is China’s capacity to undermine the US-led global financial order — the very system that allows America to print dollars and buy the world.
Wall Street’s aging financial architecture is losing its grip. It can’t control crypto flows. It can’t keep up with new financial ecosystems. China — with its digital yuan, vast industrial base, and rising global influence — is the first real threat to this system.
Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” were never about balancing trade. They were a desperate attempt to slow down China’s rise and protect the dollar system from collapse. Because if China succeeds, the US loses its magic weapon: monetary dominance. See point 2 above.
Today, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core with the Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline) and the stock market (America’s wallet). Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction.
The US is now panicking over who’s selling off US Treasuries. China? Japan? Others? Trump reportedly wants to punish any surplus country that dumps Treasuries — with tariffs, of course. This is not about trade. It’s about a dying empire trying to stop the bleeding.
In short, America is no longer confident in its own financial fortress. And China is no longer playing by the old rules. This isn’t just a trade war — it’s a war for the future of global finance.
I mention Mark Wauck (Meaning in History) regularly, because he monitors so many sources, and has such a keen eye for key passages. A top rate aggregator of perspectives. But he is also a keen thinker in his own right, and because he looks at so many widespread sources, his own analysis is fascinating.
I know some of my friends on the left still think the right has no clarity about economics. But that opinion will not survive a reading of even this brief exerpt. Like I say, the team we need to actually win a fight this big, is as yet split between two false sides, and consumed almost entirely with petty faction slap-fights, while the same evil bastards rob us all (and outright kill many others) in common.
To me, it is beyond obvious that linking the wisdom, intelligence, principle and heart of those who still have that full recipe to offer, from both sides, is our most pressing challenge.
“...While I’m not competent to evaluate the financial ins and outs in current geopolitics in any sort of detail, it appears to be beyond doubt that the Trump 2.0 strategy—building on Project 2025’s call to weaponize US economic leverage to maintain its global military hegemony—is to use various financial and trade related measures to force the world to pay down America’s unsustainable debt so that the US can maintain military hegemony. No amount of fiscal austerity—if that were even conceivable in today’s America—will ever pay down America’s debt load, but the idea seems to be to squeeze the rest of the world to help us out. The inducement is continued access to US markets and a kinda promise of security. Don’t try to use those kinds of promises to pay for much of anything.
The reality is that the Anglo-Zionist Empire is massively overextended. The older Chinese and Russian empires maintained their ambitions within generally manageable limits—their “near abroads,” or relatively adjacent empty-ish regions. The Anglo-Zionist Empire has attempted to colonize the world and is predictably overextended. Like overextended empires of the past, the Anglo-Zionist Empire wants to retain its hegemony. You could perhaps frame what’s going on as a shift from the New Monetary Theory of the recent past—just keep printing more money, debt doesn’t matter—to a more fiscally “conservative” form of empire: balance the books, or at least get debt within some reasonably manageable range, by looting the vassal states.”
and
“...As the American-led order unravels, nations, corporations, and individuals are looting what remains. Britain is no exception. ...; when there’s no future left in society, the only sane move is to loot what you can.
Looting sounds crude. These days, we prefer the soothing language of “asset restructuring” and “strategic investment.” ... what’s increasingly clear is that the U.S.-led liberal international order—the empire of open markets, open societies, and open wallets—is dying. Not suddenly, but recognisably. Not in one cataclysm, but in a thousand rational decisions.
We start at the top. The United States is looting its own empire. Washington has weaponised the dollar, overreached with sanctions, and now subsidises domestic industry through tariffs and other means. It pressures European allies to purchase American liquefied natural gas (LNG), even when it’s more expensive and carbon-intensive, undercutting Europe’s supposed climate aspirations, and gutting German industry in the process. That industrial base, once the motor of Europe, is now partially relocating to American soil, where energy is cheap and regulations are less onerous.
It is imperial preference by other means. Washington is telling allies to buy American or go hang. Corporations are following suit. Multinationals that once championed global stability now feast on the remnants of the old order. They siphon off taxpayer money through contracts that guarantee returns regardless of outcomes. See no further than the Pentagon’s cost-plus model, or the public-private patchwork of America’s infrastructure push, where lobbying, not efficiency, determines who gets paid.”
I know our recent hard provocation toward Nuclear war is already last week’s news – but this piece from Matt Taibbi at Racket is truly superb, for making my point about how outrageously dangerous, or emotion-driven factionalism has now become.
He has it exactly right, they will risk the death of the world, just to own Trump.
(And how do otherwise sane people still watch Maddow, anyhow? All of her favourite guests are proud and smiling fucking war criminals!)
“...In a segment titled, “Ukraine burns Putin, but also schools Trump with surprise drone attack,” MSNBC hosts Nicolle Wallace and Rachel Maddow chatted giddily after a paradigm-shifting operation by Volodymyr Zelensky that left the world on the edge of nuclear exchange. Rachel first plugged Wallace’s new podcast, The Best People, then they bantered about Wallace’s husband, then moved on to Ukraine’s “audacious” Sunday drone attacks, said to have destroyed a third of Russia’s “strategic carriers” in an operation widely dubbed “Russia’s Pearl Harbor.”
“I feel like you’re, you’re one of my friends who understands how my brain works on this sort of thing,” Rachel asked, beaming. “Like, it is an incredible war story about Ukraine’s capability and their resilience and their creativity and the way they have just done this, you know, like David versus Goliath… But it also does have international strategic implications for every country in the world… In Russia’s position, in terms of thinking about its own defenses, thinking about its own nuclear deterrence…”
A network scriptwriter once told me the purpose of every TV news segment was to end on the note, “Isn’t that weird?” That’s how Rachel framed this moment: “Ukraine just pulled off this incredible David and Goliath story, but it also has strategic implications in terms of nuclear deterrence — isn’t that weird?”
and
“...For almost ten years we’ve had a consensus mechanism that evaluates all things this way: if it’s bad for Trump, it’s good for the world. It started with being “disappointed” to learn Robert Mueller didn’t find Russian agents in the White House and progressed to “told you so” tales of 400,000 deaths proving Trump wrong about Covid. Now we have the best political Schadenfreude story ever: Nuclear showdown proves Trump’s incompetence. Or, as Walter Kirn put it, ending the world to own Trump.
The Maddow segment was one of a pile of ebullient “Peace Averted!” responses to Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb,” which in any normal era would be covered first as an unprecedented escalation of nuclear tension. Officially now, politicians and media have gone mad, so focused on Trump that they no longer see or acknowledge danger to you, me, and the rest of the world beyond. The headlines alone are mind-boggling:”
This might have served as a warning to many of us (had we only been paying attention).
Ken Klippenstien on Africom’s latest orgy of colonialist hyper-violent madness.
“...In Africa, the administration has also increased the intensity of its operations, particularly in Somalia. Acting Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James W. Kilby provided a rare hint of the enormity of these military operations in a recent Council on Foreign Relations discussion.
“They launched the largest air strike in the history of the world—a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds from a single aircraft carrier—into Somalia,” Kilby said, referring to an operation carried out by the USS Harry Truman Strike Group in February.
To give you a sense of the scale here, a swarm of 16 U.S. aircraft reportedly dropped 124,000 pounds of ordnance in under two minutes, targeting senior ISIS-Somalia fighters in a series of cave complexes, according to Africa Command.
And what Trump has eliminated in these strikes, again signaling that soft power is dead, is what his administration thinks is excessive worry about civilian casualties, as one senior intelligence official told us.”
And here’s a fantastic piece about the way that false understandings within both tribes here, have led us to do incalculable damage to Afghanistan, often exactly when we feel sure we’re being most righteous. As so often, there are overdue lessons here, which apply all around the world, which help explain why we are now (still) the bad guys.
“...This informal economic sector might also have helped Afghans to counter the economic pressure caused by the imposed financial isolation. However, Afghanistan is a “deeply dollarised” economy, which means that a significant proportion of domestic transactions, savings, and even public revenues are tied to the US dollar. “In practical terms this means that any depreciation of the Afghani relative to the dollar directly raises the cost of imports (from basic food stuff to energy supplies), which are critical to daily life”, Dr Elif Kaya tells me. Kaya, a global political economy specialist and Vice Head of the Department of Economics and Finance at Istanbul Aydin University, has conducted research into how countries react to sanctions and the kind of strategies the Global South is implementing to resist these pressures.
The Afghan economy became the symbol for how geopolitical dependency makes national economies acutely vulnerable to external shocks. The price inflation that Afghans have witnessed regarding food prices was largely due to this structural externalisation of Afghanistan's monetary and economic sovereignty. The more the country had adhered to the World Bank policies, IMF indications and the proposals of foreign financial advisors, the more its economy was untethered from these larger transnational agencies and interests.”
And
“...Since 2001, blaming the Taliban without critical analysis was something quite common and that enforced so many stereotypes about Afghanistan within the international scope. For example, I often meet Afghan refugees here in Italy who tell bizarre stories about their asylum claims, always blaming some kind of Taliban persecutions. Such stories resonate with the average Western perception of the country due to how major media has converted the country since 2001, but these stories are incoherent to whomever is even minimally familiar with Afghanistan’s culture, history, and political landscape.
To counter this narrative though, the Taliban has also become quite active as a propagandising entity rebranding an old tale that has neatly framed them as a local, anti-colonial force fighting against western imperialism. The dynamic, over time, has become increasingly bizarre as foreign influencers and vloggers landed in the Kabul Airport, able to visit once unreachable provinces such as Wardak, Helmand, and Kunduz. Social media feeds have been filled with these travel activists praising a country at peace and echoing the words of old English, orientalist envoys, which described Afghans as people with wisdom and courteous manners.
The reality, however, was to be found in neither side of these stories. Since the Taliban abandoned their motorcycles transforming themselves into bureaucrats who sit in offices when they took power in 2021, they have become stuck at a crossroads, watching the people they claim to defend drown in deep misery.”
Finally, here’s a written piece from Diesen’s substack, about the undermining of the longstanding peace-loving sentiment of his home country, Norway. (again, sobering lessons for so many of us, especially in this dark war-cloudy moment).
“...The Norwegian is taught to express empathy for Afghans when it justifies occupation, Syrians when it justifies regime change, Libyans when it justifies military intervention, etc. However, once the strategic objective is achieved, there is no attention or empathy expressed. As we leave behind death and destruction, there is no remorse, as our alleged intentions were good. In Ukraine, the Norwegian is taught to have great empathy when it comes to advancing the war efforts. In contrast, the Norwegian will react with suspicion and anger if anyone mentions the suffering of the people in Donbas over the past decade, “military recruiters” dragging people off the streets and out of their homes, the attacks on the media, the denial of political rights, language rights, cultural rights or religious rights. The empathy for Ukrainians is instrumental, it is evoked or suppressed based on the purpose it serves.”
Apologies that I have no amusements and profundities to end with today. Broke my heart just sorting this much (leaving out dozens of other very worthy pieces) as it was (and of course listening to armageddon coming-in hard, on our dollars and equipment, rapidly incinerating our very last pretence of ethical dominance).
Pray ‘em if you got ‘em. (and if you don’t, I have found a meditation on the nature of agency in the collapse of the eigenstate will get you pretty close, in a decade or so).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On Bill Binney, 'A Good American' (2015).