On a tip off from reader Nick Hefferman, a few posts back, I’m reading Aaron Good’s American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. It does what it says on the tin – or, six chapters in, holds out every promise of doing so – but I’ll refrain from saying more pending a full review.
Meanwhile I do what I can – see Roaming charges on a benighted planet – to keep up with global developments, which is to say, of empire’s crimes. Venezuela alarms me, as it should you. One reason being the justification, ridiculous in more ways than one, of murder on the high seas as glorified DEA raids in The War on Narcotics. 1 2 Another being Russia’s naval presence, a third that China is heavily invested in a country crippled by decades of lethal blockade, failed coup, outright theft, and efforts to install a US puppet in Caracas.
Has a new front opened on a WW3 said, by commentators I take seriously, to be not imminent but already underway?
Speaking of China, and of ridiculous, we have Trump’s attempts to depict his trade talks with Xi as a victory. Here’s the FT, quoting US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as saying China made a grave error of the overplayed hand sort. Au contraire, say the two Alexanders at the Duran as they run with the poker theme: Xi holds aces. Soya bean imports for one, rare earth exports for another. Bessent’s claim that the US can be up to speed on the latter within two years is a subset – since ‘rare earths’ aren’t rare, 3 but their feasible extraction relies on a manufacturing capacity offshored decades ago – of the lie that Trump, and more importantly US elites, 4 can or even wish to ‘bring American jobs home’. I’ve gone into this elsewhere. Here for instance.
(A useful piece on the Korea talks is offered today by WSWS. If you’re like me, you’ll humour the call, mandatory in the final paragraph of most WSWS pieces, for the international working class to rise up and deliver us to a just and sane global order. Rabbits and hats spring to mind, but so do babies and bathwater. 5 )
And speaking of crude gunboat diplomacy, here’s the first of my two featured posts today. Steel city regulars know my relationship to Andrew Korybko’s output to be one of toxic dependency. He bugs me at every turn but is too useful to be banished from the library. Today’s theme is that Islamism in Mali may furnish an excuse for provoke French intervention. Definitely worth a read, not least for his allusions, backed by a tsunami of evidence our lovely media ignore, and by the “Alt Media Community” he despises, to a rich history of Western weaponising of jihad. 6
As always he’s commendably brief.
Mali’s Potential Fall To Terrorists Could Result In Another French-Led Intervention
The dual pretexts of crushing the world’s latest caliphate and averting another 2015-like migrant crisis could suffice for rallying the public around a French-led mission for restoring Western influence in the region.
The Wall Street Journal recently warned that “Al Qaeda Is on the Brink of Taking Over a Country”, writing that the group’s local ally Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) has encircled the capital, cutting it off from food and fuel. The latter’s unexpected dearth has hindered the Malian Armed Forces’ (FAM) ability to respond. According to their assessment, JNIM hopes to replicate their like-minded allies’ seizure of power in Afghanistan and Syria, namely through their own war of attrition against the state.
The FAM is nowhere near as weak as the Afghan National Army always was nor as the Syrian Arab Army ultimately revealed itself to be. Russia has been providing arms, training, intelligence, and logistical support to them for several years already and thus turned them into a force to be reckoned with. The problem is that France, Ukraine, and arguably neighboring Algeria to an extent have been backing terrorist-designated Tuareg separatists who once again entered into an unholy alliance with Islamists.
This created space for JNIM to expand elsewhere throughout the country and in neighboring Burkina Faso as well, which comprise the Sahelian Alliance/Confederationwith Niger, who’s also confronting its own Islamist insurgency but led by a local ISIS ally instead of rival Al Qaeda’s JNIM. This regional integration bloc considers France to be a state sponsor of terrorism, having long accused it of backing a motley crew of such groups in their countries, with suspicion swirling that they even support Islamists.
The combined effect of these (French-backed?) terrorist offensives has been to destabilize the core of West Africa’s multipolarity processes, the Sahelian Alliance/Confederation, and create the credible possibility (which is still far from assured) that one, two, or all three of its members fall to terrorists. While they’re all Russian military partners, with Mali being the top one, Russia is still waging its specialoperation and therefore cannot realistically carry out a 2015 Syrian-like intervention to save them.
Nevertheless, adversarial media are expected to blame their potential falls on Russia in order to frame it as an unreliable ally, even going as far as to experience schadenfreude if terrorists take over this chunk of West Africa. About that scenario, it would be a major geopolitical event not only due to its symbolism, but also because these states control some of the smuggling routes from the populated West African coast to Europe, possibly leading to an explosion in illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration.
Moreover, the precedent of France militarily intervening in Mali to halt the advance of Islamist-backed Tuareg separatists in early 2013 at Bamako’s request suggests that Paris might unilaterally attempt something similar, but perhaps with more direct Western European and/or US backing. The dual pretexts of crushing the world’s latest caliphate and averting another 2015-like migrant crisis could suffice for rallying the public around this French-led mission for restoring Western influence in the region.
Securing access to African resources, markets, and labor is of grand strategic significance for the West as is rolling back its Chinese systemic rival’s access to the aforesaid. The average Westerner doesn’t understand the importance of this goal, however, hence the need to let the region fall in part or in whole to terrorists (and possibly help this happen). If it does, then the West can stage its latest powerplay in the Global South, but the unintended costs might ultimately outweigh the expected benefits.
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My second read is, once again, Caitlin Johnstone – a blogger I recently heard described as “a force of nature”. No quarrel from this quarter.
I allude often to three primary truths the vast majority of my fellows fail, either completely or in the follow-through of praxis, to understand. One is the existence of a ruling class, another that of empire. (Both are pivotal to the book I’ve pledged to review.) A third is that corporate media are systemically incapable of speaking truth – for the most part lying by omission – where that would be counter to the interests of ruling class and empire.
That third is Caitlin’s focus here, exemplified in the markedly different coverage of mass murder in Sudan from that in Palestine.
How The Media Normally Report On A Mass Atrocity
If the western press had not been aggressively protecting Israel and its interests this whole time, all their reporting on Gaza over the last two years would have looked very much like the reporting we’re seeing on the genocide in Sudan.
The Washington Post has published an article titled “Families shot down, held at ransom as they flee Darfur’s killing fields”, subtitled “Sudan’s RSF paramilitary and its allies have carried out mass ethnic killings and hostage taking in the captured city of El Fashir, survivors told The Post.”
The article opens with a paragraph humanizing the victims of the El Fashir massacres: “Families gunned down as they huddled for safety. Young children weeping over their mother’s body in the desert. Doctors seized for ransom and executed.”
It names the perpetrators, “the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces,” in the second paragraph.
It names the backers of the perpetrators in the third paragraph, saying that “The RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates.”
It mentions the word “genocide” three separate times. “Ethnic killings” appears twice. The UAE is named repeatedly; even the fact that it is “a key U.S. ally” is explicitly highlighted.
Do you notice anything strange about this reporting?
Me neither. What stands out, reading this article here in the year 2025, is how completely and utterly normal it is.
It’s not fantastic or extraordinary journalism, it’s just normal for a mainstream western publication. The reporters talk to the victims, describe the massacres they were told about, explain the various power dynamics at play from a mainstream western perspective, name some US officials who are pushing for a halt to the RSF’s atrocities, and use appropriately strong language to describe the horrors they are documenting — including in the headline.
They do all the normal mainstream news reporter things. They cover a depraved mass atrocity the same way they’ve typically covered such things for generations.
None of this would stand out on its own, if we hadn’t spent two years watching the mainstream western press do absolutely none of these normal journalistic things in Gaza.
The passive-language “Gazans perish in explosion” headlines. The contortions to avoid naming the perpetrator and the governments that are backing its atrocities. The adamant refusal to use the word “genocide” except to frame it as a dubious claim being made by another party which Israel forcefully denies. The wildly biased discrepancy between the strength of language used to describe violence inflicted by Israelis versus violence inflicted by Palestinians.
If the western press had not been aggressively protecting Israel and its interests this whole time, all their reporting on Gaza over the last two years would have looked very much like the reporting we’re seeing on the genocide in Sudan. There’s a discrepancy in the reporting because there’s a discrepancy in the propaganda needs of the western empire.
It is good that the western press are doing actual journalism in Sudan and covering that genocide with the normal level of urgency and emphasis. If they had been reporting on Gaza in the same way these last two years, the west’s support for Israel would have completely collapsed by now.
Which is exactly why they haven’t been doing it.
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- Leaving aside the Armageddon potential of China and Russia asserting – sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander – a presence in America’s back yard, what is alarming about US piracy on Venezuela is that even in the face of stiff competition from the wars on Iraq, Libya and Syria, the justification for naked aggression has never been thinner. As with Israel’s claims, more Goebbelsian with each passing day, extraordinary accusations – “Maduro is a narco terrorist” – are made not only without a scintilla of evidence but contrary to reports by all the world’s leading authorities and agencies tasked with the monitoring of drug cartels. This speaks to me of a West in decline and willing to shed even the pretence of rule of law, international or domestic.
- Still on the US calling out Maduro for drug trafficking, we should note a long US history of a deep state using narcotics to fund deeds off-the-books and shielded from Congress oversight. In American Exception, Aaron Good writes, pace Peter Dale Scott, that:
Examples of deep politics include the recurrence of US foreign policy intrigues involving petroleum and narcotics traffic or the legal immunity of organized crime in Chicago for much of the twentieth century.
- ‘Rare earths’ as I understand things are widely distributed – China has no geographical monopoly – but in such minute quantities that these now critical materials can only be extracted at scale using sophisticated techniques attendant on the industrial processes Western elites found it more profitable to export to the global south.
- Central to the aforesaid book by Aaron Good – and for that matter a Brian Berletic often featured on this site – is that, as shown by a remarkable continuity in US foreign policy since JFK, the agency of its president is grossly overstated. This too is a subset of a thing bigger: namely the evidence-defiant myth of America as a democracy.
- Rabbits and hats? IMO WSWS peddles a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in all the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This in a West whose offshoring of industry has eroded the socialising conditions – an exploitation endured en masse in those huge and dark Satanic mills – which led Marx to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into socialism. Babies and bathwater? WSWS delivers highly informative articles much appreciated even as I yawn and disregard the obligatory call, in the closing paragraph or two, for the workers of the world to rise up and throw off their chains. Nice thought but don’t hold your breath.
- As Aaron Good (ibid) notes:
The Islamist terror phenomenon derives from over a century of Western imperial meddling, most notably by Britain and the US … the British supported the Wahabist Saudi royal family and created (through the Suez Canal Company) the Muslim Brotherhood specifically to combat nationalism and socialism in Egypt. After World War II, the most popular statesmen across the Middle East were secular nationalists—Mossadegh and Nasser. Not coincidentally, both governments also suffered paramilitary violence from Western-backed Islamist terror organizations. Additionally, both Iran and Egypt were ultimately undone by Anglo-US imperialism—the CIA’s Operation Ajax and Israel’s Six Day War, respectively.
Other Middle Eastern states targeted by the US include secular governments in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Additionally, the US Operation Cyclone backed the Islamist Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The massive campaign utilized a Saudi network for logistical assistance which eventually evolved into al Qaeda. Led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the paramilitary terror organization was deployed by the West in Bosnia, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, and Libya before 2001.146 During the Obama administration, al Qaeda was used to affect regime change successfully in Libya, unsuccessfully in Syria. [Good writes mid 2022, some thirty months before Assad’s Ba’athist government fell to US armed jihadists.] The key point is that the Western use—and subsequent demonization—of Sunni Islamist terror can lend itself to Clash-of-Civilizations-style cultural explanations for international political phenomena. However, this can only occur in the context of widespread historical obscurantism and disinformation that could collectively be described as state gaslighting.