Cuckooing is when criminals take over someone’s home to use for dealing drugs, storing weapons, sex work or other illegal activities. They target vulnerable people: someone with a drug or alcohol problem, money troubles, a mental health issue or disability, or an elderly person
London Metropolitan Police website
Two days ago while basking in sunshine over morning coffee in the garden, I was Whatsapped by a friend alerting me to a BBC piece with the self-explanatory title, Poverty and technology leading to record levels of slavery in UK. I read in full, then followed a link at the end to the tragic story – ‘I was trapped …’ – of one victim.
Both were short and easy reads. I hadn’t finished my coffee before replying:
Interesting read. Ditto its link to the case study of Christian, a cuckooing victim. As for the link with rising poverty, two US wars, in Ukraine and Iran, to maintain global dominance have been backed by Europe’s comprador leaders despite being against the interests of their citizens and economies. You might call it cuckooing on a massive scale. Both wars have accelerated the impoverishment on which modern slavery thrives.
I first encountered the concept of cuckooing through the BBC drama, Line of Duty. It denotes the takeover of a person’s home, as per the Met info above, even as the rightful occupant continues to live there. While that Line of Duty storyline featured a victim who had Down syndrome, 1 in the case of Christian we are told:
…. after he was unknowingly befriended by criminals, he was pulled into a world of coercion, fear and criminal exploitation.
The men he believed were friends took over his home, manipulated him into travelling abroad to smuggle drugs, and ultimately cost him his relationship with his loved ones.
Christian had become a victim of modern slavery.
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As I will keep saying, the Ukraine conflict was not caused by unprovoked Russian invasion – as the most far reaching and sophisticated propaganda machine the world has ever known would have it. 2 Rather, it marks Washington’s success in having Europe at its own expense bog down Russia to allow a waning hence triply dangerous US hegemon to marshal resources diminishing in relative terms to thwart the rise of China.
(To see this we must look beyond the media babble of a rift between Europe and an Uncle Sam washing his hands of Ukraine. A more accurate depiction is of a division of labour which allows Washington to pivot to Asia while its vassals allies keep Russia, at once a formidable adversary and likeliest ally of China, otherwise engaged. 3 To this end it matters not one iota that Ukraine cannot win, while the further weakening of Europe has its advantages for the US hegemon. 4 )
In the case of the aggression on Iran, my efforts are focused less on its illegality, and the price everyone else is paying to shore up an empire growing reckless. On these things I’m pushing at an open door. The challenge lies more in countering the superficially plausible view that this is all down to the deranged personalities of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Hence my insistence that (a) America is not a functioning democracy, (b) policy on what most matters is decided behind closed doors by corporate elites, ergo – (c) – beneath a surface froth of partisan quarrel can be seen, by the few who choose to look, a continuity in US foreign policy across every administration since Bill Clinton’s. On the drivers of that continuity those elites can afford to be remarkably candid (since few do choose to look) in their policy documents. Witness the Brookings Institute’s Which Path to Persia? and the Rand Report on Extending Russia.
The brief period of unipolarity following the collapse of the Soviet Union is over. The US cannot impose its will purely by armed force and dollar supremacy. Nor can it simultaneously confront head on its two most powerful adversaries. The strongest remaining card of a waning imperium is a soft power that allows it to capture foreign governments, often after decades of grooming future leaders, which then act against the interests of the people they ostensibly represent.
Like the rest of my baby boomer generation, I grew up in a culture drenched with associations of the land of the free with a soaring eagle. But is another avian emblem now more fitting?
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- Line of Duty’s cuckooing victim, Terry Boyle, is played by a Tommy Jessop whose wiki entry tells of:
- “… the most far reaching and sophisticated propaganda machine the world has known …” Our consumer addicted culture sees nothing grotesque in the wall to wall commercial propaganda known as advertising, which makes mass deceit so societally fundamental that we no more notice it than we do the air we breathe, far less consider the corrosive implications of normalising mendacity. Nor does it leave room for a question that should be obvious. Why assume the dark arts of mass persuasion to be applied exclusively in the shaping of market behaviour, while their use to shape political opinion among the many, in ways which benefit the few, is by gentleman’s agreement scrupulously shunned?
- In one of several links between criminal aggression against Iran, and proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, Moscow’s ability to help Iran as a matter of enlightened self interest is limited by the existential war it has been forced to fight on its southwest border.
- As I and others claim – here and here for instance – spiralling operating costs in Europe, its German powerhouse especially, consequent on eschewing cheap gas from Russia in favour of more expensive LNG from Alaska, have seen manufacturing rivals to American firms go under or relocate in the US. That’s before we get to millions of Europeans now in fuel poverty, or to the mutually enriching trade Europe might have enjoyed with Eurasia had its Atlanticist leaders not spent decades vilifying China and Russia while allowing the US to cuckoo their own economies.
An excellent piece Phil.
The fact of Russia being bogged down with the Ukraine conflict, which as you point out, Ukraine cannot win, leaving the US free to focus on China, cannot be repeated often enough. Words fail me when it comes to our “leaders” in Europe.
While on the subject of cheap gas v vastly more expensive gas from the US, how many remember, or for that matter believe, Joe Biden having those pipelines blown up? He bragged about it before the act ffs! Not only a massive crime, a massive crime against the planet we all live on, the environmental destruction who knows the extent of?
Trump and Netanyahu are deranged but you make the clear observation of continuity of US foreign policy across a long line of presidents, sometimes with the supposedly secret stuff said out loud. I can’t tell you how many people go “Oh Trump is awful!” and I say yes but they’re all awful, Trump’s just more of a crude blow hard, they give me funny looks followed by an awkward silence. If I can see it I don’t get how they can’t. Well no. I do – they get their “news” from the BBC, or the Guardian! Anyway, again, well said.
I like Line of Duty, good acting and storylines, and I particularly remember the young man cuckooed by the lowlifes, who even put that woman’s butchered remains in his freezer. Then when he tried to tell that useless female copper with the bad attitude, he was ignored. She did have a wellmeaning young sidekick with some humanity but he was put in his place very quickly.
Heartbreaking story, especially alongside the account of what happened to Christian, a real life cuckooing victim.
Having said that, my son is a DI up here in the north and says the only cop drama close to reality is Happy Valley, which just happens to be set in his neck of the woods, some of his colleagues even referring to their patch as Happy Valley.
Biden’s promise, echoed by Victoria Nuland, to destroy Nordstream should Russia invade Ukraine – an outcome every US administration after Reagan worked tirelessly to bring about – ranks with Rand and Brookings as an example of the empire thinking out loud.
When the enemy shows his true face, believe him.
Line of Duty and Happy Valley gave us riveting drama, though in markedly different ways. Line of gave powerful characters, gripping story and, in those prolonged grillings chaired by DSU Hastings, edge of seat verbal tennis. If plotlines at times beggared belief, what of it? As with the magnificent Peaky Blinders, to fixate on mere plausibility is spectacularly point missing. The Blinders mesmerised us the way, at their finest, opera and ballet do. And wasn’t there something equally operatic in those Line of interrogations – Dunbar, Compston & McClure – at the HQ of AC10?
Your son is right though. Happy Valley was more firmly rooted in social realism. It too had great dialogue and strong characters – none more so than Sarah Lancashire’s jaded but never cynical sergeant – and by the way, I’ve never seen her reach anything like the same form in other roles.
Speaking of the “empire thinking out loud”, Brian Berletic’s three-part commentary on the recent US Senate committee hearing on the ‘preparedness’ of US forces in the Indo-Pacific region to meet current ‘challenges’ is unmissable: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tyXGuyJ5F2k&ra=m (parts 1 & 2 are linked in the video description). As well as providing his usual penetrating analysis of the Empire’s malicious manoeuvres and powerfully illustrating his ‘continuity of agenda’ thesis, Brian outs himself as something of a gifted comedian with some scathing and darkly hilarious jibes at the committee members and their highly decorated witnesses. It’s a lengthy series of videos but utterly compelling in the way it shows the empire thinking aloud beneath the staged pantomime and distracting noise of ‘partisan’ political knockabout and captured media chattering.
One of Brian’s great strengths is his insistence on damning the US empire in its own words. As for the specimen you cite, I’ve watched the first two parts and mean to to catch part 3 while I do the Sunday ironing.
It’s too often assumed, usually unconsciously, that propaganda works by lies of commission. To be sure these are deployed when needed, and this site is full of examples from Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere. More often though it works by (a) lies of omission to steer the conversation in ways that best serve ruling class designs – aimed less at telling us what to think than what to think about – (b) speaking frankly in channels, like Brookings and Rand, which few outside elite circles have time or inclination to tune into while leaving to mainstream corporate media the job of spinning fairy tales like “bringing democracy” and – this from the most aggressive regime on earth by an objective and massive margin – “standing up to bullies”.
You mention ” a continuity in US foreign policy across every administration since Bill Clinton.” But arguably it goes back to the equally slimy and contemptible H. Truman at the end of WWII. The CIA were involved in fomenting insurrectionary feelings in the Ukraine from that time onwards, (as no doubt was MI6 under Churchill). I think that that supremacist attitude applies to much US foreign ‘policy’ from that time onwards – at the end of the war there seems to have been an intensification of US ‘capitalist imperialism’ – possibly because they found themselves at the top of an impoverished and weakened heap.
I actually thought the same thing ie every president since 1945, with the possible exception of JFK. and look what happened to him.
There’s a case to be made, for all its surface implausibility, that the last halfways independent POTUS was not JFK but – wait for it – Nixon. I’m still hoping for a free moment to re-read and post a review of Aaron Good’s American Exception, in which he makes precisely that argument within the broader context of assembling evidence for the thesis that conspiracy occupies a more pivotal position in ruling class devilry than Marxists like me have been wont to believe.
I’m not especially attached to any given presidency as marking a decisive shift to oligarchic capture, but chose Clinton because his was the first to begin its term in the unipolar world ushered in by the fall of the USSR. For Bush Senior it happened mid term, while Reagan – for all his crimes – genuinely if naively thought the cold war ended in 1991. (A sentiment shared – for all her crimes – by Mrs Thatcher.)
I’m a bit late coming to this but maybe that’s OK because I’m not really conrtrbuting to the discussion more pointing to something off-piste. It is now understood that nests with cuckoos in them have a 40% higher survival rate than nests with a cuckoo in them. Yes there are occassions when a cuckoo egg witll hatch first and then throw the other eggs out of the nest. And yes, it also happens that if bird notices the cuckoo egg and chucks it out, the mother cuckoo will return and demolish the whole nest, (it’s called the Mafia strategy.) But mostly the cuckoo chick will protect the other chicks in the nest by excreting a substance that keeps parasites at bay, by protecting the smaller chicks from wind and rain, and its larger size deters predators. Not only that, the cuckoo has evolved a flight pattern similar to a hawk and so when the cuckoo flies close to the nest of the host bird on her eggs, the host bird flies away briefly to escape what she thinks is a hawk. The cuckoo will then lay one egg before moving on and can do this for up to 22 times. Plus the egg she lays is mysteriously similar to the colour and pattern of the host birds eggs. No one knows why or how this happens. A small point but as we know, language has power and the word ‘cuckooing’ is not honouring the complexity and intelligence of these wonderful birds. Perhaps we should just call it ‘lying- manipulative-humaning.’ As always, what you are saying is great stuff Phil. Thank you.
Anne your encyclopedic knowledge of the countless species we share this earth with never ceases to impress. I shall now look on the cuckoo with greater respect. But whether or not the metaphor is unfair – and I don’t suppose the bird in question gives two hoots either way -it draws on an ancient narrative to encapsulate in vivid terms one more invidious aspect of societal collapse.