Commenting yesterday, September 16, on the second attempt in under two months on the life of Donald Trump, Caitlin Johnstone opined:
Trump supporters are again touting it as evidence the Deep State is after their man, but I’m not buying it. If the real power players wanted him dead he’d be dead.
I agree. As for alleged attempts by the Russian authorities to rub out Alexei Navalny, a far right critic of Vladimir Putin with a tiny fanbase in Russia and on that count no threat, they too seem extraordinarily inept. As one FB pundit, name lost in the mists of, put it at the time:
Putin poisons water in hotel room. Navalny gets sick and is taken to Omsk hospital. No one kills him there, though a hospital is an easy place to do that. Russian authorities approve his transfer to Berlin, where medics find Novichok. Angela Merkel accuses Russia, the EU imposes sanctions. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it?
There are limits to the ineptitude of power. But I’ve opened with a feint. This post is less about the limits, more about the ineptitude. I concluded the previous post, on the corner into which Europe’s compradors have painted us, with this:
Europe’s US-groomed leaders are beyond redemption. But what of its massively propagandised public? Given the stakes, is it too much to ask that the rest of us finally wake up and smell the coffee?
It’s true of course – this blog is replete with evidence – that the collective West’s much vaunted democracy is almost entirely bogus. 1 On any matter of vital importance to those who truly rule, the masses have no meaningful say. In a piece two years ago, Let’s Stop Pretending America Is A Functioning Democracy (a sentiment we can extend to other Western ‘democracies’) my favourite pastor, Chris Hedges, wrote:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from unemployment and underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. Insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run the healthcare system for profit instead of health are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is spectacle, a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying for power by the ruling class dominates the news cycles, as if politics were a race to the Superbowl. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the laws, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
As I hinted a few days ago in Gaslit to Armageddon, the most cursory inspection of the facts reveals that Russia was provoked in Ukraine, there is a genocide in Gaza and it is a nonsense peddled by learned buffoons in media with a vastly overstated reputation for depth, accuracy and independence to say that China and Russia pose a greater threat to global peace than a blood-soaked and US-led collective West.
Sadly though:
… we are more psychological than logical beings. Facts count less with us than narratives. This served us well enough, dark lapses aside, for tens of millennia as homo sapiens sapiens, individuated yet deeply social, evolved in bands of hunter-gatherers; bound on the one hand by the objective circumstance of our being ill equipped to survive alone, on the other by the myths with which we made sense of the world and our place in it.
Now that deep embedded trait has outlived its usefulness. First the neolithic revolutions which delivered surplus wealth and the rise of small elites, second the age of mass media influenced if not controlled by those elites, made our elevation of story over empirical reality a means of enslavement.
Even that had its positive side when … in return for the masses’ subservience, surrender of the surplus fruits of their toil and readiness to kill and be killed in – or nowadays simply cheer on – its wars of plunder, the duty of every ruling class has been to provide stability, security and the conditions for prosperity. Peace at sword or gun point is no oxymoron. Not for nothing do we speak of a Pax Romana. History shows that exploited peoples will tolerate entrenched privilege and high (though not infinitely so) levels of social injustice if the only perceived alternative is the tyranny of lawlessness and destitution. But that implicit social contract has been broken. Those same mass media storytellers, fully answerable when it most counts to those same tiny elites, have brought us to the brink of thermonuclear destruction …
Gaslit to Armageddon
But those of us in the process of waking up – of putting ideology presenting as common sense 2 under critical scrutiny – are prone to a different error. Where previously we took democracy at face value, and derided as extremists those who spoke of a “ruling class”, we now see – the evidence is incontrovertible once we sniff the coffee – that there is indeed such a thing. In so doing, however, we may fall prey to ideas of our rulers as fiendishly clever.
They aren’t. Ruthless and preposterously entitled, yes, but men and women like you and me. A shade more sociopathic, to be sure, but subject to the same weaknesses. And this, as they sense their nemesis in Eurasia rising to call time on five centuries of exploiting the global south, is the problem. In their panic, subject of yesterday’s post on Mario Draghi’s Report – its pretentious managerial techno-babble cover for having no answer to a fundamental problem it could but dare not name – those weak and unprincipled, hubris-gripped rulers (and their stewards) clutch at straws.
And in so doing, endanger us all. The road they have chosen for us leads not only to Europe’s certain decline, but to something even darker:
So we are where we are. And where we are, in Middle East no less than Ukraine – and for the same reason; a waning empire with the means to destroy the world a thousand times over steered by men and women with the maturity and strategic vision, if you’ll excuse the insult to simiankind, of adolescent chimpanzees – is closer to Armageddon than at any point in history.
How far to WW3, sir?
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Coming soon: the zero sum addiction of the West’s rulers, versus China’s we win-you win.
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- Of all the ways of showing Western democracy to be largely fake, I can think of none more cogent than that (a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are, as Noam Chomsky put it, “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations”.
- For a brief discussion of a very big subject, see my post of January this year, What of ideology, when reality intrudes? It not only houses a shorthand definition of the i-word but, pertinent here, adds this:
… the matrix is not quite the all-encompassing, perfectly and self-perpetuatingly interlocking web of power-endorsing meaning it presents as. It has its flaws. Yes, it skews our ability to see things as they are but it can never float entirely free of reality.