Middle East, ecocide, imperialism

Only connect, said Edward Morgan Forster. Sound advice, but to apply it with accuracy we need detailed facts, and axiomatic principles to organise them in evidence based narratives. I know intelligent men and women, whom I like and love and have so much in common with; men and women who at best tolerate my scribblings and at worst have given up on me. ¹

My story, and I’m sticking to it, is that they don’t join the dots.

Just three things separate us. One, they don’t see, or act as if they see, that ours is not a genuine democracy but a financial oligarchy driven by laws of motion which demand that the needs of profit and accumulation trump all other considerations. Two, they don’t see that the West still rules the global south (and that an inexorable weakening of that rule is propelling us to nuclear war). Three, they don’t see, or act as if they see, that our corporate media – ‘popular’ or ‘elite’, generalist or niche, conservative or liberal – may deliver accurate news and honest opinion on matters by no means trivial but, on matters which go to the heart of oligarchy and empire, are systemically incapable of doing so.

But for those few triflings we’d get on like a house on fire. Prick me, do I not bleed?

Here’s a video I saw yesterday. It’s short – six minutes fifteen – so there’s a chance you’ll watch it in full. If you’re one of those I’ve just been speaking about it likely won’t change your point of view and more importantly get me back on your Xmas card list. But it does set out, in unusually concise form, the realities of class rule and empire. And it does so from the starting points on the one hand of genocide in Palestine, on the other the catastrophic effects on the global south of capitalism’s war – corollary of the primacy of profit – on nature.

Still with me? Here’s former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, unusually grim of countenance, on just how close we now are to thermonuclear annihilation.

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1. Almost five years ago, in The tragedy of Corbynism, I wrote:

   I began political blogging ten years ago, with increased intensity in the past five or six. On a few issues – Russia, the 2016 US Election, Brexit, Syria, Venezuela – my positions, and reactions to them, have threatened or actually cost me friendships I valued. Yet no one took me to task over specifics. No one ever said:

   You know what, Phil? You’re dead wrong about Putin .. Trump/Clinton .. the nature of the EU .. Assad .. Maduro. And here, point by closely argued point, is why …

   Rather, they traded generalities. I’m biased, said some … an extremist, said others.