A downside of taking up arms against a dying hence triply dangerous empire, even as a mere keyboard warrior, is the bi-weekly visitation in the wee small hours of cognisance, temporarily overwhelming my emotional defences, of the enormity of its evil. That the visitations are short lived is down to the fact that when darkness floods the soul I know what to do. I leave the bed’s warm but immiserating embrace, throw on dressing gown and ragged cardi. Downstairs I step over sleeping K9s, hit the lights and locate the coffee pot. On such mornings various LEDs will put the time at between 02:30 and 04:30.
A few minute later I’m back in bed, nursing a cup of the ridiculously strong. Caffeination brings optimal conditions for the meditative state, access to which a flawed but brilliant man taught me three decades ago, in which to let my dismal thoughts orbit the entity I call “me”. I neither embrace nor push them away but the demon at my inner ear – “there’s no point, you’re wasting your time, resistance is futile; All Is Lost” – recedes defeated into the night.
Works every time.
My thoughts become no less dismal but – here’s the liberation gospel – their force is spent. I no longer confuse them with the self organising principle I refer to as “me”. Fit to re-enter the fray, I’ll likely as not be at the keyboard, too busy to be downhearted, long before daybreak.
As I am this minute. Don’t get depressed; get angry – and focus the anger.
I thought I’d share that personal snippet before getting down to business. To recap the diffuse and sprawling nature of what is happening, let me set out a few bullets, crude and mechanistic though such devices are. Sometimes crude and mechanistic does the job even when the organic realities they seek clumsily to snapshot are in dynamic interplay and shrouded by the fogs of war.
- The world is closer to global war than at any point in my life, due to the refusal of a West now US-led to accept the end of 500 years of supremacy and negotiate a soft landing by embracing multipolarity. Instead it seeks to confront militarily and economically, and – by dominating target nations’ information space – to engineer ‘colour revolutions’ in allied or neighbouring states to menace the nations, led by China and Russia, ringing in the changes. Antonio Gramsci spoke truth: when that which must happen cannot, we live in an age of monsters.
- Genocide in Palestine, with the West fully and actively complicit, is one aspect. Widening the focus it is now impossible for all but the very stupid and/or wilfully blind to fail to see a US empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington. To this end it is as happy to use a genocidal client state, and a medievalist jihadism it condemns but has been arming for decades, as it is to use neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. In their twilight stages empires find themselves obliged – in this case due to the ‘optics’ of sending their young to kill and be killed thousands of miles from home in wars which can be supplied but not won by aerial and naval power – to use proxy forces they think they can control.
- Widening the focus further, the war the West imposed on Russia though provocation on reckless provocation is showing every sign of merging with wars in the Middle East. As when Ukrainian drones and AFU special forces in Aleppo helped Al-Qaeda cut-outs bring chaos and terror, Libya and Iraq style, to Syria.
- One consequence of Syrian regime-change puts Israel and Turkiye – the one the West’s beachhead in the Middle East, the other housing NATO’s largest army – on a collision course. Men like Itamar Ben-Gvr and Bezalel Smotrich insist a psychotic sky god clearly fabricated in a warlike tribe’s own image has mandated, in Genesis through to Joshua, a Greater Israel far beyond the borders of its 1948 UN charter …
… while men like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seek to rebuild an Ottoman empire which also claims large chunks of Syria. That the two are irreconcilable is one of many measures of the bipartisan recklessness, in lieu of long term foreign policy long farmed out to CIA and Pentagon funded ‘think tanks’, at large in Washington. In lieu too of any capacity for diplomatic skills deemed superfluous by a Beltway in denial of the end of unipolarity.
- Given its build up of naval forces in the Philippines, Taiwan and other parts of the South Pacific, it could not be clearer to those with eyes in their heads that US attempts to shore up its hegemony transcend their local specificity to pose a generalised and, again, global threat. For reasons explored in previous posts, neither Russia nor China can allow the US hegemon to make such inroads on Eurasia’s western, south-western and eastern poles. US-Israeli designs on Iran form the likeliest and most immediate tipping point but no less ominous are escalations in both the Ukraine and the China Seas.
- Parts of Latin America and Africa are scenes of growing tension over raw materials, and choke points like the Panama Canal.
- On all of this the first duty of corporate media will not be to shed light. For reasons given here and here and here the first duty of corporate media, even those truthful on matters less critical for our ruling elites, will be to use lies of omission and commission to deflect, distract, shield from public gaze else present material conflict as principled, and in these ways enable said elites to preserve their power regardless of human cost. Regardless too of the absurdity of a narrative that the USA – armed to the teeth, with a history of forever wars, its borders protected by vast oceans, and a nuclear superpower to boot – rings the planet with military bases for defensive purposes. For the still widespread acceptance of that preposterous fairy tale, those corporate media can take a deep bow.
These things, I submit, offer more than a useful but subjective lens on world events. They offer the only objective framework through which world events make sense. This applies to relatively minor stuff like those hole-ridden and suspicious-as-fuck official accounts of the attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas. And it applies to the monumental stuff like Europe’s economic freefall, its underlying drivers synchronised and fast-tracked by the folly and supine treachery of its US groomed leaders, 1 following their failed roll of the dice in the Ukraine.
Of which more in a forthcoming post on the looming gas crisis.
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- Why say Europe’s leaders are “US groomed”? In a post last September on The West’s poltroons and Quislings I cited Radhika Desai, a political economist I rate alongside Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff. Asked why those leaders are acting so manifestly against the interests of their citizens and industries, she replied:
The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Annalena Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.