Accelerating the Soul Suicide
Great article by Edward Curtin Jr. I also knew about the buildings being downed by explosives during 9/11 rather than the impact of the plane crashes, and the anthrax attacks by the US military (from Glenn Greenwald).
What Curtin says about the current landscape – especially re: college graduates – is also spot on.
To know this, one has to read books, but they have been replaced by cell phones, functional illiteracy being the norm, even for college graduates who are treated to four years of wokeness education and anti-intellectualism that reduces their thinking to mush and graduates them with sciolistic minds at best. I am being kind.
— Edward Curtin Jr
That is a big part of why I generally find it hard to take seriously the people in elite colleges who say they support Palestine.
A lot of those people think that the way to bring Israel down is like how the "international community" supposedly is winning against "evil Russia", basically like with just sanctions and so forth (i.e. the Boycotts Divestments Sanctions movement for Palestine).
Except that sanctions backfired on Europe which is now in recession (like Germany after refusing to use cheap gas from Russia anymore), and Russia's GDP is growing.
Or like how the West cancelled Russians and Belarusians from sports, like the Olympics and tennis, and music and so forth — some of those people called for serving Israelis to be banned from the Olympics.
They quite remind me of the "climate activists" in Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil and so on – who believed they had to chain themselves to roads and vandalize paintings, to make some kind of disruption to status quo or have any attention paid to themselves.
The reason that those people focus on that kind of thing a lot, and believe that they're effective, is because they're bourgeoisie through and through. If they actually had any impact on society, like workers, they could make an impact by massively withdrawing their labour. But the bourgeoisie like to get themselves jobs that pay a lot and where they don't have to exactly do a lot. That's why the impact on society of them withdrawing their labour is zilch. And that's why they think they have to disrupt other people going to work (by chaining themselves to roads) or interrupt other bourgeoisie visiting galleries, to make some noise.
The antiwar movements in the West are too ineffectual to stop the machine.
Right now the rot is way too deep. The forever-war deep-state can just keep adding to the US public debt (now at $35 trillion) with one snap of the fingers🫰after another after another, and keep funding their warmongering. For parasitic empires, the people who run them (after inheriting the wealth of their forbears) all have forgotten how to make a living decently, and instead spend all efforts on preserving the parasitic structures (colonialism). They mass-murder and torture everyone else who tries to resist and increasingly are breaking free.
This is why one of MLK's lines on Vietnam particularly stays with me:
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be – are – are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
— Martin Luther King Jr in Beyond Vietnam
Empires die from overreach and when people stop paying their taxes – i.e. they lose all legitimacy. The US is close to that stage. It spends all its money on warmongering foreign policy to preserve the parasitic wealth income streams of a tiny few elites, while the people living in the empire have zero of their needs met (no healthcare support, no proper help during emergency environmental disasters like hurricanes and floods, etc.). The elites try to massage the population into acquiescing to their agenda through the mass media.
I think the people in the US will especially see the truth of their situation once the debt reaches $100 trillion and beyond.
As for the likes of Europe and Australia, having proudly chained themselves to a dying empire – they will become irrelevant. It is amusing to see how quickly Europe accelerated its decline by following the nonsense of the US on Russia, as Australia will accelerate its own decline by following the nonsense of the US on China.
The US bombed the Nord Stream (a Danish harbourmaster also confirmed to Danish newspaper Politiken that US warships were in the area during that time with their transponders off). Now Germany is in recession. Europe has to pay for more expensive gas from the US, which may as well have come in golden pipelines for all the good that the switch has done for the European economy.
Orinoco Tribune 2
Cheap gas from Russia was one of the large factors of Europe's ongoing prosperity and competitiveness. Now Europe is publishing reports and reviews saying how the loss of economic edge (without naming the cause) reduces Europe's political influence.
RT
Article by Rachel Marsden
Draghi said that the bloc desperately needs to keep up with China and the US, but has been failing. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the EU readily jumped in to ride shotgun alongside Uncle Sam along regime change highway, but now finds itself kicking dirt on the roadside and wanting to make its own way.
“Now conditions have changed,” Draghi said. “World trade is slowing. China is actually slowing very much, but it’s become much less open to us, and actually it’s competing with us in global markets on all accounts. We’ve lost our main supplier of cheap energy, Russia. And now we have to start for our defense again for the first time since the Second World War.” Apparently, the jokers ruling Europe from the big top tent in Brussels are shocked to discover that they’ve been victimized. Who could possibly have done such a thing?
Gotta love the use of the passive there. “Lost” their cheap energy from Russia. Like it just fell out of their pocket like a set of house keys on the way back from the store. […]
The whole report is just loaded with gems, like this one: “If Europe cannot become more productive, we will be forced to choose. We will not be able to become, at once, a leader in new technologies, a beacon of climate responsibility and an independent player on the world stage. We will not be able to finance our social model. We will have to scale back some, if not all, of our ambitions. This is an existential challenge...”
— Rachel Marsden
Meanwhile China is Australia's biggest trading partner. Australia got hauled in to sign itself up for $368 billion AUD ($243 billion USD) submarines from the US — which might as well be made of pure gold and sink straight to the bottom of the ocean, for all the good that it is supposed to do for Australia's "national security" — which will be used as attack submarines against China for the US.
I don't think Australians understand how big the sum is.
The US has sent over $310 billion USD in total to Israel since 1948, adjusted for inflation.
Jonathan Masters
And around $333 billion USD has also been sent to Ukraine from 41 country donors, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker via RT.
RT
So notwithstanding the collapse of the entire US empire and financial system, the only way I can see of saving Palestine and Lebanon is with physical force. I believe that a stronger coalition of Arab countries should defend Palestine and Lebanon.
There simply isn't enough mass revolt to stop the US warmongering elites from the homeground. It's like expecting the US to stop funding Ukraine – expecting the US to stop funding Israel is even less likely.
There hasn't actually been substantial revolt on the home front of the empire. In all previous foreign wars — against Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, against Russia via Ukraine, against Palestine, more — the biggest determiner of survival is the actions by the resistance themselves, not the scale of revolt in the U.S.
And the UN is useless. It has never stopped or militarily intervened against any of those previous invasions or war crimes.
Russia can defend itself today, and Vietnam worked to get the backing of the Soviet Union and China back then.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s movie ‘Apocalypse Now’, the character Hubert de Marais has this very important line which he delivers with a typical French accent: “The Vietnamese are very intelligent. You never know what they think. The Russian ones who help them – ‘come and give us their money. We are all communists. Chinese give us guns. We are all brothers.’ They hate the Chinese! Maybe they hate the American less than the Russian and the Chinese. I mean, if tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists they will be Vietnamese communists. And this is something you never understood, you Americans.”
RT
Even in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, the people have thrown off the parasitic stooges of the West in recent coups.
The second option is to wait for the imperialist massacrers and torturers to leave after destroying your country, when they have found their next target. Which is what happened in Afghanistan.
I don't understand the situation of the Arab countries well enough to grasp why they don't help Palestine directly, aside from a few non-state political groups like Hezbollah from Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen.
I have read that Palestine used to be a Pan-Arab rallying cause. I have seen that the US has a number of other Middle Eastern states in their pockets. And also I read that the decline of democracy in the Middle East is contributing to the factor of the governments not doing what the people want and have protested for — which is to intervene directly to help Palestine.
Abdullah Al-Arian.jpg)
Omar Hassan
And I know that there are some religious differences between Sunni and Shia Muslim sects, exacerbated by Western imperialism and colonialism.
I also know that US imperialism also destroyed countries that strongly backed Palestine. Before US imperialism went and destroyed Iraq and Libya, those countries had very strong support for Palestine at the highest levels of government.
But still, I don't understand why there isn't a more substantial effort to appeal directly to other neighbouring states for more direct military support to fight the aggressive Israel.
Palestinians in Gaza have also asked why Arab countries won't do anything.
If neighbouring Arab countries won't help Palestine—neighbours which should be easier to convince—realistically it's much harder to convince the rest of the world to militarily intervene for Palestine. At best, South Africa and Nicaragua have submitted legal cases against Israel and Germany for genocide and support in genocide.
As for waiting for the US, Australia, Canada and the likes to stop backing Israel: most of them were already soul-dead a long time ago. The phenomenon of losing humanity that is happening in Israeli society happened in those other settler-colonies a long time ago.
Gideon Levy
By dissident Israeli historian Gideon Levy
As barbarism thus became justified, humanity was removed from the public conversation, and at times even ruled unlawful. It’s not that the discourse within Israel was previously humane and attentive to the plight of the Palestinian people; but after 7 October, all remaining restraints were removed.
It began by criminalising any display of compassion, solidarity, sympathy or even pain in response to the terrible punishment of Gaza. Such views are considered treasonous. Israelis expressing compassion or humanity on social media have been monitored and summoned for police investigation. Some have been fired from their jobs.
This form of McCarthyism has mainly harmed Palestinian citizens of Israel, but sympathetic Jews, too, have evoked a harsh response from authorities. In essence, compassion has been outlawed. It cannot be expressed towards Palestinians - not even dead, wounded, hungry, disabled or orphaned babies. All are rightfully being subjected to the punishments Israel inflicts.
The Israeli media, which has been more disgraceful over the past year than ever before, voluntarily carries the flag of incitement.
Losing its collective humanity vis-a-vis the Palestinian people may prove irremediable for Israel. That the country will reclaim it after this war is exceedingly doubtful.
The loss of humanity in public discourse is a contagious and sometimes fatal disease. Recovery is very difficult. Israel has lost all interest in what it is doing to the Palestinian people, arguing that they “deserve it” - everyone, including women, children, the elderly, the sick, the hungry and the dead.
What lies ahead
Nonetheless I believe that 3 important questions will be dealt with over the next few decades, over what will probably be called World War III —
- the fate of Israel,
- the fate of Europe,
- and the fate of US and its other warmongering settler-colonial-genocidal allies of Canada and Australia.
The anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements from rest of the world will rise to a crescendo. The empire cannot tolerate it.
The empires—arrogant and bloodthirsty, instinctively used to plunder—will blame the reasons for their decline on their designated enemies, instead of themselves and their own supreme arrogance and laziness. To escape the wrath of their populations, they will manufacture reasons for self-defeating wars to consolidate national identity and maintain their rule.
Israel is waging a self-defeating war against Iran, Lebanon and Palestine. Europe, once its decline is irreversible, will probably manufacture reasons to go to war with Russia, once again following in the footsteps of the doomed invasions by Napoleon and Hitler. Australia will follow headfirst with the US into a manufactured war with China.
Soul suicide? Definitely, en masse.
