Very interesting as ever, especially the bits about Trump's effective revival of the Monroe Doctrine - three comments:
I don't think that this government is particularly incompetent - it faces really difficult problems, mostly without obvious solutions, and it also knows that it has five years to produce a coherent narrative.
It is not a constitutional dysfunction that we have five years of political stability in the UK, but a reflection of Labour gaining a 174 majority in a stable and well-tested system which is accepted by most of the population. They had a chance to vote for something else under the Coalition government and turned the alternative down flat.
I wish you'd stop criticising Israel when it's not part of your argument - don't fall for this leftist obsession! War crimes are a nebulous concept, although there are some definitions, and they're going on all over the place - holding hostages in Gaza, mass murder in Sudan, killing prisoners by Russians. And in the case of Israel, what is a war crime when dealing with a cruel and openly genocidal enemy?
[I agree with you about the strange breed of women in Germany, Finland and Denmark, but I think it's just a bit of a co-incidence and not a theme]
There is a legal definition though I am suspicious of relying on lawyers when it comes to moral matters. The victors and the stronger tend to define the law and so the crime. Similarly rights often end up as weasel cover for interests.
In the end, it comes down to moral attitudes related to proportionality, non-combatant status, levels of terror targeted at the impotent and treating the vulnerable as victims of circumstance not as targets. It is about treating the other as human.
Gailure to have these attitudes is thus less relevantly a matter of law and more relevantly a matter of good and evil. Hamas undertook an evil act albeit as an excursion from an economic concentration camp but Israel has been engaged in disproprtionate and terroristic behaviour in response that can be reasonably regarded as war crimes.
Similarly we speak of Israeli hostages and rarely of the arbitrary imprisonments of many more Palestinians and the theft of land by extremist settlers on the West Bank.
But everyone is at it. Bomber Harris was a psychopath. Suddenly men who chopped off heads are heroes of the hour in Syria. America's prison gulag incentivises incarceration through private sector deals. It is inbuilt into the human condition.
Our species is a mix of sociopathy, ignorance, apathy, complicity, group justification, hysteria, decency, moral courage and self sacrifice.
I admire Arabs who call out thuggery and Jews who call out neo-nationalist excesses (there are many of them) but my issue is not with Israelis or Palestinians (whose squabble is for them to sort out) but the corrupt lack of moral compass in my own Government which apparently acts in my name. Supplying armament and intelligence to a state that acts as Israel has acted in the last eighteen months or so is a moral wrong.
The evidence of wrong-doing is not fake news from a bunch of Lefties but is available for all to see online. This is not to say that there are not arguments on Israel's side but only that a moral line has been crossed in terms of behaviour much as it was crossed by our own security apparat to a lesser extent in Northerm Ireland. You either have a moral compass or you do not. The law is just a flawed simulacrum of it.
Tidily delineated; we agree across the board. One hopes that someone of import in Whitehall is paying attention to the new reality. Maybe if it's referred to as the Great Reset?
And this gem from when money and trade men began appreciating the East: "It follows an old eighteenth century doctrine that warfare is about manouevre and that the greatest general is one who never has to fight a battle."
I assume that you’re referring to Hamas on 7th October 2023 and the Arab killers in Darfur, or maybe the Burmese junta who have a taste for targeting Muslim or Christian children. I assume that you don’t mean the IDF who are the only army in history to send warnings before bombing buildings used by terrorists, and to move people out of the way!
All I can respond with is the view from here in North America from a basically pro Trump viewpoint…the reasons Trump won the election and the hearts and minds of US middle Americans.
All I can respond with is the view from here in North America from a basically pro Trump viewpoint…the reasons Trump won the election and the hearts and minds of US middle Americans.
From this viewpoint Europe is a disaster. Germany has gone from an industrial powerhouse to a pre- industrial, impoverished condition. Holland’s farming capacity to feed Europe has been gutted along with farmers in Germany and France. Their protests have fallen on deaf ears. Engineered famine seems to be the motivation. The UK is in an even worse mess run by pedophiles and corruption. Musk has highlighted the “grooming gangs” and the non-existent protection of young girls and retaliation against the British population. Fathers and protesters are severely punished while the gangs are given free rein. Pensioners are freezing because their pensions are cut so the government can continue to prop up the Ukraine. All this is viewed as Globalist attempts to kill off as many European indigenous populations as possible and replace them with a mishmash of more amenable immigrants ( although why they are viewed as more amenable and likely to not demand their pensions and rights is a mystery to me!)
The Great Poisoning of populations from every direction…medical tyranny, food and water corruption, EMFs and burning of populated areas like Maui and LA purposively is seen as some kind of foreign corruption of political and bureaucratic agencies who are mostly called Marxist, Communist Wef-ers or simply “woke”. Trump’s first order of business has been firing the lot of them which pleases Trumpists to no end. He reminds me of Hitler, Marcos and others who placate their populations with much needed social reforms before they bring out the iron fist.
Is this narrative, which you never mention, in any way accurate? News from even Europe is impossible to find in the mainstream press and that is the only press we get in Canada which is why I am forced to read conspiracy theory and little else. I presume a lot of this is accurate to some degree. I bet the news situation is the same in Europe although places like Italy, Hungary, Belarus may also share these “conspiracy” views seeing as they have elected “populist” leaders. I find your commentaries completely leave out these factors and I wonder why. I enjoy your posts because they come from a viewpoint that is completely unknown to me.
Thank you for this. You open a whole can of worms here because what you are referring to is a general distortion of reality by all parties - for example, the absurdity of commemorating the Holocaust at Auschwitz withour referring to the liberation of the extermination camps by Russians (and Eastern Ukrainians). The picture you are given is half-true but very heavily exaggerated. The German economy is in trouble. Net Zero is creating considerable problems. The UK is administratively dysfunctional. However, the Great Replacement Theory is just radical right wing nonsense designed to give a simple explanation for a much more complex problem. The issue is ineptitude rather than conspiracy although there are undoubtedly some vicious and malign forces lurking amongst the sociopaths who rise to the top of any system. What is actually happening is that a whole series of mistakes in the past are beginning to come together in what Tooze has called the 'polycrisis' with a total system beginning to fragment, panic and try to manipulate the narrative through a collapsing media and information structure. It is this process that I have tried to analyse as it unfolds. The fundamental American populist error in interpreting these events is based on a fundamental ignorance concerning ideology and history. The 'great replacement' is largely, for example, an accidental result of economic policies that encouraged mass migration to reduce the cost of labour for a neo-liberal model of growth without investing in the necessary infrastructures or taking account of possible socio-cultural differences and tensions - ineptitude and greed in summary. The idea that the American Left is Marxist or Communist is laughable - it is, in fact, just a form of radical liberalism that placed cultural politics ahead of economic or social change and which abandoned the working class. Real Marxists or Communists (and they still exist to some extent though marginalised in Europe) would place the interests of the working class ahead of 'woke' and Net Zero interest. The new Left-populism (WPB in the UK and BSW in Germany) does just that. The US has no serious Left as Europeans would understand the term. The Democrats are effectively an oligarchical party because that is how American politics is structured. The essence of the European (and British) problem lies in its fragmentation and the fact that US 'imperial' influence distorts its politics. European populism, for example, collapses into pro-American (Trump) and pro-Russian wings that can only be reconciled if Trump were to come to a deal with Putin over the head of Zelensky (which prospect terrifies the inreasingly out-of-control centrist establishment). If I leave out much in my commentaries, it is because I am deliberately trying not to get sucked into conspiracy narratives from any side and so try to see what is happening with some degree of detachment. People tend to like simple explanations of complex phenomena and refuse to look for complex explanations that do not meet their own emotional needs. The core to our current crisis appears to be a general refusal to face our own political impotence in the face of crisis and, instead of organising to change things doggedly from below, we transfer those emotions to figures who act symbolically for them and then leave them to it. In this way a broken system is shaken and stirred but not fundamentally changed to the benefit of the impotent masses.
Very interesting as ever, especially the bits about Trump's effective revival of the Monroe Doctrine - three comments:
I don't think that this government is particularly incompetent - it faces really difficult problems, mostly without obvious solutions, and it also knows that it has five years to produce a coherent narrative.
It is not a constitutional dysfunction that we have five years of political stability in the UK, but a reflection of Labour gaining a 174 majority in a stable and well-tested system which is accepted by most of the population. They had a chance to vote for something else under the Coalition government and turned the alternative down flat.
I wish you'd stop criticising Israel when it's not part of your argument - don't fall for this leftist obsession! War crimes are a nebulous concept, although there are some definitions, and they're going on all over the place - holding hostages in Gaza, mass murder in Sudan, killing prisoners by Russians. And in the case of Israel, what is a war crime when dealing with a cruel and openly genocidal enemy?
[I agree with you about the strange breed of women in Germany, Finland and Denmark, but I think it's just a bit of a co-incidence and not a theme]
Peter
What is a war crime? Murdering children.
What is a war crime? Murdering children.
There is a legal definition though I am suspicious of relying on lawyers when it comes to moral matters. The victors and the stronger tend to define the law and so the crime. Similarly rights often end up as weasel cover for interests.
In the end, it comes down to moral attitudes related to proportionality, non-combatant status, levels of terror targeted at the impotent and treating the vulnerable as victims of circumstance not as targets. It is about treating the other as human.
Gailure to have these attitudes is thus less relevantly a matter of law and more relevantly a matter of good and evil. Hamas undertook an evil act albeit as an excursion from an economic concentration camp but Israel has been engaged in disproprtionate and terroristic behaviour in response that can be reasonably regarded as war crimes.
Similarly we speak of Israeli hostages and rarely of the arbitrary imprisonments of many more Palestinians and the theft of land by extremist settlers on the West Bank.
But everyone is at it. Bomber Harris was a psychopath. Suddenly men who chopped off heads are heroes of the hour in Syria. America's prison gulag incentivises incarceration through private sector deals. It is inbuilt into the human condition.
Our species is a mix of sociopathy, ignorance, apathy, complicity, group justification, hysteria, decency, moral courage and self sacrifice.
I admire Arabs who call out thuggery and Jews who call out neo-nationalist excesses (there are many of them) but my issue is not with Israelis or Palestinians (whose squabble is for them to sort out) but the corrupt lack of moral compass in my own Government which apparently acts in my name. Supplying armament and intelligence to a state that acts as Israel has acted in the last eighteen months or so is a moral wrong.
The evidence of wrong-doing is not fake news from a bunch of Lefties but is available for all to see online. This is not to say that there are not arguments on Israel's side but only that a moral line has been crossed in terms of behaviour much as it was crossed by our own security apparat to a lesser extent in Northerm Ireland. You either have a moral compass or you do not. The law is just a flawed simulacrum of it.
Tidily delineated; we agree across the board. One hopes that someone of import in Whitehall is paying attention to the new reality. Maybe if it's referred to as the Great Reset?
And this gem from when money and trade men began appreciating the East: "It follows an old eighteenth century doctrine that warfare is about manouevre and that the greatest general is one who never has to fight a battle."
I assume that you’re referring to Hamas on 7th October 2023 and the Arab killers in Darfur, or maybe the Burmese junta who have a taste for targeting Muslim or Christian children. I assume that you don’t mean the IDF who are the only army in history to send warnings before bombing buildings used by terrorists, and to move people out of the way!
All I can respond with is the view from here in North America from a basically pro Trump viewpoint…the reasons Trump won the election and the hearts and minds of US middle Americans.
All I can respond with is the view from here in North America from a basically pro Trump viewpoint…the reasons Trump won the election and the hearts and minds of US middle Americans.
From this viewpoint Europe is a disaster. Germany has gone from an industrial powerhouse to a pre- industrial, impoverished condition. Holland’s farming capacity to feed Europe has been gutted along with farmers in Germany and France. Their protests have fallen on deaf ears. Engineered famine seems to be the motivation. The UK is in an even worse mess run by pedophiles and corruption. Musk has highlighted the “grooming gangs” and the non-existent protection of young girls and retaliation against the British population. Fathers and protesters are severely punished while the gangs are given free rein. Pensioners are freezing because their pensions are cut so the government can continue to prop up the Ukraine. All this is viewed as Globalist attempts to kill off as many European indigenous populations as possible and replace them with a mishmash of more amenable immigrants ( although why they are viewed as more amenable and likely to not demand their pensions and rights is a mystery to me!)
The Great Poisoning of populations from every direction…medical tyranny, food and water corruption, EMFs and burning of populated areas like Maui and LA purposively is seen as some kind of foreign corruption of political and bureaucratic agencies who are mostly called Marxist, Communist Wef-ers or simply “woke”. Trump’s first order of business has been firing the lot of them which pleases Trumpists to no end. He reminds me of Hitler, Marcos and others who placate their populations with much needed social reforms before they bring out the iron fist.
Is this narrative, which you never mention, in any way accurate? News from even Europe is impossible to find in the mainstream press and that is the only press we get in Canada which is why I am forced to read conspiracy theory and little else. I presume a lot of this is accurate to some degree. I bet the news situation is the same in Europe although places like Italy, Hungary, Belarus may also share these “conspiracy” views seeing as they have elected “populist” leaders. I find your commentaries completely leave out these factors and I wonder why. I enjoy your posts because they come from a viewpoint that is completely unknown to me.
Thank you for this. You open a whole can of worms here because what you are referring to is a general distortion of reality by all parties - for example, the absurdity of commemorating the Holocaust at Auschwitz withour referring to the liberation of the extermination camps by Russians (and Eastern Ukrainians). The picture you are given is half-true but very heavily exaggerated. The German economy is in trouble. Net Zero is creating considerable problems. The UK is administratively dysfunctional. However, the Great Replacement Theory is just radical right wing nonsense designed to give a simple explanation for a much more complex problem. The issue is ineptitude rather than conspiracy although there are undoubtedly some vicious and malign forces lurking amongst the sociopaths who rise to the top of any system. What is actually happening is that a whole series of mistakes in the past are beginning to come together in what Tooze has called the 'polycrisis' with a total system beginning to fragment, panic and try to manipulate the narrative through a collapsing media and information structure. It is this process that I have tried to analyse as it unfolds. The fundamental American populist error in interpreting these events is based on a fundamental ignorance concerning ideology and history. The 'great replacement' is largely, for example, an accidental result of economic policies that encouraged mass migration to reduce the cost of labour for a neo-liberal model of growth without investing in the necessary infrastructures or taking account of possible socio-cultural differences and tensions - ineptitude and greed in summary. The idea that the American Left is Marxist or Communist is laughable - it is, in fact, just a form of radical liberalism that placed cultural politics ahead of economic or social change and which abandoned the working class. Real Marxists or Communists (and they still exist to some extent though marginalised in Europe) would place the interests of the working class ahead of 'woke' and Net Zero interest. The new Left-populism (WPB in the UK and BSW in Germany) does just that. The US has no serious Left as Europeans would understand the term. The Democrats are effectively an oligarchical party because that is how American politics is structured. The essence of the European (and British) problem lies in its fragmentation and the fact that US 'imperial' influence distorts its politics. European populism, for example, collapses into pro-American (Trump) and pro-Russian wings that can only be reconciled if Trump were to come to a deal with Putin over the head of Zelensky (which prospect terrifies the inreasingly out-of-control centrist establishment). If I leave out much in my commentaries, it is because I am deliberately trying not to get sucked into conspiracy narratives from any side and so try to see what is happening with some degree of detachment. People tend to like simple explanations of complex phenomena and refuse to look for complex explanations that do not meet their own emotional needs. The core to our current crisis appears to be a general refusal to face our own political impotence in the face of crisis and, instead of organising to change things doggedly from below, we transfer those emotions to figures who act symbolically for them and then leave them to it. In this way a broken system is shaken and stirred but not fundamentally changed to the benefit of the impotent masses.