This is an archive of links to interesting websites I have been collecting since 2017. Many of these links go to what I consider to be significant articles found in weblogs that I follow.
What you see below this first article that you are reading now, is a long list of articles, each of which has a title that is a link to the original website. Click to go to that website.
The article text was originally intended to be a short description or excerpt of whatever the link refers to. However, the more recent articles generally display most or all of the significant textual content. This is because links can disappear from the internet over time, and this is a way to preserve the content.
Unfortunately, I have not been consistent in marking articles text that is only an excerpt, although many excerpts include an ellipsis (...) indicator. Most articles dated before 2019 (the date is given in the bar at the bottom of the article) are excerpts.
Generally I have presented the articles without comment, so you can make your own assessment, but most political articles are "alternative" to "mainstream" views. Some do have a qualifying comment at the front, or are labelled ("tagged") with "Bullshit" when I feel there is egregious false or misleading content.
There are more than 1300 links here, so there are a few ways to select what you want to read. In the green bar at the top, you can visit the "Tag cloud", which shows "tags", words that describe significant aspects of each article. The larger the tag appears, the more articles exist that have that tag. For many articles, one of the tags will be an author name. Click on a tag to bring up a list of only those articles tagged with that word. You can also view the tags sorted alphabetically, or by number of uses.
You can also search using the "Search text" and "Filter by tag" boxes at the top of the articles list. Another way to browse, is to visit the "Picture Wall" and hover your mouse pointer over an interesting picture to see the title, and click.
If your search produces a lot of results, and the articles are long, you can hide the article text to see just the titles by clicking on the caret ( ^ ) at the top right "Links per page" area. Unfortunately, you will have to do this again when proceeding to the next page of links. I hope to fix this someday.
I hope there is something that you will find worthwhile to see here!
I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.
But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.
This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.
They would give techies a mind-expanding vision from outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber. These books would guide them to concepts and solutions that tech, on its own, will never deliver.
Back in August, I promised that I’d write about some of the individual books on my list.
Today I’m doing just that—offering a rapid-fire overview of some insights from Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century.
Hannah Arendt
As many of you know, I often study predictions made 50 or 100 years ago, and try to see how accurate they were.
I have done this in the past with J.G. Ballard, Arnold Mitchell, Chris Anderson, Paul Goodman, Oswald Spengler, and others.
Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.
Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous becuse they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.
Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:
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On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”
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On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.
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On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”
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On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.
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On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”
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On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”
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On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.
I read all this in astonishment.
It sounds like Arendt had anticipated my recent article about Silicon Valley turning into a creepy cult—and grasped this potentiality more than 60 years ago.
In other word, she saw all this even before Silicon Valley had a name or a mission.
Arendt’s entire book is filled with insights. I won’t try to summarize everything, but I will share a few more of her provocative views.
Here are 12 more key passages from The Human Condition:
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“Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world.” [It sounds like she is describing scrolling on a smartphone but Arendt wrote this before the first integrated circuit was built!]
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“The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.” [Does that sound familiar?]
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“The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”
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“Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.”
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“Society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion….imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”
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“Behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship.”
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“The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”
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“The loss of human experience in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a function of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could.”
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“We have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.”
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“For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”
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“This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”
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“It is quite conceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”
Does any of that ring true today? Let me remind you that all this was written in the mid-1950s.
I will have more to say in the future about other books on my subversive tech reading list. But even this quick survey of Hannah Arendt’s worldview shows how much we gain from adopting a larger vision of technology from a wise and compassionate human standpoint.
On history's repeating itself
Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War
So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.
What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.
Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.
Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.
These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.
If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.
Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.
And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.
Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.
In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.
Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.
[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]
As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.
As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.
As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.
Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.
There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.
Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.
Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.
…
People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC
Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen.
The transition from years of confinement in a maximum-security prison to standing here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and surreal shift.
The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence.
I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured – the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can i speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.
I apologise in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect in such a distinguished forum.
Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.
However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly. I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today.
Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank PACE for its 2020 resolution (2317), which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noted that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture called for my release.
I’m also grateful for PACE’s 2021 statement expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release.
And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights.
However, like so many of the efforts made in my case – whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens – none of them should have been necessary.
None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day.
This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.
I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.
I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.
As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.
I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism – to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now.
When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better.
Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.
Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none.
We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance.
We revealed not just when and where these things happened but frequently the policies, the agreements, and structures behind them.
When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world.
But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval.
In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing these policies.
The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations is simple: Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest.
WikiLeaks’ work was deeply rooted in the principles that this Assembly stands for.
Journalism that elevated freedom of information and the public’s right to know found its natural operational home in Europe.
I lived in Paris and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers in based in France, Germany, and Norway.
But 14 years ago the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, PFC Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq.
The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues.
The US government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and freeze our accounts.
The UK government took part in some of this retribution. It admitted at the European Court of Human Rights that it had unlawfully spied on my UK lawyers during this time.
Ultimately this harassment was legally groundless. President Obama’s Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed.
The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution.
In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.
However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA Director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General.
By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of French political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.
We revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.
CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.
It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.
My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy.
This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.
The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain.
This Assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA.
PACE’s groundbreaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centres and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law.
In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to forty years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation.
His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it.
These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.
Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes.
The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and extradition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe.
In Mike Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA Director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA.
Indeed, acceding to Pompeo’s efforts, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness.
Manning was held in prison for over a year and fined a thousand dollars a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me.
She ended up attempting to take her own life.
We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources. But Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist.
By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way, and the US government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition.
The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years, while it, the US government, and the new president of Ecuador moved to shape the political, legal, and diplomatic grounds for my arrest.
When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without them no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy.
If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to – perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he may be extradited just like me.
Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit.
The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalisation of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my extradition, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users, by claiming that their secrecy laws have been violated.
The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here.
As one of the world’s two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere.
I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.
The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.
Journalism is not a crime; it is a pillar of a free and informed society.
Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone else.
I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this assembly, to the conservatives, social democrats, liberals, leftists, greens, and independents – who have supported me throughout this ordeal and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release.
It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties.
Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads. I fear that unless norm setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late.
Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.
RIP Refaat in Gaza
Sad news:
Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 - 19:52 UTC · Dec 7, 2023
Israel killed Prof. Refaat al-Areer, one of Gaza's most prominent writers, poets & activists who spent his life trying to get Gaza's voice to the outside world.
He was killed in a targeted airstrike on his sister's home that also killed his brother, sister & her 4 kids...
Refaat's pinned tweet:
Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 13:01 UTC · Nov 1, 2023
If I must die, let it be a tale.
Refaat's last tweet:
Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 5:00 UTC · Dec 4, 2023
The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.
Quote
Vice President Kamala Harris ...
Embedded video
His writing:
My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’ - NY Times - May 13, 2021
By Refaat Alareer
Mr. Alareer lives in Gaza and is the editor of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories.
...
On Tuesday, Linah asked her question again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is nothing left.”But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I lie: “No, sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”
Lectures:
English Poetry Lecture 1/28: An Introduction to Poetry (video) - Refaat Alareer / eLearning Centre - IUG
On air:
_Palestine voices on Israel's war against Gaza - Usefull Idiots - Oct 13, 2023
This week’s interview with Refaat Alareer, Yumna Patel, and Muhammad Shehada
video_
How Refaat was murdered:
شهداء غزّة Gaza martyrs @Gaza_Shaheed - 12:54 UTC · Dec 8, 2023
Important information on Refaat’s assassination:
The day before yesterday, Refaat received a phone call from the Israeli intelligence about locating him in the school where he took refuge. They informed him that they were going to kill him. He left the school not wanting to endanger the others, and at 6 p.m. his sister's apartment was bombed, where he was killed, his sister and her four children
Obits:
In memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer - The Electronic Intifada - 7 December 2023
‘If I must die, let it be a tale’: a tribute to Refaat Alareer - Max Blumenthal - December 7, 2023
Related:
The “Hunt for Hamas” Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza - Adam Johnson / The Nation - Dec 7 2023
The US press and politicians are trying to fit the attacks on Gaza into a Zero Dark Thirty mold, but it’s something much simpler—and sinister.
> America’s media and political class is analyzing, debating, and shaping a narrative in Gaza that’s entirely different from the one being discussed in Israeli media and among Israeli political leaders. This gap, born from casual racism, deliberate credulity, and reflexive alignment with the US government’s party line, is creating a media failure the likes of which we haven’t seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. ... <
A dear friend of Moon of Alabama tweets:
annie fofani🇵🇸 @anniefofani - 22:08 UTC · Dec 7, 2023
I miss you so much Refaat. i assume you sent me this so i could pass it on after your death. so, here it for the world. click, the date is at the base.
Rest in peace.
Posted by b on December 8, 2023 at 10:44 UTC | Permalink
“As President of the United States of America, I apologise for the suffering we have caused the world for decades, and particularly in the Middle East. I am sorry for causing so much pain to the Iranian population by inflicting harsh and aggressive sanctions with the aim of curbing their sovereignty and submitting them to US hegemony. I am remorseful on behalf of previous administrations who convinced the Arab countries that Iran is their enemy and that they need our weapons and protection to defend themselves from an Iranian attack that never took place. The real objective was to sell our weapons, to transform the Middle East into a huge US weapons warehouse for the benefit of our armament industry. I am repentant for my country that contributed to overthrowing the Iranian regime in the past and that has sought, up to the present, to destabilise the entire Middle East”.
“I am remorseful for having watched and allowed without intervening the growth of ISIS in Iraq and its migration to Syria. Our aim was to create failed states in the Levant and Mesopotamia. Finding one single country for all Jihadists to gather in their dream world, Bilad al-Sham, was convenient to help the US and its allies, mainly Israel, expand and occupy Syrian territory without obstacles. The lives of Syrians were of no concern and categorised as “collateral damage”, a sentence all previous administrations used to cover their criminal acts including the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. I have no justification for our having prevented the Syrian population from rebuilding their country. We did this through the imposition of brutal sanctions, by putting pressure on Jordan to limit commercial exchange, by occupying al-Tanf crossing in order to close the doors to Iraq-Syria commerce, and by keeping forces in north-east Syria with the aim of giving a state to the Kurds and then leaving them to the mercy of Turkey. We really didn’t know what we were doing and had no strategy because we were totally ignorant of the realities of the Levant”.
“I am rueful on behalf of the US for the Iraqi people killed by the US directly and as a consequence of the US actions. We have destroyed and looted the economy of Mesopotamia by imposing sanctions (food for oil) and we contributed to the death of hundreds of thousands of children, dismantled the army a decade later, killed as many Iraqis as possible and tried to divide the country into weakened mini-states”.
“I am apologetic for having offered Israel the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory, rather than imposing on Israel a peace deal with Syria. I don’t understand why no previous President forced a Palestinian State when the same Palestinians agreed to live with the Israeli in two states. We closed one eye to all the murders committed by the Israeli Army and supported these actions in the name of “the right to self-defence”. We have justified every Israeli war, targeted killing or invasion rather than working on a peace deal that would have benefitted all concerned. We gave Jerusalem to Israel ignoring the Palestinians rights because we convinced the Gulf Arabs to abandon their cause. The Israeli lobby is too powerful in Washington to be ignored and Presidents want to be re-elected.”
“I don’t know what to say regarding Afghanistan. We attacked the country, destroyed it and killed so many people because we have a strong army and don’t know what to do with it. We held the Taliban responsible for sheltering the same al-Qaeda that our government had created and armed to fight the Soviets; the same al-Qaeda that, decades later and up to today, we have supported with training and weapons in order to terrorize the people of Syria and to combat its legitimate government. The last administration shook hands with Taliban after so many years of unnecessary war and made peace with them.”
“I know my predecessor humiliated Arab leaders and bullied kings with the goal of sucking their monies. Previous presidents considered these leaders non-elected, therefore immune to US blackmail. There was no fear of a coup d’ètat because these kingdoms pass on the rule from one member of the family to another. Even so, we had no right to intervene and call them asking for money. We have behaved in the most abominable way that goes against any moral and ethical principle of the west”.
“I should stop here, or I would need to speak for days about how we have made the world less safe, fostered an arms race with Russia, deployed missiles in Europe and convinced Europeans of a Russian danger that doesn’t exist, trying to stop imports of Russian gas by forcing Europe to find an alternative and closing the tap in Ukraine, threatening European allies when they don’t follow the US policy even if we have reaped boundless profits from every single penny we invested in defending the continent in the Second World War. I am sorry for trying to change the regime in Venezuela and in so many other places around the world over many decades”.
“ I promise to work for peace, impose on Israel to give up its hundreds of nuclear bombs, oblige the Arab states to construct schools, universities, offer job opportunities, look after the climate and earth, and open borders to all those looking to improve their and their family’s lives, and stop the animosity we have fuelled by promoting sectarian narratives we. I promise to use the Army of the United States of America against any country in the world willing to invade or destabilise another country. When the people are mature enough, they will react and change their regime. It is not up to the US to do the job on their behalf. If they suffer, it is a process they should go through to realise what they want in life.”
“And finally, I have no shame to express my feelings and share it with the world. I, as a human being, feel vulnerable, happy, sad, joyful and sometimes depressed. There is no harm in facing oneself as a man and human-being. I examine my conscience daily and seek to act in accordance with the benefit and the well-being of the world, without idiotically saying “God Bless America and no one else”. I say God bless the world and guide my steps to avoid causing suffering and hunger because the world is my home as it is the home of every person willing to live in peace and prosperity”.
This is what the newly elected US President said to all nations, today, live on the TV, on the day of his election. I couldn’t believe my ears. Everybody around me was listening, in tears. People suddenly had a new hope in life.
I suddenly woke up…
Will there comes a time when a similar speech could be addressed to some future generation?
Song of a neighborhood nightingale transcribed in 1868 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein:
Tioû, tioû, tioû, tioû.
Spe, tiou, squa.
Tiô, tiô, tiô, tiô, tio, tio, tio, tix.
Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio.
Squô, squô, squô, squô.
Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi.
Corror, tiou, squa pipiqui.
Zozozozozozozozozozozozo, zirrhading!
Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis.
Dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, hi.
Tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, dzi.
Dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo.
Quio, tr rrrrrrrr itz.
Lu, lu, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, liê, liê, liê, liê.
Quio, didl, li lulylie.
Hagurr, gurr quipio!
Coui, coui, coui, coui, qui, qui, qui, qui, gai, gui, gui, gui.
Goll goll goll goll guia hadadoi.
Couigui, horr, he diadia dill si!
Hezezezezezezezezezezezezezezezeze couar ho dze hoi.
Quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, ti.
Ki, ki, ki, ïo, ïo, ïo, ioioioio ki.
Lu ly li le lai la leu lo, didl ïo quia.
Kigaigaigaigaigaigaigai guiagaigaigai couior dzio dzio pi.
In his 1795 Natural History of Cage Birds, he notes that some captive birds “never sing unless confined within narrow limits, being obliged, as it would appear, to solace themselves, for the want of liberty, with their song,” and so should never be given freedom within a room.
See Bird Talk, Bird Songs, and Who’s Who.
In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:
A Poet’s Advice to Students
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)
First published on Substack
I propose a new sociopolitical model that I call Voluntary Democracy. You may reasonably ask how I became arrogant enough to even contemplate doing such a thing.
I am no one or everyone, depending on your perspective. I am a very average bloke with some limited life experience, a modicum of knowledge, and sufficient interest to talk and write about the topic we are about to discuss.
I do not profess to have all the answers or even know what most of the questions are. I am just about as flaky as it is possible for a man to be and am undeserving of your trust which is among the reasons I ask you not to place any in me.
I am merely proposing an idea. My only hope is that you consider it. If I’m lucky perhaps you will question it and, if I’m very fortunate, start expanding on it.
We are going discuss some of the problems with representative democracy which is the political model of state preferred by most people I will refer to a statists. I’ll call this model simply the state.
I was born and live in the the state called the United Kingdom (UK). Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be ruled by a king or his government, but that is the nature of the state. It’s not a choice to be a subject of the state. Though statists claim it is.
Therefore, I will use the current alleged constitutional monarchy, the claimed basis for the UK state, as my test case.
What Democracy Is and What It Is Not
Democracy is a political system first formally established in ancient Greece by Cleisthenes (c. 570–500 BCE). Cleisthenes introduced “sortition”—which is the random selection of citizens drawn by lot. Under his reforms, the Boule (executive) proposed legislation, and the Ecclesia (legislature) would then debate the proposed statute laws and vote on their enactment.
The citizen members of the Boule and the Ecclesia were selected by sortition. Once their work was done, the Boule and the Ecclesia were disbanded. The people would return to their everyday lives. The next time the Boule and the Ecclesia were needed, sortition would again be used and a different group of people selected.
Sortition was also used to form juries, whose citizen members sat in the Dikasteria (courts). The jury in the Dikasteria represented the highest law in the land. Any Dikasteria could overturn the enactments of the Ecclesia. This political system enabled the people to create legislation (statute law) as well as law derived from precedent (case law).
Crucially, Cleisthenes empowered the Dikasteria (the law courts) to overrule (annul) any law that was found to be unjust in a jury-led trial. There were no judges. Magistrates were merely administrators for the court. If the defendant was found guilty, both the judgement (ruling) and the nature of the punishment (sentence) were decided by the citizen jurors.
If the full application of the law (including legislation) did not serve justice, the jury could annul it. The defendant may have technically contravened the law but could still be found not guilty if the jury believed the defendant had acted honourably, without any intent to cause harm or loss (mens rea).
In such a circumstance, it was the law, not the accused, that would be found at fault. Any flawed legislation would be wiped from the statute scrolls and the Boule and the Ecclesia would have to amend or abolish it in light of the Dikasteria’s ruling.
The word “democracy” (demokratia) derives from “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power). Literally translated, it means “people power.” Cleisthenes proposed a governance system whereby the people were sovereign by virtue of exercising the rule of law through jury-led trials. This, and only this, is “democracy” and it has nothing to do with voting or electing anyone.
So-called “representative democracy” is not democracy. In representative democracies the people are permitted to select representatives who make all decisions for them for the next few years. During their rule, the representatives enforce their collective will upon the people.
Representative democracy is based upon the people handing all their decision making power over to a tiny clique of privileged rulers. It is the antithesis of democracy.
We are allowed to elect the legislature, which we call Parliament (Ecclesia). The dominant faction, usually formed from the most popular mob—chosen by those who bothered to vote—then forms the executive. We call this the government (Boule).
Depending on how dominant the ruling mob is—determined by their relative number of parliamentary seats—the executive (Boule or government) can either easily compel the legislature (Ecclesia) to adopt its desired policies (legislation) or engage in some horsetrading with their “opposition” to amend their legislation (policy diktat) prior to its almost inevitable adoption. “Opposition” is a misleading term because the people who actually rule control both the government and the so-called opposition.
The current British government, despite only securing votes from a small minority of the population, enjoys a massive parliamentary majority. The government (Boule) can “whip” its own representative members of Parliament (MP’s) to push through pretty much any policy it likes without bothering to consult anybody.
In the UK’s representative democracy, while statists think they are electing people who will represent their views and prioritise addressing their concerns, Parliament declares itself sovereign over all of the people. Statists actually select their own rulers—of sorts.
Parliament’s claim to sovereignty is false. The British have a codified, written constitution that makes the people sovereign. That doesn’t matter, however, to government as long as the population continues to assume Parliament’s claim is valid.
The advantage of “representative democracy,” from the perspective of the oligarchs who actually rule, is that it allows them to rule in perpetuity. Through lobbying, political party and campaign funding, government partnerships, corruption, coercion and orders issued to puppet MP’s, the vast bulk of parliamentarians represent only oligarchs’ views and prioritise oligarchs’ concerns. Oligarchs aren’t overly concerned about who wins elections.
In the UK’s representative democracy the courts (Dikestaria) are led by the Judiciary. As a Common Law jurisdiction, juries in the UK can still technically “annul” legislation. The judiciary “instructs” juries but never informs them they can annul. Consequently, British juries remain oblivious of their own rights and powers. The judiciary really doesn’t like jury trials in any event, and is working with the government to do away with them if they can.
The state supposedly operates on the comically misnamed separation of powers model. Everyone who lives and works in the UK knows this is total bunk.
The three branches of government comprise of the executive (government or Boule) and the legislature (Parliament or Ecclesia) which together form a single, oligarch controlled rule-making institution. The third branch, the judiciary (courts or Dikesteria), forces the people to comply with the rules and punishes those who don’t. It rarely, if ever, rules against the oligarchs’ rule-making institution and is completely divorced from anything the rest of us might consider justice. The only people who don’t have to obey dictatorial rule are the oligarchs who are above all the rules they impose on everyone else, often because they can buy themselves out of having to comply with any.
This, then, is the state.
Introducing Voluntary Democracy
The problem with “representative democracies” is that they always resolve in kakistocracies ruled by oligarchs. In other words, dictatorships. The people are merely given the illusion of choice through anointment ceremonies called elections where they are invited to crown the next gaggle of kakistocrats who will rule them on behalf of the oligarchs.
I suggest the solution to this is Voluntary Democracy.
Voluntary democracy wouldn’t necessitate reinventing the wheel. The three branches of governance would remain and the process of proposing, enacting, and ruling on legislation would continue.
The executive would be replaced with a body formed of citizens who would be randomly selected by sortition from the whole population and would serve on a temporary or perhaps issue by issue basis. We could call this the Boule or something else. How about “voluntary-executive” perhaps? Let’s use “the Volexec.”
The legislature would be a larger body—selected and serving in the same way—who would then deliberate on and enact legislation proposed by the executive. Again, we could stick with Ecclesia, but let’s use “the Volegis.”
The biggest procedural difference in a voluntary democracy, other than the selection process, would be the abolition of bench trials. All justice would be dispensed by jurors in jury led trials and judges would be replaced by conveners whose only role would be to facilitate proceedings.
The most important difference would be that all juries would be sovereign. Juries and only juries would represent the supreme rule of law in the whole jurisdiction and their only concern would be to ensure justice was served. We shall call these voluntary Dikasteria “the Volcourts.”
Through jury-led trials, these sortition selected groups of citizens—jurors— sitting in Volcourts across the land, would have the united and annexed power to annul any and all legislation and set case precedents wherever they deemed it necessary. In the event of annulment, the Volexec and the Volegis would need to either amend or abolish the faulty legislation accordingly.
There would be no government and no resultant state in a voluntary democracy. Voluntary societies would be jurisdictions without rulers, not jurisdictions without rules. Nor would voluntary democracy necessitate the existence of nations, though people could form them voluntarily and call themselves whatever they liked. Therefore, as we proceed to Part 2 and move away from the UK based example to broader considerations, I won’t reference the concept of nations but rather use “jurisdictions.”
Voluntary democratic jurisdiction won’t be perfect and they won’t solve all our problems. Nonetheless, I think they could resolve many of the injustices we currently suffer. Not least of all by effectively removing oligarchs’ political power.
To realise the promise of a voluntary democracy we would all need to work through a major philosophical shift. Our fundamental belief and value systems would need to change. For example, obedience would no longer be a virtue but rather a failing. Initially, individuals would have to start by learning to think differently. Ultimately, if we wanted to operate voluntary democracies at the macro scale, all of us would need to develop and adopt a new political philosophy. Statists, who form the majority, all currently share essentially one political philosophy so there is no reason why voluntaryists couldn’t do the same and become the majority themselves. We’ll expand on this in Part 3.
So I hope some will be sufficiently intrigued to read Part 2. If not, thanks for voluntarily reading this article.
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Related posts:
Voluntary Democracy – Part 3
Voluntary Democracy – Part 2
Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 1
Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 2
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 15
Welcome to the last installment of the Convivial Society for 2024. Come January, this iteration of the newsletter will celebrate its fifth year. It’s been a joy to write, and a pleasure to connect with readers over the past five years. Thank you all. In this short installment, I offer you a principle which might guide our thinking about technology in the coming year, along with a couple of year-end traditions tagged on at the end.
Cheers and happy new year,
Michael
A few weeks ago, I posted about how certain lines or quotations can function as verbal amulets that we carry with us to ward off the deleterious spirits of the age. Such words, I suggested, “might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart.”
One such line for me, which I did not include in that earlier post, comes from a rather well-known 1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.”1 Of course, to say it is “well-known” is a relative statement. I mean something like “well-known within that tiny subset of people who are interested in technology and culture and who also happen to care about what older sources might teach us about such matters.” So, you know, not “well-known” in the sense that most people would mean the phrase.
That said, the essay should be more widely read. Sixty years later, Mumford’s counsel and warnings appear all the more urgent. It is in this essay that Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics.”
Here’s how Mumford describes the bargain. Forgive the lengthy quotation, but I think it will be worth your time if you’ve not encountered it before.
The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.
There’s a lot to think about in those few lines. For my money, that paragraph, written sixty years ago, tells us more about the current state of affairs than a thousand takes we might stumble across as we browse our timelines today. There is, for instance, just below the surface of Mumford’s analysis, a profound insight into the nature of human desire in late modern societies that is worth teasing out at length, but I’ll pass on that for the time being.2
A little further on, nearing the close of the essay, Mumford tells readers that they should not mistake his meaning. “This is not a prediction of what will happen,” he clarifies, “but a warning against what may happen.” More than half a century later, I’m tempted to say that the warning has come perilously close to reality and the only question now might be what comes next.
But all of this, patient reader, is prelude to sharing the line to which I’ve been alluding.
It is this: “Life cannot be delegated.”
Simply stated. Decisive. Memorable.
Here’s a bit more of the immediate context:
“What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under-dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.”
I say it is simply stated, but it also invites clarifying questions. Chief among them might be “What exactly is meant by ‘life’?” Or, “Why exactly can it not be delegated?” And, “What counts as delegation anyway?” So let’s start there.
Whatever we take life to mean, we should immediately recognize that we are speaking qualitatively. Mumford is telling us something about an ideal form of life, not mere existence.3 Earlier, for example, he had spoken about life in its “fullness and wholeness.”
Mumford’s claim is a provocation for us to consider what might be essential to a life that is full and whole, one in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because by its very nature it requires our whole-person involvement. And by delegation, I take Mumford to mean the outsourcing of such involvement to a technological device or system, or, alternatively, the embrace of technologically mediated distraction and escapism in the place of such involvement.
I also tend to read Mumford’s claim through Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds. Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or institution counterproductive. This means that rather than declare a technology or institution either good or bad by its nature, we recognize instead the possibility that a technology or institution might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become, first, counterproductive and then eventually destructive.
So, with regard to the principle that life cannot be delegated, we might helpfully ask, “What are the thresholds of delegation beyond which what we are left with is no longer life in its fullness and wholeness?”
This seems to be an especially relevant question as we navigate the ever-widening field of technologies which invite us to delegate an increasing range of tasks, activities, roles, and responsibilities. We are told, for instance, that we are entering an age of LLM-based AI agents, which will be able to streamline our work and simplify our lives across a wide array of domains.
Perhaps. My point is not to rule out any such possibility.4 Rather, I am inviting us to critically consider at the outset where the thresholds of delegation might be for each of us. And these will, in fact, vary person to person, which is why I tend to traffic in questions rather than prescriptions. I am convinced that these are matters of practical wisdom. No one can set out a list of precise and universal rules applicable to every person under all circumstances. Indeed, the temptation to wish for such is likely a symptom of the general malaise. We must all think for ourselves, and in conversation with each other, so that we can arrive at sound judgments under our particular circumstances and given our particular aims.
The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
Perhaps we are tempted to think that care, skill, judgment, and responsibility are only of consequence when the circumstances are grave, momentous, or otherwise obviously consequential, which means that we might miss how, in fact, even our mundane everyday work might be exactly how we care, develop skill, exercise judgment, and embrace responsibility. (It occurs to me just now, that the etymology of mundane, usually given a pejorative sense in English, suggests something that is “of this world.” It is the stuff our world is made of, to take flight from the mundane is to take flight from the world.)
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know this is something I’ve sought to articulate at various points in the last few years (for example). So I’m always glad to encounter someone else trying to say the same thing and saying it well. Recently, I stumbled across this bit of wisdom from Gary Snyder6:
“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says … master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than another, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick—don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our ‘practice’ which will put us on a ‘path’—it is our path.”
I’ll conclude by offering you a complementary principle to Mumford’s: To live is to be implicated.
I take the language of implication, with its rich connotations, from Steven Garber, who writes about work and vocation from a religious perspective. Drawing on Wendell Berry and Václav Havel, Garber argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to be. In my view, Garber’s exhortation echoes Mumford’s warning but in another key. To say that life cannot be delegated is to say that life, lived consciously and well, will necessarily implicate us in the world. May we have the courage to be so implicated.
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Year’s End
It is customary for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem “Year’s End” in the last installment of the year. Enjoy.
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
“The Hunters in the Snow,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565)
1
For a more extensive consideration of this essay, see this excellent discussion by Zachary Loeb: “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, revisited.”
2
Here’s another paragraph that remains timely: “The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.”
3
Although I am immediately tempted to add that there is no such thing as mere existence. Existence itself is a miracle, and the recognition of this fact the beginning of wonder and thus thought.
4
Although I commend to you Rob Horning’s analysis: “Generative AI, [Ben] Recht argues, ‘always seems to provide the minimal effort path to a passing but shitty solution,’ which actually seems like a fairly charitable assessment. But it is obviously something that worker-users would employ when they don’t care about what they are asking for or how it is presented, for optimized producers who see research as an obstacle to understanding rather than the essence of it, for people conditioned to be absent at any presumed moment of communion. Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.”
5
I’m tentatively planning on following up with two additional posts on related principles: Life cannot be simulated, and life cannot be accelerated. We’ll see!
6 In the original post, I wrote “the late Gary Snyder,” which, as more than one attentive reader pointed out, was a grave mistake. Snyder is still with us, and I’m not sure how I got it in my head that he had passed. Snyder was the subject of a recent episode of the wonderful
. Also, I think the most recent episode with
is quite pertinent to the content of this post, and well worth your time.
Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability
[First published by Middle East Eye]
If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.
The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.
It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.
2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.
Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.
He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.
By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.
It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.
Held in torture camp
The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.
After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.
According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.
The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.
Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.
Psychotic logic
According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.
By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.
In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.
An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.
A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.
The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.
Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.
This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.
Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.
'Consciousness warfare'
Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.
That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.
Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.
Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.
They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.
The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.
But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.
The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.
And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.
And that is exactly what they did.
Red herrings
Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.
Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.
Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.
These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.
Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.
The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.
Mass graves
Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.
These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.
Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.
Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.
Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.
For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.
Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."
In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.
They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.
Trajectory to genocide
The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.
Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.
He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”
The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.
But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.
The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.
Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.
Mad Max vision
Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.
Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.
It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.
Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.
Where does this lead?
Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.
Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.
It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”
The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.
This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.
Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
Cover story
The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.
They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.
Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.
So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.
They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.
This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.
No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.
The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.
Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.
Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.
Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.
The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
by John Helmer, Moscow
[@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)
The war to destroy Russia has been an evil in which the British, Americans, Germans and French have combined for more than a century now. In the present stage on the Ukrainian battlefield, every weapon and force fielded by the Anglo-Americans and their allies has been defeated; the Ukraine itself, territorially and politically, has been destroyed.
No serious Russian believes this war will be over when the incoming US president claims the personal credit for negotiating end-of-war terms short of the US side’s capitulation.
About men like him and negotiations like his, it was the Irishman Edmund Burke who in his 1770 essay “Thoughts on the Present Discontents” issued this warning: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”* In the present war against Russia, the bad men have combined across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Against them on the information war front, there are very few good men – not one in the mainstream media, almost none in the alternative media.
The power of state repression is only half the reason. The other half is the competition for money. In competing for internet media subscribers, even those tempted to be good will be motivated not to associate, to compete against each other instead, and thereby “fall, one by one in the contemptible struggle.”
In propaganda war, the bad men must convince their paymasters more than their audience that they are winning. Reaching this point today has required a series of confidence-building, warmaking preparations – the putsch in Kiev of February 2014; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. The official narrative of Novichok, the Russian chemical warfare weapon allegedly used against the Skripals, has just reached its climax in London. A state-sponsored report will be published in a few weeks’ time. It will conclude that President Vladimir Putin had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the Skripals, and is guilty of attempted murder on English soil.
But the forensic evidence which has slipped into the public record from the British intelligence and security services, the chemical warfighters at Porton Down, and the Whitehall staffs advising the prime minister proves the narrative and the indictment are false. Weapon, crime scene, victim, killer, motive – all have been faked. By the Anglo-American and Canadian law standards of reasonable doubt and balance of probabilities, the prosecution of the case against Russia should have collapsed. Except, of course, that in the present state of war, this hasn’t happened.
The new book, _Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the world_is the lone voice to explain for the time being at least; it is also the only platform to defend Sergei and Yulia Skripal as political prisoners of the British for the past seven years. Because they didn’t die after they had been sprayed with a British poison, they have been kept in hospital under forced sedation and tracheostomy; then held under guard, in isolation, incommunicado. Their telephone calls to family in Russia, made in a hurry and in secret, stopped five years ago.
For the first time the book documents the British presentation in public of the poison weapon itself, revealing the clue of the colour of Novichok. This is the evidence that the murder weapon wasn’t Russian, it wasn’t Novichok at all.
In today’s podcast from Canada, Chris Cook and I discuss the reasons for the failure of Novichok to kill anyone, and its success at brainwashing everyone, or almost everyone.
The contrast with other media campaigns of resistance to western information warfare is a glaring one. For example, the campaign to defend Julian Assange and free him from a British prison and trial in the US has turned out to have been a popular success. However, Assange himself, his Wikileaks platform, and his London advocates have done nothing to expose the Novichok deception operation. They are good men who have done nothing — their media success has failed to deter or stop the Anglo-American march to war in the Ukraine; Assange’s lawyers are supporters of the war against Russia. Assange’s alt-media reporters have pretended they are the only truth-tellers in the present discontents; their war is against their media competitors.
For their names; for the truth of the Novichok story; and for the after-life of the Novichok poison in the coming war against Russia, click to listen.
Begin at Minute 31:00. Source: [https://gradio.substack.com/](https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-jeremy-c35)
For the introduction to this broadcast, access to the 20-year Gorilla Radio archive, and Chris Cook’s blog, click here and here.
[*] It is usually believed that what Edmund Burke (_right_) said was: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” As a warning against inaction or apathy, it’s salutary, if not quite right. But Burke didn’t say this. Instead, what he wrote was the line quoted in the lead. He then elaborated on how the moral duty of good men should be exercised in action. “It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth,that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Read Burke’s essay in [full](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2173/2173-h/2173-h.htm).
by Editor - Thursday, January 16th, 2025
The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.
Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.
What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.
But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.
Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.
Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.
That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.
The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.
In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.
In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.
In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.
There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.
The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.
In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.
The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.
That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.
The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.
So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.
I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.
Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025
So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.
The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.
I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.
Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.
I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.
Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.
Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.
Biden wanted Genocide.
The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.
The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.
Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)
Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.
Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.
A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.
This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.
Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.
While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.
Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.
Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.
Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.
Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.
Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.
It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.
It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.
The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.
This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.
To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.
That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.
At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.
The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.
Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.
———————–
To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.
If you have not yet contributed financially, I should be grateful if you could do so. If you have contributed, perhaps you could help further by encouraging others to do so. I would as always stress I do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them the slightest financial hardship.
My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.
Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.
Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.
I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.
On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.
She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the “vetting” was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not “Western-oriented” and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.
You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking “Western orientation”.
Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was “won” by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was “won” by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.
In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.
There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia – the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that’s the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.
As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.
In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.
Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU – won with a majority of 10,555 – and for President Sandu – majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.
It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.
This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.
Călin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.
In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.
Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.
The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the world nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from “Western security services” of Russian online campaigning for him.
Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.
Which is what an election is.
It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.
But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.
Targeted advertising, and the sale of your online data, is a horrible, everyday feature of modern life. All political parties and all causes use it nowadays.
I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas. So does every major country. I did it myself for the UK – unsuccessfully in Poland when Kwaśniewski was elected and successfully in Ghana when Kufuor was elected. The EU and Western powers fund NGOs and fund journalists all over the world to sway opinion, openly, and covertly Western security services fund “agents of influence”. Let me say it again. I have done it personally.
However it becomes somehow uniquely wrong when Russia does it.
That is not even to mention the absolutely massive role of the Israeli lobby in buying political influence all over the world. That is a far greater threat to democracy than Russia ever is.
I don’t know how Romania’s judges were curated to get the right result, as they were in Moldova, or how they were forced or bribed to change their original decision not to annul the election, just four days later.
I do know that regime change propaganda is in full swing in Georgia, where again the “wrong” party, insufficiently hostile to Russia, had the temerity to win the election. The French President of Georgia is hanging on. Not even large sums of CIA money nor funds channelled through CIA NGOs, nor beautifully printed English language placards, have been able to get enough people out on the streets to make the “colour revolution” demonstrations look convincing.
Georgian opposition supporters rally to protest results of the parliamentary elections that showed a win for the ruling Georgian Dream party, outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on October 28, 2024. (Photo by Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE / AFP)
Meanwhile back in France, Macron refuses to accept he lost the election and insists on appointing a series of right-wing ministers that cannot possibly get support in the National Assembly.
The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza.
My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.
Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.
Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.
I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.
In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.
That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.
In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.
With that in mind, what follows are some summations.
• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.
• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.
• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.
• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.
• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.
• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.
• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.
• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.
• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.
• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.
• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”
But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.
So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on
Bad advice.
In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.
That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.
In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.
With that in mind, what follows are some summations.
• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.
• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.
• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.
• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.
• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.
• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.
• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.
• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.
• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.
• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.
• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”
But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.
So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on
Bad advice.
There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr\u2019s The twenty years\u2019 crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.
Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say \u201Cresponsibility\u201D it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:
The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).
Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.
The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. \u201COur enemies are little worms\u201D, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.
In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable\u2014whether domestically or internationally\u2014the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept \u201Csome give or take\u201D as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (\u2018balance of power\u201D) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.
Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)
Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. \u201CJust as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers\u201D (p. 82).
Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.
As this brief description makes clear similarities with today\u2019s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the \u201CNew World Order\u201D produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors\u2019 policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia\u2019s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn\u2019t want to, accept more.
The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin\u2019s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.
Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.
There is a peculiar comfort in believing that things simply happen by accident. That the powerful don’t conspire, that institutions don’t coordinate, that the crumbling pillars of society represent mere happenstance rather than design. I’ve come to call these people “accidentalists” – those who find refuge in randomness, who dismiss patterns as paranoia.
The Cost of Seeing
Like the red pill in The Matrix, recognizing patterns changes everything. Many choose comfortable illusions over uncomfortable truths. As Hannah Arendt observed, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.”
For the professional class – academics, journalists, corporate managers – acknowledging these patterns means confronting their own complicity. Their success, their status, their sense of self – all are built on supporting rather than questioning power structures.
The accidentalist mindset offers refuge from this self-examination. Better to dismiss than face one’s role in the machinery.
The Death of Coincidence
It requires impressive mental gymnastics to believe that those with power – who achieved it through careful planning and coordination – suddenly stop planning and coordinating once they obtain it. That they abandon the very tools that brought them success. That they become, somehow, passive observers of their own decline.
When confronted with evidence of coordination – be it documented government censorship, institutional narrative control, or coordinated media campaigns – the accidentalist draws an arbitrary line. “Well, that’s different,” they say. “That’s not a conspiracy, that’s just…” And here they trail off, unable to articulate why some coordinated actions by the powerful count as conspiracies while others are merely business as usual.
The Weaponization of Skepticism and Manufacturing Outcasts
The term “conspiracy theory” itself reveals institutional manipulation. The CIA’s 1967 dispatch (Document 1035-960) explicitly directed media assets to use this label to discredit Warren Commission critics. They transformed skepticism into pathology – making the very act of questioning power seem delusional.
This weaponization of language worked brilliantly. Today, pattern recognition itself becomes suspect. In 2022, the New York Times published perhaps the most revealing example of institutional arrogance – an essay warning citizens against “doing their own research,” suggesting they weren’t competent to question expert conclusions. The message was clear: leave the thinking to us. Trust the experts. Stay in your lane.
That this patronizing directive came from a publication with its own history of spreading misinformation speaks volumes. The accidentalist, naturally, sees no problem with experts telling people not to think for themselves. They miss the deeper implication: when institutions actively discourage independent investigation, they reveal their fear of informed scrutiny.
The pattern is unmistakable: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them. The accidentalist never asks why questioning power triggers such coordinated attacks.
Today’s Denials, Tomorrow’s Headlines
Consider a revealing moment: In 2021, several of my friends eagerly recommended Dopesick, (“I think you would especially like this”), condemning the Sacklers’ manipulation of medicine for profit. Yet these same friends mocked me for questioning pharmaceutical companies today – despite their status as the most heavily criminally fined industry in human history. Those who recognized similar patterns were labeled ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘threats to public health.’ Scientists suggesting lab origins became ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The pattern repeats: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them.
Let’s examine three cases where “conspiracy theories” transformed into acknowledged history:
-
The Sugar Deception: In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to blame heart disease on fat instead of sugar. These industry-funded studies shaped dietary guidelines for decades, creating a massive public health crisis through “low-fat” but sugar-laden foods. The accidentalist views this as an isolated historical incident rather than a template for corporate manipulation of science.
-
The Tobacco Playbook: For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence linking smoking to cancer while funding research to create doubt. Their infamous internal memo stated, “Doubt is our product.” The accidentalist sees this as a unique case rather than recognizing the same tactics in current corporate practices.
-
The Vioxx Cover-up: Merck concealed evidence that their blockbuster drug caused heart attacks, leading to an estimated 60,000 deaths. Internal documents revealed executives strategizing to “neutralize” critics. The accidentalist treats this as an aberration rather than standard operating procedure.
The Pattern Repeats
Consider the timing: A 342-page Patriot Act appeared weeks after 9/11. Operation Lock Step described pandemic measures in 2010. Event 201 simulated responses in October 2019 – the same day as the Wuhan Military Games. Months later, these exact measures were implemented globally. What are the odds?
The patterns of control repeat at every scale:
- Globally: WHO/WEF coordination
- Nationally: Regulatory capture
- Corporate: Internal suppression of dissent
- Local: Community pressure to conform
Power’s fingerprints are everywhere. Once you see them, they can’t be unseen.
The Corporate Convergence
Here’s where the accidentalist worldview truly fails: These weren’t separate conspiracies but a single system perfecting its methods. The tobacco giants that knowingly addicted millions didn’t disappear – they bought food companies (RJR Nabisco) and continued manipulating public health. Those same food conglomerates now merge with pharmaceutical corporations (Monsanto/Bayer), putting the same scientists who engineered addictive cigarettes and processed foods in charge of our medicine.
These corporations don’t just share ownership – they share methods. The same tactics used to addict smokers were applied to processed foods. The same research manipulation that hid tobacco dangers now obscures pharmaceutical risks. The same media control that sold cigarettes as healthy now promotes untested medical interventions.
The Reality Merchants
Consider the current media response to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s nomination as HHS Secretary. The coordinated messaging is impossible to miss – talking heads across networks uniformly label him a “conspiracy theorist” and “danger to public health,” never addressing his actual positions. These are the same voices that championed destructive pandemic policies, now attempting to discredit someone who questioned their wisdom.
Or examine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – a Stanford professor whose expertise was unquestioned until he challenged lockdown policies. Despite eventual vindication, the institutional response was swift: coordinated media attacks, academic ostracism, and algorithmic suppression. The pattern is clear: expertise is respected only when it aligns with institutional interests.
Engineering Compliance
The template begins with manufactured scarcity and enforced dependency. But understanding the mechanics of fiat systems is just the beginning. The real revelation is recognizing how this architecture extends beyond money into every domain of human existence.
Covid-19 didn’t create new systems of control – it revealed existing ones. The infrastructure for rights suspension, narrative enforcement, and dissent silencing was already in place. The “Great Reset” wasn’t conceived in 2020. The surveillance architecture wasn’t built overnight. The ability to coordinate global policy, control information flow, and reshape human behavior wasn’t developed in response to a crisis – it was waiting for one.
Moreover, the selective enforcement of truth reveals power’s preferences. Regardless of what one thinks about Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook statements, his $900 million fine stands in stark contrast to the total impunity enjoyed by the New York Times and other media outlets whose WMD lies led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. This reveals how power protects its own while punishing outsiders, even when institutional lies cause far greater harm.
The Psychology of Disbelief
“That can’t be true” becomes the mind’s defense mechanism against pattern recognition. This isn’t natural skepticism – it’s programmed rejection (as detailed in “How the Information Factory Evolved”). The larger the pattern, the stronger the denial. They’ve weaponized skepticism against itself, creating a population that reflexively defends authority while attacking any challenge to it.
We’re watching the early stages of converging control systems, with clear signs of what’s coming:
- Digital IDs linked to health records
- CBDCs enabling programmable money
- Social credit systems disguised as ESG metrics
- Surveillance capitalism merging with state control
- Artificial scarcity through controlled supply chains
These aren’t predictions – they’re systems actively being built and tested across the globe, from China’s social credit system to Nigeria’s CBDC rollout.
Understanding the Impossible
“But how could they pull this off without anyone knowing?” the accidentalist asks. The answer is simple: compartmentalization. Like the Manhattan Project, most people in global institutions are unaware of the larger plan they’re working on. Even in tech companies, the Gmail team has no idea what YouTube’s content moderators or Google Earth’s mapping division are doing. Each department serves its function without seeing the whole. Professionals across academia, corporate America, and media unknowingly serve a broader agenda, often believing they’re working for noble causes.
The truth isn’t hidden – it’s protected by its own audacity. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” This explains why major revelations often hide in plain sight: the scale of coordinated deception exceeds what most people can psychologically accept as possible.
Breaking the Spell
The ultimate revelation isn’t how powerful they are – it’s how fragile their control really is. Their greatest strength – total integration – is also their greatest weakness. Complex systems have more failure points. The more systems are interconnected, the more a disruption in one area can cascade through the whole.
The solution isn’t fighting their systems directly – it’s building parallel structures that make them irrelevant:
- Local food systems over global supply chains
- Peer-to-peer networks over controlled platforms
- Direct exchange over surveillance currency
- Natural immunity over subscription immunity
- Real communities over virtual spaces
The Choice
The question isn’t whether power conspires – it’s why we’re so resistant to seeing it. What comfort do we find in believing in accidents? What fear do we harbor of seeing design?
Perhaps it’s simpler to believe in chaos than to confront order. Perhaps it’s easier to dismiss than to engage. Perhaps the accidentalist position isn’t about truth at all – it’s about maintaining the comfort of ignorance in a world that increasingly demands awareness.
Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand that power coordinates, plans, and conspires by its very nature, the only wacky conspiracy theory becomes believing it doesn’t.
The awakening isn’t something that happens to us – it’s something we choose. And that choice, multiplied across millions of individuals, will determine whether humanity enters a new dark age or experiences its greatest renaissance.
The question isn’t whether you see it. The question is: what will you do once you can’t unsee it?
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Joshua Stylman has been an entrepreneur and investor for over 30 years. For two decades, he focused on building and growing companies in the digital economy, co-founding and successfully exiting three businesses while investing in and mentoring dozens of technology startups. In 2014, seeking to create a meaningful impact in his local community, Stylman founded Threes Brewing, a craft brewery and hospitality company that became a beloved NYC institution. He served as CEO until 2022, stepping down after receiving backlash for speaking out against the city's vaccine mandates. Today, Stylman lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and children, where he balances family life with various business ventures and community
Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. There is a reason for the word ‘decision’ being a part of our language. Not accidentally, the term derives from the Latin for ‘cut;’ in other words, when we decide something, we make a volitional ‘cut’ of sorts in the sequence of events, or in the reasoning concerning such events, that precede the decision – a concrete reminder that human beings are not equipped with an algorithmic device that enables them to know with absolute certainty what course of action to pursue. Every decision, therefore, represents an acknowledgment that we have to act with incomplete, provisional knowledge, and by implication, that more information and more comprehension could lead to a different decision.
Philosophers have known this for centuries, even if their philosophies sometimes give the opposite impression. Nietzsche – who was himself a thinker of provisionality, as evinced in his exhortation, to overcome the ‘spirit of revenge’ against time’s irreversible passage – did Socrates an injustice when he used his name as shorthand for the excessive rationalism of Western culture. Rather than ‘Socratism,’ he should have used the term ‘Platonism,’ provided he meant the reception of Plato’s work, and not the Greek master’s work ‘itself’ – even if, unavoidably, the latter is ‘itself’ only available to us after centuries of translations.
After all, anyone who has read Plato’s texts carefully – even in translation – and not only through the eyes of his countless commentators, soon recognises the distance that separates what may be called the two ‘faces’ of Plato. There is the metaphysical, idealist Plato, and there is the ‘poetically reflective’ Plato whose writings (perhaps unexpectedly) reveal what one might call his nuanced awareness of the ineradicable provisionality of even the ostensibly strictest distinctions. It is difficult to say which one of these has given rise to a never-ending series of ‘footnotes’ among Western philosophers since his time, according to Alfred N. Whitehead, who noted of Plato’s writings that the ‘wealth of general ideas scattered through them’ comprise a ‘an inexhaustible mine of suggestion,’ but I would opt for the second one.
In the Phaedrus Plato shows that he knew, for instance, that a “pharmakon” is both poison and remedy, that language is simultaneously a rhetorical instrument of persuasion and the arena where struggles for truth are enacted; both the soil where poetic powers germinate and metaphysical armour for the protection of mortal bodies. Poets and dithyrambic music do not belong in the ideal republic, according to him, but paradoxically the poet in Plato is harnessed for the sensorily evocative linguistic embodiment of the epistemic inferiority of the senses, as the myth of the cave in the Republic demonstrates, accompanied by his simultaneous claim that the truth represented by the sun shining outside the cave transcends the perspectival limitations of the senses.
Do these paradoxes not reflect Plato’s awareness of the provisionality of his metaphysical bulwark against human uncertainty and finitude, embodied in the supratemporal, archetypal Forms, in which all existing things participate, however imperfectly?
The clearest indication that Plato knew about the ineradicably provisional status of human life lies in his depiction of his teacher, Socrates, who did not write anything himself, as the archetypal philosopher of provisionality – unambiguously captured in Socrates’s famous ‘docta ignorantia’ (learned ignorance), that the only thing humans know with certainty is ‘how little they know.’ Despite these signs in Plato’s work, that he was quite conscious of the limitations to human knowledge (further demonstrated in his notion of the paradoxical, errant causality of the Khôra in his Timaeus, which simultaneously is and is not in space), what the philosophical tradition has sought to emphasise is Plato’s own strenuous attempt, in his metaphysical doctrine of the archetypal Forms, to provide supra-sensible protection against the inescapable erosion of human knowledge by time – for this is what is ultimately indexed in an awareness of provisionality.
These considerations – which could be extended significantly – make a mockery of the idea that there is a fail-safe research methodology (with its accompanying methods), that would guarantee the time-resistant validity of human knowledge, instead of acknowledging that, despite our very best efforts at securing precise, unassailable knowledge, it is nonetheless always already infected with the eroding germ of time. This is the sobering insight gained from one of Jacques Derrida’s most exemplary poststructuralist essays in Writing and Difference, namely ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences,’ where (following Claude Lévi-Strauss) he distinguishes between the image of the ‘bricoleur’ (tinkerer, handyman, Jack-of-all-trades) and the ‘engineer.’
The former avails him – or herself of any tool or material at hand to construct or ‘fix’ things in order to restore them to working condition, while the engineer insists on fail-safe instruments and working materials to guarantee exactitude of measurement and time-resistant functioning of the products of their design and work. Needless to stress, these two types function as metaphors for distinct ways of approaching the world around us – some people think like the ‘engineer;’ others like the ‘bricoleur.’
Contrary to the standard reading of this essay by Derrida (where this is but one of the stages of his complex argument), which erroneously attributes to him a kind of postmodernist privileging of the bricoleur over the engineer, he states explicitly that humans are in no position to choose between these two paradigmatic figures of knowledge – inescapably we have to choose both. What does this mean? Simply that while we have the epistemic duty to emulate the engineer, we also have to face the sobering thought that, our best efforts at constructing unassailable knowledge notwithstanding, our knowledge systems – even in its most ‘tried and tested’ form, namely the sciences – cannot evade the ruinous effects of time, or history.
This is amply demonstrated with regard to the history of physics in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), although Kuhn’s thesis, articulated in the book, has many rationalistic detractors, who cannot bear the thought of science being equally subject to temporal constraints as any other form of human knowledge.
Such champions of epistemic absolutism need only remind themselves of the exemplarily Socratic admission of the leader of one of the two teams at CERN’s Giant Hadron Collider that worked on the attempt to confirm the ‘existence’ of the ‘Higgs boson’ (or so-called ‘God-particle’) – an Italian woman physicist named Fabiola Gianotti – that the confirmation of its ‘probable’ existence, far from representing the summation of ‘complete’ knowledge in the realm of physics, merely means that the work of understanding the physical universe is only beginning. Socrates all over again, and from a natural scientist.
How is this possible? What she was referring to is the fact that physicists now face the daunting prospect of probing the nature of dark energy and dark matter which, they claim, together comprise the largest part of the physical universe, and of which physics knows hardly anything except its percentile extent. And who knows how many revisions will be made regarding the ‘standard model’ of physics in the course of unravelling the structure, nature, and functioning of these two ‘dark’ entities – if they can be called ‘entities’ at all? Another confirmation of the provisionality of human knowledge.
This, incidentally, is also related to Jacques Lacan’s notorious (but understandable) claim that the structure of human knowledge is ‘paranoiac,’ by which he evidently meant that we are deluded into believing that human knowledge systems are far more enduringly unassailable than they actually are – a Lacanian claim that resonates with the insights of the redoubtable English novelist, John Fowles, in his novel, The Magus.
Returning to Plato’s oft-ignored wisdom concerning provisionality, it is not difficult to establish a connection between him and Lacan, who was a very thorough reader of Plato, for instance of the latter’s Symposium – perhaps the most important of his dialogues on love. Just as Plato shows with admirable insight that, what makes one into a lover – and indirectly also a philosopher – is the fact that the beloved, insofar as she or he remains a beloved, instead of a possessed, always has to be ‘just out of reach’ of the lover. We are lovers, or philosophers, to the extent that we ‘desire’ our beloved, or in the case of the philosopher (and the same goes for the scientist), knowledge, neither of which we could ever totally ‘possess.’
What this suggests, of course, is that the lover or philosopher never quite reaches fulfillment of their desire – should you ‘attain’ the desired beloved, or knowledge, your desire would evaporate, because there would be no need for it any longer. Desire is a function of absence or lack. This makes a lot of sense – provisionally, at least.
If human beings were to be able, at last – which, by and large, they are not – to accept and embrace their own finitude and temporality, they would realise that all things human in the domain of culture and the arts, science, and even philosophy, are provisional, in the strict sense of being subject to revision, ‘correction,’ modification, or amplification. Many of the difficulties faced by people in the world today derive from their futile, hubristic attempt, to be ‘engineers’ in the sense of perfecting knowledge through science and technology, ignoring Derrida’s counsel, that we are also, finally, mere bricoleurs, or tinkerers, jacks of all trades.
Hardly ever before in human history has the futility of believing that one can overcome the ineluctable limitations on human endeavours been more amply demonstrated than during the past five years. What the international cabal of neo-fascists at the World Economic Forum (a misnomer if ever there was one) had regarded as a foregone conclusion, namely, to ‘condition’ people into accepting the proto-totalitarian regime they tried to impose through Covid lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and eventually by mandating, as far as possible, the deadly Covid pseudo-vaccines, has turned out, in retrospect, to have been merely provisional.
This is no reason for complacency on our part, however, as most of the awake tribe know. Their implicit belief in their quasi-divine powers guarantees that they will try again.
[This post is loosely based on my essay, published in 1998 in the Afrikaans Journal for Philosophy and Cultural Criticism, Fragmente, and titled ‘Filosofie van Voorlopigheid.’]
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Bert Olivier
Bert Olivier works at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Free State. Bert does research in Psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ecological philosophy and the philosophy of technology, Literature, cinema, architecture and Aesthetics. His current project is 'Understanding the subject in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism.'
In Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes the following about soft despotism: Chapter VI
I HAD remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceived, upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made, by most of our rulers, of the notions, the sentiments, and the wants created by this same social condition, for the purpose of extending the circle of their power. This led me to think that the nations of Christendom would perhaps eventually undergo some oppression like that which hung over several of the nations of the ancient world. .
A more accurate examination of the subject, and five years of further meditation, have not diminished my fears, but have changed their object.
No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire; none ever attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to strict uniformity of regulation and personally to tutor and direct every member of the community. The notion of such an undertaking never occurred to the human mind; and if any man had conceived it, the want of information, the imperfection of the administrative system, and, above all, the natural obstacles caused by the inequality of conditions would speedily have checked the execution of so vast a design.
When the Roman emperors were at the height of their power, the different nations of the empire still preserved usages and customs of great diversity; although they were subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were separately administered; they abounded in powerful and active municipalities; and although the whole government of the empire was centered in the hands of the Emperor alone and he always remained, in case of need, the supreme arbiter in all matters, yet the details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control. The emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.
It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. We have seen how the customs of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.
Independently of these reasons, drawn from the nature of the state of society itself, I might add many others arising from causes beyond my subject; but I shall keep within the limits I have laid down.
Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger, but these crises will be rare and brief. When I consider the petty passions of our contemporaries, the mildness of their manners, the extent of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their regular and industrious habits, and the restraint which they almost all observe in their vices no less than in their virtues, I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.1
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.
Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.
By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.
When the sovereign is elective, or narrowly watched by a legislature which is really elective and independent, the oppression that he exercises over individuals is sometimes greater, but it is always less degrading; because every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine that, while he yields obedience, it is to himself he yields it, and that it is to one of his own inclinations that all the rest give way. In like manner, I can understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and is dependent upon the people, the rights and the power of which every citizen is deprived serve not only the head of the state, but the state itself; and that private persons derive some return from the sacrifice of their independence which they have made to the public. To create a representation of the people in every centralized country is, therefore, to diminish the evil that extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it.
I admit that, by this means, room is left for the intervention of individuals in the more important affairs; but it is not the less suppressed in the smaller and more privates ones. It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.
Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.
I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.
It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.2
A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.